By Corey Dargel
In the first essay from The Invisible Dragon, Dave Hickey argues that arbiters and artists care too much about the meaning of art and not enough about whether it gives us pleasure. His focus is on visual art:
Since pleasure is the true occasion for looking at anything, any theory of images that is not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begs the question of art’s efficacy and dooms itself to inconsequence… If [images] only do things after we have talked about them, then they aren’t doing things, we are. [p. 2]
However, Hickey believes that beautiful works of art tend to use their beauty to persuade us. They make something strange look beautiful, in order to seduce the viewer into accepting and ultimately appreciating what is portrayed. The artwork’s power comes not from criticizing the mainstream–which only acknowledges the mainstream’s importance and ghettoizes the artist–but from celebrating the margins of society, and doing so “persuasively, powerfully, and beautifully.” [p. 15]. Of Robert Mapplethorpe’s pornographic photographs (NSFW), which inspired the essay, Hickey writes:
A single artist with a single group of images had somehow overcome the aura of moral isolation, gentrification, and mystification that surrounds the practice of contemporary art in this nation and directly threatened those in actual power with his celebration of marginality… It was the celebration… that made these images dangerous. [p. 14]
Can Hickey’s argument be transplanted from the genre of visual art to the genre of music? I am skeptical but anxious to be persuaded. The problem, it seems to me, is that instrumental music is too abstract to “celebrate the margins of society” in a way that would be apparent to all listeners. Music that relies on text has an easier time celebrating the margins–songs by The Smiths and operas by Robert Ashley come to mind–as does music that interacts with other disciplines like Meredith Monk’s Ellis Island. Are we allowed to take the artist’s biography and background into consideration, for example in the cases of Arthur Russell, Harry Partch, and Julius Eastman?
Tell me if I’m missing something: Can you think of any music that celebrates the margins, that makes something strange seem beautiful, without resorting to textual or visual elements, and without requiring a knowledge of the composer’s or performer’s biography?
* Andy Warhol, Ambulance Disaster, 1963-64. Founding Collection, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
I think it depends on how far you want to stretch the idea of a cultural margin (and I’m flying a little blind with regards to Hickey’s definition, since Amazon is taking its sweet old time getting me this book). If you think of musical marginalization as a process of defining some things as not music, I would make a case for a lot of early John Cage—the Imaginary Landscapes and such—as being a convincing analogue to what Hickey is describing.
Naturally, I haven’t read the book either (I am cheap, lazy), but I’d say Eastman definitely makes this list, if only for his titles.
Howevs “the music itself” (T.M.I.) is certainly also encoded with fraught relationships to social norms. The controlled anarchy of Eastman’s music (like Riley’s, or Rzewski’s) is an aestheticization of the breakdown of a central musical control, in which the excitement of the piece comes not from keeping in conscientious unison but from coming conscientiously apart. Hard not to see it as a metaphor for a happy political breakdown. (Your happiness may vary: Eastman and Rzewski don’t quite seem to share Riley’s optimism, I guess.)
I don’t know Russell’s music well enough to make a strong argument either way, but I want to claim that his erosion of the barrier between music for the concert hall and music for the gay discotheque is a Mapplethorpe-like gesture, framing an underground culture for highbrow reception?
This comment brought to you by the ReCAPTCHA words ‘deejays’ and ‘nual.’
At least within the realm of purely musical aesthetics, I think good music is probably always involved one way or another in making the strange seem beautiful, and also making the beautiful seem strange. That’s what I love about it. But if “celebrating the margins” means making an explicit social or political argument that the audience will understand as such, then no, I don’t think you can really do that without relying on words, images, or conventional extra-musical associations. However, to make music at all could be construed as a kind of social statement in itself, asserting that there is value in such activity. That’s not necessarily a subversive stance, but in a culture that doesn’t share its premise, it might seem like one.
John Zorn’s Speedfreaks? This composition sticks out among those in his “Torture Garden” period. It’s musically transgressive, celebrates the marginalized (various musical styles each marginalized perhaps from each other?), in a marginalized form of expression (speed metal), makes the beautiful strange and the strange beautiful, and except for some screaming has no “textual” elements.
I think even if you had no experience with the various genres of music that go by in its less than 60 seconds, you would still laugh at and perhaps even be a bit frightened by its audacity? Hope that makes sense.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkrfVZGmLL8
I also thought of Charles Mingus’ Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting and Haitian Fight Song. Both celebrations, completely unselfconscious, and representing a “margin” of society.
I like what David said.
Beyond the formal institutional culture (symphonic and chamber organizations paralleling the museums of Hickey’s concern) with which Invisible Dragon is wrestling, reading up on Terre Thaemlitz on the intersection of GLBT nightlife and techno will be informative.
I agree with Matthew that Cage’s Imaginary Landscapes is a good example of a marginal celebration, or a celebration of marginal cultural activity. I wonder if it’s closely enough associated with a specific marginal cultural group for Hickey to make the same connection we’re making.
There’s a lot of music that finds beauty in a manner that a broader public wouldn’t appreciate, but often the abstraction that Corey mentions is what makes it acceptable to arts institutions — I’ve figured that the sonic abstraction provides a comforting parallel to visual abstraction. It’s probably tougher for traditional singer-songwriters to make their case to the MOMA than for an audio experimenter. (This is the text thing Corey mentions.)
(Dan, one of my two reCaptcha words was “bischoff,” as in, I suppose, John Bischoff, the Mills music scholar and composer.)
I’m not sure you frame the question in a fair way for abstract instrumental music, Corey. Mapplethorpe didn’t create abstract representations of those acts in the photos, or make gestural paintings meant to evoke them, he made actual photos of them. It seems similar to me to a composer setting a specific tune, and everyone saying, “Right, ‘Simple Gifts.'” No one asks what the tune is, and no one asks what is going on in those photos. It would be fair to ask if Jackson Pollack *and* an abstract composition could ever “celebrate the margins” without resorting to words, and I think the answer is likely “no.”
Also, when there are no words to describe a narrative in a piece of art, whether it’s a ballet plot or to state what’s going on in a Mapplethorpe photo, it’s pretty darn hard to come up with an agreement about A) what it means and B) how that is transgressive. I could argue that Mark-Anthony Turnage’s instrumental Blood on the Floor “celebrates the margins,” but only if you allow me to say that it’s an elegy for a drug-abusing brother. Even with all the squalling jazz-inspired passages, it’s a hard case to make unless I can bring it back to reality…and that needs words!
And doesn’t this line of reasoning go back to the New Criticism and the idea that it was only the work itself that should be considered, and not the biography of the artist or anything else that was outside it? I thought it was strange Hickey never talked about that, even if it was just to dismiss this form of criticism that slices away any attempt to tie an artwork back to its historical time and author’s biography.
Music “that makes something strange seem beautiful”? Three examples off the top of my head:
* Schumann’s D minor Piano Trio has a sul ponticello passage that almost perfectly exemplifies this.
* Late Renaissance ‘mannerist’ composers, of which Gesualdo is the best known.
* Virtually all early Webern.
After reading through the discussion, I agree with the Marcs. We need to reshape the question and go outside of the narrow definition that “abstract instrumental music†has seemed to elicit from this group. Hickey is pretty clearly peeved about “art about art”, so I would assume that “margins” have a broader societal meaning as he uses it. So, while this kind of music may be “marginal†compared to other musical forms, the people making it often are not.
Therefore, can beauty—which according to Hickey as we’ve said serves to “celebrate the margins†to push for social change—can this beauty come from what many would see as a cultural or at least a socio-economic elite? Following this particular logic, the answer would be no and I think this is one of the underlying issues that Hickey grapples with as he takes on the institution and the academy.
On the other hand, this is just one of the many functions of beauty he identifies. In fact, I only began to buy into his ideas in the last essay, once I felt that he was able to loosen his grip on his own political agenda for beauty and show how “reorganizing society†can be or at least start with something small and personal.
The experience of American beauty, when it surprises us, is always, potentially, an occasion for change—for changing one’s beliefs, one’s friends, one’s fashions, one’s furnishings, or one’s livelihood—for changing one’s home, in the hope of discovering a new home that “feels more like home.†(p. 84)
So can the kind of music that has so far dominated the discussion possess rhetorical beauty, capable of reorganizing the listener’s perspective? Can it be an occasion for change? Sure it can. We have all had personal experiences with this kind of music, which is why we are a part of this particular social subset (meaning this book club).
Are there other genres of music that might do so on a wider scale? Of course. Marc W’s example of techno and the LGBT community is a good one. And without requiring any additional reading, drawing simply on our shared American musical heritage, we can see that most of our music came from the margins (slaves, sharecroppers, immigrants, religious sects…). Music is a natural and powerful celebration of these margins and has played a major role in transforming society. Jazz is the obvious example of music (some of it instrumental and quite abstract) that completely reorganized our society. Interestingly, and following Hickey’s assessment, jazz was rendered powerless when it became institutionalized (no comment on correlation or causation).
I agree with Marc and Amanda that the issue is more complex and nuanced than I’ve made it out to be in my initial post. And of course, I’m presuming that there are margins to celebrate–that there actually is a genuine counter-culture, which is debatable, at least compared to the way things were at the time when Mapplethorpe’s photos were made.