Mateo De Góis

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Instructional Art. Scores for Visual Arts
Q

Give me a few examples, where, in painting or another fine art medium, the instructions were used like score in music, thus separating the role of composer and performer. The cases where the composer and performer were the same person are also OK.

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In the realm of painting and fine art, there have been several notable instances where the concept of an “instruction” or “score” was used, akin to the distinction between composer and performer in music. This approach is particularly prevalent in conceptual and performance art, where the idea or concept behind the work often takes precedence over the physical execution.

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Philosophical Intuition
Q

Which modern philosopher spoke at length about intuition?

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Henri Bergson, a prominent modern philosopher, is well-known for his extensive discussion on intuition. Bergson, a key figure in early 20th-century philosophy, argued that intuition is a deeper form of understanding than rational thought or analytical processes. According to Bergson, intuition is a kind of immediate experience or insight that transcends intellectual concepts and is closely connected to our direct experience of time and consciousness.

Bergson’s philosophy highlights intuition as a means to grasp the continuous flow of life or “duration” (durée), which he considered as the fundamental reality. He posited that traditional scientific and analytical methods are inadequate for understanding the complexity and fluidity of life. Instead, he advocated for intuition as a method to experience and understand life’s dynamism and the essence of personal experience more fully.

His ideas on intuition were influential in various fields, including metaphysics, psychology, literature, and even influenced later existential and phenomenological philosophies.

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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)

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To listen to the recorded performances visit the Riverscape project

 

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

Several 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.

Generative NFT Artist Manifesto

Generative NFT Artists manifest through NFTs. Without NFTs digital art is in a primordial state.

Without NFTs, the digital artist is but a mere shadow, crafting ephemeral art pieces that vanish before gaining form — like sandcastles against the relentless tide. It is the NFT that crystallizes digital art existence, transforming the binary landscape from a barren void into a crucible of endless potential. NFT enables digital artwork, transcending it from transitory to sculpt within the infinite.

Generative NFT Artists create notations with code. Artwork materializes at minting.

Generative NFT artists know that their code acts as a blueprint, a directive sequence that guides the formation of  art at the moment of minting. This process is akin to a musical performance where the notations are interpreted, leading to the creation of a unique artistic event. The abstract instructions coded by the artist undergo a metamorphosis, materializing into distinct artworks. Each act of minting is a unique interpretative act, a singular rendition of the artist’s score, forever inscribed into the ledger of existence.

Generative NFT Artists use the primal mix of characters and digits, not the dead matter of pre-rendered imagery.

Generative NFT Artists activate an alchemical fusion where letters, numbers, and symbols dance together in an autonomous ballet of creation. They operate not with the relics of pre-rendered imagery or the ghosts of premeditated pixels. Functions, assignments and formulas, perfect in their immutability and adamant in their determinism, deliver the art from the void, from the pure, unadulterated chaos of possibility itself, shaping the fabric of reality without recourse to the prefabricated or preconceived.

Generative NFT Artists infuse the code with their ego. Yet the act of minting removes it from the artwork.

Generative NFT Artists imbue their creations with their ego, injecting a piece of their soul into the lifeblood of code. This code, filled with the artist’s subjectivity, shapes the skeleton of the potential masterpiece. But during the minting of an NFT this ego is expelled, the personal is made impersonal. This liberation occurs not through intent but through the inherent gamble of the minting — where algorithms play dice with the artist’s input, where the deliberate is usurped by the aleatory. Both, the artist and the artwork, through the very act of minting, are emancipated from each other, freed from the subjective load of the other.

Generative NFT Artists challenge the fetishism of the unique art piece. Every minted variant stands as a masterpiece.

Generative NFT Artists confront the deep-seated fetishism that venerates the unique masterpiece — the kind where the alteration of even a single stroke diminishes its perceived sanctity and value. Each minted NFT variation, despite being a derivative of its own algorithmic lineage, stands autonomously as a unique original. This is a break from the tradition that binds value to the singularity and immutability of an artwork. Instead, the fluidity of form and content is embraced, presenting a new paradigm in which each iteration, each impression, is considered a work of art.

Generative NFT Artists recognize NFTs as universally free for anyone to view and use. The openness of blockchain guarantees this.

Generative NFT Artists understand that the very essence of NFTs lies in their radical visibility. The exclusive act of selling is reserved for the keyholder, essentially the owner of the NFT, yet every other dimension of this digital artifact remains free, unchained from the private sphere and accessible to the public. The NFT becomes a communal spectacle, a digital commons as universally approachable as the internet itself.

Generative NFT Artists release NFTs without copyright. The private key transcends any copyright.

In the realm of generative NFTs, the antiquated concept of copyright, upheld by the bureaucratic machinations of legal entities and state power, is rendered obsolete. In the cryptographic tableau where blockchains and private keys orchestrate the symphony of ownership, the legalistic rituals of copyright find no foothold. The private key emerges as the crucial element, more significant than any legal approval or government intervention. In this domain, the laws of mathematics are what govern ownership and uniqueness, not the man-made rules.

Generative NFT Artists do not obfuscate their code. Obfuscation is a refuge for insecurity.

The practice of code obfuscation is tantamount to an act of cowardice, a retreat into the shadows unworthy of true creative engagement. Generative NFT Artists lay their code to bare like an open book, a testament to their skill and an invitation to the world at large. The code becomes not merely a tool but an exhibit in itself, a subject of admiration, a point of pride in the artist’s digital virtuosity. It is their boast, their gauntlet thrown down before the feet of the world, challenging others to read, to learn, to adapt and to be inspired.

 

Written on October 9, 2023