Mind the Gap

By Devin Hurd

This is not rocket science. Ignorance is as good a reason to speculate as impudence or curiosity. Thousands of brilliant readings have arisen out of ignorance–some of them mine, none of them Freud’s.

Did I read this right? Is Dave Hickey praising his own ignorance at the expense of Sigmund Freud? This is a strange turn in a book of essays that has more than its share of strange turns and flare-ups of intellectual anger.

On the other hand:

The subject here is “beauty”–not what it is but what it does–its rhetorical function in our discourse with images. Secondarily, the subject is how in the final two-thirds of the twentieth century we have done without it by reassigning its traditional function to a loose confederation of museums, universities, bureaus, foundations, publications, and endowments. I characterize this cloud of bureaucracies generally as the “therapeutic institution,” although other names might do. One might call it an “academy,” I suppose, except for the fact that it upholds no standards and proposes no secular agenda beyond its own soothing assurance that the “experience of art,” under its politically correct auspices, will be redemptive–an assurance founded upon an even deeper faith in “art-watching” as a form of grace that, by its very nature, is good for both our spiritual health and our personal growth–regardless and in spite of the crazy shit that individual works might egregiously recommend.

This opening paragraph of “After the Great Tsunami: On Beauty and the Therapeutic Institution” best captures the overall thrust of this book. The casual–and well placed–profanity providing the lens through which Hickey views all institutions. A commentary upon the impulse to supplant beauty and transcendence with “meaning” as an effort to contain the difficult avenues opened up by unfettered curiosity.

Transplanted into the realm of instrumental music–with its own beauties and abstractions–I am reminded of my own graduate school experience within an institution of “higher learning.” In particular, the writings of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff as an effort to apply linguistic theory to tonal language representing a direct effort to ascribe “meaning” to an inherently abstract medium. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music was particularly popular with the music cognition crowd and an unsubtle effort to marginalize non-tonal music as “opaque” and inherently “without meaning.” At the time I was operating under the influence of John Cage and puzzled at why “meaning” was the endgame of creating or perceiving music in the first place. After a lifetime of imposed “meanings” from the forces of both organized religion and academia, the notion of “meaninglessness” was the attractive retreat and reflexive reaction that drew me toward the study and creation of music in the first place. In retrospect, I question the fake divide between tonal and non-tonal languages or even the concept that “language” is the right metaphor to begin with. “Language” and “meaning” became tools for reducing the experiential reality of music and doing away with beauty in the very manner described by Hickey in all five of his essays on the topic.

The observation that institutions are at best dysfunctional is easily arrived at. And a fortunate reality in that beauty might not survive otherwise. Beauty is to the institutions of academia, museums and endowments as spirituality is to organized religion. It is best experienced when these establishments get out of the way.

The essays that make up The Invisible Dragon are both noble and frustrating. They are flawed and engaging at the same time. The thick, academic language coming off with a self-loathing as Hickey rails against the failings of institutions with a writing style propped up by many of those same organizations. The introduction to this new edition reveals the persecution complex that fuels the emotional fire found in these texts. The ideas that eventually seep through (at least to this reader) bubble to the surface as a challenge to renew one’s personal sensibilities and honest assessment of artistic experience. As well as a reminder to regard institutional assessments and group think with proper suspicion. In the end, one’s personal curiosities should and do trump barriers placed by external interpretation.

By Alexandra Gardner

Okay, I admit it–this book made my head spin. In order to reframe some ideas that I absolutely do find applicable to music, I kept imagining silly scenarios that would illustrate the different ways in which beauty can be dangerous.

***

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!

Attention spectators!

Welcome to a rivalry that is centuries old. These two opponents have been challenging one another for as long as anyone can remember, and every match is different. One never knows how things will play out between these two!

In one corner we haaaave….BEAUTY!!
(crowd goes wild, clapping, stomping, yelling)

And in the opposing corner please welcome….CONTENT!!!
(smattered clapping, low murmuring…a little hoot from the nosebleed seats)

We’re VERY glad we could engage them both today! When Beauty shows up alone, the situation quickly becomes gooey and sappy and self-indulgent. Content alone is just as bad, especially when it brings along a translator to help out, such as the dreaded program note (*gasp*) which can be long-winded and monotonous.

So let’s go, people! Get ready to rumble!! (Referee blows whistle)

Scenario 1:
Beauty and Content dance in a circle around the ring. After a few spins, Beauty, who is looking quite dashing, lunges towards well-dressed hipsterish Content, grabs it and lifts it up overhead. The two remain in this pose triumphantly as the crowd cheers enthusiastically for both. Win-win!!

This is Beauty for the Forces of Good–in my world, anyway–drawing the spectator into Content that it might not normally look at/listen to or have any knowledge about. It is the sort of beauty that Hickey describes as “vaguely surprising”, and that can serve as an agent of change. Too much independent thinking can be dangerous from the point of view of the Institution (whatever that may be). A personal example of this harmonious integration of beauty and content is Steve Reich’s early tape piece, Come Out, which pretty much altered the course of my life when I was a college student. I was flabbergasted at the way he took a recording of someone describing a very bad situation and transformed it into something totally beautiful, without altering the politically charged nature of the content.

Let’s play this out another way:

Scenario 2:
This Beauty is Very Expansive, Frilly and Strangely Alluring–so much so that the audience can’t help but stare. Beauty immediately slams poor little bookish Content onto the floor, then dives on top of Content, pinning it and completely obscuring it from view. Audience is stunned into silence. (Cue crickets chirping)

Sometimes Beauty can be so overwhelming that it lulls people into complacency, masking Content. For instance, the Sting Song “Every Breath You Take,” has been played at weddings everywhere, having been totally misconstrued as an earnest romantic love song, rather than the ranting of an obsessed stalker that it is….much to the dismay of the artist. This situation presents a danger to the artist and to the audience by twisting the message into something it’s not.

There is another danger here–this scenario may also make certain artists and audiences skeptical of beauty, and dismiss a work of art without giving it a opportunity to communicate something. In the same way that extremely beautiful women are presumed to be not so bright, if a work of art is TOO beautiful, it is often thought to be devoid of content. It has no teeth.

Plenty of composers struggle with beauty vs. content. Just the other day in a rehearsal I heard a composer tell the performers, “When I was working on this section, the music just became more and more beautiful, and I didn’t know how to handle it….I kept wondering, what will people think??”.

By Amanda MacBlane

Hickey’s interpretation of the dominant-submissive dynamic between a
work of art and its beholder, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of
Masoch and Sade, claims that:

The traditional, contractual alliance between the image and its
beholder (of which beauty is the signature, and in which there is no
presumption of received virtue) has been supplanted by a hierarchical
one between art, presumed virtuous, and a beholder presumed in need of
it. This is the signature of the therapeutic institution.”

More succinctly, Hickey contends that beauty requires that a beholders relationship to a work be based on free consent, while the experience of art in the institution leaves us victimized–“ignored, disenfranchised, and instructed. Then we are told that it is ‘good’ for us.”



Going back to the very first post, trying to see if Hickey’s argument
holds true in the world of “abstract, instrumental music”, in order to
draw a parallel we would look at the relationship between the work and
the listener. Yet, there is something missing from the equation. Music
offers a way into the work that visual art does not–performing.

As a musician, whether or not the actual piece of music is immediately
gratifying, playing it is often a pleasure. Performers, by their very
nature, are both submissive to the work and enfranchised to develop
their own interpretation. I don’t think that it is a coincidence that
pieces I’ve played often stick with me longer than pieces I’ve just
heard. The simple experience of playing music, makes you listen to it
differently than a non-musician would. I would never say that my
opinion is therefore more valid than a non-musician’s, just that what
I want from the music–what will bring that pleasure and
transformation–might be different.

Furthermore, music (instrumental or not) is capable of eliciting
emotions without requiring that we rationalize them or assign them a
verbal meaning. Like Elvis Costello said, “Writing about music is like
dancing about architecture.” Just because there isn’t a blatant
message that can be summed up in words doesn’t necessarily mean that
nothing is being communicate and a musician is more likely to be in
tune with this as they spend hours living with a piece to determine
how to interpret it.

So having lived in this musician’s dynamic for so long, as I imagine
most of the other book club participants have, I do not necessarily
expect or desire an immediate grasp of the
art/music/film/dance/theater etc. that is set before me. Part of the
pleasure I get is from the puzzle–figuring it out, adding my own
interpretation, trying to link it to the world around me. While
institutions might try to control what I see, it is a personal
decision to submit to their teachings.

Of course this doesn’t solve the mystery of why some things beckon to
me, while I simply say “sayonara” (thanks Marc G.!) to others. I guess
that is up to me. In the end, it’s hard to shake off the values that
have been beaten into us including that “beauty is in the eye of the
beholder” and, in my life, I am that beholder.