Datasets:

maldv

/

crabcanon

like 0

code by which a listener could decode them into a message. A typical example is

"Imaginary Landscape no. 4", the polyradio piece described in Chapter VI. I may not

be doing Cage justice, but to me it seems that much of his work has been directed at

bringing meaninglessness into music, and in some sense, at making that meaninglessness

have meaning. Aleatoric music is a typical exploration in that direction. (Incidentally,

chance music is a close cousin to the much later notion of "happenings" or "be-in"' s.)

There are many other contemporary composers who are following Cage’s lead, but few

with as much originality. A piece by Anna Lockwood, called "Piano Burning", involves

just that-with the strings stretched to maximum tightness, to make them snap as loudly as

possible; in a piece by LaMonte Young, the noises are provided by shoving the piano all

around the stage and through obstacles, like a battering ram.

Art in this century has gone through many convulsions of this general type. At

first there was the abandonment of representation, which was genuinely revolutionary:

the beginnings of abstract art. A gradual swoop from pure representation to the most

highly abstract patterns is revealed in the work of Piet Mondrian. After the world was

used to nonrepresentational art, then surrealism came along. It was a bizarre about-face,

something like neoclassicism in music, in which extremely representational art was

"subverted" and used for altogether new reasons: to shock, confuse, and amaze. This

school was founded by Andre Breton, and was located primarily in France; some of its

more infl uential members were Dali, Magritte, de Chirico, Tanguy.

Magritte's Semantic Illusions

Of all these artists, Magritte was the most conscious of the symbol-object mystery (which

I see as a deep extension of the use-mention distinction). He uses it to evoke powerful

responses in viewers, even if the viewers do not verbalize the distinction this way. For

example, consider his very strange variation on the theme of still life, called Common

Sense (Fig. 137).

Here, a dish filled with fruit, ordinarily the kind of thing represented inside a still life, is

shown sitting on top of a blank canvas. The conflict between the symbol and the real is

great. But that is not the full irony, for of course the whole thing is itself just a painting-in

fact, a still life with nonstandard subject matter.

Magritte's series of pipe paintings is fascinating and perplexing. Consider The

Two Mysteries (Fig. 138). Focusing on the inner painting, you get the message that

symbols and pipes are different. Then your glance moves upward to the "real” pipe

floating in the air-you perceive that it is real, while the other one is just a symbol. But that

is of course totally wrong: both of them are on the same flat surface before your eyes.

The idea that one pipe is in a twice-nested painting, and therefore somehow "less real"

than the other pipe, is a complete fallacy. Once you are willing to "enter the room", you

have already been tricked: you’ve fallen for image as reality. To be consistent in your

gullibility, you should happily go one level further down, and confuse image-within-

image with reality. The only way not to be sucked in is to see both pipes merely as

colored smudges on a surface a few inches in front of your nose. Then, and only then, do

you appreciate the full meaning of the written message "Ceci West pas une pipe”-but

ironically, at the very instant everything turns to smudges, the writing too turns to

smudges, thereby losing its meaning! In other words, at that instant, the verbal message

of the painting self-destructs in a most Godelian way.

The Air and the Song (Fig. 82), taken from a series by Magritte, accomplishes all

that The Two Mysteries does, but in one level instead of two. My drawings Smoke Signal

and Pipe Dream (Figs. 139 and 140) constitute "Variations on a Theme of Magritte". Try

staring at Smoke Signal for a while. Before long, you should be able to make out a hidden

message saying, "Ceci n’est pas un message". Thus, if you find the message, it denies

itself-yet if you don't, you miss the point entirely. Because of their indirect self-snuffing,

my two pipe pictures can be loosely mapped onto Godel’s G-thus giving rise to a

"Central Pipemap", in the same spirit as the other "Central Xmaps": Dog, Crab, Sloth.

A classic example of use-mention confusion in paintings is the occurrence of a

palette in a painting. Whereas the palette is an illusion created by the representational

skill of the painter, the paints on the painted palette are literal daubs of paint from the

artist's palette. The paint plays itself-it does not symbolize anything else. In Don

Giovanni, Mozart exploited a related trick: he wrote into the score explicitly the sound of

an orchestra tuning up. Similarly, if I want the letter T to play itself (and not symbolize

me), I put T directly into my text; then I enclose T between quotes. What results is "I"

(not T, nor "T"). Got that?

The "Code" of Modern Art

A large number of influences, which no one could hope to pin down completely, led to

further explorations of the symbol-object dualism in art. There is no doubt that John

Cage, with his interest in Zen, had a profound influence on art as well as on music. His

friends jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg both explored the distinction between

objects and symbols by using objects as symbols for themselves-or, to flip the coin, by

using symbols as objects in themselves. All of this was perhaps intended to break down

the notion that art is one step removed from reality-that art speaks in "code", for which

the viewer must act as interpreter. The idea was to eliminate the step of interpretation and

let the naked object simply be, period. ("Period"-a curious case of use-mention blur.)

However, if this was the intention, it was a monumental flop, and perhaps had to be.

Any time an object is exhibited in a gallery or dubbed a "work", it acquires an

aura of deep inner significance-no matter how much the viewer has been warned not to

look for meaning. In fact, there is a backfiring effect whereby the more that viewers are

told to look at these objects without mystification, the more mystified the viewers get.

After all, if a

wooden crate on a museum floor is just a wooden crate on a museum floor, then why

doesn't the janitor haul it out back and throw it in the garbage? Why is the name of an

artist attached to it? Why did the artist want to demystify art? Why isn't that dirt clod out

front labeled with an artist's name? Is this a hoax? Am I crazy, or are artists crazy? More

and more questions flood into the viewer's mind; he can't help it. This is the "frame

effect" which art-Art-automatically creates. There is no way to suppress the wonderings

in the minds of the curious.

Of course, if the purpose is to instill a Zen-like sense of the world as devoid of

categories and meanings, then perhaps such art is merely intended to serve-as does

intellectualizing about Zen-as a catalyst to inspire the viewer to go out and become

acquainted with the philosophy which rejects "inner meanings" and embraces the world