From: perseus@crl.com (Jeff Blanding) Newsgroups: alt.music.brian-eno Subject: duchamp/cage/eno essay (for ambient mag) Date: 20 Aug 1994 14:42:09 -0700 this is an essay i wrote several years ago for a college art history class. it relates marcel duchamp, john cage and brian eno... i thought lithium might find this interesting (re prev post 'Ambient Mag'). Duchamp once said: "I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind."1 In the creative process responsible for what we usually call Art, Duchamp has said that the spectator's contribution is at least equal in importance to the artist's. According to Duchamp (via Calvin Tomkins), the artist "does not really know what he is doing or why he is doing it. It is the spectator who, through a kind of "inner osmosis," deciphers and interprets the work's inner qualifications, relates them to the external world, and thus completes the creative cycle."2 Art is thus ultimately created by the viewer - any object, or, potentially, any concept, becomes art when intellectual analysis is focused upon it.3 "All Futures and Pasts begin here." --- John Cage Ultimately, Duchamp's readymades have served to de-commodify art. Art as commodity is art before Duchamp. A lazy person desires to purchase their dinner already made for them. Similarly, many desire an art in which all creative activity has already taken place and the profitable conclusions or "answers" of some "investigation" are offered up for the taking without requiring any investment on the part of the viewer. In this view art is like science, consisting of problems, experiments and, most importantly, Truth or Fact. This type of consumer of art seeks to benefit from someone else's creative invention in the same way they benefit from the skill of their mechanic or some religious icon's assurances of "what it all means."4 However, we can see that artists such as Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Brian Eno have progressively created art that is "unfinished" - in other words, that requires creative investment from each viewer ("completing the creative cycle") and thus has a different meaning for each individual.5 Obviously, this has had disastrous effects on the Art Market and associated structure of academics, critics, art historians, etc. How can we expect these people to remain open minded to this "return" of art to "the service of the mind" when to them - their profession - this is a struggle of life and death? When there is no "right way" to interpret a poem, when there is no special education needed to enjoy a piece of contemporary art, when, in short, everything is admissible, where is the place for the academic, the critic, the art historian or anyone else desirous of telling others what to think? Only the past is safe for them, which is why these people are essentially reactionary and unreachable by means of reason. An enlightened critic is no longer a critic, and thus has taken the first step out of the imaginary past. What is the value of museums, if any, in this environment? Certainly, Duchamp's readymades have drastically affected the nature of museums today. However, not, as is often posited, in a merely one-dimensional extreme of "destroying the museum-space," or even being "absorbed" by it. Rather, as Brian Eno, in the shadow of Duchamp, states: there is currently "a situation where there is not a simple distinction between artists and watchers: where people can choose their level of involvement."6 With Duchamp, the museum-space looses it's monopoly on the defining of the Art Object. Duchamp has caused it to be seen that a spectator's ability to alter their perception (to perceive art) is not dependent on a museum or other construction of the Art Market, but only on themselves. To come full circle, Cage has shown that since the aura of Art is created entirely within the viewer the museum-space should have only a superficial effect on the Art Object. Objects in a museum are neither more nor less worthy of artistic evaluation than objects anywhere else.7 Brian Eno's concept of various "levels of involvement" seems to me the only remaining referent for judging the "quality" of a work - a successful work of art should be able to support various levels of "viewer involvement." While this has perhaps always been a requirement for a successful work of art, the current situation is notable for it's widespread elimination of competing factors of quality judgment. For example, Duchamp's Fountain eliminated many of the relationships between the Artist and the Art Object as worthwhile basis for quality judgments. Since Duchamp had not personally constructed any of his readymades their physical details could not be looked at as a product of his creativity. Further, Duchamp removed the Siren of Intention simply by choosing from what chance presented to him.8 This was the first step towards a conceptual art. When Benjamin discusses "the feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera," he stops several steps short of an interesting aspect related to the mis-en-abime affect in photography. In front of the movie camera the actor acts for an audience that he imagines viewing the film at some latter date. When viewing the film the audience tries to imagine what the actor was imagining - that is to say, the audience tries to become the actor's imaginary audience. In doing this several purposes are served, one of them being that the audience gives itself the illusion of intimacy with the actor, thus to better understand/identify with him and the movie as a whole. Thinking they are recognizing similarities to themselves in the actor, the audience is actually recognizing themselves. This is a type of creation as well as repression, or, as Orwell put it, doublethink.9 We can see this same dynamic in the common desire to know the background to a particular piece of art: how it came to be created by the artist or what materials comprise it's body or what year it was created. All these "facts" help establish a mental framework within which various aspects of the work of art can be more easily related to the individual ("understood"). This framework is the "imaginary audience" that the viewer imagines in the mind of the artist to facilitate interpretation of such things as "well understood" motifs, symbols or techniques - in short, to attempt to kill the creative life of a work by rigidly defining it, removing it's mystery. In the end, Duchamp's readymades seem to have struck the decisive blow in liberating art from many of its modernist limitations. Duchamp himself has not only stimulated several generations of artists, but has vastly expanded the possibilities of artistic activity by exerting an influence that has directly led to the creation of a conceptual foundation for our contemporary view of art "at the service of the mind." 1 Calvin Tomkins, The Bride & the Bachelors, p.13. 2 Calvin Tomkins, The Bride & the Bachelors, p.9. 3 "There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear." John Cage, Silence, p.8. 4 "Let no one imagine that in owning a recording he has the music." John Cage, Silence, p.128. 5 If we accept that a successful piece of art can support various levels of intellectual investment from the viewer, a given piece will not have a single unchangeable "meaning" for that individual. Rather, the meaning for that person will be made up of a network of shifting interactions between many perceptions of the work. It is interesting to think about the mental space that these interactions and perceptions take place in. 6 Brian Eno, from transcript of REAL WORLD THEME PARK address in Opal Information #21, p.2. In October's issue of The Wire, # 104, p.22, Mark Sinker defines Brian Eno: "The man who pissed in Duchamp's urinal is a most charming fraud. Conjuror, charlatan, confidence trickster: in his preferred - imagined - art/music worlds, all these words we bridle at Brian Eno hears as compliments." Dada, here I come? 7 "Theatre takes place all the time wherever one is and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case." John Cage, Silence, p.174. 8 Many an art historian/critic has been lured from the path of useful discussion to fall prey to the romantic desire for Intention - for Understanding and its comforts in loneliness. Today this seems foolish, for, as Duchamp has shown us, not only is it impossible to "really know what the artists' intent was," but it is also irrelevant. The importance of a work is entirely circumstantial. 9 "Walter Benjamin's concept of 'Rezeption in der Zerstreuung,' originally conceived for film, is as valid for radio and records. According to Benjamin the mass reception of art is accompanied by a steady decline in the attention given to the individual work of art: music has become environmental sound, the radio produces ambience, the quality of which can be measured by the ease with which it goes in one ear and out the other. Continuos and omnipresent, radio generates habituation and demands no more than an absent minded attention. With radio it's often less a matter of what there is to hear than that there is something to hear. The radio is on. The question is whether artists are satisfied with this and, imitating Brian Eno, will make 'ambient music' ridiculing the dispersal of attention." Max Bruinsma, Talking Back to the Media, Amsterdam, 1985. Also, see Freud's paper On Narcissism and Ovid's The Story of Narcisus & Echo.