Zero Miles Per Hour

Effects of the isolation are many. Perhaps, the first to notice is the spatial confusion and the loss of clarity of your physical presence. Where are you when you partying over Zoom? And where are those twenty people (with you) whom you impress with the Covid knowledge? The mere number of activities and the geographical distribution of their reference points and impacts, questions the relevance of the territorial coordinates defining the position of your body, and maybe even questions the physicality of your body itself.

Paradoxically, the opposite is also true. The significance of the physical space you spend your time in is vastly magnified. You study your place anew, you explore it, adapt it and bend it. You pay very close attention to various objects that copopulate your narrow habitat. Sometimes such attentive observation brings a discovery of a new facet in the familiar, a new essence or a new utilization.

For example: running a treadmill. A very isolational activity, manifesting both of the aforementioned properties.
Spatially, it’s not clear whether, after thirty minutes of running, you have moved 5 miles or stayed in-place.
Auditory, you discover the musical-instrumental aspect of it. Indeed, it produces sound and you can listen to it, play with it, affect it with your steps. You can put a synthesizer on top and start processing and filtering it, turning this exercise into something a bit less rodent.

Cage-Duchamp-Cage

Set against the backdrop of John Cage’s composition, this audio collage features Marcel Duchamp discussing his ego-driven intention to ‘kill art.’ It then transitions to John Cage, who advocates for creating art free of the artist’s ego, focusing on its removal from the process.

The narrative of art history is a tale of shifting perspectives and cyclical evolution. Initially, art served as a medium for conveying grander concepts and moral narratives, acting more as a signifier than an autonomous aesthetic experience. This paradigm shifted with the advent of modern art, a period marked by the unity of form and aesthetic essence, focusing on “art for art’s sake” and the pure pleasure of visual beauty.

Yet, this trajectory was reversed, influenced notably by artists like Marcel Duchamp, who labeled the works of modern period “retinal art” to condescendingly describe art that appealed only to the eye. This was a counter-revolution, bringing back the traditional, conceptual approach to an artwork, valuing the idea, the concept, over the aesthetic value. Or poetics. Or beauty. This marked a shift to the new regime, the regime of conceptual interpretations and intellectual engagement which, unexpectedly even for Duchamp, became the new canon, the doctrine for the next (at least) 100 years.

Duchamp (1968): […] The fact they [Ready-mades] are regarded with the same reverence as objects of art probably means I failed to solve the problem of trying to do away entirely with art. It is partly perhaps because I have only a few Ready-mades. If I can count 10, 12 gestures of this kind in my life, that is all. And I’m glad I did now because this is where the artists of today are wrong, I think. Must you repeat? Repetition has become the great enemy of art in general.

– What you were also attempting to do, as I understand, was to devalue the art as an object, simply by saying “If I say it’s a work of art, that makes it a work of art”.

– Yeah, but … work of art is not so important for me. I don’t care about the word art, because it’s been so, you know, discredited.

– But you in fact contributed to this discrediting, didn’t you, quite deliberately?

– Yes, deliberately, so I really wanted to get rid of it, because the way many people today have done away with religion, it’s sort of unnecessary adoration of art today which I find unnecessary. And I think, I don’t know, this is a difficult position because I’ve been in it all the time and still want to get rid of it, you see? And I cannot explain everything I do because I do things, the way people do things, and they don’t know why they do it, you know?

Sources:
An Interview with Marcel Duchamp, From 1968
Marcel Duchamp interview on Art and Dada (1956)
Marcel Duchamp – BBC interview (1968)
John Cage Interviewed by Jonathan Cott (1963)

The Riverscape

“The notation is more important than the sound. Not the exactitude and the success with which a notation notates a sound; but the musicalness of the notation in its notating.” (Cornelius Cardew)

Nile

Los Angeles Port

Ganges

Danube

To listen to the recorded performances visit the Compositions page.

The Rivescape is a research project investigating and questioning the roles of composer and performer, the auditory nature of the medium of music, and the interdependency between the score and the performance.

The project originates in a series of paintings – riverscapes – sighted from above and abstracted to maps, graphically structured to serve as musical scores.

The musicians have accepted the commission to compose and perform the music based on the paintings-scores: Shira Legmann, Orr Sinay, Nitai Levi, Shaul Kohn, Tom Klein, Hovav Landoy.

Exposition

The scores created for the project, function in two media at the same time: the medium of painting and the medium of music. While serving as notations for musical compositions, the paintings don’t cease to be perceived as paintings. This creates the possibility of diffusion – the paintings take on musical intentionality, the music aspires to be a transliteration of the visuals.

The meaning shifts start with maps, dropping their purpose to describe a territory in favor of the aesthetic purpose of being pictures. In turn, the pictures, without abandoning their conventional role, take on the musical intent, serving as instructions for composing music.

The resulting score provides musicians with a form, a starting point, a key, a path, a possibility of composing the music. The paintings specify a flow of time but not limit it to any specific length. They also don’t restrict the ways of interpretation of the visual elements: shapes, sizes, colors, textures. The compositional technique is fully open, varying from improvisation, to preparing an intermediary self-score, to digital composing in post production.

The aims of the project can be reduced to three main points:

First: Attempting to construct a situation, where a performer becomes a composer by choosing to play a score. The score is indeterminate, yet it is sophisticated enough to make the transformation (player -> composer) easy by providing a formal structure, starting point and an inspiration.

Second: Trying to create a series of scores that can be perceived as self contained artifacts, possessing an aesthetic value of their own. I intentionally avoid saying “artistic” value, for the word “art” may mean different things for musicians and musical community and for the contemporary, post visual art-world community.

Third: Experimenting with reciprocal causal dependency between a self contained score and a self contained musical composition. That is, just as the painting serves a reason for a musical composition, in the same way the (future) musical composition serves a reason for creating a painting. We can call is a mutual automation.

Music in the Arts

When we speak of ‘art’ today, we should be aware of the ambiguity that this term drags along. This idea is pivotal – the word ‘art’, as it echoes in our contemporary discourse, is a deceptive homonym hinting at divergent conceptions. Indeed, there are multiple facets to this concept, but let’s not lose ourselves in this labyrinth; we’ll focus on the two primary ones.

The Pantheon of Arts

There was a time when ‘art’ was not a standalone entity. It was always ‘arts’, plural, a diverse pantheon including music, painting, architecture, poetry, theater, and sometime others. Each held its own, yet there was an underlying, almost Hegelian unity – a shared elevation above mundane existence. These arts, detached from the daily grind, served a higher purpose, a telos of sublime experience.

In this older understanding, ‘art’ was but a member of this larger family. To say, “Music is an art of sound,” was not to define music fully but to place it within this broader, more holistic framework. These arts were tangible, concrete, inseparable from their mediums – a painting, a symphony, a building. They were phenomena to be experienced through the senses, not just abstractions floating in a conceptual void.

The Mono-Art

In the 20th century, a shift occurs. From the depths of visual arts, particularly painting, emerges a new, dominant notion of ‘art’ – a mono-art, eclipsing its predecessors. This new art form is a chameleon, unmoored from any specific medium. Its essence lies not in a physical object but in a sort of conceptual aura that hovers around or within it. It’s not the material but the idea, the signified, that demands our attention.

This mono-art, in its quest for dominance, effectively relegates traditional arts to mere techniques. Beauty, once revered, is now scorned as kitsch, a relic of a bygone era. In this new doctrine, anything can become ‘art’ – be it carpentry, gastronomy, or shopping. Traditional forms like music, painting, or performance are demoted to mere mediums, stripped of their once-celebrated unique status.

Music Under the Mono-Art Regime

The emergence of mono-art has cast a long shadow over the realm of visual arts, particularly painting, while music (along with other non-visual arts) has navigated these waters with remarkable dexterity. Music, in its defiance, has retained its esteemed stature as an art within the poly-artistic spectrum, even as the mono-art revolution reshaped the cultural landscape.

In the contemporary discourse we continue to refer to music as ‘art’, yet we must acknowledge a profound ambiguity inherent in this usage. When we speak of music in relation to ‘art’, we must consider what we are truly implying. Music, in the context of a specific piece, could be seen as merely a technological tool, or it might transcend to become the embodiment of the artwork itself. This issue is not trivial; it represents a dialectical conundrum that underpins two fundamentally divergent approaches to evaluating a musical work.

Critical awareness is imperative in recognizing the potential ambiguity that the word ‘music’ carries within our language. In discussions where we label music as ‘art’, clarity is essential regarding the dimension of ‘art’ being invoked. This endeavor is not solely an academic exercise; it is a quest to pierce through the linguistic veil and truly comprehend the essence of what we mean when we refer to music as ‘art’ in our modern dialogue.