Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl: The Musicalization of Art 9781501330131, 9781501330162, 9781501330148

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Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl

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Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl The Musicalization of Art Edited by Diane V. Silverthorne

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC 1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America in 2019 Copyright © Diane V. Silverthorne and The Contributors, 2019 Diane V. Silverthorne has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Ceri Richards, Clair de Lune, 1973, screenprint on paper, 53 × 72.4 cm. Tate, London. © The Estate of Ceri Richards, DACS, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN :

HB : 978-1-5013-3013-1 ePDF : 978-1-5013-3014-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-3015-5

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To BG for her love and knowledge of music and words. (1922–2017)

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Contents List of Plates and Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: A Work in Two Parts – Continuities and Discontinuities from Romanticism to Postmodernism Diane V. Silverthorne Prelude: The Musical in Art Jed Rasula

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The Musicalization of Art, Part 1: Spaces of Intimacy, Touch and Temporality 1

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Romantic Musical Celebrity and Printed Portraits: Visual Intimacy and Mass-Market Distance Alan Davison Making an Entrance: Manet’s Still Life with Hat and Guitar Therese Dolan Time in Fin-de-Siècle Painting Anne Leonard Erik Satie and the Interart Genre Ann-Marie Hanlon The ‘Figure in the Carpet’: M. K. Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts Spyros Petritakis

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The Musicalization of Art, Part 2: Spaces of Performance, Sound and Silence 6

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Music, Sound and Light: Embodied Experiences of the Modernist and Postmodern Gesamtkunstwerk Diane V. Silverthorne Squaring the Circle: Wilfred’s Lumia and his Rejection of ‘Colour Music’ Nick Lambert

129 149

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Contents

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In Concert: The Emergence of the Audio-Visual Moment in Minimalism Meredith Mowder 9 Riffing the Index: Romare Bearden and the Hand of Jazz Nikki A. Greene 10 The Politics of Music and Image in Contemporary Iranian Art: ‘The Impossibility of Putting One’s Body and Voice on a Stage’ Kirstie Imber 11 Contemporary Feminist Art, the Musical: Listening to the Visual Legacy of Riot Grrrl Cara Smulevitz Postlude Diane V. Silverthorne and Alan Davison Bibliography Index

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235 239 261

List of Plates and Figures Plates 1 2 3 4

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Katushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, c. 1831, colour woodblock oban print. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Édouard Manet, Hat and Guitar, 1862, oil on canvas, 77 × 121 cm. Musée Calvet, Avignon, France. Édouard Manet, Dead Toreador, 1864, oil on canvas, 75.9 × 153.3 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC . Paul Signac, Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890, 1890, oil on canvas, 73.5 × 92.5 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Alphonse Osbert, Les chants de la nuit, 1896, oil on canvas, 76.5 × 123.2 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. František Kupka, Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colours, 1912, oil on canvas, 211 × 220 cm. National Gallery, Prague. Erik Satie, ‘Golf ’, Sports & Recreations, 1914, image from score. Typ. 915.14.7700, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, ‘Fugue’ from the triptych Phantasy, 1908, tempera on paper, 61 × 70.7 cm. Photo A. Baltėnas. © M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art, Inv. No. Čt–24. Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, ‘Allegro’ from Sonata No. 7 (Sonata of the Pyramids), 1909, tempera on paper, 76.6 × 59.7 cm. Photo A. Baltėnas. © M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art, Inv. No. Čt–4. Alfred Roller, set designs for Tristan und Isolde, 1902 (date of performance 1903), gouache and ink on card. HZ _HU 15693, KHM -Museumsverband, Theatremuseum Vienna. Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003, mono-frequency light, foil, haze machine, mirror foil, scaffold, c. 15 m. Installation view: Tate Modern, London, 2003. © Olafur Eliasson. Photo Andrew Dunkley and Marcus Leith. Courtesy the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Thomas Wilfred, Elliptical Prelude and Chalice, 1928, maple table, metal, fabric, glass, and electrical and lighting elements. Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of Thomas C. Wilfred. Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery. Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977, long-term installation, western New Mexico. © 2017 The Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo John Cliett. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York. ix

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List of Plates and Figures

14 Romare Bearden, Pittsburgh Memory, 1964, photostat. Estate of Romare Bearden. Romare Bearden Foundation, New York. © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA , New York, NY. 15 Romare Bearden, The Street, 1964, paper collage on cardboard, 32.7 × 39.05 cm. Milwaukee Art Museum. Gift of Friends of Art and African American Art. Acquisition Fund M1996.52. Photo credit Larry Sanders. © Romare Bearden/Licensed by VAGA , New York, NY. 16 Installation view of Zines and distribution catalogues (1991–2013) in the Alien She exhibition at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University curated by Astria Suparak and Ceci Moss. Photo Tom Little, 2013.

Figures I.1 1.1 1.2 2.1 4.1 4.2 4.3

4.4

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5.1

6.1

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Ceri Richards, Clair de Lune, 1973, screenprint on paper, 53 × 72.4 cm. Tate, London. © The Estate of Ceri Richards, DACS , 2017. 15 Franz Liszt, lithograph by Achille Devéria, 1832. Bridgeman Images. 43 Franz Liszt, lithograph by Josef Kriehuber, 1846. Bridgeman Images. 44 Édouard Manet, Second State of a Frontispiece, Polichinelle Presents, 1862, etching, 32.7 × 24 cm. New York Public Library. 58 Erik Satie, ‘Venomous Obstacles’, Instantaneous Centuries-old Hours, 1914, musical notation (excerpt). Courtesy Jean Izarin/Librarie Chrétein. 91 Erik Satie, ‘Venomous Obstacles’, Instantaneous Centuries-old Hours, 1914, musical notation (excerpt). Courtesy Jean Izarin/Librarie Chrétein. 92 Erik Satie, excerpt from ‘Ocean Bathing’ (left-hand accompaniment), Sports & Recreations, 1914, musical notation (excerpt). Courtesy Jean Izarin/Librarie Chrétein. 92 Erik Satie, excerpt from ‘Ocean Bathing’, Sports & Recreations, 1914, image from score. Typ. 915.14.7700, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 93 Erik Satie, excerpt from ‘Wave’. Motif in the first line of ‘On a Vessel’, Automatic Descriptions, 1913, musical notation (excerpt). Courtesy Jean Izarin/Librarie Chrétein. 95 Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Rex, 1909, tempera on canvas, 147.1 × 133.7 cm. Photo A. Baltėnas. © M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art, Inv. No. Čt–134. 114 Alfred Roller, Tristan and Isolde, undated, black ink and white pastel on paper. HZ _HU 54412, KHM -Museumsverband, Theatremuseum Vienna. 134 Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003, mono-frequency light, foil, haze machine, mirror foil, scaffold, c. 15 m. Installation view: Tate Modern, London, 2003. © Olafur Eliasson. Photo Andrew Dunkley and Marcus Leith. Courtesy the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. 140

List of Plates and Figures 8.1

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Robert Morris, Box with the Sound of its Own Making, 1961, wood, internal speaker, 116.8 × 24.8 × 24.8 cm, duration of recording 3.5 hours. Seattle Art Museum. Gift of the Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection, 82.190. © 2007 Robert Morris. Photograph Elizabeth Mann. 179

List of Contributors Alan Davison is a musicologist and Deputy Dean at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. He is a scholar of the long nineteenth century, and his research interests include music and visual culture, performance practice and music aesthetics. He has published widely on the portraiture of musicians, and iconography in relation to music biography and reception. He is co-editor of Late Eighteenth-Century Music and Visual Culture (Brepols, forthcoming). Therese Dolan is Professor of Art History at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA . She is the author of Gavarni and the Critics (University of Michigan (UMI ) Press, 1981), Inventing Reality: The Paintings of John Moore (Hudson Hills Press, 1996) and Manet, Wagner and the Musical Culture of Their Time (Ashgate, 2013), and has served as editor and contributor to Perspectives on Manet (Ashgate, 2012). Nikki A. Greene is Assistant Professor of Art History, Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA . Her book manuscript, Rhythms of Grease, Grime, Glass and Glitter: The Body in Contemporary Art, presents a new interpretation of the multimedia work of Radcliffe Bailey, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and Renée Stout, and considers the intersection between the body, black identity and the musical possibilities of the visual. She serves as Visual Arts Editor of Transition magazine. Ann-Marie Hanlon is a cultural musicologist and Lecturer in music at Dundalk Institute of Technology in Ireland. She completed her PhD, a reception study of Erik Satie, in 2013, in which she explored the mechanisms by which Satie was excluded from the French Modernist musical canon. She has contributed to a variety of publications including Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature (Ashgate, 2014) and The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (UCD Press, 2013). She is currently preparing a monograph that documents and critically appraises  the reception of the femaleidentified voice in Irish popular music. Kirstie Imber is Associate Research Fellow in the History of Art Department at Birkbeck College, London. Her PhD considered Iranian women’s contemporary art, with a focus on the representation of voice and silence. Nick Lambert is Head of Academic Research at Ravensbourne College, London. His publications include the co-editorship of White Heat, Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960–1980 (MIT Press, 2009). Nick’s interests revolve around the digital medium and its application in contemporary art and visual culture. He has researched the history of xii

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computer art and developed parallel interests in the history of digital technology, in particular its roots in Cold War America. Anne Leonard is Senior Curator of European Art and Director of Publications and Research at the Smart Museum of Art, and Lecturer in the Department of Art History, University of Chicago. She is co-editor of The Routlege Companion to Music and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2014) and the exhibition catalogue Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France (Smart Museum of Art, 2008). Meredith Mowder is completing her doctoral thesis at the Graduate Center, The City University of New York, USA. Her research focuses on the intersections between art, music, performance and entertainment in the post-war period. She has received the Graduate Center’s Enhanced Chancellor’s Fellowship and a Graduate Teaching Fellowship, and was a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 2013–2017. Meredith has contributed to numerous publications including Twice Drawn (The Frances Young Tang Museum, 2012), After Images (Jewish Museum of Belgium, 2011) and Confrontation (Long Island University, 2013) and is the editor of the first monograph on artist duo Fischerspooner, titled Fischerspooner: New Truth (Damiani and Artbook/D.A.P, 2014). Spyros Petritakis graduated from the History and Archaeology Department of the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Ioannina in Greece and obtained his MA in the History of Art from the University of Crete, where he is currently finishing his PhD. His research interests and publications include the convergence between painting and music, German and East European Symbolism and the confluences of theosophical and anthroposophical currents into the artistic field. He has also studied music. Jed Rasula is Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Georgia, USA. Among his scholarly publications is History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2016, recipient of the Matei Calinescu Prize of the Modern Language Association), and a companion volume, Acrobatic Modernism, from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory (forthcoming, Oxford University Press). Previous publications include a history of Dada, Destruction Was My Beatrice (Basic Books, 2015), Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Imagining Language: An Anthology, co-edited with Steve McCaffery (The MIT Press, 1998). Diane V. Silverthorne is an art historian and a ‘Vienna 1900’ scholar, with research interests in the synchronicity of music and the visual arts from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. She has published in several anthologies including Music and Modernism 1849–1950 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2014) and Music and Transcendence (Routledge, 2015). She holds a post in cultural studies at the University of the Arts,

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London, and is working on a monograph about Vienna Secessionist and stage designer Alfred Roller (1864–1932) and the aesthetics of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Cara Smulevitz is completing her doctoral thesis in Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research focuses on the productive exchange between contemporary popular culture and multi-media visual art, and she is working on the performance artist and film-maker, Miranda July (1974–).

Acknowledgements My parents endowed me with a love of music. I found my own way into the study of art history. My early introduction to the subject at Birkbeck, University of London, was revelatory in ways I could never have divined at the outset. I am happy to have the opportunity here to acknowledge Professor Simon ShawMiller, University of Bristol, who showed me the way to bring the studies of art and music together, even as a non-musician. This experience has fed my interests and imagination in ways which are difficult to account for in words. Other contributors to these fields have been of particular value. I would also like to acknowledge the work of Julian Johnson, Regius Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, for his encouragement as external examiner of my doctoral thesis on fin-de-siècle Vienna. Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London, granted me a term’s research sabbatical to get the book started. This was invaluable. I found Jed Rasula’s book, History of a Shiver (2016), just after Bloomsbury Academic had granted the contract for this volume, and felt enabled to invite him to contribute. I was delighted that he agreed to do so. Alan Davison generously collaborated on the postlude; Skype meetings between London and Australia provided collegiate support as the project neared conclusion. The two anonymous readers offered constructive guidance which helped to shape the final product. Margaret Michniewicz, the commissioning editor at Bloomsbury, has been supportive of the project from the outset and at every stage. My colleague Karl Baker made invaluable and timely suggestions for the Introduction and I would also like to thank Louise Garrett for acting as amanuensis in getting the manuscript together. Students at Central Saint Martins who have taken my elective on music and art have contributed more than they will know by bringing fresh, contemporary perspectives to the subject. This experience has also been enriched by my teaching colleague, the composer Nicholas O’Neill. Most of all, however, I most profoundly thank the contributors to this volume. We have been on a very long journey together, and they have shown patience and persistence as well as generosity in offering their scholarship. I cannot thank them enough for staying the distance.

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Introduction A Work in Two Parts – Continuities and Discontinuities from Romanticism to Postmodernism Diane V. Silverthorne

In Debussy’s La Mer we feel the sea’s atmosphere, in Hokusai’s Great Wave we sense its weight. Yet art does not copy nature. Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst1

The Story of Music, a book aimed at children written by Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst and published in 1958, opened with a chapter on sound and rhythm. The three images chosen to illustrate the opening words were an excerpt from Debussy’s score of La Mer, a reproduction of Hokusai’s The Great Wave (see Plate 1) and an abstract painting by the British artist Ceri Richards.2 The choice of Hokusai was not surprising. The artist was just one amongst the many that Debussy admired, and who inspired him in his compositional work. The print famously had been selected by Debussy – who reportedly loved imagery almost as much as music – for the cover of the first published edition of his orchestral score. Neither Debussy nor Hokusai were concerned with a mimetic representation of the sea, but instead an evocation of the particular atmosphere, an affectiveness suggested by Britten’s use of the words ‘feel’ and ‘sense’ to convey the essence of ‘sea-ness’ in Debussy’s music and Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave’. Rather than ‘direct imitation’ (to use musicologist Deryck Cooke’s term) of the one for the other, and more familiar music tropes, such as the sound of cymbals crashing, Debussy employed new orchestral forms: pentatonic harmonies for sixteen cellos in the opening chorale.3 The sound of swelling strings gives a slowly-growing, expanding sense of the sea’s enormity. Hokusai’s great wave employed the brilliantly resonant Prussian blue, and evoked a strange, restless sense of perspective. The wave overpowering Mount Fuji behind suggested the force of the sea, poised in timeless suspension. It is resolutely stylized. The young readers of this volume may have observed well enough the repeating wave-like configuration of Debussy’s notation as analogous to the Hokusai image. For those who are intimately involved in this relatively youthful field of study examining the dynamic relationships between music and the visual arts, the seemingly obvious 1

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Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl

juxtaposition of image and musical notation potentially raises many important questions. Not the least of these concerns are the symbolic and analogic relations between Hokusai’s visual image, the notation and the phenomenon of the sea itself, between a wave suspended spectacularly in space in the moments before the crash and the ‘tonally moving forms’ of Debussy’s musical equivalent heard in performance (or as a remembered performance in the imagination of the readers), and to what all of this may refer.4 Debussy was the subject of one of the first biographies of a musician which considered the significance of the many interlinked and overlapping circles of mutual influence amongst musicians, painters, writers, poets and critics.5 Debussy and his work serve as a useful paradigm for this volume. The composer, rooted in late Romanticism, was also forward looking and responsive to the urgent call of the twentieth century. Debussy recognized it as a period of ‘endings’, the ending of tonality as a dominant language in music as well as modes of representation in painting and poetry, at the same time anticipating the imperative for radical revisions of what constituted the arts in all their forms. This critical evaluation drove many musicians and artists at pivotal points in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to look to other arts for alternative languages on which to build anew. In particular, in the nineteenth century the philosophical ideal captured by the notion of ut pictura musica (as is music, so is painting) in aesthetics drove artists to ‘aspire to the condition of music’, from Walter Pater’s often-cited injunction of 1873.6 Debussy completed the score for La Mer in Eastbourne in 1905. While applauding the place for its quietude, he intriguingly wrote to his publisher of his relief that there were ‘no musicians talking about painting and no painters talking about music’.7 This may give some sense of the intense dialogue which took place at the turn of the century between musicians and artists in the grip of the suggestive and seductive idea that painting should aspire to music’s unique position within the hierarchy of the arts for its abstract form and its ability to appeal to the senses directly. Or in Richard Wagner’s terms, music alone is the revelation of the inner essence, ‘the inmost essence of ourselves and all things’.8 Such aspirations were marked by the turn inwards towards expressive rather than representative forms of art, and the break with languages of tonality and harmony. This was not just a one-way passage acknowledging music explicitly as the greatest of all the arts for its ability to convey the essence of things without relying on the material world. Debussy admired not just Hokusai and the poetry of Apollinaire, but also the art of Monet amongst other painters. The composer described his three Nocturnes for Violin and Orchestra (1894) as the musical equivalent of Monet’s grey tones ‘lightly tinged with white’.9 Debussy’s stress on tonal ambiguity and Monet’s emphasis on the painterly ‘affect’ of colour and light rather than form were two parts of a conjoined impulse to search for greater expressivity in both painting and music. Neither was this exchange confined to Paris. Anton Webern, a composer perhaps not best known for his Romantic inclinations, was inspired by the panoramic landscape paintings of artist Giovanni Segantini, expressing his longing for ‘an artist in music as Segantini was in painting’, and structuring his single-movement String Quartet of 1905 to reflect in mood and spirit the themes of Segantini’s unfinished Trittico de La Natura (1899).10 In the transition between late nineteenth-century Romanticism and early

Introduction

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twentieth-century modernism, this sense of ‘feeling’, in response to music and art, was often designated by the term Stimmung or ‘a prevailing mood’ in the German Romantic tradition.11 The conviction that music is always embedded in the act of seeing as well as listening is the driving impetus for this volume. As the chapters here show, the relationship between music and art (denoted here in their conjoined state as music-and-art) has been self-consciously exploited by artists and critics particularly in the last 200 years – a period circumscribed in this volume by the musical aesthetics of early prints, the painting of early modernism, and later in multimedia art and performance. Rather than clinging to the shores of modernism, however fruitful and significant as such studies are to the expanded field of ‘music-and-art’, the relationship between the two art forms in the extended period here – from Liszt to Riot Grrrl – offers a lens through which to examine the questions of artistic ‘modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’ anew.12 Importantly, this coverage allows for the consideration of relationships between music-and-art across and ‘after the great divide’, in Andreas Huyssen’s words.13 These two dominant modes of thought are embraced and debated extensively in art histories, although with more reluctance in music histories, as noted by Karol Berger. Berger’s preference in characterizing music’s histories is for either an understanding of ‘sustained modernism’ or Habermas’s ‘incomplete modernity’, thus dispensing with notions of postmodernity as a break in the progress of modernism’s ideals.14 In these deliberations so much depends, as Simon Shaw-Miller insists, on how ‘we tune ourselves to cultural rhythms as to whether we still detect modernism’s fading echo or recognise a new cultural paradigm in postmodernism’.15 Nevertheless, the following observations are intended to provide a brief, contextual journey ‘from romanticism to postmodernism’, implied by the title of this book and reflected in its temporal and spatial concerns.

From Romanticism . . . Modernism’s concerns are reflected by implication in the title of this book, yet, as we seek to show here, any examination of either modernism or postmodernism in this field must listen to and look for the persistent call of Romantic ideals which privileged music as the pre-eminent art form. In particular, instrumental (or ‘absolute’) music was capable of representing the unrepresentable, of uttering the ineffable, of a penetrating affectivity unique amongst the arts. Music – the object-less art – had these powers, floating free of any distinguishable associations, a condition for which the visual arts longed.16 Karl Marx himself in 1844 acknowledged the critical relationship between all the senses and society, differentiating between the sensate and insensate being. The transformation of the objective world into a ‘subjective world of consoling’ depended on the development of all the senses: Just as music alone awakens in people the sense of music, and just as the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear, the sense of the social person

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Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl are other than those of the non-social person. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of people’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form), either cultivated or brought into being.17

At a more intimate level, such impulses may be read in the Beidermeier painting featuring the subject of the first chapter of this anthology. Josef Danhauser’s Franz Liszt Fantasizing at the Piano (1840) shows a fictive gathering of notable figures from literature and music in an act of seemingly silent contemplation of music in the intimate surroundings of a richly curtained and shadowy music room. An aperture mysteriously opens out onto the numinous vision of a boundless and stormy sea-scape in which floats Beethoven’s bust, neither inside the room, nor in any recognizable space outside it. The Countess d’Agoult (who bore Liszt three children) at Liszt’s feet has abandoned propriety; George Sand swoons in ecstasy, thus underlining Richard Leppert’s thesis that music is always about the body.18 The marriage of music, literature and painting through the medium of painting itself is evoked through the significant figures brought together in this imagined scene. The living figures – Berlioz (or possibly Paganini), Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, as opposed to those beyond the shades depicted in the portrait of Lord Byron and the bust of Beethoven – are wrapt in a hushed silence: the idealized nineteenth-century form of listening. Liszt has the music open at the piano, but is gazing into the infinite, thus Danhauser casts him as the disciple of artist as genius. Romanticism was characterized by a turn away from Enlightenment principles and the rational towards bourgeois subjectivity and a celebration of the inner world of feeling and emotion. The central tropes of Romanticism are perhaps best expressed by their German terms which carry a more nuanced and deeper affectiveness than the one-word translation conveys: ‘the contemplation of the infinite’ (das Unendliche), a yearning or longing (Sehnsucht) for transcendence, and the turn inward towards the self (Innerlichkeit). As the Danhauser painting shows at both intimate and universal levels, music was the meeting point of these emotional longings, a painterly manifestation of the gulf between desire for the infinite and the impossibility of its fulfilment. Amongst the arts only music, as Schopenhauer asserted, was ‘by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas’ but uniquely ‘a copy of the will itself ’.19 Only music, it seemed, had the power to open up a spectrum of feelings that might accompany the earth-bound individual into higher states of being, and sensations which could only otherwise be found in contemplation of ‘boundless spaces and starry skies’, wooded landscapes and other similar tropes such as are found in plentitude in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, no less than in the music and thought of Beethoven.20 All of this may be seen in this painting, a visual discourse on Romantic musical aesthetics, evoking a longing for states of experience never to be achieved in this life. Musicians in the midst of musical reverie were a particularly appealing subject for artists of the period: interpreting and transposing into materiality the metaphysical entry into Schopenhauer’s transcendental musical world of the will. It is easy to imagine the hushed silence, leading to a long indrawn collective sigh at the end of Liszt’s playing,

Introduction

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rather than applause or discussion. Whilst the scene may be fictive, this group were at the epicentre of the ‘Romantic revolution’, Berlioz with Byron, Chopin and Liszt with Georges Sand and Delacroix. A further term which may usefully be added to this mix of emotion and boundless imagination is ambiguity: in Romantic terms the deliberate exploitation of ambiguity to intensify expressive power. Again, the German language had a term for this, the notion of hovering between two states, or Schweben.21 Used by Hegel, in a notable passage from his lectures on aesthetics, and as a concept found extensively in the poetics of Romanticism, Schweben suggested a ceaseless exchange between the world of intellectual ideas and the spiritual realm, ‘the inner so pushed to the extreme’ that it became ‘an expression without any externality at all’.22 Later, Baudelaire coined the term dédoublement (doubling, or double nature), insisting on the artist’s essential investment in both subjectivity and objectivity, passionately absorbed and coldly detached at once. Within this metaphysical space – for the artist and the viewer – lay the promise of the Sublime, the effect of which was characterized in 1757 by Edmund Burke as astonishment, ‘the effect of the sublime in its highest degree’, and later by Baudelaire as the deliberate cultivation of delight and terror.23 Recently, philosopher Jacques Rancière has observed this phenonemon as both ‘the paradox and the promise’ at the heart of Schiller’s assertions in Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Man’s human-ness can only be divined ‘when he plays’, thus ‘bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful and the more difficult art of living’.24 This passing to and fro over and through the metaphysical ideals of Romanticism was inextricably linked to the ‘new’ throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. Beethoven, as a progenitor of Romanticism and of music which was notable for ‘the rush of progress’, inspired the Vienna Secessionists – the singular avantgarde artist group to emerge from the modernist crucible of this ‘fin-de-siècle’ period in central Europe.25 Their 1902 Beethoven Exhibition promoted their modernist credentials through a fusion of the beautiful, the sublime and the progressive.

Musicality Romanticism’s insistence that ‘musicality’ was an expressive intent for all the arts marked the turn inwards towards an innate expressivity, a yearning for the manifestation of an affective experience not of this world, through the use of colour and line. Lydia Goehr has extensively accounted for Schiller’s use of the term ‘musicality’ (das Musickalische) in his critique of Kant, deliberately to describe what could be achieved in art without insisting on the presence in the imagination of ‘a given object’, in other words, ‘object-less art’.26 Baudelaire, anticipating the ambition for painting to aspire to the condition of music, wrote in praise of Delacroix, persuading his readers to view the artist’s canvases from afar, thus to discern their musical affect. Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which privileged music as the greatest of all the arts, reinforced by Wagner’s seminal writings of the mid-nineteenth century insisting that music had the power to disclose truths which went beyond those of language itself, also helped drive music to its unassailable position.

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Beethoven’s quest for the new encouraged artists and musicians who followed him to idealize the composer not just because of his celebrated mythical status, but in order to go forward into the future.27 Danhauser’s painting is suggestively modern in other ways. Attributed as propaganda for Liszt, it appears to promote the pianist-composer as the vessel through which such metaphysical states might be realized in the real world. It is evocatory of the power of art to bring the genius out of isolation and into the realm of the people, albeit in a somewhat illusory way.28 This takes us to the proliferation of printed portraits of Liszt and the starting point of this anthology.

Romanticism into modernism Romanticism was the last great tendency following directly from bourgeois society that was able to inspire and stimulate the profoundly responsible artist – the artist conscious of certain inflexible obligations to the standards of his craft. By 1848 Romanticism had exhausted itself. Clement Greenberg29

In his seminal essay ‘Towards a newer Laocoön’ (1940), Clement Greenberg, patrolling the borders between the arts in the spirit of his eighteenth-century predecessor Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, insisted that Romanticism was done by the mid-point of the nineteenth century.30 Such sentiments resonate with Hal Foster’s survey of postmodernist discourse in which he proposed that whatever else might be said about the aesthetics of modernism, most postmodernist theorists by the late 1980s agreed that the project of modernism was either ‘deeply problematic’ or, in the words of Jürgen Habermas, ‘dominant but dead’.31 The assumed death of Romanticism at the birth of modernism, and the demise of modernism as it gave way to its ‘post-’ were challenged contemporaneously, and more recently in a proliferation of monographs and anthologies focusing on modernist practices in fields as diverse as art magazines, the world of the applied arts and design, as well as the interart aesthetics of music-and-art. ‘Modernism is on a roll’, to quote Jed Rasula, his analysis hovering over and between diverse fields, states and figures from Victor Hugo, Marx and Proust to Schnitzler, E. M. Forster and Marinetti, yet insisting on the thickness of the term, and its endlessness.32 Such studies adopt a predominantly synchronic view of culture and aesthetics, remarking on commonalities of thought simultaneously held in a contiguous time period across different fields of cultural production – literature, philosophy, the visual arts and music – and tend to privilege the synthetic rather than autonomous artwork in the building of their case. Importantly, the recognition of the synthetic impulse derived from the music, writings and auratic influence of Wagner, a tendency often now termed as ‘Wagnerism’, has emerged as a small but expanding field of modernist thought in its own right.33 ‘Wagnerism’ appears to have liberated the study of Wagner’s aesthetics from the justifiable and darker burden of twentieth-century associations with anti-Semitism and fascism. Wagner pervades several chapters in this book not only through direct reference, but suggestively, and through the adherence of virtually

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7

all contributions to this area to draw out his importance to this particular field of scholarship. Rasula insists on the continuing resonance of late Romanticism amongst the ‘avatars of modernism’, notably Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, Erik Satie, Edvard Munch and Wassily Kandinsky, all of whom were born into late Romanticism, and carried Romantic impulses into their pioneering new forms of music and art.34 Schoenberg’s ‘Transfigured Night’, Verklärte Nacht (1899), and Debussy’s La Mer (1905) may exemplify continuities and discontinuities with the music of the past, in which the composers ‘still played with tonal expectation to build intense moments of arrival . . . largely in order to sidestep them’, in Julian Johnson’s words.35 The same might be said of Kandinsky who also played with ‘intense moments of arrival’, notably in the areas of brilliantly saturated primary colours of his painting Concert (Impression III) (1911), inspired by a recital of Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10. Whilst the painting still suggests elements recognizable from the real world of the concert hall, colour and line parted company, thus sidestepping the mutually supportive relationship they had retained for millenia. In this context, it is interesting to note musicologist Jonathan D. Kramer’s observation of one of the defining practices of modernist music, that various essential constituencies such as duration, pitch, rhythm and timbre were deemed ‘separatable’.36 Modernity’s continuities and discontinuities may be illustrated by two parallel, and often inextricable, drives towards hybridity and mixed media on the one hand, and towards autonomy, abstraction and medium purity on the other.37 In his introduction to Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Albright defined a series of ‘highly charged modernist experiments’, which depended on whether the boundaries between the arts separated each into its own autonomous realm, or where such experiments transgressed the boundaries between them. In his exploration of the convergence of music and art, Albright defines his version of modernism through ‘figures of consonance’, a stream of modernism for which the arts seemed ‘endlessly interpermeable’.38 Their quest for meaning ‘engaged all the senses at once’, anchoring the journey through which modernism’s trails may be followed to a synaesthetic impulse.39 Both of these streams of modernism, Shaw-Miller argues, emanate from music: music as a paradigm of abstract formalism, but also as a model which is powerfully multisensory and multidimensional. The first of these models absolutely rejects the embrace of low or popular culture; it wishes to remain ‘pure’. The other modernism, which Shaw-Miller terms ‘contextual modernism’, is concerned with hybridity.40 It is this form of modernism which, transformed and expanded, adding different and new accretions, ultimately emerges as a postmodernism. Surely these arguments are culled not only from prevailing aesthetic impulses, but also from now-seminal texts which trace the ‘patrollers of the boundaries between the arts’, such as those of Lessing in the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth century, the music critic Eduard Hanslick, as opposed to the synthesists, notably Wagner and Walter Pater. Even while advocating that the arts, particularly ‘tone’ with its fluid nature, ‘sorely needed an espousal with another (art)’, and opera as the supreme meeting point of all three ‘sister arts’, Wagner also argued that this supreme

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Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl

synthesis could only be achieved if each of the art forms individually achieved its greatest intrinsic, ‘absolute-ness’.41

Modernism and lateness in musicology A reluctance to enjoin with the concerns of modernism and postmoderism seems particularly notable in musicology, bearing out the assertions of Jost Hermand and Gerhard Richter that ‘any thinking about music will always have come too late’, a position they defend in musicology’s resistance to partner with other forms of thought including philosophy, through the justification that music leaves no immediate material trace and can only be thought of in and of itself (a view that the field of discourse within this book contests).42 Musical modernism is neither defined by an epoch or a ‘style’, nor can it be claimed to end historically with postmodernism, or to have re-emerged in a different guise, somehow transformed and still potent. Relieved of the burden and historicity of modernism’s theories and freer to review the relevance of such concepts through the lens of now (and looking back across 200 years of music), Erling E. Guldbrandsen and Johnson hold that musical modernism is none of these things; rather it is an attitude to musical practice – in composition, performance and listening – that involves an increased awareness of its own histories and which ‘remains alive and kicking’.43 Johnson reflects on terminal lateness (after Foucault and Žižek) and ‘continuing late modernity’, taking a long view of ‘the making of modernity’ across 400 years or more, and ending his survey (for now at least) in the twentieth century with an investigation of ‘the musicalization of space’.44 Thus he confounds those theorists, notably Lessing, Milton Babbitt and Greenberg, who insisted on the distinction between the temporal and spatial arts, and helpfully indicates the conceptual path which has been taken by several of the chapters here. Musical modernism’s search for new soundscapes and modes of expression (which has often in the contemporary world included new collaborations between the visual arts and new spaces of listening and reception) is ‘inextricably tied to an earlier age’. Its mode of historical awareness and reflection on its histories suggest an awareness that is subject to constant change, but not rupture.‘Such transformations should be recognised as part of a long game which returns to romanticism.’45

. . . To postmodernism Postmodernism: does it exist at all and, if so, what does it mean? Hal Foster46

There can be no theory of the postmodern that does not assume a means of identifying the modern. Theories and practices of postmodernism inevitably assume or frame certain meanings and values of modernism. Two significant surveys in the 1980s, the publication of which can be read as an ending in itself of postmodernism’s narrower concerns, Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983) and E. Ann Kaplan’s Postmodernism and its Discontents (1988), offered a range of theoretical

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9

positions in the framing of postmodernism.47 Three broad themes emerged: ‘postmodernism as a critique of the myth of originality, of historical narratives and as a critique of the grounds of difference’.48 Simply put, ‘to talk of a postmodern culture is to talk of forms of opposition to hegemony’.49 Frederic Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ suggested that the artistic signs of the postmodern are to be recognized in elaborated modes of pastiche but such characteristics might equally be attributed to icons of modernism, the painting of Manet and Picasso’s Cubism.50 Defining postmodernism as ‘an incredulity towards metanarratives’, Lyotard dispensed with the break between modernism and postmodernism, declaring instead its sense of temporal distance from modernism which he assumed to be definitively finished as early as 1960.51 He contested the idea that the postmodern was simply something which came after the modern. ‘Posmodernism isn’t modernism at its end, but in the nascent state and this state is constant.’52 Lyotard takes postmodernism out of its historical time and lets it loose to attach itself to a modernity that is ever aborning. A work may ‘precede and postdate the modern’.53 Turning to Lyotard’s defining statemenent on postmodern’s ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, Clayton Koelb in his evaluation of Nietzsche as postmodernist contends that ‘few would argue with the proposition that Nietzsche stands behind the broad concept of postodernism’.54 Koelb suggestively draws Lyotard’s and others’ postmodernity back to Nietzsche’s delight in the metaphor of the mask of classical Greek drama, and the often repeated notion of ‘the appearance of things’ invested in the term Schein. The Greeks were ‘superficial out of profundity’, pointing to ambiguities and hidden places beyond the play of surface and depth.55 Craig Owens’ feminist postmodernism identified an art which undermines and deconstructs modernism’s claims to authority and authenticity,‘upsetting the reassuring stability of that mastering position’.56 In particular, Owens identifies postmodernism’s challenge to modernism’s dominant Western-centric, unitary and masculine vision, in accord with Derrida’s exhortation to ‘thinking altogether differently’.57 Owens defined postmodernism as performance in the interstitial spaces between what can be represented and what has been prohibited from representing, to give voice and presence to those who were denied legitimacy, specifically women. Ann Kaplan, in Postmodernism and its Discontents (1988), illustrates similar theoretical continuities, as opposed to discontinuities, between modernism and postmodernism, through a reading of Hal Foster’s own defining twin postmodernisms: ‘a postmodernism of resistance and a postmodernism of reaction’.58 Foster’s postmodernism of resistance ‘seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and political affiliations’, also one might say, a reasonable account of ‘some modernisms’.59 Jameson’s writings on postmodernism may illuminate these distinctions; they ‘exploded like so many flares in the night sky, lighting up the shrouded landscape of postmodernism, transforming its shadows and obscurities . . . in pursuit of postmodernism’s mutable forms’, Perry Anderson wrote in his encomium.60 Jameson notes the ‘ingenuous twist or swerve’ in Lyotard’s views in which, Jameson affirms, he ‘proposes that his own vital commitment to the new and the emergent, to postcontemporary cultural production, be grasped as part of a reaffirmation of the authentic older high modernism (after Adorno)’.

10

Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl Any conception of a historical break between the modern and the postmodern moments calls into question the usefulness of the very category of postmodernism . . . becoming a mere dialectical intensification of the old modernist impulse towards innovation.61

Although he does not revisit what he terms ‘another largely academic series of debates’, Jameson acknowledges another vaster sense of ‘the profound continuity of romanticism from the late eighteenth century onwards of which both the modern and the postmodern will be seen as mere staging posts’.62 This may now be termed ‘metamodernism’: newer works as he predicted which ‘return to the truly serious older texts of a more wholesome past, offering the merest pastiche of those older texts’.63 Huyssen’s After the Great Divide reminds us that postmodernism dismisses the cultural and conceptual separations between high art and popular culture, mixing things up to épater la bourgoisie, all over again.64 Amongst the few musicologists who have investigated the possible relevance of the term postmodernism to music, Lawrence Kramer’s singular voice noted it as something of an anathema to musicologists. Also noting Lyotard’s postmodernism as a resistance to and undermining of ‘grand, synthesizing schemes of rational understanding’, and its ‘incorrigible interdisciplinary’ nature,65 Kramer finds his route through from music’s autonomous state, epistemologically alone, to something other, determined by the ‘logic of alterity’, setting up oppositions between the normative, unitary self, invested with universal significance, and its ‘other’, a plurality of deviant or imperfect others. Music is not so much an acoustic phenomenen as an object constituted in representation, a cultural trope ‘produced by musical aesthetics, imaginative literature and musical composition’.66 In other words, music is a discursive practice, as others in this field have extensively and eloquently shown. Kramer develops this notion of music and alterity from a sustained argument for seeing music as dangerous and disruptive, putting at risk the thin veneer of civilization thus underpinning its Dionysian tendency, by way of Nietzsche, Thomas Mann and James Joyce, and challenging musicology as opposed to music itself. Lawrence Kramer was responsible for institutionalizing the term ‘new musicology’ (1990), which rejected notions embedded in Romanticism that music can provide direct access to absolute values of truth and beauty, and instead acknowledged music’s irreducible relation to social and political meaning.67 Jonathan D. Kramer’s postmodernism turns backwards to particular compositions of Beethoven, Gustav Mahler and Charles Ives to identify postmodernism in music not as a period or as a style, but as specificities in music’s temporal structures. J. D. Kramer interprets ‘the post in postmodernism’ as a ‘reinterpretation of modernism, not chronologically after’.68 In other words, some music may be described as immanently postmodern. Shaw-Miller points to postmodernity as ‘an aesthetics of indifference’, constructed by John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, both of whom were seen by critic Michael Fried as moving beyond the purview of art into the more spatial (yet transgressive, according to Fried’s insistence on medium purity) modes of performance.69 Cage’s position at the mid-point of the twentieth century may be compared with that of

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Wagner’s in the nineteenth in its importance to all the arts: Cage was postmodernism’s avatar, bridging modernism’s twinned modernisms, the synthetic and the autonomomous, to open up spaces into which minimalism in the visual arts and music found its place.70 If modernism was exemplified in one of its defining paths as the impulse to absorb ‘the musical’ into all other arts, postmodernism was marked by music’s embrace of non-musical ideas, to disturb, to disrupt, to challenge, to discomfort. Postmodernist strategies defied Fried’s absolutist injunction to avoid the theatrical, and instead evolved an always-becoming performativity. The V&A exhibition in London, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 (2011) exemplified these characteristics in many ways, describing postmodernism as an unstable mix of the theatrical and theoretical, the colourful, the ruinous, the ludicrous and the luxurious. If modernists wanted to open a window onto a new world, ‘postmodernism turned into the mirror itself, fragmented and broken’.71 Many exemplary figures were included, and in the final, almost sacral space – a semi-closed darkened cube – images of Laurie Anderson presided, an androgynous epithet to postmodernism’s ambiguities, its unsettled objects, its theatricality and its sense of the ecstatic. Thus the affective properties of the Sublime, now associated with ‘metamodernism’, reinserts itself into postmodernism’s concerns.72

Contributors to this field Sociologist Jacques Attali asserts that music is more than an object of study, it is ‘a way of perceiving the world, a tool of understanding’.73 This may seem overdetermined in favour of music, yet it is a prevailing concern of the contributors here, as well as recent robust additions to the field. From the subjects of painting to the live engagement of performance, music is inescapably ingrained in the visual experience. Similarly, scholars in this field contend that music and ‘the musical’ is always engaged with the visual world in one way or another.74 In other words, music is never ‘alone’. This singular contention has been eloquently discussed and debated in the fields of philosophy, music and aesthetics, notably by Peter Kivy, Stephen Davies and Lydia Goehr.75 Cultural theorists as well as musicologists and art historians are amongst the progenitors of the study of ‘music-and-art’, also described as an ‘interart’ aesthetic, notably Richard Leppert, Peter Vergo, Peter Dayan, Daniel Albright and Simon Shaw-Miller.76 This field, of music-and-art, or interart scholarship, owes its recent birth and significance to their contributions. The richly rewarding subject of landscape and music, an inherently visual topic, has been brought into sharper focus by musicologists Julian Johnson and Daniel Grimley, bringing new insights to bear on music as well as one of the most ancient of visual art genres.77 Other scholars more closely associated with musicology have engaged with interart aesthetics. Maynard Solomon brought the significance of Romantic visual imagery, particularly landscape and the starry firmament, to an understanding of ‘late Beethoven’, while social anthropologist Tim Ingold extended his enquiries into landscape and affect with reference to art, music and sound.78 In his analysis of German

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modernism and the convergences in music and art, Walter Frisch proposes the concept of ‘ambivalent modernism’ in the context of Wagnerian and Nietzschean ideas of synthesis.79 Particular tropes have in recent years been the focus for concentrated analysis. Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, and its associated ideas, constitute a field of study which has been given closer analysis from outside of the sphere of music than from within it. Notable amongst these more recent contributions include Matthew Wilson Smith’s investigation of the Gesamtkunstwerk from its Wagnerian inception to its manifestation in popular culture and cyberspace; Anke Finger’s and Danielle Follett’s edited, multiauthored volume on notions of the Gesamtkunstwerk in its ‘splintered’ postmodernist form; and, more recently, Jed Rasula’s rewarding instatement of ‘Wagnerism’ as the ‘missing modernism’.80 The subject of synaesthesia, borne out of the late nineteenth century’s fascination with theosophy, a yearning for synthesis in music and art, and the desire to experience the mixing of the senses, notably hearing and seeing continues to exert its seductive if elusive appeal. New historical perspectives reaching from Romanticism to the later twentieth century have emerged, notably those of ShawMiller and Daniel Albright, the latter coining the term ‘panaesthetics’.81 These studies, with this volume, may also be read in the context of an expanding interest in the conceptualization of ‘affect’ and its salience to contemporary art, and its appeal not only ‘to the senses we have, but to the senses as yet undiscovered’.82

Themes and interests ‘Affect’ in music and art Where does affect come into all this? Is it those intrinsic musical meanings that move us so deeply, or is there a transference of affect, via the notes from the composer to the performer to the listener? Leonard Bernstein 197383

A prevailing theme through this volume is the notion of ‘affect’, suggesting a mode of expression or perhaps, more particularly, expressiveness, which flows from the idea and experience of music into other arts, and vice versa. As to whether affect is immanent, contained within the artwork itself, or engendered in other more subjective ways, continues to be debated. The concept of ‘affect’ and its meaning should be recognized as historically and culturally specific. Different terms relating to the time period covered in this book have emerged which seek to denote a way of expressing the affective qualities of music and art, traversing at least 150 years of cultural discourse. We have Wagner to thank for defining the relationship between music, affect and the unconscious, from his conviction that ‘music makes sensible what words try to make visible in vain: the ineffability of sensation, the power of unconscious life’.84 Wagner insistently used the term Stimmung to characterize the indefinable affect of his music dramas. Nietzsche employed the term ‘musical mood’ (musickalische Stimmung), after

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Schiller, who ‘in the state of mind preparatory to the act of writing had before and within him, not a series of images but rather a musical mood’.85 The term Stimmung was used extensively in late nineteenth-century cultural criticism as an accolade in the German-speaking world and more widely applied to literature and art of the period. The term carries with it the essence of sound, in the German term Stimme, or voice, and of spiritual harmony. In a rather different mode, Viennese art historian Alois Riegl published the essay ‘Mood as the Subject of Modern Art’ (1899), which considered the atmosphere of (specifically seventeenth-century Dutch) landscape painting and subjectivity as the essential goal of modern art. His suggestive ideas relating mood to issues of the way we perceive the illusory, the ‘purely optic effect’ of distance and nearness, might be said to prefigure later theories of phenomenology commonly associated with Maurice Merleau-Ponty.86 As Riegl stated, ‘the modern need for mood or atmosphere (Stimmung) can only be gratified and satisfied completely and directly by a type of painting based on purely optic perception, and made to be seen at a distance’.87 The late Romantic use of Stimmung was it seems variously mutable, applied to both music and the musical, to painting and the painterly. It was always suggestive of an immersive experience and in Wagner’s and Riegl’s terms implied altered states and ways of perceiving. Also rooted in Romanticism, Goehr traces the use of the term ‘the musical’ – also ‘musicality’ (musikalische) – which, as she eloquently describes, was used in the eighteenth-century writings of Schiller to suggest the indefinable expressiveness of all the arts.88 Musicality invoked what we might now term an interart aesthetic. From the twentieth century onwards, music also becomes noise, or ‘musicalized sound’ – the post-Cagean aesthetic identified by Douglas Kahn, who addressed the scholarly silence on sound in the histories of the visual arts.89 In a similar vein, we might also propose the concept of ‘musicalized silence’ as an affective characteristic in art post-Cage. Jameson’s early seminal statements on postmodernism argued for ‘the waning of affect’. Yet he also acknowledged that it would be wrong to suggest that ‘all affect, feeling or emotion’ had been evacuated in the postmodern artwork. This can best be grasped in ‘the glitter of gold dust’ acting as ‘compensatory exhilaration’.90 Such states of exhilaration may be observed in the experience of modernity and in postmodernity, inflected with the spirit of late Romanticism: a response to the music dramas of Wagner as noted by Baudelaire in his essay on seeing and hearing Tannhäuser for the first time (1861), and in the public’s response to the immersive installations staged in the newly-constructed spaces of the contemporary art museum.91 More recently, ‘affect’ – the study of feelings, sensation and their value, and as the encounter between and with the aesthetic experience ‘which moves us’, suggesting ‘a conceptual realm’ determined as one of ‘nearly utopian space’ – has been explored in several cultural contexts, other than those of music.92 These later twenty-first-century readings, termed ‘metamodernism’, an aesthetics which revives mythological states of being, suggest a return of what was repressed at the behest of postmodernism’s prevailing concerns.

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Synchronic and diachronic Our contributors have set out to reveal critical points in the histories of both arts through the sharing of ideas, concerns and practice, or by other means, cognisant of the weight and significance of specific subject-related histories, but untrammeled by the imperative of single-discipline scholarship. In other words, this series of studies in cultural practice is concerned with the diachronic, the disposition of the art-form in the context of its own histories, and the synchronic, the simultaneous significant and relevant impulses in other arts. We hope to demonstrate here that this study sharpens and deepens an understanding of both disciplines, as well as contributing to the expanding field of music-and-art scholarship. As Albright has rather grandly put it, the ‘comings together and splitting asunder’ of music and art ‘is one of the great stories in the intellectual history of the West’.93 Inevitably, however, these studies can make only partial inroads into the existing body of scholarship on music-and-art and are necessarily fragmentary.

Language and meaning The concept of metaphor is a highly-respected mode through which to examine the language of the arts. In his work on music and representation, Peter Kivy points to V. A. Howard’s 1972 account of expressiveness and Debussy’s La Mer as an exemplar of the form. The music does not describe the sea as much as express its qualities, its ‘shimmering, heaving, swirling’, which belongs ‘literally to the sea, and metaphorically to the music’.94 Kivy also notes English language scholar Joseph M. Williams’ definition of the transfer of ‘sensory words’ such as ‘dull colour, deep sounds’ from one sensory mode to another, from painting to music, as ‘metaphorical transfer’.95 The value of this form of expression and thought in music and the visual arts has been highlighted in recent studies.96 One of the principles in this book has been a determination to move the critical languages of the study of music-and-art beyond notions of metaphor and analogy in search of further diverse and common ground between the two. The pairing of music and the visual arts, unrestricted by theme, allowed for the exploration of a common language around such notions as sound and silence; shifting ideas of space and time; mediation of the spaces between artist and audience; imagined and real states of being; immanence and transcendence.97 As is evidenced here, new critical concepts continue to be evolved to promote robust conceptual frameworks for the analysis of these various interart states. To a greater or lesser extent, each author addresses the challenge of ekphrasis, commonly described as a literary description of a visual work of art. Words must be used to describe a work of art which is both musical and visual. Philosopher Leo Spitzer defines ekphrasis as ‘a way of reproducing, through the medium of words . . . sensuously perceptible objects’, turning his interpretation back to the subject of affect.98 Albright describes ekphrasis as ‘an intermedial translation – or pseudomorphosis’, employing ekphrasis in the term ‘panaesthetics’ in the title of his book.99 Using both metaphor and ekphrasis, British art writer Pierre Jeannerat’s

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Fig. I.1: Ceri Richards, Clair de Lune, 1973, screenprint on paper, 53 × 72.4 cm.

description of Ceri Richards’ painting Clair de Lune (1973; see Fig. I.1), inspired by Debussy, most effectively suggests the elusive yet musical expressiveness of Richard’s work: A moon hoop rolls blue along a darker blue horizon. Blue and red undefined shaped what may be clouds or memories drift elsewhere across a face of what may be the moon. Dark masses that may be rocks lie amidst swirling strokes that may be waves. We are left with our own musings, as in a concert hall. The ordered eloquence of the fluent paint stirs and moves our imagination.100

Terminology and language is examined, re-examined and redeployed to apply to situations newly uncovered but which do not fit existing conceptual frameworks.

Diverse mediums, spaces of reception To cite musicologist Nicholas Cook, the chapters here are tasked with ‘wrenching meaning’ out of the materials of these materially very different art forms.101 The challenge for scholars in this field is to write about music and art, severally and as conjoined entities, as well as to capture shifts over time. Due consideration must be given to both the effects of unifying media and the transgressing of the borders between the two, the many different settings in which such events take place, from the surface

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Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl

of the canvas to the concert hall and art museum, from the Salon to the private sphere, from art college to loft space, and in the case of this anthology, geographically from West to East. Audiences invoked may be fixed in their auditorium seats or provoked into action, bound by the conventions of society and politics, of hearing and seeing, or be present in the moment as an act of liveness, distanced by technology, or are absent altogether. In such situations, fixed concepts of time and space, both real and metaphorical, are dissolved. As Paul Klee impatiently declared of Lessing’s Laocoön and his essay ‘On the Limits of Poetry and Painting’ (1766), ‘much fuss is made about the difference between temporal and spatial art. Looking into the matter more closely, we find that all this is but a scholastic delusion. For space, too, is a temporal concept.’102 Such sentiments will continue to be interrogated beyond the pages of this volume.

About this book This book emanated in part from a panel at the Association of Art Historians’ annual conference in 2012, which examined the permeable boundaries between music and art, bringing music from its place outside of the extensive discourse on the visual arts to play a critical role from within. The subject matter of the papers under discussion embraced studies of canonical as well as lesser-known figures in both fields. They encompassed the mediums of music, architecture, painting, performance and theatre. What emerged were distinct and different ways of interrogating received ideas and theories in the visual arts through the prism of music’s formalist language, the aesthetics of music, music as metaphor and analogy, and music’s immaterial, expressive characteristics. The result, it is hoped, is the expansion of a field of study concerned with ‘the musicalization of art’ – the way in which the visual arts intentionally relate to musical thought and practice, and vice versa.103 We were interested to know what dialectical relations between music and the visual arts might emerge with regard to contemporary concerns of the temporal and spatial, subjectivity and objectivity, affect and perception, autonomy and synthesis, abstraction and representation, and the expanded universe of music as sound and performance. In particular, we wanted to move beyond the early modern period, marked in this volume by the celebrity status of composers, notably Franz Liszt, in the early 1800s, towards the later twentieth century and the ‘post-medium’ condition (after Rosalind Krauss), also referred to as an ‘art of the borderless’.104 As a result, we embrace at the end of this volume another kind of celebrity in the performances inspired by Riot Grrrl in the late 1990s.

A work in two parts The chapters in this book are grouped together as a work in two parts. Part 1 examines the musical in the mediums of painting, print and the musical score, focusing on the two-dimensional surface of such works and a metaphysical third dimension: the dynamic space between the work and the viewer. Temporality and duration are

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17

examined suggestively and insistently, implicitly through the temporal imagination implied by certain painterly signifiers, and explicitly through musical time. Notions of performance and performativity attend throughout. Part 2 deals with different, often incongruent facets of music and performance occupying the three-dimensional world in spaces as diverse as the infra-thin in the layering of collage, the theatre and opera stage, the exhibition, the modern art museum, and a fourth dimension, the interaction of performative work with audience through time. Together the studies in these two parts point to a set of thematic continuities and discontinuities that occur and reoccur across the duration encompassed by this book, as well as the diverse aesthetic spaces traversed. These include complementary notions of the temporal and the spatial, analogous ideas of colour, mood and affect, the impact of common thought between figures and their practices in both fields at particular ‘breakthrough’ moments. A notable underlying theme in this volume is the insistent call of late Romanticism, definable as the ‘imperative of affect in consciousness’, well into the late twentieth century. In this respect we would concur with Johnson’s assertion that modernity flows backwards in time across Romanticism, ‘dissolving its own boundaries’ both temporally and conceptually.105 Perhaps this impulse is particularly evident in the great flowering of music and musical thought throughout the Romantic period, and indeed the philosophical desire to dissolve the boundaries between the arts as exemplified by Walter Pater’s assertion. Three of the chapters, temporally situated in the second half of the twentieth century, deal with politics, gender and race, thus firmly situating their concerns not only in the field of music-and-art, but also raising questions which play to postmodern concerns of thinking beyond the binaries of Western philosophical traditions.

The musicalization of art, part 1: spaces of intimacy, touch, temporality Liszt had retreated from public life to concentrate on composing when lithographic likenesses started to flood the market. Alan Davison’s analysis of the mediating role played by printed portraits between musicians and their public in the early nineteenth century argues that the cult of musical celebrity was rooted in Romanticism. Issues of nearness and distancing, the authentic and inauthentic, are investigated as well as the contribution that printed media made in disseminating the immanent presence of the musical celebrity and the reimagined experience of the musical performance. Drawing on various sources, Davison proposes three new concepts through which to evaluate and analyse musical portraiture. Manet’s credentials as the consummate modern artist are undisputed. In a finely tuned, elegantly constructed analysis of a single painting, Hat and Guitar (1862), Therese Dolan draws together the commentary of Manet’s contemporaries with a detailed and insightful iconographic reading of the painting, which also examines the implied sonoric spaces beyond the canvas. Artist, paint and touch are drawn together in a symbiotic relationship in which music, both sounded and unsounded, is brought into subtle play.

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Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl

Also working on paintings, Anne Leonard’s analysis draws on contemporaneous critical reception as well as Bergson’s theories of durée to illustrate the disparate ways in which three different artists – Félix Signac, Alphonse Osbert and Frantiŝek Kupka – produce different modes of time in painting. Leonard argues that music provided the inspiration for ways of transcending the formal limits of their art, disputing the arthistorical distinctions made between aesthetic movements of the period. Moving forward in time, and returning to the world of the composer, Ann-Marie Hanlon’s probing discussion of Satie’s musical scores emphatically denies the notion of ‘music alone’. Hanlon complicates the idea of performance singularly attached to the representation of the two-dimensional surface spaces of the score by a recontextualization of performance as three-dimensional operation in the spaces between score, image and the audience. Bergson’s theories of memory and the temporal continue to underpin this analysis. Satie’s strategies cannot simply be positioned as ‘extra-musical’ but rather, as Hanlon asserts, the composer’s insistence on the primacy of the unified visual experience situates Satie firmly as a pioneer of ‘inter-art’ aesthetics. Part 1 concludes with the rather more indeterminate and all-together vaguer status of the Lithuanian artist Mikalojus Konstantins Čiurlionis. Unlike Schoenberg, a composer who also painted at a critical time in his musical life, and Klee, formerly a musician who chose painting as his vocation, it would be difficult to differentiate the painter from the composer in Čiurlionis. His musical and painterly output were virtually equal in measure, and each of the two art forms informed the other. Perhaps because of this lack of distinction, as Spyros Petritakis deliberates, a kind of muddling ensued. Petritakis insists on a different evaluation of his musical as well as his painterly project to show the contingent importance of Theosophy, and the ways in which spirituality, temporality and the spatial were conflated in the synthetic impulse.

The musicalization of art, part 2: spaces of performance, sound and silence Moving from the two dimensions of painting and print to the temporally-inflected three-dimensional spaces of performance, Nicholas Lambert’s contribution and my own chapter examine different yet related manifestations of late- and neo-Romantic expressive impulses and the uses of ‘new technologies’ of colour and light as a visual equivalent of music. I interrogate Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk through two acts of performance, distanced by 100 years. One analyses the fulfilment of Wagner’s ideas in one of Europe’s great opera houses, and the other, an immersive art installation in the spaces of the modern art museum. I argue that this particular installation, Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (Tate Modern, 2003), is an essentially ‘musical’ experience. Lambert’s scrupulously researched chapter examines artist Thomas Wilfred’s ‘lumia’ compositions and uncovers Wilfred’s ideas and aspirations for an early form of timebased light art, brought to fruition in the 1950s. As Lambert reveals, Wilfred insisted that his lumia compositions were not music-based but ‘silent visual art’. Both the modern art installation in my account and Lambert’s analysis of Wilfred’s lumia pieces

Introduction

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draw out the underlying ‘sublime’ in the way both were experienced. Both chapters are marked by the spirit and aesthetics of ‘Wagnerism’. Positioning iconoclast John Cage centre stage, Meredith Mowder reveals a set of personal connections and intra-art relationships between the figures closely associated with Cage and the movements of musical minimalism and minimalist art. Demolishing the formal boundaries between the two, Mowder traces and clarifies a series of overlapping circles connecting Fluxus artist Nam June Paik with minimalist composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass which describe the ‘audio-visual moment’. Through Mowder’s interrogation of thought and practice in the ‘intermedial’ spaces between the arts, the continuities between the two minimalisms are brought into clearer focus. Drawing out the racially and politically inflected universe of mid-century America, Nikki Greene focuses on the art of Romare Bearden and his deep connections with 1950s jazz. Greene draws together the analogous in black American jazz forms, its roots in ‘sorrow songs’, and social commentary on the invisibility of black identity in 1950s America. Framing her analysis through W. E. B. Du Bois’ 1903 concept of ‘doubleconsciousness’, Greene reveals the social and political significance of play, together with the layering of meaning in the cut-and-paste of Bearden’s photomontages. The final two contributions address the significance of the female voice, both silenced and noisy. Kirstie Imber and Cara Smulevitz consider gendered readings of music and the social sphere by evaluating the impact of women in performance, embodied musicmaking, society and politics, as well as two different world views. Imber’s account of Listen (2010) – an installation by Iranian photographer Newsha Tavakolian – draws attention not just to the visualization of sound and its absence, but to a metaphor of the gendering of music which signifies the delicate and compromized position of women in contemporary Iran. In an emphatically Western account of third-wave feminism, and developing the themes of music and visual art as a resistant and embodied practice, Smulevitz traces the influences on and impact of subversive and short-lived feminist punk movement Riot Grrrl. Progenitors of a ‘radical theatre’, Riot Grrrl’s work marked a series of important crossing points, connections and transitions from Cage onwards and a deliberate return twenty years later to hybrid forms of performance and identity fragmentation. Whilst in the West, Riot Grrrl acts were seen as a noisy and disruptive repudiation of male dominance, in Islam music itself is deemed dangerous and subversive. Thus we reach the furthest borders, temporally and spatially, of the musico-visual world contained within this collection, from nineteenth-century Romanticism to twentyfirst-century postmodernism and beyond, and from West to the Middle East. Whilst there may seem little to connect the celebrity of Franz Liszt, the subject of the first chapter, to that of Riot Grrrl in the last, the case studies here are all conjoined in their interest both to acknowledge and to disrupt the borderlines between music and art, opening up, it is hoped, the potential for new spaces of exploration and research, which are neither specifically musical or visual, but a more dynamic product of the two. Music-and-art, in close collaboration with silences, sounds and its spaces of performance, ‘is not a matter of metaphoric approximation’, to cite Rancière. ‘Art is always more than art, more than the meeting of specific means of organizing speech, sounds, colours, volumes and movements. It is an idea of what art does.’106 In this volume, what art does, it does with music.

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Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl

Notes 1 Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst, The Story of Music (London: Rathbone Books, 1958), 7. 2 Katsushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, also known as ‘the Great Wave’, from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1830–32. Polychrome woodblock print; ink and colour on paper; 25.7 × 37.9 cm. For an image of the cover of the 1905 first edition of Debussy’s La Mer, which uses Hokusai’s image, see http://www. metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/now-at-the-met/2014/debussy-la-mer (accessed 6 August 2016). The British abstract artist Ceri Richards (1903–71) was a talented musician; musical subjects remained central to his painting and print-making. 3 Deryck Cooke, The Language of Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 3. 4 Eduard Hanslick, ‘On the Beautiful in Music’ (1854), in Art in Theory 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. C. Harrison and P. Wood with J. Gaiger (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 479. 5 See Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind V1 and VII (London: Cassell & Company, 1962, 1965) for an account of Debussy’s immersion in the arts and culture of his day, and the impact on his music. 6 Walter Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’, in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), 128–49 (132). 7 Francois Lesure and R. Nichols (eds), Debussy Letters, trans. R. Nichols (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1987), 153. 8 Richard Wagner, ‘Beethoven’, in Actors and Singers (1896), trans. W. Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 78. 9 Lockspeiser, Debussy, 128–9. 10 Eric Frederick Jensen, ‘Webern and Giovanni Segantini’s Trittico dela Natura’, The Musical Times V130/1751 (January 1989), 11–15 (12). 11 For an account of Stimmung, see Diane V. Silverthorne, ‘Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk’, in The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, ed. Tim Shepherd and Anne Leonard (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 246–54. 12 See, for example, Marsha L. Morton and Peter L. Schmunk (eds), The Arts Entwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Century (New York and London: Routledge Taylor Francis, 2000, 2011); Charlotte de Mille (ed.), Music and Modernism c.1849– 1950 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011); James H. Rubin with Olivia Mattis (eds), Rival Sisters: Art and Music at the Birth of Modernism 1815–1915 (Burlington and Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2014); Patrick Coleman (ed.), The Art of Music (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press with San Diego Museum of Art, 2015) for recent multi-authored contributions to music and modernism. Also see Tim Shepherd and Anne Leonard (eds), The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture (New York and Abingdon: Routledge with Taylor and Francis, 2014), which provides a series of short chapters as snapshots of contemporary scholarship in this field, reaching beyond modernism to later twentiethcentury versions of hybridity, film and multimedia. 13 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Post-Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 14 Karol Berger, ‘Time’s Arrow and the Advent of Musical Modernity’, in Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, ed. K. Berger and A. Newcomb (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3–23.

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15 Simon Shaw-Miller, ‘Modernist Music’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. P. Brooker et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 599–617 (600). 16 Eduard Hanslick, ‘On the Beautiful in Music’ (Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, 1854), famously described the ‘specifically musical’. See also Thomas K. Nelson, ‘Klinger’s Brahmsphantasie and the Cultural Politics of Absolute Music’, Art History 19, no. 1 (1996): 26–43, for an exegesis of ‘the politics of absolute music’. 17 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), cited in Stephen F. Eisenmann, ‘Introduction: Critical Art and History’, in Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 11. 18 Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the Body (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1993). 19 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Indiana Hills, CO: Falcon’s Wing Press, 1958), 257. 20 Maynard Solomon, Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 42–57. 21 See Thomas K. Nelson, ‘Klinger’s Brahmsphantasie’, 26–43, for an exegesis of Schweben. 22 Cited in Nelson, ‘Klinger’s Brahmsphantasie’, 28–9. 23 Daniel Albright, Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 220, 221; Chapter Five ‘Wonder and Sublime’ passim for an interpretation of the Sublime in the arts; Henri Dorra, ‘Prologue: Baudelaire, Delacroix, and the Premises of Symbolist Aesthetics’, in Symbolist Art Theories, ed. H. Dorra (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984), 5, citing Baudelaire. 24 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes’, in Dissensus on Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 123. 25 See David B. Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics 1870–1979 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1986), for a nuanced account of Beethoven’s modernity analogous with the ‘rush’ of his music. 26 Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2008), 53. 27 Solomon, Late Beethoven, 41. 28 Kenneth Hamilton, After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 82. 29 Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoön’, Partisan Review 7 (July–August 1940): Section III, 296–310 (298). 30 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his ‘Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Poetry and Painting’ (1766) insisted on the arts as separate entities with distinct defining characteristics, either temporal (as is poetry), or spatial (as is painting). 31 Hal Foster, ‘Postmodernism: A Preface’, in The Anti-Aesthetic Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. H. Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), ix. 32 Jed Rasula, History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernsim (New York, London: Oxford University Press, 2016), xx. 33 Simon Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000); Matthew Wilson Smith, The Total Work of Art: From Wagner to Cyberspace (London: Routledge, 2007); Juliet Koss, Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Anke Finger and Danielle Follett (eds), The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Rasula, History of a Shiver.

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34 Rasula, History of a Shiver, 8–9. 35 Julian Johnson, Out of Time, Music and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 303. 36 Jonathon D. Kramer, ‘Postmodern Concepts of Musical Time’, Indiana Theory Review 17, no. 2 (1996): 21–61 (24). 37 On these opposing and complementary themes in modernism, see Daniel Albright, ‘Series Editor’s Foreword: The Need for Comparison among the Arts’, in Music and Modern Art, ed. J. Leggio (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), ix–xv; Simon Shaw-Miller, Eye hEar The Visual in Music (Abingdon: Routledge (Ashgate) Taylor Francis, 2014), 141–2; also see S. Shaw-Miller, ‘Modernist Music’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. P. Brooker et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 599–617, for a methodological summary of early modernism’s significant proponents. 38 Daniel Albright, ‘Introduction: Laocoön Revisited’, in Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature and Other Arts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 6. 39 Albright, ‘Introduction: Laocoön Revisited’, 6. 40 Shaw-Miller, ‘Modernist Music’, 605. 41 Albert Goldman and Evert Sprinchorn (eds), Wagner on Music and Drama: A Compendium of Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. H. Ashton Ellis (New York: Dutton & Co, Inc., 1964), 121–2. 42 Jost Hermand and Gerhard Richter (eds), ‘Introduction’, in Sound Figures of Modernity: German Music and Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 3. 43 Erling E. Guldbrandsen and J. Johnson, ‘Introduction’, in Transformations of Musical Modernism, ed. Gulbrandsen and Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1. 44 Johnson, Out of Time, 288–9, for ‘the musicalization of space’. 45 Johnson, Out of Time, 2. 46 Hal Foster, ‘Postmodernism: A Preface’, in E. Ann Kaplan ed. Postmodernism and its Discontents, Theories and Practices (London and New York: Verso, 1998), ix. 47 E. Ann Kaplan (ed.) Postmodernism and its Discontents, Theories and Practices, (London and New York: Verso 1988). 48 Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, ‘Introduction – Ideas of the Postmodern’, in Art in Theory 1900–1999: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. C. Harrison and P. Wood (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 989. 49 Harrison and Wood, ‘Introduction – Ideas of the Postmodern’, 990. 50 F. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society, in Postmodernism and its Discontents 13–29 (16). 51 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 10, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), xxxiv. 52 Cited by Clayton Koelb, ‘Introduction’, in Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, ed. C. Koelb (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 2. 53 Christopher Kul-Want, ‘Introduction: Jean-Francois Lyotard’, in Philosophers on Kant to the Postmodernists: A Critical Reader, ed. C. Kul-Want (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 237–8. 54 Koelb, ‘Introduction’, 5. 55 Koelb, ‘Introduction’, 5.

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56 Clive Owens, ‘The Discourse of Others’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New York Press, 1998), 57–82. 57 Owens, ‘Discourse of Others’, 59. 58 Foster, ‘Postmodernism: A preface’, in The Anti-Aesthetic, xi–xii. 59 E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Introduction’, in Postmodernism and its Discontents, 1–10 (3). 60 Perry Anderson, ‘Foreword’, in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on Postmodernism 1983–1998, ed. Frederic Jameson (London and New York: Verso, 1998), xi. 61 Jameson, The Cultural Turn, 26. 62 Jameson, The Cultural Turn, 26. 63 Jameson, The Cultural Turn, 98–9. 64 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 65 Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 5. 66 Kramer, Classical Music, 35. 67 Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘Postmodern Concepts of Musical Time’, Indiana Theory Review 17, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 22– 3. 68 Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 113, 114. 69 Shaw-Miller, Eye hEar, 142. 70 Shaw-Miller, Eye hEar, 142. 71 V&A website, http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/postmodernism/about-theexhibition/ (accessed 11 December 2016). 72 Tim Vermeulen and Robin van der Aaker, ‘Notes on Metamodernism’, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2 (2010), DOI: 10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677, http://www. aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/view/5677/6304 (accessed 11 December 2016). 73 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 4. 74 For this definition of ‘the musical’, see Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), particularly Chapter 2, 45–78. 75 See Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Peter Kivy, Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Lydia Goehr, Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2008), amongst several contributions to music, philosophy and aesthetics. 76 For significant single-authored volume contributions to this field, see Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the History of the Body (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993) and Simon Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music from Wagner to Cage (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000); see also Peter Vergo, The Music of Painting: Music, Modernism and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to John Cage (London: Phaidon Press, 2010) and Peter Dayan, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art from Whistler to Stravinsky (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2011) for ‘interart aesthetic’.

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77 Julian Johnson, Webern and The Transformation of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Daniel Grimley, Grieg Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity (Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer, 2006). 78 Maynard Solomon, Late Beethoven: Music, Thought and Imagination (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). 79 Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005). 80 See Matthew Wilson Smith, The Total Work of Art: From Wagner to Cyberspace (London: Routledge, 2007); Juliet Koss, Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Anke Finger and Danielle Follett (eds), The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Rasula, History of a Shiver. 81 Shaw-Miller, Eye hEar; Albright, Panaesthetics. 82 Albright, 286, cited in Mark Stuart-Smith, ‘From Mousicke to Synaesthesia: New Interdisciplinary Agendas in Music and Visual Culture’, Art History 39, no. 1 (2016): 181. 83 Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1976), 135. 84 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London and New York: Verso, 2013),123, glossing Richard Wagner, The Artwork of the Future and Other Works, trans. W. Ashton Ellis (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 152. 85 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Spiers, trans. Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 29, citing Schiller’s letter to Goethe. 86 Alois Riegl, ‘Mood as the Subject of Modern Art’, trans. Karl Johns, originally published as ‘Die Stimmung als Inhalt der modernen Kunst’, Die graphischen Künste 22 (1899): 47–56, and reprinted in Alois Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze (Augsburg and Vienna: Filser, 1929), 28–39. I am grateful to Johns for making his unpublished translation available to me. 87 Riegl, ‘Mood’, unpaginated. 88 Goehr, Elective Affinities, 5. 89 Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999). 90 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 10. 91 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Richard Wagner and Tannhauser in Paris’, in Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 325–57. 92 Mary Favret, ‘The Study of Affect and Romanticism’, Literature Compass 6, no. 6 (2009): 1160, citing Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 93 Albright, Panaesthetics, 3–4. 94 Howard, cited in Kivy, Music Alone, 123. 95 J. M. Williams, cited in Kivy, Music Alone, 63–5. 96 See ‘Convergence in Metaphor: Convergence in Conception’, Routledge Companion to Music, ed T. Shephard and A. Leonard, 189–262.

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97 See Férdia J. Stone-Davis (ed.), Music and Transcendence (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), for various characterizations of transcendence and immanence. 98 Leo Spitzer, ‘The “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” or Content vs Metagrammar’, in Essays on English and American Literature, ed. Anna Hatcher (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 72. 99 Albright, Panaesthetics, 234. 100 Noël Barber, ‘Ceri Richards’, in Conversations with Painters (London: Collins, 1964), 29–30. Richards created several works titled Clair de Lune. 101 Nicholas Cook, Analysing Music Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3. 102 Paul Klee, Creative Confession and Other Writings (London: Tate Publishing, 2003), 9. 103 See Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 18, for ‘the musicalization of sound’. See Jed Rasula, ‘Wagnerism’, in History of a Shiver, 110, for ‘the musicalization of identity, psyche and consciousness’. 104 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000). 105 Johnson, Out of time, 8. 106 Rancière, Aisthesis, 128–9.

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Prelude The Musical in Art Jed Rasula

Thanks to our increased familiarity with transgender reallocation, we now know from personal testimony that something apparently as foundational as gender can feel, to some, not quite right. And if that’s the case, could it be that an itch of discontentment applies to the senses as well? Might someone feel, instinctively, that the act of seeing is not doing all the work it seems destined for? Judging by a thick sheaf of testimonials from the fin de siècle, the answer would be an emphatic ‘Yes’. But one would have to ask why then? Why are such testimonials not issued around the clock, century upon century? If there was a crescendo of synaesthetic yearning at the end of the nineteenth century, could it be that this sublime corporeal itch was historically unique – and, presumably, now past? At the cusp of Romanticism and modernism (humour me these bloated terms), why was it desirable, or expedient, to compare one sense with another? If it’s simply a matter of comparison, examples can be found throughout history. Analogy has always been at hand, egging us on. But is synaesthesia (a rare pathology but a widespread artistic aspiration) merely a hyperbolic dramatization of the instinct to compare? Or is it symptomatic of some wizened surmise that each sense is a ratio (as William Blake would put it) trained on unfathomable immensities beyond the reach of mere sensory estimation? ‘The hands want to see, the eyes want to caress,’ wrote Goethe, presaging a trend that would escalate throughout the nineteenth century.1 It’s a fetching expression that immediately communicates something, but what? Is it strictly a matter of words being capable of evoking fantasies and speculative scenarios that exceed realization? Certainly, human cultures abound with fantastical visions. But is it in human nature to impute optical possibilities to the hand, and haptic potential to the eye? Or are such prospects simply an expression of otherwise inexpressible yearnings? ‘What you look hard at seems to look hard at you,’ observed Gerard Manley Hopkins in his journal in 1871.2 This sense of interpenetration, merging object with subject (and even reversing their polarity: ‘seems to look hard at you’), emboldened many artists in the fin de siècle to reveries of inter-animation among all the arts. Not all of them followed the fantasy of a blended or totalizing artwork; for some, the medium27

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Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl

specific impact of a work possessed or solicited a counterforce best denoted by way of another art. Fin de siècle fantasies of artistic miscegenation basked in the euphoric presumption of eventuality, incited perhaps by the theory of evolution that it was the destiny of the senses to migrate into a farther realm, swapping one sensorium for another. But for practising artists there remained the discomforting challenge of how to make it happen. One could endlessly affirm the prospect of some eventual code switch, but how could one induce a synaesthetic sensation by means of a particular art? The driving force behind these fin de siècle reveries was music, the art to which all the other arts then aspired, as Walter Pater had famously observed in 1873. Borne along on Richard Wagner’s majestic music dramas and his torrent of writings, music spoke to diverse constituencies, bearing something like a secret conceptual handshake that initiated artists generally into the mission of renovating their particular arts. Music is said to ‘speak’ to us, both collectively and individually. It’s an expression that goes down easily, often unquestioned. But the expression smuggles in a Trojan Horse, because to say something speaks is to grant it powers of articulation that derive from language. And while it may be accurate to characterize music as a language, it’s misleading to conflate music’s ‘language’ with natural speech. Nonetheless, the elevated prestige of music during the nineteenth century linked it with a principle of articulation and, in turn, endowed it with the potential to fulfil cultural programmes that were invariably spelled out in words and slogans. But here’s the curious thing. Because music stimulated deeply personal feelings, testimonials of its potential were idiosyncratic in the extreme. Music emancipated private reveries into a chorus without creed or text. Stéphane Mallarmé, estimating the consequences for his own art, found it a ‘truly extraordinary spectacle, unique in the history of poetry: every poet finds his own spot to play on his own flute whatever tunes he wants’.3 It’s as if the grand surge of optimism invested in music forced individuals into cul de sacs of their own devising. The Sprechstimme developed by Arnold Schoenberg for his song cycle Pierrot Lunaire registers this dilemma by pitching the voice headlong into a cauldron of expressivity without designated musical notes, amidst an instrumental sound-world conjured by the normative means of a musical score. It’s as if Schoenberg wanted to engulf the words in music while holding them at bay, reserving their fullest articulation for a realm in which the text takes its place as one mode of articulation among others. Eduard Hanslick, a dedicated opponent of Richard Wagner, tried to anchor musical expression in the concrete materiality of tönend bewegte Formen (or ‘tonally moving forms’, as Diane Silverthorne translates it in her Introduction to this volume). This strikes me as precisely what Schoenberg sought to accomplish in Pierrot Lunaire, a composition in which words as well as musical sounds together participate in a realm of tonal forms in motion. If nineteenth-century reveries fixated on synaesthesia as the quixotic phantom perpetually glimpsed in the distance without ever getting closer, the same urge in the early twentieth century distinguished itself by its close adherence to the actual

Prelude

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compositional materials of different media. In the process, more genuinely inter-media explorations arose, pollinating the unparalleled engine of the avant-gardes. But that’s another story, dominated more by the visual arts than by music. In my book Sublime Impudence, I cited Serge Charchoune’s 1917 Painted Film Based on a Folk Song, with its commingling of three media for a single title as prelude to the following assessment of synaesthetic aspirations in the wake of the Great War: After the Great War the alliance of painting and music had become so familiar that art historians could casually employ the analogy to explain the general tendency of modern art. In his 1921 book on Cubism, Vincenc Kramár found that ‘Picasso’s paintings truly expand into edifices of Bachian polyphony’. In Der Kubismus: Ein künstlerisches Formproblem unserer Zeit (1920), Paul Erich Küppers was mesmerized by the Baroque grandeur of Cubism: ‘Out of pale harmonies of colour, lines arise, prisms protrude, grow out towards us, leap back, chisel steps into infinite space, lead upwards and into the depths, expand, multiply, combine into chords, are suffused with rhythm and begin to dance in the absolute music of space. One experiences this transcendental dynamism in a way no different from the metaphysical counterpoint of Bach’s fugues’. Divested of the anticipatory synaesthetic shudder of the nineteenth century, these descriptions are strictly honorific in applying musical vocabulary to visual art. With this, melomania subsided into description. The party was over.4

The contributors to this book suggest otherwise. Or, if it was a party, there was an afterparty, which may be ongoing. It turns out that the creative imagination is incapable of imagining its limits. To imagine, it seems, is to dissolve limitation. Technical impediments may remain, but the imagination swoops over them. In fact, imagination may be the best term for the capacity to dissolve impediments, or maybe just ignore them. Conceding the unworkability of one proposal, the imagination bounds onward, heedless but self-replenishing. Ezra Pound called poetry a centaur, an astute model for this relentless metabolism of creative energy that can’t help but grow a new limb or member for anything lopped off or impeded. ‘We are always tempted to read into form a meaning other than its own,’ wrote Henri Focillon in The Life of Forms (published, like Ezra Pound’s Make It New, in 1934), though this, he cautioned, is ‘to confuse the notion of form with that of image and sign. But whereas an image implies the representation of an object, and a sign signifies an object, form signifies only itself ’ – as, indeed, living creatures do in the gestural modalities of autopoiesis. ‘And whenever a sign acquires any prominent formal value,’ Focillon continues, ‘the latter has so powerful a reaction on the value of the sign as such that it is either drained of meaning or is turned from its regular course and directed toward a totally new life.’5 New life: the vita nuova to which the acts, ardours and events of what we’ve come to call modernism aspired. For form is surrounded by a certain aura: although it is our most strict definition of space, it also suggests to us the existence of other forms. It prolongs and diffuses

30

Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl itself throughout our dreams and fancies: we regard it, as it were, as a kind of fissure through which crowds of images aspiring to birth may be introduced into some indefinite realm.6

That realm comes to life in the following pages – concerning which, foregoing further commentary, it’s best to be succinct: turn the page.

Notes 1 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture (Chichester: Wiley, 2009), 14. 2 Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 204. 3 Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 697. 4 Jed Rasula, History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 73. 5 Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles B. Hogan and George Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 34. 6 Focillon, The Life of Forms, 34–5.

The Musicalization of Art, Part 1: Spaces of Intimacy, Touch and Temporality

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1

Romantic Musical Celebrity and Printed Portraits Visual Intimacy and Mass-Market Distance Alan Davison

In this chapter I consider the relationship between printed portraits and musical celebrity in the first half of the nineteenth century. The historical basis of musical celebrity is still poorly understood, and the hope here is that what follows will stimulate greater interest in the nineteenth-century origins of what is now a pervasive cultural and global phenomenon. My aim is to highlight some of the mechanisms by which printed portraits played a crucial role in enabling musical celebrity, and in order to do so develop methodological tools to facilitate further research. The underlying contention here is that not only do printed portraits of musicians reflect the changing nature of contemporary fame and celebrity during the Romantic era, but that they were an active component in this very change. Simply put, printed portraits formed a bridge between the celebrity and his/her audience by feeding a voracious appetite for a parasocial relationship. This relationship – an imagined interpersonal connection between the fan and their idol – was tied up with a ‘hermeneutic of intimacy’,1 where the increasing anonymity of the audience to the individual musician spurred a fascination with the latter’s personal life. Printed portraits, then, played a significant part in mediating disengagement between musician and public within a print-dominated public sphere. The Romantic era saw a rapid expansion in the commerce of both music and images, and the resulting synergies that developed between the two areas are manifest in portraits of musicians, ranging from Mozart and Beethoven to Rossini and Liszt. The explosion of print media and the concurrent enthusiasm for print collecting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been the focus of some scholarly studies,2 and yet the place of printed portraits within the wider context of visual culture has yet to receive sustained attention or be systematically related to the rise of celebrity culture.3 The value of portraits for historians has been demonstrated by seminal studies such as Wendorf ’s early 1990s book on the links between portraits and biography in Stuart and Georgian England, where he highlighted the connection between visual and literary portraits of public figures.4 Some recent studies in theatre history have argued for the important role of portraiture in the formation of actors’ celebrity in the mid- to late eighteenth century, using the examples of David Garrick and Sarah 33

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Siddons’ self-promotion and creation of an ‘image’ that was in large part achieved via the distribution of engraved portraits.5 The late eighteenth century was the moment when living composers could be famous within their lifetime over a previously unprecedented international reach, due to the rapid printed dissemination of their music, along with biographical literature and printed portraits.6 This being the case, the connection between images of musicians and music consumption in the late eighteenth century has important and continuing historical ramifications, for it is a precursor to the modern multimedia music industry of today. It was in London, especially where ‘[t]he seeds of musical capitalism were sown’,7 that several key components with distinctly modern conditions for fame and celebrity are first found. This was a time of remarkable growth in the reciprocal relationship between music and commerce, with the rapid expansion of the manufacturing of instruments, increased printing of music and composers’ portraits, a thriving public concert scene, an active and critical musical press and an overall rise in middle-class music-making.8 These developments foreshadowed the modernization of concert life and music commodification that occurred in the following century across Europe and that are taken for granted now: the rise of symphonic music, performed at commercial orchestral concerts; and the idea of a repertoire of masterworks – a canon of musical works.9 London was, moreover, a modern musical city in that it attracted leading itinerant musicians who relied less on personal contacts with the aristocracy (such as in Vienna at the same time) and more on a wider network of commercial connections.10 While musicians were also less likely to have direct social interactions with concert goers, their biographies and portraits could be seen in periodicals, prints and exhibitions, and their music purchased at one of the many music sellers. For example, in London in the early 1790s, a music lover could attend a concert featuring Haydn’s newest symphonies with the composer himself directing from the keyboard, see the painter Thomas Hardy’s oil portrait of him exhibited at the Royal Academy and then buy it as a print published by the music seller John Bland, as well as acquire the composer’s music readily at a variety of music print sellers, including Bland’s own shop.11 One of the long-recognized facets of the emerging dynamics and contexts of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music culture was that of its ‘mass culture’. The question that naturally follows from this is: how did the relationship between audience and composer develop, given the widening gap and increasing depersonalization between them? Indeed, this distance was not only between musician and audience, but increasingly between audiences themselves. This was the inevitable result of rapidly widening access that a broader public had to cultural activities generally where, as John Brewer has observed, ‘it was available to almost anyone who could pay’.12 William Weber astutely characterized the impact of mass musical culture some time ago: What has characterized musical mass culture primarily has been . . . the impersonality of relationships between listeners and performers and the active exploitation of a broad public by the music business. To be sure, neither the size of

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audience nor the circulation of sheet music during the nineteenth century compares at all closely to contemporary levels [1970s], and early marketing techniques may seem crude by comparison with those used for Elton John or Leonard Bernstein. But the impersonality of concert events and the manipulative devices of the publishing industry had much the same basic qualities then as now. Because of these dynamics, the appearance of 1,000 instead of 300 people at some concerts and the publication of tens of thousands instead of several hundred new pieces of music per year changed the social structure of music fundamentally.13

The important role that the print medium might have had in the connection between the public and composer has already been signalled by Ivo Supičić who postulated that ‘printed music increasingly became the mediator’ in the context of the impersonal relationship between musicians and their public.14 At one level, the link between the growing celebrity of musicians and their representation in print media is clear through the strong positive correlation. By the first few decades of the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of freelance musicians were congregating in the major musical centres of Europe, with London, Paris and Vienna especially playing host to the greatest pianists, singers and composers of the day.15 Coinciding with this was the exponential rise in the number of portrait prints showing famous or fashionable musicians in the new format of the physionotrace (a mechanically-aided method of portraiture) in Paris and then the new medium of lithography more widely across Europe.16 Portraits also adorned biographies in the newly emerging illustrated musical periodicals in the first half of the nineteenth century, such as Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Vienna), La Revue et Gazette musicale and Le Pianiste (Paris) and Harmonicon (London). These publications linked the life, works and images of prominent musicians in the readers’ minds, through their juxtaposition of biographical background, discussion of music or performances, and printed portraits. For example, the very first volume of the Harmonicon (1 January 1823) began in earnest with a ‘Memoir of Haydn’ accompanied by an engraved portrait. The challenge, then, is to connect our understanding of these events to an emerging trajectory of celebrity and its mechanisms; to understand what we would now describe as ‘celebritization’. Significant strides have been made within cultural studies over the last few decades since Boorstin’s groundbreaking work of the early 1960s considering the nature of fame and celebrity in the twentieth century, ranging from Schikel and Jaffe to Rojek’s classification of types.17 However, it is only more recently still that the historical origins of celebrity culture have been considered more systematically.18 What these various studies have established is the central role visual culture played in developing the cult of celebrity, as well as the crucial place of print media more generally.19 Moreover, recent research has postulated the historical causes that led to the cult of the public celebrity, namely that ‘[t]he mass circulation of text and image, disengaged from its author or subject, created a need for a mechanism to link the public to the individuals who gave value to these new commodities’.20 Tom Mole, in his detailed account of Byron’s celebrity, goes further in describing the context and mechanisms of celebritization:

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Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl [A] recognizably modern culture of celebrity emerged [in the Romantic era] in response to the rapidly industrializing print culture of the late-eighteenth-century, which left readers feeling swamped with new reading material, yet estranged from its writers. The apparatus of celebrity was among the structures that Romantic culture developed to mitigate this sense of information overload and alienation. It responded to the surfeit of print by branding an individual’s identity in order to make it amenable to commercial promotion. It palliated the feeling of alienation between cultural producers and consumers by constructing a sense of intimacy.21

It is timely, then, given the recent surge of scholarly interest in the historical roots of celebrity generally – as evident in a recent overview by Cheryl Wanko – to consider the role of images in the historical development of musical celebrity culture.22 In this chapter I will only consider images from a narrow time frame in the longer story of celebrity’s development, roughly the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and focus on lithographs (for reasons that will become clear later). After the 1850s, photographic portraits – especially the phenomenally successful medium of the Carte de Visite – provided images of impeccable physiognomic veracity. It is in fact the latter point that marks the end of an era in celebrity portraiture, for no longer could the flattering or misleading portraits in other media stand uncontested. The study of musical celebrity and the role of portrait prints encounters many hurdles, in no small part because of the necessarily interdisciplinary nature of the endeavour. Having said that, embedded intellectual strains and aesthetic values within disciplines also contribute to the challenge. In order to engage with the printed images and celebrity, three methodological pillars are proposed below within which such study can be productively situated:

1. 2. 3.

Iconological nominalism; Synaesthetic awareness; The ‘physiognomic paradox’ of portraits.

The first relates to a general research paradigm, the second is tailored towards the links between music and visual art, and the last is focused upon the genre of portraiture specifically.

1. Iconological nominalism I would like to advocate a broad stance for what I term ‘iconological nominalism’, which characterizes an approach to studying images, their origins and influences. This term relates to two facets of methodology: one broad and rather pragmatic; the other focusing on the vexed issue of authenticity and scholarly value. At the broadest level, the approach is evident from the use of the key words. ‘Iconology’ obviously derives from the seminal formulation of Erwin Panofsky, where it refers to the deepest level of visual analysis that seeks to find the fundamental link between an artwork and its

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socio-historical meaning, while ‘nominalism’ comes from Karl Popper’s anti-historicist and anti-essentialist theories regarding historical development and cause.23 In line with a broadly post-positivist world-view,24 iconological nominalism does not privilege a visual object with a fixed or essentialist meaning, be it intention or inherent aesthetic value, but still proposes that reconstructing a likely sphere of influence and significance within its time is a legitimate endeavour. That this significance cannot be reconstructed with certainty does not preclude positing likely parameters and drawing links between motives and consequences. As with any project exploring the visual representations of musicians in a historical context by engaging in the connections between specific musical, textual and visual subjects (i.e. composers and performers, their portraits, and listeners/viewers), postulating motives and consequences is essential to the task. The second, and more focused, use of ‘iconological nominalism’ relates to authenticity, likeness and meaning. In considering the role of musical prints, it is hard to move past some immediate stumbling blocks relating to materials and methods for dealing with them. Much of the time scholars have to work with portraits from artists of lower rank. When this is the case, the only saving grace of these portraits seems to be that they are valuable if they are authentic. By ‘authentic’, I intend to mean in the sense of being both a good likeness and a result of the artist’s direct contact with the sitter. So, one of the first barriers for music historians’ examination of images of the past is the fact that much of imagery relevant for studying celebrity is either kitsch or far removed from its ‘original’ model, or both. There is still an overriding interest in the authenticity of portraits rather than the value of portraits as visual reception, authentic or not. The result is that images deemed inauthentic are frequently discarded rather than being approached as potentially valuable sources in the history of ideas. The art historian Paul Barlow, writing in the mid–1990s on the acquisition policy of the National Portrait Gallery in London during its early days, observes how their initial policy of collecting ‘authentic’ portraits had several consequences. This desire for authenticity led, firstly, to many mediocre portraits being purchased (something widely criticized in the day), and secondly, it requires a certain faith from the viewer that the artist’s putative connection to their sitter enables the viewer to somehow ‘see’ the past. Barlow writes: The authentic portrait might seem to offer that spark of communication which allows the viewer to ‘go back to the day in which [the subject] lived,’ but that day is defined by its own assumptions and requirements. Our separation from the past and its experiences remains.25

We still crave a true likeness of cultural heroes (or villains) no matter what the quality, so long as they are authentic. Biographies of musicians still focus on ‘true’ portraits (i.e. taken directly from the sitter), and those that are taken as unreliable are summarily dismissed. This is fine, so long as we are not throwing the baby out with the bath water. The aesthetic of authenticity pushes the ‘inauthentic’ (whatever that might be) to the side. I would like to make the bold claim that, in many ways and on some occasions, the ‘inauthentic’ is of more use than the authentic. Indeed, it might even be said that the main use of the authentic is as a measuring tool to assess the inauthentic, but it is of little use in itself.

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What is of interest here, rather than a philosophical debate with diminishing returns about likeness and authenticity, is this: what value might the ‘inauthentic’ have or, put another way, what might the significance be in the divergence between the authentic and the inauthentic, the like and the less like? This might be as simple in practice as comparing two portraits of the same sitter, made at the same time, but showing diverging features. Rather than just identifying one as ‘more accurate’ than the other, we might ask instead ‘Why do they differ?’ With the natural-enough emphasis on identifying authenticity in likenesses of composers it is hardly surprising that these images have been largely ignored by musicologists. The generally dismal view of such imagery amongst scholars is not recent, being linked naturally enough to the increasingly scholarly efforts of music historians and biographers in the later part of the nineteenth century. Gustav Kobbé summed up the perceived worth of such imagery as long ago as 1910 with an obvious contempt that pervades to this day: Many a so-called ‘portrait’ of some great composer is not a portrait at all, but merely a fancy picture – some modern artist’s idealization of a famous person long dead. Such things as pretty pictures of Bach – as if Bach ever could be accused of having been ‘pretty’ – representations of Mozart as a second Apollo, or of Beethoven in the role of a premeditated bear, are modern, absolutely worthless as portraiture and, like the feeble attempts that have been made to describe heaven, quite unattractive to persons of cultivated taste.26

Kobbé may well have been absolutely correct in most of what is said here: such images may indeed be worthless as portraiture in a certain strict sense, but they might yet be valuable as a special type of reception document. It is precisely this ‘idealization’ that is of interest; that is, the ideals and assumptions that form the background to ‘fancy’ portraits rather than their value as patently inauthentic artefacts. These claims view iconography within a ‘history of ideas model’, a model articulated so strongly over thirty years ago by James McKinnon. McKinnon argued, in a vision of music iconography still far from realized, that the essential character of the field is the study of musical ideas not artefacts.27 As such, music iconographers are not only in a unique position to aid in the identification and understanding of shifts in musical thought, but also reflect upon the nature of disciplinary boundaries through their own interdisciplinary practice. The obsession with artefact over idea remains a dominant and restrictive strand in music iconography however, and is reflected in ways such as the preoccupation with historically ‘authentic’ images of composers.

2. Synaesthesic awareness The second methodological pillar here is ‘synaesthesic awareness’. The expression neither implies nor searches for a conscious attempt by artists or musicians to emulate one art form in another, but rather refers to an interpretative strategy adopted for

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engaging with portraits within the web of their contemporary context. As a concept, synaesthesic awareness is drawn from Baxandall’s formulation of the viewer ‘completing’ the image with their own knowledge or background of the subject matter.28 More generally, it is an extension of the methodological principle where the context of viewing or experiencing the artefact forms a crucial part of its interpretation. In the case of music portraiture, the viewer ‘completes’ their formal and physiognomic interpretation of the portrait informed by their knowledge of the sitter’s musical style and (assumed) artistic and/or intellectual attributes. For example, a music lover beholding a printed portrait of Mozart, Liszt or the famous soprano Jenny Lind would be familiar with their music, or performances, and link this image of the ‘author’ to their musical perceptions and vice versa. By extension then, synaesthesic awareness acknowledges that a viewer’s mental construction of a musician is at least partly formed through the acts and performances, or products and compositions, of the sitters themselves, as Moran’s study into literary celebrity has argued in relation to authors and their works.29 So, portraits can not only be situated within the web of interconnecting ‘material processes of cultural production and consumption’30 but also in relation to the specific musical properties or associations attached to the sitter portrayed. Thus ‘synaesthesic’ is an appropriate term to describe a mode of visual analysis that not only requires the application of art-historical methods, but also demands skills in understanding the reception of musical performance and composition in its historical and stylistic context.31 Portraits, like all pictures, are presented within a context that adds meaning to their interpretation, whether literally the ‘frame’ that encloses the image, such as a hanging space in a gallery or exhibition hall, a framed print, or one mounted in a collection. The context may well signal the process of production, by naming the artist, engraver, owner and so forth; what Jordanova calls ‘contexts of production and display’.32 The resulting image may be the end product of complex negotiations between artist, publisher, sitter and expectations of the consumer. It is contended here that a crucial ‘context of production’ for viewing images of musical celebrities is their musical work, just as images would have provided a backdrop for the listener or consumer engaged in a musical experience. Images endure once sound has faded, of course, and can be viewed at any time before or after a musical event. When collected and shared, printed portraits in the nineteenth century, for example, would also have formed the basis for discussion and debate, and so be part of a wider public discourse on music. This second pillar might be justifiably subtitled ‘Beyond the Paratext’. The reason being that while the advances in, and application of, methods derived from literary studies (such as Gérard Genette’s notion of the ‘paratext’) have been productive,33 there is still a fixation on developing tools that approach images as some form of text. Jordanova makes this point strongly: It is common for scholars from a number of disciplines to speak of ‘reading’ images and objects, and to treat them as (sometimes) possessing ‘messages,’ which contemporary audiences and later interpreters can also ‘read.’ This formulation reveals little of the distinctive types of operation involved in really looking at items

40

Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl of visual and material culture. Most non-textual sources are indeed connected to texts but in diverse and complex ways. Many incorporate words. However, the manner in which they are viewed is not and cannot be identical to the act of reading. Past visual logics need to be given their due. It follows that historians should consider the role of audiences, sometimes generations of diverse audiences, however difficult this is. It also follows that contexts of production and display need to be taken into account, and that includes the theoretical and critical frameworks within which items are made and viewed.34

If images are only to be conceived in terms of texts, they will not be given their due as objects capable of influencing and reflecting ideas.

3. The ‘physiognomic paradox’ of portraits Finally, the third methodological pillar involves a reflection upon portraiture as a genre, especially that of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The inauthentic images of Mozart referred to in this chapter come from a historical period that witnessed a great pseudo-scientific interest in human appearance, expressed through beliefs in such systems as physiognomy and phrenology, and later eugenics and degeneration. As a consequence, portraits were widely presumed to offer insights into their subjects’ moral and intellectual qualities through reproducing interpretable physiognomic or phrenological ‘signs’. Paradoxically, however, portraits often manipulated a sitter’s appearance in order to idealize these qualities, resulting in images of doubtful veracity, such as with the highly Romanticized printed portraits of Liszt (one of which is discussed below). And yet, the very presumptions upon which Romantic portraits may have been manipulated provides scholars now with remarkably ‘legible’ faces of musicians to be interpreted in relation to well-known signs of creativity and moral character. Whether seen as ‘verifiable’ (i.e. factual likenesses) or ‘biographical’ (in the sense of Nadia Tscherny’s formulation of ‘interpretative’),35 portraits functioned as biographical insight in providing a legible face. The role of the portrait as revealing musical biography in the nineteenth century needs study, but a single example is illustrative. In a book of Musical Memories by Alice Mangold, published late in the nineteenth century, she recounts meetings with various famous musicians, and makes regular reference to their portraits, with the assumption that portraits (possibly more than even the direct physical encounter with the sitter) are a lens through which to discuss and compare the character of those discussed. She writes, in relation to the English composer-pianist Sterndale Bennett: There is a faint resemblance in his portraits to those of Chopin, Weber and Mendelssohn. Musicians, especially creative musicians [composers?] sometimes have this slight, indefinable family likeness to each other, more in contour and expression than in feature.36

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Physiognomy, then, provided the fine-grained measure of normative values and expectations that viewers in the Romantic era used in their ‘reading’ of faces. So, considering the possibility that any given portrait of a musician may actually be less than a good likeness, its value to researchers today may lie more in its potential to disclose motives and relationships than in its physiognomical veracity. And yet, the very presumptions upon which Romantic portraits may have been manipulated provides scholars now with remarkably ‘legible’ faces of musicians to be interpreted in relation to well-known signs of creativity and moral character. The great pianist-composer, and iconic musical celebrity of the nineteenth century, Franz Liszt (1811–86) provides an ideal case study through the lens of lithographic portraits. Already famous when a prodigy, he developed into the most renowned virtuoso pianist of the 1830s and 1840s, facing great acclaim and popular success on the one hand, and sustained allegations of superficiality on the other. He strived for legitimate status as a composer as well, and argued for the increased role and standing of musicians in his published letters on the status of artists in society. Mid-century, he retired from public concerts to devote himself to composition, and in doing so was at the vanguard of a radically new school of composers. Liszt’s likeness was known, and his fame attested to, through the many printed portraits available of him during the height of his ‘virtuoso’ period. Popular prints and photographs provided the nineteenthcentury public with the most common likenesses of Liszt, both in terms of sheer number and variety of images. For those in the public who were never to see him close up, these images would have been the only visual guide to his physiognomy. Printed portraits thus presented the face of Liszt as it existed, or perhaps facilitated its hold on the popular imagination. Invented at the turn of the nineteenth century, lithography as a medium is fundamentally different from engraving, for it allows the original drawing by the artists to be reproduced almost exactly; it is a planar method enabling results with the subtleties of pencil drawing. Like photography, lithographic prints were incompatible with letterpress, with illustrated papers such as the Illustrated London News and L’Illustration making use of wood-engraved prints. The long-term success of the technique and medium varied from country to country, being enormously popular in France, although it fared less well in England.37 Stalls selling prints became common in Paris, where people could peruse and buy images of celebrities, and in fact lithographs exist showing lithographic stalls with potential patrons examining their wares, often to humorous effect. The rise of lithographic portraiture was, as Beatrice Farwell explains, a significant development in the history of portraiture: Unlike painted portraits, which were unique and might be commissioned by anyone, prints imply by their multiplicity a market for the likeness among people who did not know the sitter personally. Thus printed portraits declare the fame of the person represented. The new mass market of the nineteenth century gave rise to new patterns in fame, most of them prophetic of what was to come in the era of the photographic portrait.38

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In the 1830s and 1840s, Liszt was portrayed by two of the leading exponents of the lithographic medium: Achille Devéria (1800–57) in Paris and Josef Kriehuber (1800– 76) in Vienna. While he exhibited paintings at the Paris Salon, Devéria is mostly remembered today as a leading lithographer of his era. His commercial success was no doubt aided by his marriage to Céleste Motte, daughter of the lithographic publisher Charles Motte, a union that also brought him into contact with many leading Romantic figures in Paris at the time.39 His output in the medium comprised of over 3,000 examples in a wide variety of styles and encompassing many subjects and themes, although it should be noted that he avoided portraying the lower classes.40 Devéria’s lithographs were produced to satisfy a market, with many of his works fashion-based or erotic. But his depictions of contemporaries, mostly literary men, saw him at his creative best. These portraits, numbering over 450, constitute a ‘gallery of romantic Restoration society’, and include Chateaubriand, Dumas père, Géricault and Victor Hugo.41 Devéria’s 1832 lithograph of Liszt exhibits many features of the artist’s portrait style, especially its apparently easy informality and intimacy (see Fig.  1.1). This is a highly ‘sentimentalized’ portrait, with the young Liszt’s face shown rather unrealistically elongated, with nose and mouth refined. Liszt is shown comfortably placed on a sofa, legs crossed, arms casually resting – the debonair and sophisticated artist. An opened music score (but with no notation evident) forms an immediate backdrop over his left shoulder. The expression is that of distant contemplation, presumably of a musical nature, given the manuscript. Even for Devéria, this is a heavily romanticized image. In most portraits of contemporaries the sitter looks at the viewer, and the expression is inviting and less distant. There is some use of chiaroscuro, also evident in Devéria’s portraits of artistic types, such as Victor Hugo and fellow lithographer J. David. Connecting this portrait back to our reflections upon celebrity and the methodology for its study, we can perceive that this portrait of Liszt invites the viewer into a gaze that is not returned by the sitter. The viewer can derive a sense of insight into the man and his creative process, as we can stare and contemplate this apparently intimate scene and depiction without being confronted by a returning gaze or even acknowledgement of being watched; we have unmediated access into Liszt’s creative persona and processes. In contrast to Devéria, Kriehuber’s multiple portraits of Liszt during the late 1830s and into the 1840s seem to present us with a rather more refined and ‘Biedermeier’ representation of the musician.42 An early portrait from 1838 is typical of Biedermeier sensibilities, focusing upon the pianist’s good looks and presenting him staring thoughtfully into the distance. Liszt himself probably refers to this portrait in a letter to his partner Marie d’Agoult from 1838: I have made no friend here [in Vienna], but still have very many courtiers. My room is never empty. I am the man à la mode. Fifty copies of my portrait have been sold in a single day. You won’t wrong me by thinking that this makes the least impression on me, will you?43

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Fig. 1.1: Franz Liszt, lithograph by Achille Devéria, 1832.

As Liszt’s fame and celebrity grew, and as he tried to establish himself more as a composer, we can see a change in the portraits, suggesting a shift in purpose and possibly viewership. Later portraits by Kriehuber present more obviously ‘themed’ images, such as the 1846 Byronesque ‘poet of the piano’ (see Fig. 1.2).

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Fig. 1.2: Franz Liszt, lithograph by Josef Kriehuber, 1846.

Liszt is shown deep in contemplation, heavy-lidded, in the classic pose of reflection: head resting on arm. His right hand is placed upon a music manuscript, with some notation evident. Liszt, the composer and creator, is deep in musical thought. We, as viewers, gain a direct line of sight (emphasized through the triangular composition of his torso and arms) and can ‘see’ the cycle of creativity that leads from the external and

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unknowable inspiration, to the mind and to the score. While not knowing Liszt’s thoughts, we are offered intimate insight into the man’s own processes. This provides the viewers with more material to work with, and allows them ‘insight’ into the creative artist: although the creative forces within the musical genius and celebrity were, of course, largely unknowable. Such an image facilitates the ‘hermeneutic of intimacy’ that celebrity culture requires, perhaps better than any other medium, by giving an apparently intimate and unmediated view of the artist at work. When contrasted to other forms of contemporary images, especially oil portraits, there appear at first glance to be self-defeating contradictions. Oil portraits of Liszt from the 1830s and 1840s present much more the distant artist, removed from society.44 This, of course, was entirely consistent with Liszt’s published writings on the role and place of the artist. In an essay ‘On the Situation of Artists and on their Condition in Society’ published in the mid–1830s, Liszt had characterized the creative artist as a Prometheus, a priest, someone whose calling excludes them from society: The work of some artists is their life. Inseparably identified one with the other, they are like those mythical divinities whose being was inextricably linked to that of a tree in the forest. The blood pulsing through their heart is also the sap that spreads through the leaves and fruit of their branches, and the precious balm that collects on the bark forms the silent tears which drop one by one from their eyes. The musician, especially, as one who is inspired by nature but does not copy it, exhales the most personal mysteries of his destiny in sounds. He thinks, feels, and speaks in music.45

All here is mystery, personal and certainly unknowable to the audience. While this appealing thought is essential to the status of the creative celebrity, it is at first thought hardly conducive to forming a sense of intimacy between them and their increasingly large and anonymous body of admirers. However, it invites the highly literate and informed viewer to engage with such a portrait, and probe its sitter’s veiled personality and link it to their work. Oil portraits such as the famous examples by Henri Lehmann and Ary Scheffer reinforce Liszt as the enigmatic musician. Of course, rather than working against the apparently accessible and rather ‘middleclass’ lithographic images discussed above, within the context of the mechanisms of celebrity, oil portraits presenting a ‘distant’ artist actually work in tandem or synthesis beyond merely catering for different audiences. The unknowable and removed musical genius (represented in the oil portraits) feeds the urge to know and seek access into the intimate process (offered via the lithographs). The lithographic portraits from the 1830s and 1840s date from a time when Liszt was swept up with romantic precepts of the exiled artist whilst at the same time enamoured with elite and fashionable salon society.46 While he may have professed, in rhetoric typical of the circle within which he moved, a deep yearning for isolation, his public and popular images suggest someone enjoying posing before the public. This posing, however, was arguably not just motivated or indeed successful because of fame in itself, but because the result enabled a form of imagined connection between viewer

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and subject, between celebrity and audience. This enabling was that of imagined intimacy and insight. In this regard, lithographical prints such as Devéria’s and Kriehuber’s epitomize an emerging mass-market context for celebrity and the ensuing distance between the celebrity figure and their ‘fans’ or consumers. It is not enough that these portraits provided a likeness – of whatever authenticity – but rather that they promise to offer the viewer an unobstructed gaze and legitimate intrusions into the imagined inner workings of the subject. Within the ‘synaesthetic’ model described above, the ‘work’ required of the viewer changes as the distance between them and their sitter increases, and as the level of literary and musical knowledge of those exposed to Liszt’s musical celebrity drops. The hermeneutic of intimacy remains as images provide more instructive cues as to the form of viewer engagement. What role such imagery had in the historical development of musical celebrity has yet to be systematically studied, yet the prominence of images in the public sphere of celebrity musicians then and now – whether Rossini, Paganini, Lady Gaga or the ‘popera’ singer Katherine Jenkins – is undeniable. While the current mass media visual overload that accompanies celebrities may seem particular to recent decades, parallels with two centuries ago are not misplaced.47 The commodification of art, the mass production (and reproduction) of texts and images, an increasingly depersonalized relationship between musician and audience, and the fascination with the personal events of celebrities all congeal during the Romantic period. Going beyond the history of celebrity, the issues I have raised in this chapter suggest the pressing need for further study into the relationship between the visual and the musical, trying to ascertain how the permeable boundaries between the two have flexed and shifted over time, and how one has influenced our understanding of the other.

Notes I would like to thank the editor Diane Silverthorne for her ongoing encouragement and advice through the inception and progression of this chapter. Special thanks also to Tim Shephard for his constructive comments on a draft version. 1 Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). 2 See, for example, Sara Zablotney, ‘Production and Reproduction: Commerce in Images in Late Eighteenth-Century London’, History of Political Economy 31, no. 3 (1999): 413–22, and Stana Nenedic, ‘Print Collecting and Popular Culture in EighteenthCentury Scotland’, History 82, no. 266 (1997): 203–22. 3 Tom Mole, ‘Lord Byron and the End of Fame’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (2008): 343–61. 4 Richard Wendorf, The Elements of Life: Biography and Portrait-Painting in Stuart and Georgian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 5 Shearer West, ‘Siddons, Celebrity and Regality: Portraiture and the Body of the Aging Actress’, in Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1600–2000, ed. M. Luckhurst and J. Moody (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 191–231.

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6 Haydn’s fame, and the role of print culture, is discussed in Thomas Tolley, Painting the Cannon’s Roar: Music, the Visual Arts and the Rise of an Attentive Public in the Age of Haydn, c. 1750–1810 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). 7 Alexander Ringer, ‘Musical Taste and the Industrial Syndrome: A Socio-Musicological Problem in Historical Analysis’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 5, no. 1 (1974): 139–53. 8 See, for example, Ringer, ‘Musical Taste and the Industrial Syndrome’; William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 9 Simon McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 223. 10 Tia DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803 (London: University of California Press, 1995). 11 See Alan Davison, ‘The Face of a Musical Genius: Thomas Hardy’s Portrait of Joseph Haydn’, Eighteenth Century Music 6, no. 2 (2009): 209–27. 12 John Brewer, ‘ “The most polite age and the most vicious”: Attitudes towards culture as a commodity, 1660–1800’, in Consumption of Culture, ed. A. Bermingham and J. Brewer (London: Routledge, 2013), 348. 13 William Weber, ‘Mass Culture and European Musical Taste, 1770–1870’, International Review of Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 8, no. 1 (1977): 7. 14 Ivo Supičić, ‘Early Forms of Musical “Mass” Culture’, in Music in the Classic Period: Essays in Honor of Barry S. Brook, ed. A. W. Atlas and B. S. Brook (New York: Pendragon Press, 1985), 255. 15 See Alexander Ringer, ‘The Rise of Urban Music Life Between the Revolutions, 1789–1848’, in The Early Romantic Era, Between Revolutions: 1789 and 1848, ed. A. Ringer (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991), 1–31, and William Weber, Music and the Middle Classes: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1975). 16 Beatrice Farwell, French Popular Lithographic Imagery, 1815–70: Portraits and Types, vol. 2 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982). 17 Seminal texts on celebrity include Daniel Boorstin, The Image, or, What Happened to the American Dream (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961); Richard Schikel, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity (New York: Doubleday, 1985); Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2001). 18 Tom Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 19 See, for example, Elizabeth Barry, ‘Celebrity, Cultural Production and Public Life’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (2008): 251–8. 20 Barry, ‘Celebrity, Cultural Production and Public Life’, 256. 21 Mole, ‘Lord Byron and the End of Fame’, 345. 22 Cheryl Wanko, ‘Celebrity Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Interdisciplinary Overview’, Literature Compass 8 (2011): 351–62. 23 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1995 (1945)).

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24 See, for example, John Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes. Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 25 Paul Barlow, ‘Facing the Past and Present: The National Portrait Gallery and the Search for “Authentic” Portraiture’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 233. 26 Gustav Kobbé, ‘A Collection of Musical Portraits’, The Lotus 1, no. 2 (1910): 8. 27 James McKinnon, ‘Musical Iconography: A Definition’, RIdIM/RCMI Newsletter 2 no. 2 (1977): 15–18. 28 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). 29 Joe Moran, Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America (London: Pluto Press, 2000). 30 Moran, Star Authors, 149. 31 For a particularly rich discussion on the culture of synaesthesia and in-depth examples, see Simon Shaw-Miller, Eye hEar: The Visual in Music (Farnham: Ashgate: 2013). 32 Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Image Matters’, Historical Journal 51, no. 3 (2008): 778. 33 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 34 Jordanova, ‘Image Matters’, 778. 35 Nadia Tscherny, ‘Likeness in Early Romantic Portraiture’, Art Journal 46, no. 3 (1987): 193–9. 36 Sterndale Bennett, Musical Memories (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1897), 305. 37 A good introduction to the history of lithography, used as the basis for this section, can be found in Linda C. Hults, The Print in the Western World: An Introductory History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). 38 Farwell, French Popular Lithographic Imagery, 1. 39 Farwell, The Cult of Images: Baudelaire and the 19th-century Media Explosion (Santa Barbara: University of California Press, 1977), 71. 40 Farwell, The Cult of Images, 71. 41 Farwell, The Cult of Images, 71. 42 For a detailed discussion of Biedermeier representations of Liszt, by Kriehuber and Joseph Danhauser, see Alan Davison, ‘Virtuosity Domesticated: Portraits of Franz Liszt by two Biedermeier Artists’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 2, no. 1 (2005): 3–22. 43 Franz Liszt, Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Adrian Williams (Oxford: Clarendeon Press, 1998), 89. 44 See Alan Davison, ‘The Musician in Iconography from the 1830s and 1840s: The Formation of New Visual Types’, Music in Art 28, no. 1–2 (2003): 147–62. 45 Published on 16 July 1837 in Gazette Musicale, translated in Franz Liszt, An Artist’s Journey: Lettres d’un Bachelier ès Musique, 1835–1841, trans. and annotated Charles Suttoni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 28–9. 46 See Eleanor Perényi, Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974). 47 See West, ‘Siddons, Celebrity and Regality’.

2

Making an Entrance Manet’s Still Life with Hat and Guitar Therese Dolan

The most banal of objects produces sublime inspirations. Gustave Flaubert1 Manet’s success with the Spanish Singer at the Salon of 1861 preceded one of the most productive years in his career. With a seemingly unstoppable burst of energy in 1862, the artist painted, drew, etched and lithographed some of the most significant works of his entire oeuvre. As with the Spanish Singer, several of the most important of these works had music as their theme, such as the Street Singer, The Old Musician and Music in the Tuileries. Hat and Guitar is the first extant still life from Manet’s hand and, similar to many of his other works of the period, contains visual provocations that undermine the protocols of the genre (see Plate 2). Although Manet dated the work 1862, it may have been started in 1861 to commemorate his success with the Spanish Singer at that year’s Salon. Possibly cut down from a larger composition,2 it served as a decorative dessus de porte (overdoor) for his studio and was not exhibited or sold until after his death.3 The painting depicts elements of the Spanish Singer’s costume contained in a wicker basket that holds the black sombrero, the guitar with the red ribbon, a pinkish cloth, the brown pantalons and the guitarist’s black bolero with its tasselled sleeves spilling out to the right. Manet positions the basket on the floor of what looks like a stage with a curtain drawn behind it. A strongly raking light, suggesting a theatre spotlight shining down on the objects, illuminates the weave of the wicker in the front centre of the basket and creates a system of shadows to the left and right of the still-life arrangement. This piece has been read as a talisman or personal logo of the artist,4 a sign of Manet’s love of Spain, and an obvious reference to his success at the Salon of 1861. Manet would paint many still lifes throughout his career, producing images of fish and fowl, flowers and fruit. Hat and Guitar, however, remains the only painted example in this genre that included clothing and a musical instrument and, despite the fact that its still-life contents were not of the traditional edible or olfactory kind, it still offers much in the way of food for thought. The depiction of musical instruments in still-life paintings originated in the seventeenth century in northern Europe, primarily as objects with other Vanitas symbols of the transitory nature of beauty and existence such as fruits and flowers, or as symbols 49

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of the attributes of the arts.5 A survey of French still-life paintings containing musical instruments (such as found in Michel Faré’s La Nature morte en France)6 shows how artists delighted in depicting shelves and tables laden with musical scores, comestibles, books and a wide variety of musical instruments, visually alluding to and aimed at stimulating the five senses. Like the familiar after-dinner scenes of seventeenth-century Dutch still life that pictured toppled glasses and the remains of meals, the scattered disarray of instruments, scores and other objects found in musical still lifes such as those by the eighteenth-century painters Nicolas de Largillière, Jean-Baptiste Oudry and Anne Vallayer-Coster implied the transitory suggestion of human presence and the fleeting notion of sensate experience. Images containing musical instruments had served as overdoors in Largillière’s Paris home, and the master still-life painter Jean-BaptisteSiméon Chardin twice received commissions to paint overdoors with musical subjects. Chardin’s first commissioned pair of overdoors with a musical theme, Musical Instruments with a Parrot and its pendant Musical Instruments with a Basket of Fruit, both painted in 1730, appeared at a sale in Paris in 1860 and were described by Horsin-Déon in 1862.7 Also in 1862, Charles Blanc wrote about Chardin’s acceptance of a commission in 1763 to paint three overdoors for the royal château at Choisy depicting the Attributes of the Sciences and the Attributes of the Arts.8 So successful were Chardin’s works containing musical instruments that two more paintings followed in 1767, The Attributes of Civilian Music and The Attributes of Military Music, prompting Denis Diderot in his Salon of 1767 to vaunt the lowly still-life genre over the more esteemed realm of portraiture. Whether Manet knew these specific musical paintings by Chardin or their literary descriptions by Diderot, Blanc and others when he came to paint his Hat and Guitar in 1862 cannot be determined, but the influence of the eighteenth-century master on his subsequent work is a matter of record.9 Encouraged by his first success at the Salon with the Spanish Singer, Manet chose the inanimate props of the hat and guitar of his performer as a personal symbol, thereby positioning his art in relation to a longstanding tradition of still lifes and overdoors with musical subjects. Previous artists had accentuated the theatricality of their still lifes by hanging curtain swags over their displays of musical instruments, as Largillière did in the eighteenth century with his Violon à la draperie. François-Léonard Dupont festooned the background of his collection of musical instruments and plaster casts with a partially-opened curtain backdrop in his 1785 Instruments of the Arts. In both these cases, however, the musical objects rest on the tables and the settings imply domestic interiors. Manet’s guitar and clothing in the wicker basket clearly lie dormant on the floor of a stage with a decorative lower border of a curtain behind them. Lit by a bright spotlight, these objects possess no other internal logic than their own self-presentation in this peculiar setting. By inventing rather than inheriting his iconography in this instance, Manet makes a revisionist statement about the still life as a genre, defamiliarizing its setting from its traditional confines of the privacy and interiority of household settings and making it take a public bow beneath the spotlighted glare of a theatre stage. More seems at stake here for Manet than art for art’s sake. At this early stage in his career Manet was especially enamoured with Spanish art, and his Hat and Guitar does not stray far from the still-life examples provided by this country.

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Concentrating on a few simple objects brilliantly lit against a dark background, Manet presented his humble basket of clothes and a guitar with an ascetic frankness and visual intensity reminiscent of Francisco de Zurbarán’s use of woven baskets with white linen cloths spilling out of them in the lower foregrounds of his 1632–3 Young Virgin Praying and 1638–40 Virgin and Christ Praying in the House at Nazareth. The sparseness of Manet’s motif and the lowliness of the objects, sitting alone on the bare stage floor, contrast with the visual profusion of the Dutch pronk still life, with its abundance of fruits, flowers and objects, and tends to recall the visual economy of the bodegónes (pantry still lifes) of the Spanish tradition, as well as the humble simplicity of Chardin’s still-life objects. Manet’s broad and cursory brushstrokes play down the sensuality of the material in order to emphasize the dynamics of shape and form in a manner more reminiscent of Zurbarán’s handling than the subtle shadings and warm tonalities of Chardin. The carefully calculated visual relationships and dramatic lighting confer an aspect of monumentality on the unpretentious objects that Manet has chosen and consequently counter the lowly status of the still-life genre, giving it an invigorated sense of optical cogency. The weave of the wicker basket provides a visually rhythmic receptacle for the play of light and shadow on the objects it contains. The oval shape of the hat is continued and enlarged in the body of the guitar on which it rests and is further sustained by the echoing shape of the basket. The rounded sides of the cartouche motif in the curtain act as a frame and resonator for the ovoid shape of the hat. Manet tames this plastic lyricism with the unbroken horizontality of the curtain border that echoes the shape of the top and bottom of the canvas and then repeats this in the middle of the canvas by the line of the bottom edge of the curtain, broken by the still-life motif. The black guitar neck audaciously breaks the restated counterpoint of the rounded shapes and horizontal lines with its unique perpendicular thrust, adding by its vector a dramatic black shape set against white that would be repeated two years later in bodily form in his Dead Toreador (see Plate 3). The red ribbon on the guitar’s neck adds a deliberate note of strong and vivid colour in an otherwise largely muted field of earthen tones. The positioning of the guitar neck in Hat and Guitar may have been visually inspired by the same directional motif of the Dead Soldier in the Pourtalès collection that Manet believed at the time to be by Diego Velázquez.10 Manet may have wittily placed the guitar as an overdoor as a visual pun on the accessibility of a musical instrument in an artist’s studio, such as is found in Isidore Pil’s image of his father sitting in his studio with the guitar hanging on the wall above a canvas seen from behind where the artist has signed his name. Théophile Gautier, whose praise of Manet’s Spanish Singer thrilled Manet, noted in his travel writings on Spain that Spanish restaurants and cafés often had guitars hanging by pegs on walls for them to be available for customers to strike up a tune when the spirit moved them.11 Gautier also used guitar music as a thematic throughout his novel Militona to signify the differences between the sensuously exotic manola whom Don Andrès ultimately chooses over his demure piano-playing fiancée, Doña Feliciana. A final scene in the novel juxtaposes a hat and a guitar as inanimate and pre-Freudian personifications of the newly-weds.12 The guitar’s accessibility and portability made it an ideal instrument for relaxation and it was a frequent tool of seduction in Spanish lore. Additionally, ekphrastic still lifes of guitars are often found in the literature of Manet’s time.13 With

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its red ribbon dangling out front, the guitar in Manet’s still life offers a tantalizing imitation to be played in his studio in lieu of the real thing, a witty example of a picture eliciting an imagined tactile response.

Touch in painting and music The red ribbon on the guitar throws a black shadow underneath it on the stage that seems to underline it emphatically. The neck and ribbon of the guitar are extended out to the viewer of the painting, as they are the objects closest to be grasped; they invite the hand to pick up the instrument and begin performing. As pointed out by musicologists, the guitar and the lute are the only instruments where the fingertips of both hands directly contact the sounding strings and produce tone, as distinct from the violin, for instance, where a manipulated bow is drawn across the strings to produce the sound, or a piano where the hammers strike the chords in response to pressure on ivory keys.14 Touching and stroking, therefore, are most intrinsic to the sounding of the guitar, and it is the touche and touchettes – the fingerboard and frets of the neck – that Manet extends outward from the basket of clothes. It is also by means of touch – the unique style of the application of paint by his hand – that Manet would announce his modernism. Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’s great respect for older art caused him to warn his contemporaries against showing the touch in art, arguing that it makes one see the painter’s technique instead of the object represented and privileged the hand of the artist over the thought emanating from the subject matter that should be the vital essence of the painting.15 This academic dictum persisted in Manet’s time: Auguste de Vaucelle, reporting on the Salon of 1861 in L’Artiste, praised Alexandre Cabanel’s Faune enlevant une Nymphe for making him forget that it was paint that he beheld on the canvas. So pearly white was the faun’s body that the materiality of pigment gave way to the illusion of flesh: ‘It is not colour that one has before one’s eyes, it is skin . . . In front of these beautiful forms, rendered with astounding skill, one forgets the material process and only contemplates the result.’16 Touch, however, was emphasized by Charles Blanc in his essay on Chardin, which appeared the year Manet painted his Hat and Guitar. Blanc, a noted critic and historian of French and Italian art and the founder of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, hailed Chardin’s composition and touch as being the exemplary qualities of his art.17 Manet rejected the academic finish of Salon painting with its varnished surfaces, preferring to foreground his personal touch on the canvas, turning it into a performative surface; hence, the appropriateness of the stage on which the still life is posed. Manet had accentuated touch in the Spanish Singer by means of his broad highlights and the rough stroking of his paint, called attention to by the critics, one of whom complained that each of the brushstrokes were individually visible and had been caked and plastered on like mortar on top of mortar.18 He continued this pronounced handling of his brush in Hat and Guitar by the summary vertical patches of paint that crudely define staccato shadows on the side of the guitar while the raw passages of grey shadow smeared on the pinkish-white cloth in the basket make a mockery of the suave delicacy of traditional academic modelling.

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Manet executes the blacks in the hat like a virtuoso fashion designer: a velvety rim circles the brim of the hat and a border surrounds the edge where the upper part meets the brim. The handling of the blacks in the hat and the bolero is as sumptuous as it is subtle, and their rich dark tones rhyme with the strong black outline on the upper and lower rim on the base of the guitar. The black neck of the guitar, as it bends downward toward the head with its pegs, yields a faint highlight of two dark grey stripes that threaten to get swallowed up in the shadow projected by the edge of the basket on the stage, yet they tenaciously hold their own. A faint wisp of grey guitar string strays off a tuning peg to the right. These understated details are visible only on very close inspection of the painting and would not have been easily seen when the painting served as an overdoor. Their delineation lends credence to Juliet Wilson-Bareau’s speculation that the painting was cut down from a larger work. In any case, Manet demonstrated in this still life that his brush was a pliable instrument capable of bold notes as well as delicate shadings, that it could mimic objects dense with materiality as well as the diaphanous transparency of a shadow, that his touch was as versatile in conjuring a convincing visual sonority as the guitarist’s was in evoking a plangent or lively tune.

Painting and performance Both painter and guitarist set their hands in motion to bring to life their artistic creations. Manet called attention to the performative aspects of his craft of painting in the Spanish Singer by placing the hand of the guitarist in the exact centre of the work and by exhibiting it with the active title Espagnol jouant de la guitar (Spaniard playing guitar). Manet signed his painting not in the traditional script in the lower-right corner of the painting, but gave the illusion that his name had been carved into the green wooden bench on which the guitarist sits. He thus implied that he is the artisan of this rough piece of furniture, further emphasizing his hand-tooling craftsmanship. Similarly, all the objects in Manet’s Hat and Guitar are man-made, hand-crafted or manufactured, rather than the organic product of nature such as the fruits and flowers he would depict as still-life elements in later paintings. Even without an active performer playing the guitar, Manet continually suggested the aspect of touch and manipulation in this work, from the weave of the straw basket that implies the action of manual braiding to the way in which the costume and guitar have fallen into their seemingly haphazard configuration, as if casually tossed there by a diffident hand. The clothes had to be removed from the body by someone, and they await being lifted up and put back on by another model who will pose for the painter. The guitar lies dormant, its slackened ribbon ready to be thrust over the shoulders and its neck extending itself to be taken up by a hand which will lift it and then prop up the body of the guitar before applying the strokes and strumming motions that will activate its sound. As still-life objects, the basket and its contents had to be selected and positioned on the floor of the stage where they appear. The motif of the basket with its contents initially appears informal because of the seemingly random placement of the clothes

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and guitar, but each object is strategically positioned to maximize its formal effect within the painting. Diderot’s words in the Salon of 1767 on Chardin’s paintings of musical instruments come to mind with an uncanny precision: ‘There is zest in this accumulated disorder; the effects of this art are designed to delight, the form and the colour being of the greatest truth. One can learn here how to ally vigour with harmony.’19 The clothes and the hat metonymically suggest the body that wears them, while the extended neck of the guitar alludes to the playing hand that grips, plucks, scrapes and strokes the strings to produce a sonic trace. The painter and musician share a closer affiliation of touch and style in the execution of their works than does the writer whose manuscripts in Manet’s time were most often typeset and reproduced. The inventiveness of the touch in the performance of the musical work and the permanence of the paint stroke when it has been allowed to dry express the artist’s aesthetic intentions. Most guitar performances during Manet’s time were solos as the guitar did not lend itself, as Berlioz had noted in his Treatise on Instrumentation, to group performances: ‘The guitar – in contrast to other instruments – loses when reinforced in number. The sound of twelve guitars playing unisono is almost ridiculous.’20 Thus the individuality of the guitarist’s touch came to be highlighted in performance over and above other instruments playing in concert with one another. The originality in the style of handling and sounding the instrument came to the fore when the guitar was played, and most often this was in a more intimate setting than a music hall or opera house because of the guitar’s restricted acoustic range. The spontaneity and expressiveness of the performer became more apparent and recognizable at closer range. Manet has his Spanish Singer perform solo and in this still life the guitar is the only instrument depicted. It remains, therefore, unlike the many still lifes strewn with varieties of different musical instruments that preceded this work. The distinctness of Manet’s touch was to become the signature of his style, and its Spanish origins remain evident in the broad stroke and reduced gamut of tones already seen in the Spanish Singer. Not long after Manet finished these works, Blanc – ever alert to touch as the expressive handwriting used by a painter21 – wrote about Velázquez’ style in musical terms: ‘He is a virtuoso who executes excellent music with two or three notes, where a Rubens or Veronese would take the opportunity to play a piece with a full orchestra.’22 Manet could only have agreed. Guitarists affirm that their instruments retain the marks of their personality more than most other instruments: Each instrument is carved by use: sweat on fingerboard, pick marks and pressure on the front all scar the instrument along a player’s most familiar paths. That’s one reason guitars take on personalities, something that more inert instruments like drums or keyboards rarely do.23

Manet may have had some understanding of this personalized aspect of touch and the guitar, perhaps through his friendship with the guitar-playing Zacharie Astruc and his attendance at concerts by the Catalan guitarist Jaime Bosch.24 The traces of touch are recorded as manual remains of acts of performance on the surface of the guitar, a

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lasting visual vestige of a transient acoustic event. Manet inscribed his touch as a mark of pigment on canvas, and when it congealed and was allowed to remain, the touch became part of a referential system of appearances. Both a musical instrument and a painting resonate either literally or metaphorically through the means of the artist’s touch. In Manet’s painting, as Richard Shiff has observed, iconic representations simultaneously index the presence of the artist because of the idiosyncrasy of his touch.25 Seeking to separate himself from the academic imitation of surfaces by other masters in their pictures of objects, Manet asserted his strong personality through the obvious trace of the brush, actively suggesting more than passively imitating the looping weave of the straw used to make the basket. Coarse highlights on the floor of the stage, suggesting an overhead spotlight, trail down the lower centre of the canvas, an indoor anticipation of the outdoor reflection of sunlight that Claude Monet would make on the water in his 1872 Impression: Sunrise. Manet emphatically brushed the marks of the spotlight on the stage, rhyming and inverting their horizontality and brightness with the verticality and darkness of the coarse strokes on the side of the guitar in the basket. Manet thus made the surface of the canvas perform as it becomes a literal stage for his painterly activity rather than a passive surface on which to record illusionist objects. To quote Shiff, The hand, sharing the mannerisms and ‘style’ of the eye, figures an image on the painting surface that corresponds to the visual impression forming on the surface of the retina, or perhaps on the ‘surface’ of the brain or the ‘surface’ of the memory (in this sense of correspondence, Manet claimed to ‘copy’ nature) . . . The master faculty of this indexical modernism is not vision but touch, the touch of reality that the academic iconic tradition . . . had gradually abandoned.26

Imitation in painting and music A skilled guitarist’s touch on his instrument could make it produce sounds that impersonated other musical instruments. When Fernando Ferandiere published his Arte de tocar la Guitarra española por Música (The Art of Playing the Spanish Guitar) in 1799, he commented on the guitar’s versatility for mimicry, noting that it had the ability . . . to imitate other instruments, such as flutes, trumpets, bassoons, etc.; the ability to accompany the voice, as if it were a pianoforte; and finally, it is an instrument that does not need the support of any other; so that it deserves the name, not a of a guitar, but of a whole keyboard held in one’s hand.27

Fernando Sor delighted Parisian audiences in 1822 with a guitar concert where his virtuosity filled the room with such a variety of sounds that one critic commented, ‘He charmed all Parisians by an instrument which might from its appearance have been taken for a guitar, but judging by its harmony must have been a complete orchestra

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enclosed in a small compass.’28 Other critics disliked the guitar’s impersonation of another instrument. Reviewing a concert Sor gave with Franz Liszt in 1828, FrançoisJoseph Fétis, founder and editor of the influential Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, complained: ‘One might also reproach [Sor] with changing [the guitar’s] nature, and with often making it sound like a mandolin, by his persistence in playing with a sharp sound.’29 Fétis did, however, like the sound that another guitarist, Joseph Anelli, produced on his guitar: The tones he draws from his instrument surpass in quality all that we have heard. They are at once clear, sonorous, mellow, and at the same time so powerful, that one would think the tons of the harp were added to the sympathetic sounds of the guitar.30

Sor often performed together in Paris with fellow Spaniard Dionisio Aguado, whose talents with the guitar made him a favourite of the salons and concert halls. Most famous perhaps for inventing the tripodison, a device for holding the guitar during performance that freed the arms of the performer, Aguado spoke lovingly of the guitar’s versatility: I believe that the guitar has a particular character: soft, harmonious, melancholy; sometimes it borders on the majestic, though it cannot rival the grandeur of the harp or the piano. On the other hand it offers a delicate charm, and its sounds are capable of being modified and combined so as to give it a very mysterious character, well suited to song and expressiveness . . . Of all the instruments in use today, it may be the best means of suggesting the illusion of an orchestra in miniature, with its various effects.31

This performative flexibility of the guitar, its acoustic transvestism so to speak, may have appealed to Manet as he assumed the guise of the Spanish Singer for his artistic persona. His quotation of many sources within the same work, a keynote of his paintings in the early years of his career, allowed him to diversify his own expressiveness into an artistic polyphony, enabling his brush to play a variety of stylistic roles. Manet may have realized that paint on canvas could perform like the guitar: its materiality could be used to suggest illusions of objects other than itself, but it ultimately pointed back to its original source as the resonator and the instigator of the illusion. The Hat and Guitar became the insignia of Manet’s studio when it was positioned as an overdoor, and as a consciously realist painter, Manet’s arrangement of the still-life elements on the floor of a stage in front of a curtain may have been done to recall the well-known passage from Pliny’s Natural History about the fifth-century Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Zeuxis painted such a convincing still life of grapes that birds flew down to peck at them. Parrhasius had painted a picture of a stage curtain that fooled even Zeuxis, who requested that it be drawn back to display the picture behind it. Invoking this legendary tale of mimetic realism in Hat and Guitar by including both a still life and a stage curtain would have served Manet well as he launched his career,

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for he intended to challenge the idea of imitation head-on as the basis of painting’s credibility and success as it was judged at the Salon during his time. Several details in the Hat and Guitar play subtly on the notion of representation and illusion through substance and shadow. A fringe of a black tassel on the bolero hangs over the front of the basket and casts a shadow that is only slightly less saturated in colour than the tassel itself, forming an inverted V that acts in the same manner as an acoustic echo by repetition and diminution. The shadow cast by the red ribbon onto the floor of the stage seems to run in a leftward direction under the edge of the bolero on the floor where it is then transformed into another tassel. On the left-hand side of the basket a greyish-brown stroke of paint seems to read as a part of the weave of the straw basket that has escaped upward to point to the shadows on the side of the guitar, but its congruence in colour with the folded pantalons makes us realize that it is part of the contents in the basket. The visual punning of these teasing ambiguities key themselves as indicators of the play of illusion and reality, of systems of connotation and denotation. Just as the guitar could imitate other instruments but remain a guitar, so paint could imitate other materials such as cloth and straw while retaining its character as an oil medium. Manet’s placement of his still life in front of a curtain elides the issues of presentation and representation evoked in the oft-quoted narrative by Pliny of the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Manet literally stages the issue of artistic mimesis in Hat and Guitar by pictorially questioning realism and resemblance in the still-life and curtain. The still life onstage initially appears to be a straightforward depiction of a basket filled with clothes and a musical instrument seen parallel to the picture plane. The curtain behind it seals off the space and focuses attention on the basket of objects. Closer examination of the details of the painting yield intriguing visual ambiguities. Manet positions the still life in the exact centre of the painting and supplies a curtain motif that provides a sense of symmetry between the two halves of the painting. The cartouche in the centre of the curtain serves as a frame for the hat that visually echoes its rounded shape. But rather than being absolutely uniform in presentation, the two halves of the curtain diverge into opposing fields of shape and design. Looking at Manet’s Frontispiece for an Edition of Etchings helps in understanding this incongruity as the curtain tapers downwards to the right (see Fig 2.1). However, when the section with the still life on the stage is cropped away from the rest of the composition as it may have been in Hat and Guitar, this ambiguity is not so easily understood or read, and thus the visual anomalies take on the power to express something unique. As it exists in the etching of the Frontispiece, the still life is seen from above and the resulting distortions appear logical. When cut down and framed to become Hat and Guitar, however, the still-life objects and curtain are looked at directly and the lack of symmetry between the two halves of the painting becomes inexplicable, contributing to a sense of spatial dislocation. The brim of the black hat swells on the left side as if to echo the upward thrust of the cartouche behind it and rhyme with the rounded body of the guitar on which it is perched. The right side of the hat brim appears flatter and materially thinner, more in tune with the straight edges of the neck of the guitar and the gray angulated shadows that dent the surface of the white cloth. The edge of the cartouche behind the right side of the hat plays its part in

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Fig. 2.1: Édouard Manet, Second State of a Frontispiece, Polichinelle Presents, 1862, etching, 32.7 × 24 cm.

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this visual schema as it, too, is less rounded than the opposite side, thereby thwarting any isometric balance between the two halves. The lower border of the curtain on the left side is delineated with an architectural ornamental design, but as the curtain passes behind the wicker basket to the right, the curtain pattern becomes unfocused and difficult to read as it transitions into a deeper shadow, as it progresses to the right. It is as if Manet designated the left side of the canvas as the realist and objective side and the right side as abstract and subjective, because it becomes a decorative play of paint, a free-form variation on the patterns on the left side. The right side acts as an improvisation on the more focused forms on the left. But, both sides are merely paint in a game of illusion. Manet’s curtain contains a threefold illusion: it is a painted imitation of a curtain that contains an imitation of a decorative architectural motif that is itself imitating nature by incorporating a motif of plant forms. That this representation takes place on a theatre stage reinforces Manet’s gambit of representing a subject that becomes the subject of representation.

Realism in Courbet and Manet An apt congruency occurs with the guitar in the basket in this play on realism and abstraction. The realist left side of the canvas corresponds to the soundbox and soundhole of the lower part of the guitar where the tones of the music are produced – the resonator for the endpoint of the performance where the sounds are actualized. The abstracted right side shares its space with the touche (fingerboard) and touchettes (frets) of the guitar, the parts of the instrument where the musical chords and timbres are produced by the differentiated pressure of the touch of the fingers – the making of the music. Just below the place where the red ribbon coils over on itself Manet has painted a thick, bold yellow horizontal plait of straw that, by its flatness and lack of modelling, momentarily separates itself and seems simultaneously to hang suspended from the red ribbon parallel to the picture plane at the same time that it adheres to the surface of the basket. This small instance of visual coincidence and contrapuntal simultaneity toys with the notion of real space and pictorial space, the representational and the presentational, announcing the paintedness and purely aesthetic spectacle of the still-life construction. All of the objects in the painting are props in a theater of make-believe. Modernist painting takes an early bow on the stage as illusionistic painting (almost literally in this canvas) takes its curtain call. Manet’s gesture of placing the Hat and Guitar as an overdoor to his studio may also allude to his relationship with Gustave Courbet and his brand of artistic realism. If Manet did make a painting of the composition in the Frontispiece which he later cut down, he may have been playing off Courbet’s subtitle of the Studio as A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Life as a Painter, for the Frontispiece is also a work that was clearly autobiographical and allegorical.32 On the left side of the floor of the Studio Courbet painted a hat and guitar that lie at the feet of the seated figure of the poacher with his dogs. These still-life elements have been read as cast-off Romantic apparel and bric-àbrac,33 and they may refer also to the older troubadour style of Courbet’s 1844 Le

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Guitarrero (The Guitarist). If Manet had cut his Hat and Guitar from a larger painting that represented what we now see in his Frontispiece etching, then the sword, hat and guitar of the ‘uncut’ painting would further reference the dagger, hat and guitar in Courbet’s Studio.34 In both paintings the guitar is similarly positioned and the hats are black, but Manet centres his configuration while Courbet’s serves as one detail among many on the left side. The sombre colours of Courbet’s hat and guitar blend easily with their surroundings in the Studio so that they become two objects among many others; Manet’s strong highlighting creates sharp tonal oppositions while the red ribbon provides a startling note of colour in the isolated still life which, if it indeed were part of a larger painting, would have drawn the eye downward to its brightness. Courbet finished off his objects to give them the appearance of convincing density and weight; the soft frothy feathers of the plume are clearly distinguished from the firm material of the hat, which holds its curved form even when propped up against the side of the guitar. Courbet’s objects are durable and intact, solidly occupying the space between the feet of the poacher and the body of the beggar woman holding a baby, playing their parts in the grand allegorical narrative of the composition. The abbreviated strokes Manet used to configure his hat and guitar give his work the air of something dashed off and spontaneous, something to be actively experienced in its performative making rather than passively decoded as transparent referents to the real world. In comparison with the finish of Courbet’s hat and guitar, Manet’s objects seem to be just coming into being, shaped before us in the quick facture of the performing brush, as if we are seeing in this painting what Theodor Adorno once termed ‘a passage of time that is holding its breath’.35 Courbet was clearly Manet’s rival in realism and modern painting at the time Manet created his still life, and as Manet launched his career he openly competed with Courbet by employing similar sources and subjects to different aesthetic and painterly ends. Courbet’s cultivation of a plebian persona and the political goals he sought in his painting may have seemed too heavy-handed for the urbane Manet, who was far less interested in convincing the viewer of the material physicality of things and more committed to exploring the potentialities of the act of painting that define the consciousness of aesthetic pleasure as much as, if not more, than they refer to the natural world. Kurt Badt summarized well the differences between the two major painters who carried the label of ‘realist’ in the 1860s: In Courbet we see the man who understands existence and what exists in an objective way but in Manet a man who perceives the ‘becoming’ of a whole which is perpetually dying, who measures all the facts offered by the real world by that one standard and makes use of distinctive forms only in so far as they enable this whole to function and so to be once again transformed. And we realize that space is what matters in Courbet’s realism, whereas with Manet it is time which thrusts itself forward in the phenomena of the real world – the attraction of the momentary, as for example its instability and perishability. And the means of representation adopted by the two minds corresponds to all this: in the former the solidity of the texture of a picture, in the latter the liveliness of the mind, the esprit, the sketchiness of the execution.36

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Time in painting and music Time, indeed, is what Manet may have wanted to suggest in this painting. The choice of the still life, the least narrative of the genres and the furthest removed from history painting in the academic hierarchy, allowed Manet to explore abstract relationships of form, colour, line and space as generative sources of expressive power. As Norman Bryson has observed, still life is the genre farthest removed from language and thus the hardest for discourse to reach.37 Music and literature shared auditory and temporal characteristics, while painting was visual, spatial and static. Manet may have taken on the problematics of this issue by encoding the element of time in his configuration of the curtain border across the upper surface of the canvas. The strong horizontal echoes the upper edge of the canvas, but as it passes through the cartouche its legibility becomes diffused and it tapers off rather quickly to the right in a visible diminuendo, forcing the eye of the viewer to adjust to its attenuation. The viewer faces the curtain from straight on as it is depicted in the left part of the painting, but sees it from an angle on the right side, an anticipation of the temporal viewpoints that characterized Paul Cézanne’s later still lifes and foreshadowed the roving viewpoint of Cubism. The lilting weave of the basket in the centre of the painting also elicits a plastic sense of musical time by its braiding which progresses from short and muted staccato brown strokes on the left to lengthened lyrical interlacings of brightly lit yellow plaits whose rhythmic flow and brighter tonality set a different visual tempo by their repetition and variation. Time is then visually intensified by the red ribbon which twists and almost disappears as it pulsates across the front of the basket, its thin edge becoming congruent for a short moment with the edge of a plait before it unfurls and makes a cadenced sweep downwards to the right where the descending vertical beats of the tuning pegs help to slow the motion of the ribbon before it comes to a final rest at the top of the guitar neck. This visual sonority creates a sense of temporality in ‘reading’ the image, but is separated from traditional narrative reading by the still-life genre. The visual divergence between the left and right side of the curtain also supports a temporal reading of the painting. Instead of the instantaneity of the achieved whole, Manet forces the eye of the viewer to work through what is happening between the left and right sides of the canvas. By not effacing the hand of the artist through providing a synthetic illusion, Manet keeps the viewer alert to the artifice of craft by scumbling the design on the right so that one has the sense of something coming into being in the painting even while all the elements are co-present in the work. Manet’s paintings came into existence stroke by stroke, and the visual echo of the design on the right can suggest a ‘before’ and ‘after’ reading that suggests the duration of painting’s method within the fixed forms of the canvas.38 The two sides of the painting provide two ways of looking at the same curtain at different points in space so that they become analogues of one another. Music ceases to exist as soon as it is executed, and the vanishing traces of the design on the right side of the curtain visually mimic the acoustic evanescence of music as Manet appeals to a multisensory viewer in his still life with a musical instrument. Scanning the painting from left to right causes the viewer to test the difference between

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likeness and difference, between the denotative legible pattern on the left and its connotative abstract analogue on the right, thus producing a movement of scansion from visual consonance to dissonance. That this variation occurs within a still life prominently featuring a musical instrument foreshadows the Cubist achievements of Picasso and Braque who so often depicted guitars and other musical instruments in their paintings.39 Manet’s acoustic imagination enabled him to see how painting and music could complement and enlarge one another in his move to modernist painting. Music’s freedom from the referential aspects of nature could have spurred Manet to begin considering what was most unique about his own medium of paint. In À Travers chants, published the same year in which Manet completed Hat and Guitar, Hector Berlioz wrote that instrumentation in music is analogous to the choice of colour in painting,40 and he frequently employed pictorial metaphors of nature to describe symphonic works. The discourse concerning the relations between painting and music, of which Berlioz’s statement is so symptomatic, ran through the writings of critics during Manet’s time and may have aided him in seeing music as a method that helped him to conceptualize his artistic objectives, for music was nothing until it was performed. Music’s freedom from referentiality, its pure expressivity made it a desirable medium to be investigated as art gradually pulled away from imitating natural appearances and began to focus on its own properties. Musical analogies proliferated in the art-critical literature of the time, often as fanciful metaphors even for still lifes, as seen in Émile Cantrel’s review of the Salon of 1863: ‘If M. Monginot is the Meyerbeer of still lifes, M. Philippe Rousseau is the Verdi of living beasts.’41 Nevertheless most often the use of the painting and music comparisons pointed to music’s ability to bypass the literal depiction of the resemblance that was normative for the painting of the time in favour of music’s ultimate irreducibility to anything other than itself. Eduard Hanslick’s influential essay Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful) discussed the impossibility of articulating music’s essence: Since music does not copy anything in the natural world and has no conceptual content, we can speak of it only in one of two ways – in dry technical terms or in poetic metaphors. It can indeed truly be said that the kingdom of music is ‘not of this world.’ All the fanciful descriptions, characterizations or paraphrases of a musical composition are either figurative or misconceived. What is in every other art ‘description’ is in music no more than metaphor. Music must in fact be grasped simply as music and can only be understood in its own terms and only enjoyed in its own way.42

Cognizant of the metaphors between music and art, Hanslick agreed that: . . . music is in fact a picture, but a picture of something that cannot be described in words or subordinated to our concepts. There is sense and coherence in music, but it is musical sense and musical coherence; music is a language that we can speak and understand but are unable to translate.43

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Hanslick maintained that music’s beauty was inherent in the tonal relationships without reference to any extraneous or extramusical context. The total freedom from realist depiction which abstract painting would eventually share with music would not occur until the early twentieth century,44 but, as Clement Greenberg remarked, the beginnings of modernism were rooted in Manet’s art.45 Manet’s choice of a musical persona in the Spanish Singer, personified metaphorically by the costume and guitar in the still life, may have indicated his awareness of the suggestive and expressive power of music to communicate without traditional narrative. As Manet worked towards these goals in his own art, the aesthetic qualities of music may have served as a lure as he considered the essential character of painting as a medium.

Conclusion Manet intended the objects in Hat and Guitar to act as signifiers of the artistic roots of his style and to stand as emblematic manifestations of his adopted social and cultural persona as in the Spanish Singer. Pierre Dax had remarked in the October 1860 issue of L’Artiste that every artist had two countries, the one he was born into, and the other which he gives to himself. In words that would have resonated with Manet as he painted his Spanish Singer and his Hat and Guitar, Dax observed, ‘If the first [country] is always at the bottom of his heart . . . he dedicates to the second an intense affection, and it is in this one that he seeks his dream and inspiration. She is his mistress, while the other is his mother.’46 Unlike other instruments such as the piano, flute or harp, which retained no ethnic boundaries, the guitar always retained its cultural connotations with Spain. In his review of the Salon of 1861 for Le Monde Illustré, the Naturalist critic JulesAntoine Castagnary recommended artists to look at the Baroque Spanish painters. ‘They are excellent masters,’ he claimed, ‘and perhaps the only ones that should be recommended today if one wants to make progress in painting.’47 While Castagnary did not mention Manet’s work in his review, the success of the Spanish Singer corroborated this statement and sanctioned Manet’s turn away from the sophisticated modelling of the Italian tradition to the bold approach of the Spanish.48 In his chapter on the Spanish School in his Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, which appeared the year Manet painted the Hat and Guitar, Blanc observed that, in general, what artists admire in others is a portion of themselves. Characterizing Velázquez as a sweet and sociable man, Blanc depicted him as loving his teacher Pacheco’s cultivated intelligence but rejecting his style of painting in favour of unmixed, strong colours applied with sureness and boldness in order to maintain the solidity of the paint and its freshness.49 As he sought to establish his own artistic identity, Manet donned the appearance of his beloved Spanish master by imitating what he believed to be Velázquez’ appearance in the Spanish Cavaliers.50 Like Velázquez, Manet also rejected the style of his teacher Thomas Couture, whose influence could be seen in Manet’s Absinthe Drinker that had been refused for the Salon of 1859. Couture had aspired to be the Titian of France; Manet clearly had decided to be the Velázquez of Paris by delving into Spanish subject matter and style.

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By choosing objects for his overdoor still life that would not wither or die like flowers and fruits, or disintegrate into thin air like the cigarette at the foot of his Spanish Singer, Manet depicted articles that had conceptual weight and permanence, visual analogues for his desire for making a lasting impact by his art. Perhaps for this reason he did not emphasize the texture of the objects in the painting, but their shape, stability and durability. How appropriate, then, as an overdoor for his studio where he would create works that would endure throughout time, thus fulfilling his punning motto Manet et manebit (He remains and will remain).

Notes 1 Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, vol. 1, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 427. 2 This has been suggested by Juliet Wilson-Bareau in her essay ‘Manet and Spain’, in Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting, ed. Gary Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 486. 3 On the provenance of the painting, see Wilson-Bareau, ‘Manet and Spain’. 4 Most recently by George Mauner in Manet. The Still Life Paintings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 44. 5 See Enrico de Pasquale, ‘In Praise of Silence’, in The Still Lives of Evaristo Baschenis: The Silence of Music, ed. Andreas Bayer (Bergamo: Edizioni Olivares, 2000), 41. 6 Michel Faré, La Nature morte en France. Son Histoire et son évolution du XVIIe au XXe siècle (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1962). 7 S. Horsin-Déon, ‘Le Cabinet de M. Eudoxe Marcille’, Annuaire des amateurs et des Artistes, vol. 3, (Paris: n.p., 1862), 136. See Pierre Rosenberg, Chardin. 1699–1779 (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, 1979), 146–8. 8 Charles Blanc, Historie des peintres de toutes les écoles: École française (Paris: J. Renouard, 1862), 15. 9 On Chardin’s influence on Manet and the genre of still life in nineteenth-century France, see John McCoubrey, ‘The Revival of Chardin in French Still-Life Painting, 1850–1870’, Art Bulletin 46 (March 1964): 39–53; Gabriel Weisberg, Chardin and the Still-Life Tradition in France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979); Jeannene M. Przyblyski, ‘Le Parti Pris des Choses: French Still Life and Modern Painting, 1848–1876’ (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1995); and Carol Armstrong, Manet Manette (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2002), especially 269–85. 10 One of the sources most often cited as inspiration for the Dead Toreador is a work by an unknown artist of the seventeenth-century Italian school of a Dead Soldier, which was in the Pourtalès collection in Paris when Manet painted his Hat and Guitar and was believed at the time to be an authentic work by Velázquez. See Wilson-Bareau, ‘Manet and Spain’, 381–93. 11 Antonin Proust, Édouard Manet: Souvenirs (Paris: L’Echoppe, 1996), 29. 12 Théophile Gautier, Un Trio de romans. Les Roués innocents, Militona, Jean et Jeannette (Paris: Charpentier, 1888), 245. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 13 Anthony Zielonka, ‘La Musique dans les récits de voyage de Théophile Gautier’, in Théophile Gautier et la musique, Actes du Colloque International (Montpellier: Université Paul Valéry, 1986), 97–105.

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14 Frederic V. Grunfeld, The Art and Times of the Guitar (New York: Collier Books, 1974), 86. The intimate personality of the guitar continues to the present time, as seen in a review in the New York Times (November, 2000) where Jon Parales explains that ‘the guitar has a shape that has always been seen as anthropomorphic, with a body, neck and head. But it gets more intimate treatment than a bowed string instrument. Cradled in a player’s lap or strapped across his chest, as close as a loved one, it is caressed or abused with both hands, while its vibrations are felt next to the player’s heart . . . Guitar music retains a physicality that keyboard players can only envy.’ Jon Pareles, ‘The Humble Instruments that Conquered the World’, New York Times, 12 November 2000, 36. 15 Ingres’ notes as reprinted in Henri Delaborde, Ingres, sa vie, ses travaux, sa doctrine (Paris: Plon, 1870), 150. 16 Auguste de Vaucelle, ‘Souvenir du Salon de 1861’, L’Artiste, 15 August 1861, 73. 17 Charles Blanc as cited in Rosenberg, Chardin. 1699–1779, 339. 18 Hector de Callias, ‘Salon de 1861’, L’Artiste, 12 July 1861, 7. 19 Denis Diderot, ‘Salon de 1767’, in Œuvres esthétiques (Paris : Édition Garnier frères, 1868), 492. 20 Hector Berlioz, Treatise on Instrumentation, trans. Theodore Feval (New York: F. Kulaus, 1948), 145. 21 Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin (Paris, 1880 (1867)), 574. 22 Charles Blanc, ‘Vélasquez à Madrid’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 15 (1 July 1863): 67. 23 Pareles, ‘The Humble Instruments’, 36. 24 On Manet and Astruc, see Sharon Flescher, Zacharie Astruc: Critic, Artist and Japoniste (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1978). On Manet and Jaime Bosch, see WilsonBareau, ‘Manet and Spain’, 252–4. We do not know when Manet met Jaime Bosch, but they were good enough friends for the composer to dedicate his guitar piece Moorish Lament to Manet in 1866 when Manet composed a portrait of the guitarist for the sheet music to the song. 25 Richard Shiff, ‘Performing an Appearance: On the Surface of Abstract Expressionism’, in Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Development, ed. Michael Auping (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987), 99. 26 Shiff, ‘Performing an Appearance’, 104–5. 27 As quoted in James Tyler and Paul Sparks, The Guitar and Its Music from the Renaissance to the Classical Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 230–1. 28 As cited in William Gray Sasser, ‘The Guitar Works of Fernando Sor’ (MA thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1960), 54. 29 As cited in Brian Jeffrey, Fernando Sor Composer and Guitarist (London: Tecla Editions, 1977), 104. 30 As cited in Tyler and Sparks, The Guitar and its Music, 248–9. 31 José L. Romanillos, ‘Dionisio Aguado the Man’, in Dionisio Aguado, The Complete Works for Guitar (Heidelberg: Chanterelle Verlag, 1994), 194. 32 See Theodore Reff, ‘The Symbolism of Manet’s Frontispiece Etching’, Burlington Magazine 104 (May 1972):182–7; Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 51–53; and Beth Archer Brombert, Edouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996), 254–5. 33 Hélène Toussaint, Gustave Courbet 1819–1877 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), 266.

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34 This was first observed by Bradford R. Collins in ‘Manet’s Luncheon in the Studio: An Homage to Baudelaire’, Art Journal 38 (Winter 1978–9): 109. 35 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Some Relationships between Music and Painting’, trans. Susan Gillespie, Musical Quarterly 79 (Spring 1995): 67. 36 Kurt Badt, The Art of Cézanne, trans. Sharon Ogilvie (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1985), 253 (italics mine). 37 Norman Bryson, ‘Chardin and the Text of Still Life’, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1998): 227. See also his Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 38 On moment and duration in painting, see Richard Brettell’s discussion in Impressionism: Painting Quickly in France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, 2000), 49ff. See also Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, Monet (New York: Abrams, 1983), 191–7. 39 On this subject, see the astute discussion by Simon Shaw-Miller in Visible Deeds of Music (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2002), especially 89–120. 40 Hector Berlioz, À Travers chants. Études musicales, adorations, boutades et critiques (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1862), 8. 41 Emile Cantrel, ‘Salon de 1863’, L’Artiste, 1 May 1863, 203. 42 Eduard Hanslick, ‘On the Musically Beautiful’, in Music in European Thought 1851–1912, ed. Bojan Bujic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 20. Hanslick’s treatise was written in 1854 and translated into French, Italian and Russian, going through ten editions in Hanslick’s own lifetime (1825–1904). 43 Hanslick, ‘On the Musically Beautiful’, 20–1. 44 Arnold Schoenberg commented: ‘When . . . Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Kokoschka paint pictures the objective theme of which is hardly more than an excuse to improvise in colours and forms and to express themselves as only the musician expressed himself until now, these are symptoms of a gradually expanding knowledge of the true nature of art.’ Arnold Schoenberg, ‘The Relationship to the Text’, in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 142. 45 ‘. . . the central premise of painting since Manet . . . has been its progressive surrender to, its increasing acknowledgment of, the physical nature of the medium . . .’ . Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of the Exhibition Collage’ (1948), in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 262. 46 Pierre Dax, ‘Chronique’, L’Artiste, 15 October 1860, 89. 47 Castagnary, ‘Salon de 1861’, Le Monde Illustré, 18 May 1861, 295. 48 See Gary Tinterow’s article ‘Rapahel Replaced: The Triumph of Spanish Painting in France’, in Manet/Velázquez, 3–65. 49 Charles Blanc, Histoire des Peintres de toutes les écoles, vol. 1, Ecole Espagnole (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1862), 7. 50 See Wilson-Bareau, Manet/Velázquez, 207–8 and 484.

3

Time in Fin-de-Siècle Painting Anne Leonard

The temporalities of painting are multiple: the time of artistic conception and execution, the time encompassed in a painting’s implied narrative(s), the time required for a viewer to take in the composition fully. Yet despite this, painting has long been understood as a spatial art lacking a temporal dimension. Over centuries, the struggles of painters to transcend this limitation have been a perennial subject of art theory, notably Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s essay Laocoön (1766), and have loomed especially large in paragone debates over the relative status of the different arts.1 Lessing drew a fundamental distinction between the so-called ‘sister arts’ of painting and poetry. He proposed that the strength of poetry – its ability to relate a narrative – constituted the weakness of painting. By contrast, painting surpassed poetry at visual description. A painting’s capacity to be taken in all at once by the viewer therefore amounted to a virtue when visual description was paramount, but a liability when its content involved a temporal element. After a considerable period during which painting’s unsuitability for depicting multiple moments on a continuum was perceived to be a drawback, artists of the Impressionist generation determined to seize this weakness – the capacity to represent only a single moment – and turn it into a virtue. Instantaneity itself became a subject of painting, in some cases eclipsing those very motifs (the scudding of clouds across a sky, the dappling of sun on a lawn, the rush of a crowd over city streets) that formed its justification. Thus the critic Ernest Chesneau marvelled at Claude Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines, exhibited at the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874: ‘the imperceptible, fugitive, and instantaneous character of movement has never been so grasped or so rendered, in all its awesome fluidity, as . . . in this extraordinary Boulevard des Capucines’.2 Conversely, extension through time was seen as the defining characteristic of music, and this putative opposition between painting and music continued to structure paragone debates in the nineteenth century. Along with its nonrepresentational nature, music’s temporal unfolding seemed to be the most salient quality in determining its position relative to other arts. The Impressionists’ attempt to capture fleeting phenomena of nature and the modern world by giving them a permanent existence on canvas was hailed as a revolutionary approach to painting that threatened to (and did) upend many of the most cherished tenets of academic painting, notably the ‘licked’ or finished surface and 67

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the hierarchy of genres. Against now-legendary critical and public resistance, the Impressionists put forward a campaign of exhibitions between 1874 and 1886 that, while hardly uniform in the participating artists’ approach to style and technique, did establish new critical parameters for the evaluation of a painting’s success. Crucial among those parameters was the persuasive rendering of evanescent qualities of light, colour and weather. Such claims for ‘truth to nature’ went hand in hand with new practices of plein-air painting, strongly associated with artists such as Monet and Camille Pissarro. While the fiction of a single moment captured was hardly sustainable, in view of the time required for an artist to produce even the loosest, sketchiest landscape, the aesthetic value placed on instantaneity was of a piece with long-held views about painting’s status as a spatial art, lacking temporal reach or extension. After the Impressionist heyday, there came a gradual backlash in the form of dissatisfaction with ‘mere’ representation of sensory phenomena. Already in late Impressionist painting such as Monet’s serial landscapes, there is the suggestion of a turn inward, with particular focus on psychological aspects of perception, the role of memory and the evocation of a spiritual realm. New tendencies in painting – neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, and (later on) abstraction – would in their turn reverse, neutralize or challenge the Impressionist interest in momentary atmospheric conditions and the protean moods of nature and the city. While the objections to the aesthetic of the ‘impression’ stemmed from various origins, one undeniable source was the growing prestige of music, particularly symphonic music, as a paradigm for the other arts.3 This had significant repercussions for both the production and reception of visual art. The fascination with music as an art that extended over time, inciting a state of reverie without precise beginning or end, coincided with the neo-Impressionists’ aspiration to freeze or prolong the sensations provoked by visual stimuli; and likewise with the Symbolist painters’ desire to evoke unchanging ‘states of the soul’ rather than depict specific motifs or discrete events. As other scholars have already argued, the firstgeneration abstract painter František Kupka (like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee) was similarly motivated by music’s extension through time, despite obtaining such very different results from his predecessors and exploring the potential of kinetic, dynamically evolving compositions.4 Underpinning many of these examples of musically-based dynamism or temporal extension is the idea of durée put forward by Henri Bergson. According to Bergson’s metaphysics, duration conveys the character of a ‘ceaselessly changing process’.5 Time, like motion, was for Bergson one of the phenomena that has to be perceived intuitively, not analytically. Rather than being divisible into discrete, measurable parts, durée could only mean a continuous state of becoming. Bergson sees durée moving in untrammelled fashion toward the future but always remaining inflected by the past, in the form of memory. For the fin-de-siècle artists considered here, spanning the period 1885 to 1915, the evidence points to a musical wellspring for a sustained interrogation of time in painting.6 I have chosen works by three artists whose approaches to the manipulation of time – occupying a long continuum from languor to dynamism – might seem quite heterogeneous. Precisely this manipulation, however, is what forms a commonality

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among the paintings, which are representative of a wider selection of anti-naturalist works between 1885 and 1915.7 This single parameter (the approach to representing time) is slippery enough to suggest a permeable boundary between the categories of neo-Impressionism, Symbolism and Orphism (or pure abstraction) that each respective work quintessentially represents. As Stephen Kern asserted in the exhibition catalogue Tempus Fugit/Time Flies, produced for the millennium year 2000, ‘Between 1885 (postImpressionism) and 1925 (Surrealism) a revolution occurred in the way artists conceived and rendered the time of human existence.’8 Kern is referring specifically to the decline of narrative art and focuses on twentieth-century examples, including Picasso and Kandinsky. My argument here is that the transformation in artists’ conceptions and representations of time is to a large extent rooted in the musical paradigm for art that had gained force over the nineteenth century. Despite its many divergent manifestations over the decades around 1900, the transformation of time in painting reflects this common origin. Music was credited with the power to express what other arts and mere language could not: on the basis of this special status, nourished by writers such as Charles Baudelaire, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Arthur Schopenhauer and Teodor de Wyzewa, it became a model for painters seeking to transcend the limitations of their own art and attain higher, or deeper, levels of subjective truth, as well as a temporal dimension.9 The paintings discussed here all clearly acknowledge musical inspiration by their titles alone. However, they do not reference specific musical compositions, nor are they scenes of music listening. They have been chosen expressly to avoid the imposed time of ‘musical time’ that would tend to condition the viewer’s reception of such works. To take a very explicit example, Henri Fantin-Latour’s lithograph titled Rheingold: Final Scene, when reproduced in the sumptuous Austrian periodical Die graphischen Künste in 1880, included an excerpt from Wagner’s eponymous opera score in the margin.10 This would have functioned as a mnemonic device or ‘cue’ for the elite viewer’s own imaginary soundtrack. Nothing of the kind occurs in the three case studies here. Even if these works would be inconceivable without the establishment of a powerful and prestigious musical paradigm in visual art since at least the 1850s, they use that paradigm for a more fundamental purpose, primarily as a means to achieve the effect of manipulating time itself. These works do not display the reverence for concert music that, in its most spectacular manifestation, is materialized in Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze for the Vienna Secession exhibition of 1902, whose decorative and iconographic programme follows Wagner’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.11 Quite different is the case of Paul Signac’s Portrait of Félix Fénéon (see Plate 4), where the allusion to music is pointedly ironic.12

Paul Signac Irony was by all reports the stock in trade of Félix Fénéon (1861–1944), a colourful and enigmatic art critic. Yet his support of neo-Impressionist painters remained sincere and unwavering. Described as Paul Signac’s closest friend,13 Fénéon used his

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considerable literary clout to promote the cause of Signac and his fellow neoImpressionists through exhibition reviews and larger publishing ventures.14 It was in La Vogue, a periodical he founded with Gustave Kahn, Charles Henry and Jules Laforgue, that Fénéon published his detailed and admiring review of Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte (1884), which was decisive for later appreciation of the artist.15 In 1900 Fénéon organized, under the auspices of the Revue blanche, the first large one-man show of Seurat’s work; it was also through his good offices that the Revue blanche took on the publication of Signac’s treatise D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme (1899).16 Writing as Paris correspondent for the Brussels-based periodical L’art moderne (the mouthpiece for the avant-garde group of artists Les XX ), Fénéon in 1887 could not have been more explicit about the aims of the neo-Impressionist artists in reaction against their Impressionist predecessors. In a nutshell, what they were trying to do was . . . synthesize landscape into a definitive aspect which will perpetuate that sensation. (In addition to which, their procedures are incompatible with haste, and require work in the studio.) In their figure scenes, there is the same distancing from the accidental or the transitory. And so those critics who yearn for the anecdotal will grumble: they are showing us puppets not people.17

The retreat from sketchy, plein-air landscapes and the preference for more stately, hieratic figure compositions drew a clear contrast with Impressionist aesthetics. In 1899 Signac, in his manifesto for divisionist colour, would likewise insist on an absolute polarity between the two techniques: Impressionist ‘instinct and instantaneity’ as against neo-Impressionist ‘reflection and permanence’.18 He criticized Impressionist paintings as too often resembling ‘instantaneous photographs’ rather than celebrating what should be the essential preoccupation of the artist, a studied arrangement of forms and colours.19 Over the dozen years separating these two published statements, Fénéon and Signac had together helped champion the stakes of neo-Impressionism. A stunning document of their collaboration and friendship is Signac’s elaborately titled Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890. A character such as Fénéon, with an occasional weakness for idiosyncratically grandiloquent prose, might merit such ornate verbosity on his own. More than that, though, the title reads as a spoof of several faddish trends that intertwined in late nineteenth-century Paris: theories of the physiology of colour, synaesthesia and Wagnerism. Fénéon represented a rare synthesis of these and many other interests, including japonisme. Given the unmistakable allusion to Charles Henry and his recently published colour wheel, the portrait has been frequently analysed with reference to nineteenth-century colour theory. This mode of analysis is called for because of the centrality of chromatic relationships to neo-Impressionist painting practice and the role that Signac and Fénéon played in diffusing Henry’s ideas.20 Indeed, as Joan Ungersma Halperin argues,

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‘In nearly every detail, the picture is a rigorous and flamboyant application of Charles Henry’s theories on the dynamogeny of lines and colours.’21 More recent commentators, while acknowledging Signac’s and Fénéon’s avid interest in Henry’s ideas, have suggested that their application of those ideas was unsystematic, based more on personal intuition.22 However, for the purposes of this chapter I would like to shift the emphasis from colour to temporality as a proxy for musical characteristics. That is, the painting claims a temporal dimension by means of formal and iconographic elements that introduce competing schemes of motion and stasis. Musical time intrudes upon these conflicting systems as if to impose an order within which the action of the painting can continue to resonate. In what time does the painting operate? The pinwheel background has been characterized as ‘kaleidoscopic’,23 implying a continuous flux.24 Against this emblem of instantaneity is set the profile figure of Fénéon, facing left and positioned slightly offcentre. He does not appear to be striding (he is usually read as static),25 although the delicate manner in which he holds out his cyclamen flower might suggest an advance toward the person to whom it is being offered. Crucial to our understanding of these clashing motions (circular versus linear, whirling versus static/stately) is the actual source for the distinctively patterned multicolour background. Notwithstanding its designation as an ‘enamel’, which further confuses the notion of a dynamic colour wheel, the visual inspiration for it seems to have been a sheet of kimono textile patterns, which Françoise Cachin discovered in the painter’s collection of Japanese prints.26 Although Signac altered the individual patterns (with some of the puckish humour that characterizes the portrait overall), the correlation is evident. Halperin indicates that the source object even dictated new horizontal proportions for the painting, in lieu of the vertical format Signac originally envisioned.27 Surprising as it is to find that a two-dimensional print inspired a background of such rhythmic vibrancy, this circumstance suggests that both elements – figure and background – are static, or more precisely that only one of them (Fénéon) had to be ‘frozen’ into a permanent pictorial form; the background already had been. In that sense, the reference to an ‘enamel’ in the title is not as far off as it sounds. A fixed, static composition would have been appropriate for the portrait of Fénéon, who had admired just this quality in Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte when it was first exhibited in 1886 at the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition.28 Fénéon emphasized both the liveliness of the painted surface and the hard rigidity of the figures: These forty or so figures are endowed with a succinct, hieratic line, rigorously drawn in full-face or in profile or from the back, some seated at right angles, others stretched out horizontally, others standing rigidly; as though by a modernizing Puvis. The atmosphere is transparent and uncommonly vibrant; the surface seems to flicker or glimmer.29

The same observations, adjusted for a single figure, might be applied to Signac’s portrait of Fénéon. But how do the ‘rhythmic beats’ of the title affect the temporal experience

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of the painting? Here, it is necessary to point out that Fénéon had no particular affinity for music: He was insensitive to music, except for a brief flirtation in his youth with the work of Wagner, an enthusiasm that was obligatory among the symbolists . . . Although he chose Debussy in 1901 to write the music criticism for the Revue blanche and published the scores of Darius Milhaud and other composers when editor of the Sirène publishing house in 1920, his musician friends were unanimous in agreeing that F.F. was totally ignorant of the subject.30

Even if this is so, the arrival of Fénéon in the picture – some say on the ‘stage’ of the foreground – acts as an interruption and positions him as a kind of master of ceremonies. Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to envision him as a conductor figure, taking control, freezing motion and marking rhythm with that unlikeliest of batons, a cyclamen. This interpretation would give a fuller sense to the painting’s opus number, which is commonly given to musical works. Signac applied opus numbers routinely to his paintings of the late 1880s and early 1890s, sometimes even adding musical tempo markings to the titles of individual compositions. For example, his set of five Concarneau landscapes that directly followed the portrait of Fénéon bear successive numbers op. 218–22; their respective tempo markings are Scherzo, Larghetto, Allegro maestoso, Adagio and Presto finale. Whether or not the reference to an orchestral conductor is embedded in the in-jokes of the painting, Fénéon was capable of Wagnerian rhetoric when the occasion called for it. Despite his alleged musical ignorance, he employed the vocabulary of synaesthetic correspondences in his review of the Society of Independent Artists exhibition, held at the Tuileries in August– September 1886, as Halperin notes: In fewer words than other symbolist critics, F.F. expressed the Wagnerian ideal of an art touching the soul through all the senses, noting that in these new works, ‘colorations interpenetrate like circles of waves, and the painting gives out a unified, synthesized harmonic sensation.’31

Fénéon’s words could almost pass for a description of his own portrait by Signac, four years in the future – a portrait he claimed not to be fond of, but which he kept in his possession for the rest of his life.

Alphonse Osbert Signac’s neo-Impressionism richly demonstrates how musicalized notions of time can pass into painting not as literal manifestations of a given theory but as personal expressions of ideas that have already entered the cultural mainstream. At several removes from the original source, popularized and even vulgarized, their fidelity to ‘first principles’ is no longer at issue (much in the way that political ideologies may

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alter or dilute as they gain a wider currency). By the 1890s, correspondences between the different arts, art’s capacity to provoke cross-sensory responses, and the existence of something like an ‘aesthetic emotion’32 were undisputed across a wide swathe of artists and critics in France, following Baudelaire’s example. These and other ideas of vaguely Wagnerian provenance had been translated and disseminated through the aesthetics of French Symbolism, in which Wagnerism played a decisive part (however poorly Wagner’s theories were actually understood).33 Because they were taken up in such divergent ways by the anti-naturalist movements that followed, it can be counterproductive to try to trace them back precisely. This is true even for aesthetic theories that had not gone through a long process of transformation and deformation over decades. As the preceding example showed, Signac was not so much a disciple of Charles Henry’s theories as an interested dilettante – despite his role in illustrating two of Henry’s books (Application de nouveaux instruments de précision [cercle chromatique, rapporteur et triple décimètre esthétique] à l’archéologie and Education du sens des formes, both 1890). Perhaps more important than where artists’ ideas came from is where they led. The group of Symbolist artists classed under the name ‘les peintres de l’âme’34 were, like the neo-Impressionists just before them, steeped in the Wagnerian ferment, in Baudelaire’s notion of correspondances and in Charles Henry’s investigations into colour.35 To this already potent mixture they added the deep mysticism and occultism of their spiritual leader, ‘Sâr’ Joséphin Péladan, which led them to a somewhat different concept of time in painting. Alphonse Osbert’s works of the late 1890s and 1900s are typical of a whole category of Idealist paintings from this period in which time appears to stand still. While Symbolist Idealism took many forms and stemmed from diverse sources, it generally involved a subjective view of reality – either deriving from within the self or based in a numinous realm inaccessible to the senses.36 With Osbert (and other Idealist painters such as Armand Point and Edmond Aman-Jean), the effect is not of a frozen or halted dynamism, as in Signac’s Fénéon portrait, but of a seemingly infinitely extensible moment, without beginning or end. Languorous women, often mythological or allegorical in aspect, encapsulate spiritual moods or states of the soul, refusing both naturalism and contemporaneity with equal rigour. With a strong neo-Platonist bent, Idealist painting at its apogee seems to deny any passage of time, reaching instead toward eternity and apotheosis. Still, it is useful to remember the context for these artists’ manipulation of time: a stolid belief in painting as anti-naturalist and antinarrative. This forms a continuity with the neo-Impressionists, who also sought permanence in pictorial representation, while retaining the aspiration to lively, shimmering, luminous painted surfaces. That this continuity was recognized at the time is made clear in André Mellerio’s decision to classify the neo-Impressionists among the Idealist painters in his 1896 book, Le mouvement idéaliste en peinture.37 Indeed, Osbert spent important years of his career in the company of the neoImpressionists. In the late 1870s he and Seurat were both pupils in Henri Lehmann’s studio.38 After a period working in the academic style, Osbert exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants for the first time in 1889, and the following year became a member of the Comité des artistes indépendants, joining ranks with Seurat, Signac and Maximilien

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Luce. Influenced by the neo-Impressionist use of colour, Osbert adopted some of the colour theories then in wide currency: those of Michel-Eugène Chevreul, Charles Henry and Humbert de Superville.39 Yet the same theories could lead a painter like Osbert to very different results. One of the first things one notices about Osbert’s oeuvre is the prevelance of blue in his palette. (Jean-Paul Bouillon has proposed an equal celebrity for ‘Osbert blue’ as for ‘Klein blue’.)40 The contrast could hardly be greater between Signac’s wildly polychromatic Portrait of Félix Fénéon and Osbert’s nearly monochrome Les chants de la nuit (1896; see Plate 5), a landscape with figures. In this painting, Osbert retains a stripped-down essence of colour complementarity, restricting himself to deep blue for the ground, trees and twilit sky, and yellow for the setting sun, its surrounding celestial glow and streaks of reflection in the water. This was a combination Osbert would return to again and again in his landscapes, and the effect produced by it is serene and profoundly meditative. Not for nothing had Osbert stated his credo as ‘attain[ing] Simplicity itself, the great Silence’.41 In 1920, the critic Gustave Coquiot noted the ‘hatch marks’ and ‘divided colours’ that Osbert had picked up in his formative years with the neo-Impressionists, writing that these combined to form ‘the very illustration of dreamed landscapes and souls, of union in common meditation’.42 As a great admirer of Puvis de Chavannes, and sometimes considered his heir in decorative painting, Osbert made many designs for interior ensembles that were intended to provide a ‘setting for rest and meditation’.43 So even if the neo-Impressionists had also sung the praises of decorative painting and its potential to confer a permanent reality upon natural subjects,44 in the hands of Osbert this intention shifted toward a more overt pretext for inward contemplation, untethered to natural time. The change can be witnessed in Osbert’s musically inspired titles, differently conceived than in the neo-Impressionist milieu. Gone are the pseudo-scientific references and systematized opus numbers; in their place appear vaguer musical terms, often tied to seasons, times of day or other natural phenomena. Besides Les chants de la nuit discussed here, other examples from Osbert’s oeuvre include Harmonie d’automne (1889–91, Musée d’Orsay); Hymne à la mer (1893, Beauvais); and L’éternelle chanson (1921, mairie de l’ÎleSaint-Denis). As the last title suggests, extreme dilation of time is characteristic of these canvases’ pictorial effect. In the view of some critics, the state of reverie that is both expressed and induced by these paintings can be associated with the experience of music listening, whether or not music is the explicit subject. Camille Mauclair, for example, declared that the increased sensitivity to music in the Symbolist era had recalibrated aesthetic values across the board, and that a major difference could be seen relative to earlier generations of painters, who cared nothing for music.45 Osbert frequented the Concerts Colonne in his student days; more than a simple mélomane, however, he was also a musician who relaxed after sessions with models by playing the violin.46 With his wife, MarieLouise Boitelet (of whom he made a delicate portrait drawing at the piano), Osbert hosted salons of a musical and literary bent in the 1890s. From the early part of that decade onward, critics such as Albert Charpentier and Gustave Soulier insisted on the musical aspects of Osbert’s paintings, often in terms that joined up with the works’

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contemplative mood.47 Sometimes these musical characterizations of Osbert’s painting were based on their system of colour harmony, but here again, I would like to shift the focus to time. Of Osbert’s Les chants de la nuit, Dumas notes, ‘Everything happens outside of time, a time that is indeterminate as are the gestures and existence of the figures.’48 Hieratic figures are placed at calculated intervals, non-naturalistically, in harmony with similarly rigid vertical tree trunks. Arguably, it is not even the songs of the title that account for this indeterminate stretching of time: the lyres go unstrummed and the women do not appear to sing, implying an interior music. Rather, it is the revelation of the landscape as a metaphor for open-ended reverie that allows our minds to wander, far removed from mechanically ticking clocks. The figures’ phantom-like quality and the dreamlike atmosphere, corresponding to the artist’s ‘paysage intérieur’ (a product of the imagination), signal to us the infinite extensibility of this just-before-sunset moment. Normally it would be the briefest of instants, when the sun is poised just about to drop below a line of treetops, but this anti-naturalist depiction gives an impression of permanence. In fact, the artist plays on a sense of imminent, ever-deferred loss in order to inject the scene with greater melancholy. Les chants de la nuit, ‘incontestably one of the most characteristic works in Osbert’s symbolist universe’,49 represents one in a recurring pattern of his landscapes of the late 1890s, all based on Puvis’s Bois sacré and geometrically organized according to the Golden Section: preordained, and thus unchanging.50 As a broader aesthetic phenomenon, this taste for stasis and immobility also marks developments in fin-de-siècle music. It is paradoxical that composers such as Claude Debussy, in the same years that the Idealist painters were attempting to imbue their work with spiritual permanence, also sought an ideal of immobility, in the belief that music might attain the sonic equivalent of a fixed image. In his sole opera, Pelléas and Mélisande (1902), Debussy was experimenting with various aspects of both dramatic and musical inanition – but even in his solo piano works, stasis frequently creeps in.51 Vladimir Jankélévitch described Debussy’s two dozen piano preludes as ‘twenty-four completely immobile views’.52 The close links of artists’ and composers’ aspirations in this period to halt or stretch time come into focus with Osbert’s Mystery of the Night (1897; Paris, private collection), which closely evokes Debussy’s prelude captioned ‘La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune’.53 Although moonlit twilight all on its own offers a propitious ambience for meditation and dream, Osbert had other devices for reinforcing these Idealist values. A recurrent emblem of uninterrupted reverie in his work is the lightly shimmering body of water, often a lake or pond in the near middle ground. In Symbolist/Idealist terms, this body of water stands in for a psychological space of reflection, whether the pure spiritual calm of an unperturbed, glassy surface, the mystery of a clouded, turbid pool, or the reassuring permanence of waves lapping gently on a shore as if for ever after. This combination of a serene, meditative atmosphere with the metaphoric depth and reflectivity of a body of water means that the visible landscape Osbert constructs in Les chants de la nuit is better understood as a mirror of the psyche (particularly since the water does not reliably reflect the surrounding landscape).54 In this act of reflection,

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the time of reverie is not measured in minutes and seconds, but in asynchronous transitions from immediate sensations to temporally disparate memories, perhaps even visions of the future. As Proust wrote, ‘An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates, and what we call reality is a certain connection between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelop us simultaneously with them.’55 Elapsed time might not, cannot, exactly correspond to duration as experienced in the mind. And here we come to a basic tenet of the philosopher Henri Bergson, who looms large in the next section. It is significant that Bergson calls on musical examples (the ringing of a bell, the successive notes of a melody) to demonstrate his notions concerning the human experience of time.56 Such examples crisply convey an essential property of durée, namely the survival of the past into the present. Extracting a ‘moment’ from the flow of durée is meaningless because no moment can exist independent of the ones that have preceded it. Each successive moment, or state of consciousness, is born of the previous ones and moves irreversibly into the future as pure mobility, pure extension. Any pictorial representation accounting for this phenomenon had to correspond to intuitional experience over and above analytical explanations.57

František Kupka Against the extensibility of the Symbolist moment, František Kupka’s Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colours (see Plate 6) came as something of a shock. It was misunderstood at the time of its first exhibition, at the Paris Salon d’Automne of 1912, and little commented on despite its very large size and prominent display. Regarding its relationship to the Cubist paintings that hung in the same room, Kupka himself was inclined to emphasize the differences. As he put it in an early 1913 letter to his friend, the Viennese critic Arthur Roessler, ‘I’m in the same predicament as Degas who was lumped together with the Impressionists.’58 His work did not fit neatly under either the Cubist or Futurist label. Confusing the issue further, Kupka was considered a standard-bearer of Orphist painters yet was omitted from Apollinaire’s decisive account of ‘Orphic Cubism’ given in his Méditations esthétiques.59 Despite the problem of labels, there is no question that Kupka was fundamentally concerned with the problem of representing movement and duration in painting, and that this ‘encroachment on the temporal field’60 informed the many pictorial experiments that culminated in Amorpha, recognized as the first purely abstract painting. Given its differences from a canvas like Osbert’s Les chants de la nuit, one might be surprised to discover that Kupka joined up with the Symbolists in the 1890s, his formative years, and that his art remained, like theirs, grounded in introspection and in a deep communion with nature.61 Representing surface effects interested him not at all, and he deplored sensationalist attempts to do so. Thus Kupka grouped Cubism and Futurism together with Impressionism as misguided and even fraudulent efforts, within a long realist tradition, toward ‘a growing perfection and precision in depicting natural phenomena’.62

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What alternative, then, did Kupka propose? Against simple imitation, he advocated the creation of rhythmic harmonies and linear correspondences, which he viewed as better suited to the means at the artist’s disposal. Nor was Kupka always a seeker after dynamism in the plastic arts: equally, ‘by concentric circles or parallelisms, the work of art seems to settle into the register of a single chord, as if in that work eternity stood still’.63 This realm of serene immobility is not far from the world of Stéphane Mallarmé, who, with the other Symbolist poets, greatly influenced the Orphist painters.64 We also come close to G. F. Watts’s comparison of his picture Time and Oblivion to an ‘organ chord swelling powerfully but with no modulation’.65 Yet Kupka brought to his painting a new, Bergsonian awareness of the role of subjective consciousness in holding together the infinitely divisible units of time that compose human experience. Bergson insisted on the distinction between ‘interior time’ (temps intérieur), dependent on a succession of states of consciousness that are joined together by a perceiving human subject, and the ‘time of things’ (temps des choses), measurable by physicists and characterized by a succession of physical phenomena that far outpace the human capacity to perceive.66 This modern anxiety about the fracturing of temporal and spatial unity coexists, in Kupka’s work, with an abiding belief in Lessing’s distinction between temporal and spatial arts.67 So when it came to representing motion, Kupka wished to avoid the imitative ‘fallacy’ of breaking movement down into multiple successive states, as Marcel Duchamp did in Nude Descending a Staircase, painted in the same year. Rather, in his embodiment of the unity of time and space, Kupka was led toward ‘more abstract structures which keep the eye in constant movement’.68 And so his experiments at the time of Amorpha bear the traces not just of the Italian Futurism that he saw exhibited in Paris in 1912 and quickly rejected, but also neo-Impressionism, which had surged back into current discourse with the republication of Signac’s D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme in 1911.69 The complex genesis of Amorpha finds echo in multiple origin stories.70 Of these, the most important seems to be the series of roughly sixty motion studies Kupka made, starting in 1907–8, of a girl with a ball. These studies reflect his interest – shared by Duchamp, Villon and Balla – in time-lapse photography. What began as a study of Kupka’s daughter Andrée playing with a ball, evolved, over many variations, into an arabesque form mapping the trajectory of the ball’s motion. While the Girl with a Ball series did not result in a final painting, its connection to Amorpha is made clear in Kupka’s marginal note to one of the drawn studies: ‘origin of the technique / used in the framework / of the Fugue’.71 The naturalistic origins of Amorpha – that is, Girl with a Ball as a stepping stone to pure abstraction – cannot be doubted. The reference to an underlying musical structure for the painting is made clear by its subtitle, Fugue in Two Colours. Thus red and blue are taken to stand for the ‘voices’ of a fugue, though it may be significant that the overlapping white disks in the background also form a pair. Simon Shaw-Miller suggests that the musical subject is a ‘logical summation’ of the previous motion studies of the girl with a ball, and notes that Kupka himself claimed the title was chosen after the fact. From this, one would deduce that fugal form was not a driver in the development of the painting. Yet, given the

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structural analogies put forward by both Shaw-Miller and Peter Vergo (and developed over a long series of preparatory drawings now housed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York), this seems implausible – particularly when one factors in the acknowledged influence of Bach fugues on Kupka’s work at this time.72 Another set of studies explicitly identified as preparations for Fugue in Two Colours is the so-called Newton’s Disks (1911–12). These paintings, at least two of which reside at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, feature patterns of overlapping and concentric circles in different colours. The variations in colour scheme – sometimes a full spectrum, sometimes limited to red, blue and neutral tones – demonstrate that, as Spate points out, Kupka’s use of colour is usually subjective and symbolic, not based on physical properties.73 This presents a marked difference from the neo-Impressionists, whose espousal of colour theory dictated an ostensibly more systematic and objective approach to the application of tones. Kupka’s famous remark to the New York Times about his ambitions for Amorpha post-dated the painting’s public exhibition by a year: ‘I am still fumbling in the dark but I think I can find something between sight and hearing and that I can produce a fugue in colours like Bach has done in music.’74 Several years before that, however, Kupka had tackled the problem of duration in another work that makes direct reference to music: the Piano Keys/Lake of 1909. The astonishing effect of this painting comes at first from the incongruous juxtaposition of the title: piano keys don’t belong in a lake! But using an idea from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks,75 Kupka dramatized the relationship between radiating sound and rippling water, each moving ever outward from a stationary source. Gradually a certain logic or congruity emerges: these waves in different media reinforce each other, as if the ripples in the water had been in fact generated not by a dropped pebble (as one would expect, and as would make its own kind of sound) but by the sounding of a simultaneous piano chord. Associating the phenomenon of rippling water and a vibrating instrument means that our imagined distinction between natural and musical sounds is dissolved, or exposed as false: each one radiates ever outward, as waves, with no defined endpoint. Kupka’s fascination with rippling water and radiating waves of light and sound accentuates his connection to Osbert and Signac. And this connection, in turn, suggests that the ‘new’ synthesis Kupka is credited to have made between man, nature and the universe was perhaps not so new after all.76 The influence of a musical paradigm on Kupka’s experiments in abstraction is clearly evident, even if its significance for Orphism more generally has been disputed.77 Apollinaire, who christened the movement, recognized that in Kupka’s art the dynamics of the painting come from within itself, just as in music.78 This makes the absence of Kupka’s name from all of Apollinaire’s art writing very puzzling, to say the least. Yet there is still no doubt, from Apollinaire’s criticism, that music was ‘in the air’ in the fall of 1912. Following is an excerpt from a conversation he imagined between three women who have managed to get in for a sneak preview at the Section d’Or Salon (at which Kupka may or may not have exhibited): Marcelle (to Louise): ‘So according to you, it has to do with a kind of visual music, a supremely mystical art.’

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Louise: ‘I’m not saying that. Each of these painters has his own approach. Some are realists and others are mystics. But since they’re all preoccupied with rhythm in their paintings we can indulge ourselves with what’s musical in their compositions.’79

What was musical in Kupka’s compositions, beyond their rhythmic formal elements, was the search for a bridge between the instantaneous and the durational. In this quest, music served Kupka as a model for the construction of a work of art: the assemblage of different elements that would allow a viewer to accumulate, over a period of looking, the various associations and memories attaching to the flow of time.

Conclusion It could fairly be argued that some kind of engagement with the problem of time in painting is a requirement of any artist’s work and thought, not a phenomenon confined to a particular historical period nor necessarily connected with the musical paradigm of nineteenth-century thought and practice. While the choice of subject and the process of painting will necessarily have ramifications for temporal representation, much effort is often invested in making that representation seem ‘natural’. What stands out about the period 1885–1915 is the embrace of pictorial modes that resist such naturalness. The paintings discussed here manipulate time in such a way that this manipulation is made central to a viewer’s experience of the work of art. Painters can attempt to freeze, dilate or accrete moments of time, against conventions of linear narrative, in order to better mimic the flow of perception and reflection within individual consciousness. And, I suggest, these disruptions to earlier pictorial approaches reflect a new understanding of music listening as an activity that did not simply extend through time but was itself paradigmatic of subjective experience (Bergson’s durée). In this chapter I have made the case for the influence of music on artists’ manipulations of time even in works that do not refer to specific musical works or occasions of listening. These manipulations of temporal experience tie together disparate works spanning neo-Impressionism, Idealism and Orphism. Set in this context, the experimentation with time in painting suggests a permeable boundary between these -isms, a porosity of influence already made clear in the talismanic importance to all three of music and French Symbolism (among other shared wellsprings of creative thought). It is well to recall Richard Shiff ’s groundbreaking argument for another permeable boundary, between Impressionism and Symbolism.80 In Shiff ’s now widely accepted account, Symbolism did not make a sharp break from Impressionism but was in many ways continuous with it. Although Impressionist and Symbolist approaches to the representation of time appear to be in opposition, as presented here, Shiff ’s recognition of common threads in the evolving critical responses to those two movements has been a guide for this similarly counterintuitive project: joining together, across one dimension at least, the aesthetic concerns of three

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artists who are more often differentiated from each other. Many other equally powerful examples could be chosen of overlapping aims, shared influences and stylistic crossover. It is fitting, too, in this discussion of time, to seek a corrective to the overzealous periodization that has tended to accompany the demarcation of separate artistic movements. When did French Symbolism start? When did it end? These cannot be meaningful questions in the fin-de-siècle climate where so many different pictorial trends were active at once, often in combination or in productive tension, even in the career of a single artist. Landmark paintings such as Kupka’s Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colours, which is often cited as the birth of pure abstraction, do not undo this messy reality. Even such a major pictorial innovator as he was inclined to accept Lessing’s basic distinction, elaborated nearly 150 years earlier, between the temporal and spatial arts.81 All the same, the challenges to this model undertaken by Kupka, Osbert, Signac and many others of their era suggest a powerful point of contact among disparate artistic goals and styles. Most intriguingly, the anti-naturalist focus on time draws together painters often viewed as conservative or retrograde (viz. Osbert) with their most avant-garde peers – helping to rebut the still-prevalent myth that pictorial abstraction marked a break with all that had gone before. Regardless of the approach taken – whether endowing instantaneity with permanence, stretching duration to its limits, or infusing a static medium with dynamic potential – they transformed the art of their moment in attempting to escape the temporal and narrative regimes of past painting.

Notes 1 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. E. A. McCormick (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). See also Leonardo da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting, pt. 1, chs 29–32, in Claire J. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone: A Critical Interpretation with a New Edition of the Text in the Codex Urbinas (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992); and Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1967). 2 Chesneau’s review appeared in the Paris-Journal of 7 May 1874; it is quoted in Tempus Fugit/Time Flies, exh. cat., ed. Jan Schall (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2000), 243. 3 Among recent literature, see Therese Dolan, ‘Painting and Music’, in The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, ed. Tim Shephard and Anne Leonard (New York: Routledge, 2014), 127–34; and Suzanne M. Singletary, ‘Music as Magic Architecture: Immersive Environments in Baudelaire and Whistler’, in Rival Sisters, Art and Music at the Birth of Modernism, 1815–1915, ed. James. H. Rubin with Olivia Mattis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 93–112; also the editors’ introduction to that volume, 1–34. 4 See the discussions of Kupka’s work in Simon Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 128–36; and Peter Vergo, The Music of Painting: Music, Modernism and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to John Cage (London and New York: Phaidon, 2010), 223–6.

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5 This phrase is Thomas A. Goudge’s in his introduction to Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999 (1912)), 12. 6 Among other studies of this topic, see Jonathan Crary’s important Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 7 Experiments with the different temporalities of painting are not specific to the period 1885–1915, of course, nor are they always necessarily linked up with developments in musical thought. 8 Stephen Kern, ‘Time and Art in Twentieth-Century Culture’, in Tempus Fugit/Time Flies, 22. 9 See Anne Leonard, ‘Picturing Listening in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Art Bulletin 89, no. 2 (June 2007): 266–86. 10 Michael Tymkiw, ‘Pictorially Transcribing Music: The Wagner Lithographs of Henri Fantin-Latour and Odilon Redon’, in Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France, exh. cat, ed. Martha Ward and Anne Leonard (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2007), 53. 11 See Jean-Paul Bouillon, Klimt: Beethoven (Geneva: Skira, 1986), 26–7, and Stephan Koja (ed.), Gustav Klimt: The Beethoven Frieze and the Controversy over the Freedom of Art (Munich: Prestel, 2006), 91–6. 12 Joan Ungersma Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 143. 13 Marina Ferretti-Bocquillon et al., Signac 1863–1935, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 160. 14 Fénéon himself coined the term ‘neo-Impressionist’ to describe Seurat’s work in a review of the Society of Independent Artists in September 1886. (The review appeared simultaneously in L’art moderne and La Vogue.) Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 92. 15 Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 64, 84. 16 John Rewald, ‘Félix Fénéon: II’, Gazette des beaux-arts 34, no. 1972 (February 1948): 116–17. 17 Félix Fénéon, ‘Le Néo-Impressionnisme’, L’art moderne, 1 May 1887, 138–9; translation by Carola Hicks published in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood with Jason Gaiger (eds), Art in Theory 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 968. 18 Paul Signac, D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme (Paris: Hermann, 2005 (1899)), 102. Françoise Cachin wrote in her introduction to this volume that against Impressionism, ‘art de l’éphémère’, Seurat and his friends wanted to oppose ‘une peinture d’éternité’, a phrase that appears to come from Signac’s journal. 19 Signac, D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme, 103. 20 The most sustained study of Charles Henry’s ideas in relation to contemporary painting practice is José A. Arguëlles, Charles Henry and the Formation of a Psychophysical Aesthetic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). Arguëlles devotes Chapter 7 to an analysis of this painting. 21 Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 145. 22 John Leighton, ‘Out of Seurat’s Shadow: Signac, 1863–1935, An Introduction’, in Ferretti-Bocquillon et al., Signac 1863–1935, 9–10. 23 For example, in the MoMA website entry and Ferretti-Bocquillon et al., Signac 1863–1935, 162.

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24 Without using the term ‘flux’, Henri Bergson implies the concept in his discussion of how the conscious mind synthesizes the successive positions of a body in space. See Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L Pogson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956 (1910)), 111. This very synthesis is what constitutes duration. Rather than a kaleidoscope, Bergson offers the example of a shooting star, which in traversing space creates an ‘absolutely indivisible sensation of motion or mobility’ (Time and Free Will, 111–12). 25 MoMA website again. Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 144: ‘[The critic’s] straight stiff body is antithetical to the bold rhythmic background, which looks like a giant pinwheel in motion.’ Ferretti-Bocquillon et al., Signac 1863–1935, 162: ‘This [Fénéon’s] hieratic figure contrasts strongly with the abstract background.’ 26 The print is reproduced as Fig. 90 in Ferretti-Bocquillon et al., Signac 1863–1935 (p. 160). This catalogue also notes (p. 108) the vast exhibition of Japanese prints at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in spring 1890, which Signac attended. 27 Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 144. 28 The organization of the final Impressionist exhibition produced such tension between the original members of the group and the new band of neo-Impressionists that it was decided to set apart the latter in a room of their own. See Martha Ward, ‘The Rhetoric of Independence and Innovation’, in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886, ed. Charles S. Moffett (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986), 425. 29 Quoted in Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 84. 30 Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 14. 31 Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 93. 32 See the opening pages of Clive Bell, Art (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958 (1913)), 17. 33 See A. G. Lehmann, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France, 1885–1895 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), esp. 194–206. 34 Gustave Soulier gave the name ‘Artistes de l’âme’ to the group that exhibited in February 1896 at the Théâtre de la Bodinière, but the term seems to have been used earlier than that. 35 Baudelaire’s highly influential sonnet, ‘Correspondances’, was published in Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857. 36 See Patricia Townley Mathews, Aurier’s Symbolist Art Criticism and Theory (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), 31. Also see André Mellerio, Le mouvement idéaliste en peinture (Paris: H. Floury, 1896). 37 See Véronique Dumas, Le peintre symboliste Alphonse Osbert (1857–1939) (Paris: CNRS, 2005), 18. 38 Dumas, Alphonse Osbert, 30. 39 Dumas, Alphonse Osbert, 21, 191; Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, Painters of the Soul: Symbolism in France, exh. cat. (Tampere: Tampere Art Museum, 2006), 281. 40 Preface to Dumas, Alphonse Osbert. 41 Jumeau-Lafond, Painters of the Soul, 281. 42 Jumeau-Lafond, Painters of the Soul, 281. 43 Jumeau-Lafond, Painters of the Soul, 296. 44 This observation was made by Fénéon in his text titled Signac for Les hommes d’aujourd’hui (1890). 45 Camille Mauclair, ‘Le Symbolisme en France’, L’Art en Silence (Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1901), 196.

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46 Yolande Osbert, ‘Un peintre fidèle à son rêve: Alphonse Osbert (1857–1939). Souvenirs de l’époque symboliste’, 50-page typescript in Musée d’Orsay Documentation, 9. 47 Dumas, Alphonse Osbert, 139, 66. 48 Dumas, Alphonse Osbert, 168: ‘Tout se passe en dehors du temps, un temps qui est indéterminé comme le sont les gestes et l’existence des personnages.’ 49 Dumas, Alphonse Osbert, 161: ‘incontestablement l’une des oeuvres les plus caractéristiques de l’univers symboliste d’Osbert’. 50 Dumas, Alphonse Osbert, 115. 51 See Danièle Pistone, Symbolisme et musique en France, 1870–1914 (Paris: H. Champion, 1995), 24. 52 Vladimir Jankélévitch, La vie et la mort dans la musique de Debussy (Neuchâtel: A la Baconnière, 1968), 59: ‘24 vues complètement immobiles’. 53 It is the seventh prelude in Book II, published by Durand et Cie in 1913. 54 As Dumas puts it (Alphonse Osbert, 141), ‘Osbert cherche à créer l’imagerie qui correspond le mieux à son rêve intérieur.’ Although the idea of the spiritualized landscape is hardly new with Osbert and the Idealist painters, their work embodies powerful trends in art, music, literature and philosophy circa 1900. See also Muriel Joubert, ‘Le thème du reflet dans l’oeuvre de Debussy et chez les symbolistes: une nouvelle approche de la matière’, in Symbolisme et musique en France, 1870–1914 (Paris: H. Champion, 1995), esp. 104: ‘le caractère illusoire du reflet emporte le spectateur ou l’auditeur dans des lieux imaginaires’. 55 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1981), III, 924 (‘Time Regained’). 56 See, for example, the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: PUF/ Quadrige, 2001), 64, 78. 57 See Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, and Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. 12–13. 58 Quoted in Pierre Brullé, ‘The reasons for a new beginning – Kupka and the rejection of figural representation’, in Frantisek Kupka, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Fundacio Joan Miró, 2009), 181. 59 Guillaume Apollinaire, Méditations esthétiques; les peintres cubistes, ed. LeRoy C. Breunig and Jean-Claude Chevalier (Paris: Hermann, 1965), 57–8. 60 See the chapter ‘Rythme, cadence, mouvement’ in Kupka’s treatise, La création dans les arts plastiques (Paris: Cercle d’Art, 1989), 196. 61 Philippe Dagen, preface to Kupka, La création, 14, 27. 62 Brullé, ‘The reasons for a new beginning’, 182. 63 Kupka, La création, 197. 64 Virginia Spate, Orphism: The Evolution of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris 1910–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 12. 65 Quoted in Pierre-Louis Mathieu, The Symbolist Generation, 1870–1910 (New York: Skira/Rizzoli, 1990), 18. 66 Concentrated statements of this distinction appear in Chapter 2 of Bergson’s Time and Free Will and most cogently in Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1929 (1911)), 272–3. 67 Pierre Brullé, ‘Kupka et le rapport entre création picturale et modèle musical’, Revue des études slaves 64 (2002): 106. This article spells out the limits of the musical paradigm

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Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl for Kupka in view of the difference in ‘construction materials’ required for musical and plastic creation. Spate, Orphism, 32. Spate, Orphism, 32, 15. The Museum of Modern Art’s website alone refers to fugue, stained-glass windows and arabesque. For a thorough study of the sources for Amorpha, based on the second version in Cleveland, see Anne Swartz, ‘A Redating of Kupka’s Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors II’, Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 8 (October 1993): 327–51. Brullé, ‘The reasons for a new beginning’, 182. See Vergo, The Music of Painting, 223–6, and Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music, 127–8. Spate, Orphism, 124. Quoted in Spate, Orphism, 130; the article, by W. Warshawsky, appeared on 19 October 1913 and was titled ‘Orpheism [sic], Latest of Painting Cults’. See Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music, 139, on how Kupka, in Piano Keys/Lake, combines Leonardo’s ideas with those of Bergson. See, for example, Miroslav Lamac, ‘Un univers nouveau’, in Frantisek Kupka 1871–1957, ou l’invention d’une abstraction, exh. cat. (Paris: Amis du Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1989), 8. According to Spate (Orphism, 35), the relationship between painting and music was ‘important, although not . . . essential’ to the development of Orphism. Frantisek Kupka, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Fundacio Joan Miró, 2009), 91. ‘A la section d’or’, L’Intransigeant, 10 October 1912; reprinted in Guillaume Apollinaire, Chroniques d’art (1902–1918), ed. L. C. Breunig (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 261. Marcelle (à Louise): ‘Ainsi d’après toi, il s’agirait ici d’une sorte de musique plastique, d’un art mystique au suprême degré.’ Louise: ‘Je ne dis pas cela. Chacun de ces peintres a sa tendance. Les uns sont réalistes et les autres mystiques. Mais comme ils se préoccupent tous du rythme de leurs tableaux on peut se laisser aller à ce qu’il y a de musical dans leurs compositions.’ Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Shiff ’s argument appeared in condensed form in earlier publications. See Brullé, ‘Kupka’, 106.

4

Erik Satie and the Interart Genre Ann-Marie Hanlon

In a word, the book is a ‘Genuine’ object – a kind of jewel, a type of work-of-art. It is complete. A musical work, for its part, possesses none of these precious external trappings; it is classed with academic books to which it seems to be a sort of brother – an ugly brother. Erik Satie, 19221 In a period characterized by cross-pollination of the arts, Erik Satie (1866–1925) stands apart from his modernist contemporaries in the lengths to which he pursued a distinct interart aesthetic in music and in his treatment of the musical score as an art object.2 Following years of intermittent experimentation with textual annotations and the visual appearance of his scores, from 1912 to 1915, Satie devoted himself almost exclusively to the composition of a new ‘interart’ genre, primarily written for performance on his favoured instrument, the piano. In this genre, Satie refined an approach to musical aesthetics that he had been experimenting with in various ways throughout his career as a composer. Music does not have primacy in the interart works, instead musical, visual and textual elements coexist in a manner that implies they are of equal artistic value. In his handwritten manuscripts Satie dispenses with the conventions of bar lines, key signatures and time signatures in order to provide the reader with an uninterrupted view of the accompanying texts and ornate calligraphic notation. The function of this notation often extends beyond its standard use as a system for writing music, and musical symbols are utilized with an additional purpose, as the building blocks for abstract or representational art. The interart scores are further characterized by their unusual titles, playing directions and poetic, running commentaries throughout. Satie directs the performer and audience’s gaze to the score, in which visual art, music and text combine to create a three-dimensional art object which is fully realized in performance. Like a great deal of modernist art of this period, Satie’s interart compositions explore new configurations of time and space that present a form of musical unity that differs considerably from the Romantic aesthetic of organicism. In musicology, the term organicism is often used to describe tonal music that has a clear structural logic and coherence defined by harmonic or motivic progression, a narrative form with a distinct beginning, middle and end. As unity in the interart genre can only be perceived 85

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through the synthesis of the constituent media in performance, these works also reconfigure the relationship between the musical work and its audience, demanding new modes of listening and interpretation. Musical performance is no longer presented as a single sensory experience, but rather as a multisensory one, which demands active spectatorship. Unusually, the audience is invited to view the score, an object often physically absent in a formal classical piano recital or visible only to the pianist. The visual aspect of Satie’s music invites the non-music reader and music reader alike to behold the musical work and engage with it as an art object. In a performance context, this implies that the pianist and the audience should be positioned in intimate proximity with the score in order to create a space in which a conceptual and fundamentally imaginative process of listening and viewing can occur simultaneously. These demands of intimacy could never be met in front of a large audience in a traditional concert hall setting, the primary venue type in which Satie’s music was heard in Paris in the pre-war years. The existence of the interart genre has been overlooked due to the fact that these works have not been faithfully reproduced by music publishers. In the 1910s Demets and Rouart-Lerolle published a significant number of them, but in print, Satie’s visually appealing calligraphic notation and text was substituted for standard printing typography, and this significantly changed the character and visual appearance of the score. To date Sports & Recreations (1914) remains the only interart work to be published in Satie’s original calligraphic hand, a format that was prohibitively expensive for music publishers during his lifetime. Commissioned by the fashion editor Lucien Vogel, only ten copies of this collaborative work between Satie and the illustrator Charles Martin were produced in 1914. A further 215 copies were produced in a collector’s edition in 1922, accompanied by new drawings by Martin. The interart format can otherwise only be seen in the neat copies Satie produced by hand for his publishers. This perhaps explains why Sports has been subject to a great deal more academic analysis than any of the other interart works. However, it has been analysed as an isolated exception rather than considered as an exemplar that represented one of many works of a new musical genre. While some of these are located in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the present locations of the vast majority are unknown. It is through analysing and cross-referencing Satie’s original manuscript notebooks, the neat publisher copies and the first edition publications that we can begin to reconstruct Satie’s intended outcomes and aesthetic vision.3 A number of scholars in recent years have investigated the connections between music, art and literature within Satie’s music. Peter Dayan argues that Satie is an ‘intermedialist’, a composer whose music aspires to the condition of both painting and poetry.4 Erik Satie: Music, Art & Literature (2013), edited by Caroline Potter, is the first collection of essays devoted to exploring connections between various art forms in Satie’s music. In their contributions to Potter’s collection, Simon Shaw-Miller and Helen Julia Minors argue that Satie’s music should be considered as an art object in which image, music and text are combined. In her discussion of Satie’s piano miniatures Sports & Recreations, Minors acknowledges the importance of Dayan’s interart theories in relation to Satie’s music, and she argues that the ‘pluralistic nature’ of these works

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means that they elude classifying labels. Shaw-Miller proposes that ‘Satie’s musical ambitions were simply artistic; he aspired to the condition of art.’5 This research goes one step further in proposing that in the period 1912 to 1915 Satie’s interart concerns resulted in the creation of a completely new musical genre, a genre that presents a pioneering approach to aesthetics in musical composition and the emergence of a radically new concept of musical form, one that can only be understood by situating these pieces within the context of wider avant-garde trends in art, particularly those influenced by Henri Bergson’s profoundly influential concept of duration. With the exception of Mark Antliff ’s seminal work Inventing Bergson, it is only in recent years that the extent of Bergson’s influence on modernism in the arts is being explored in depth.6 This study focuses on four pivotal issues concerning the interart genre and the interart aesthetic it promotes. The first part of this chapter addresses the issue of nomenclature that often arises in the reception of Satie’s music and clarifies the meaning of the categorization ‘interart’ within the context of this discussion. While the vocabulary of musicologists and art historians sometimes overlaps in discussions of modernism, these two disciplines do not possess a clearly defined shared nomenclature.7 This has disadvantaged Satie’s reception to an extent, as very few of the artistic movements with which he was associated have translated into musical movements. In the second part of the chapter, the three components – music, image and text – that serve as Satie’s artistic material are introduced and some of the ways in which these elements work together to embody an interart aesthetic are presented. The intermediality facilitated by the use of these materials was central to Satie’s expression of an art that distanced itself from the Romantic constructs of absolute and programmatic music. This leads into the subject of representation in the interart genre and how this aesthetic issue influenced his compositional process. In the final section on the theme of unity, Satie’s formulation of a radical new presentation of unity within the musical score is explored within the context of Henri Bergson’s concept of ‘duration’ and how it resonated with Satie’s preoccupations with time and space.

Nomenclature: the interart designation Why not use the representational methods demonstrated by Claude Monet, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and so on . . .? Why not make a musical transposition of these methods? Nothing more simple. Are they not expressions? This was the profitable starting point for experiments abounding in tentative – and even fruitful results . . . Erik Satie8

Satie’s deep respect for art is abundantly evident in his writings, where he often demonstrates a preference for discussing music through reference to the work of visual artists. His interest in contemporary developments in the art world profoundly influenced the trajectory of his aesthetic explorations in music and his modernist

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experiments exhibit close aesthetic parallels with the methods and objectives of a broad spectrum of contemporary avant-garde artists. Issues of nomenclature surround the reception and analysis of Satie’s interart compositions as they invite comparisons from across the divides of artistic media, yet resist categorization in terms of another artistic movement. During his short fourteen-year public career (1911–25), Satie was associated with at least ten different artistic movements, including Fauvism, Cubism, Simultaneism, Futurism, Primitivism and Dada, despite his efforts to remain aesthetically independent: ‘I have always tried to throw followers off the scent by both the form and content of each new work. It’s the only way, for an artist, to avoid becoming the head of a “school” . . .’9 Satie spent a considerable amount of time in the company of artists and writers in the salons, cafés and cabarets of Paris and his work often appeared on programmes of soirées that featured musical performances and poetry readings, alongside an exhibition of contemporary art.10 Roger Shattuck relates that in the pre-war years the avant-garde in Paris ‘remained a true community’ in which ‘painters, writers, and musicians lived and worked together and tried their hands at each other’s arts in an atmosphere of perpetual collaboration’.11 Satie collaborated with many of the major artists of his time, including Pablo Picasso, Albert Gleizes, Man Ray and Francis Picabia, and maintained friendships with many others, including Constantin Brancusi, Fernand Léger and André Derain. Among painters, Satie was treated with a level of respect he did not encounter in the musical world and many artists complimented his artistic sensibilities. Man Ray described Satie as ‘the only composer with eyes’,12 while the Futurist Marinetti claimed he was ‘one of the creators of modernity, a futurist without knowing it’.13 In the twentieth century, scholars devoted themselves to the creation of anthologies of artistic ‘-isms’ that built upon the critical writings of the period in formulating the canons of modernist art, music and literature.14 In reality the lines between movements in this period were often blurred. André Breton highlights the fluidity of the ‘-ism’ in a public talk in 1922, where he argues that ‘Cubism, Futurism and Dada are not, when all is said and done, three distinct movements.’15 Satie was one of many artists and composers of the period who frequently dismissed the labels critics imposed upon them, feeling them to be misleading or restrictive categorizations of their art. In Satie’s case, stylistic or aesthetic labels were often selected on the basis of which artist or group of artists he was keeping company with, more so than on account of aesthetic considerations, and the lack of critical reasoning that underpinned the selection of such diverse aesthetic labels was characteristic of journalistic practice in a period of rapid and significant change in musical language, grammar and form. Many critics were ill equipped to deal with the variety of issues presented by modernist music, and the lack of any distinct group or school of composers who followed a similar aesthetic compositional approach to Satie further complicated the reception of his music. In 1923 the composer-critic Carol-Bérard complains that ‘Erik Satie changes “his style” simply to vex the labellers.’16 The designation ‘interart’ sidesteps existing issues of nomenclature and permits engagement with Satie’s compositions in the context of artistic developments in modernism in general, rather than within the confines of a specific movement.

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The categorization of the ‘interart genre’ in this study builds upon Peter Dayan’s pioneering work on an interart aesthetic in modernist French art, music and poetry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dayan outlines a number of principles that characterize the interart aesthetic, all of which are applicable in the case of Satie’s new genre. According to these principles the interart works must be considered as objects that cannot be judged according to criteria internal to the medium of music: each composition is unique and presents a new reality; and direct translation between two media within an interart work is impossible. The most striking feature of the interart aesthetic is that a process of transposition occurs within the work whereby one medium is perceived in terms of a second: ‘Art as poetry, poetry as music, music as art, and so on, round all possible permutations. That is the interart analogy.’17 This feature of transposition occurs throughout the compositions of the new genre. In terms of music analysis and aesthetic discussion, the term interart presents an alternative view of intermediality that is distinctly different from the concept of the ‘extra-musical’. It is inclusive of the other media and treats them as intrinsic parts of the composition, rather than external or tangential to the musical work. The ten piano suites of Satie’s interart genre outlined in Table  1 are categorized according to the following criteria: they are all stand-alone musical works that

Table 1: Works of the interart genre published during Satie’s public career 1912 Veritable Flabby Preludes (for a dog): Severe Reprimand; Alone at Home; Playing (pf) 1913 Automatic Descriptions: On a Vessel; On a Lantern; On a Helmet (pf) Sketches and Flirtations of a Wooden Man: Tyrolean Turk; Slender Dance (in the manner of these gentlemen); Españaña (pf) Dried Embryos: Of Holothuria; Of Edriophthalma; Of Podophthalma (pf) Chapters Turned This Way and That: She Who Talks Too Much; The Man Who Carries the Big Stones; The Prisoner’s Lament (Jonah and Latude) (pf) Old Sequins & Old Breast Plates: At the Gold-Merchant’s (Venice XIIIth Century); Dance in Armour (Greek Period); Defeat of the Cimbrians (Nightmare) (pf) 1914 Sports & Recreations: The Swing; Hunting; Italian Comedy; The Bride’s Reveille; Blind Man’s Buff; Fishing; Yachting; Bathing; Carnival; Golf; The Octopus; The Races; Puss in the Corner; The Picnic; The Water-chute; Perpetual Tango; The Sledge; Flirting; Fireworks; Tennis (pf – a collaboration with the artist Charles Martin) Instantaneous Centuries-old Hours: Venomous Obstacles; Morning Twilight (At Midday); Haywire in Granite (pf) Three Elegant Waltzes by a Squeamish Pansy: His Waist; His Pince-Nez; His Legs (pf) 1915 Thoughts Before Last: Idyll; Aubade; Meditation (pf)

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adhere to an interart aesthetic; they are all characterized by an equivalent emphasis on text, music and visuals within the score; and with the exception of the accompanying images by Martin in Sports & Recreations, they are all authored solely by Satie.18 These interart genre compositions are more commonly referred to as the ‘humouristic’ works in contemporary Satie scholarship.19 This designation gained currency on account of three primary factors: the humorous titles and texts of many of these works (e.g. Three Elegant Waltzes by a Squeamish Pansy and Veritable Flabby Preludes (For a Dog)); Satie’s humorous journalistic writings and concert notes of the period (1912–15); and the inherited critical consensus that these pieces constituted the works of a musical joker.20 Indeed, Satie incorporated humour as part of the aesthetic experience in many of his compositions. It was an important expressive tool used by him in challenging the conventions of the musical past and the interart works contain many examples of comic musical parody. However, the term ‘humouristic’ implies that all of these works are funny in intent or content and as an aesthetic label it is misleading. The common denominator in all of these pieces is the underlying creative impetus of an interart aesthetic that informs Satie’s choice of artistic materials, and their application in exploring the representational function of his art and new forms of musical unity. The designation ‘interart’ reflects the inherent intermediality of Satie’s new genre and it permits a space for the consideration of his music free from the negative connotations and ideological issues associated with the descriptor ‘humouristic’.21

Artistic materials: image, music and text Image, music and text function in a distinctly interart manner within Satie’s scores. Most notably, the words and music often invite analogy with art in the way they paint pictures. Musical notation is frequently used to depict visual meaning, a representational function that extends beyond its traditional role of indicating musical pitch. In addition to this feature, Satie often paints vivid pictures with his words in setting the scene and mood for the reader or performer. Playing directives, such as ‘grow pale’, ‘even whiter if possible’, ‘be visible for a moment’, ‘lights out’ and ‘blackish’ also invite the listener to consider the work in visual terms.22 The relationship between words and music in the interart genre diverges significantly from the Romantic conventions of programmatic music. All of the interart pieces have unusual titles, additional movement titles and substantial poems, or running commentaries that accompany the musical notation.23 The latter type of text often appears in neat calligraphy in the space between the treble and bass staves of the piano music, an area typically reserved for dynamic markings or the occasional playing directive. The location of this text blurs the distinction between what constitutes playing directions and poetry, as conventional performance directions are rarely used in Satie’s music. This text can also appear at various points above and below the piano staves. In the interart works, Satie often used text to connect his art to the material world. For instance, references to the everyday appear in the form of Parisian street

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names in Sketches and Flirtations of a Wooden Man and as snippets of everyday conversation in Dried Embryos and Chapters Turned this Way and That. Satie’s distance from the tradition of programmatic music is evident in the differing realities he often presents simultaneously in the textual pictures and the piano’s sound world. For instance, in ‘Venomous Obstacles’, the first movement of Instantaneous Centuries-old Hours, jaunty cabaret-style piano music accompanies a bleak and lonely Surrealist text that paints quite a contrasting picture and mood to the musical soundscape that envelops it: This vast part of the world is inhabited by one single man: a negro. He is so bored he could die of laughing. It is 9.17 by the shadow of the thousand-year-old trees. The toads call each other by their proper name. To help him think, the negro holds his cerebellum in his right hand with the fingers apart. From afar, he looks like a distinguished physiologist. Four anonymous serpents enthral him, hanging suspended from the coat tails of his uniform which is distorted with a combination of grief and loneliness. On the banks of the river an aged mangrove slowly washes its revoltingly dirty roots. It is not the trysting hour.24

In the accompanying musical notation, Satie switches unnecessarily between the use of sharps and flats and he inserts naturals () when they are not required, gestures that suggest in this context that the function of these symbols is not solely musical. The repeated use of unnecessary double-flat symbols can be seen in the section of the music marked by the additional text (‘the hour’) (see Fig.  4.1) and similarly, double sharps darken the notation above the text: ‘a combination of grief and loneliness’ (see Fig.  4.2). The overly complicated visual presentation of the musical notation conflicts with the apparent carefree mood projected by the musical soundscape.

Fig. 4.1: Erik Satie, ‘Venomous Obstacles’, Instantaneous Centuries-old Hours, 1914, musical notation (excerpt).

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Fig. 4.2: Erik Satie, ‘Venomous Obstacles’, Instantaneous Centuries-old Hours, 1914, musical notation (excerpt). The absence of a stated key signature permitted Satie to evade the rules that typically govern the use of sharps (♯), double sharps (x), flats () and double flats ( ) in musical notation, giving him the freedom to choose whichever symbol was most aesthetically pleasing or meaningful for him in a particular context. His use of enharmonics may perhaps function on a primarily aesthetic visual level in providing additional texture to the visual of the score as a form of shading, or alternatively they could reflect the contrast of light and shadow depicted in the text. The playing directive ‘Blackish’, which appears at the beginning of the movement, further highlights the stark contrast between the musical soundscape and the visual and textual elements of the movement. In contrast with the ambiguity inherent in ‘Venomous Obstacles’, Sports & Recreations is an exceptional work of the interart genre due to the straightforward manner in which Satie uses the shape of the melody or accompanying line of music to depict the visual mimesis of an action or movement hinted at in the text. This can be seen in the final line of ‘Golf ’, where the right- and left-hand musical notation coincides with the accompanying text (‘His “club” flies into pieces!’) to illustrate the movement of a swinging golf club. In a similar manner, in ‘Ocean Bathing’ a distinct uniform wave pattern is depicted in the left-hand piano notation that accompanies the text: ‘The ocean is wide, Madam. Anyway, it’s quite deep. Don’t sit down at the bottom. It’s very damp. Here are some good old waves’ (see Fig. 4.3). In the interart genre, Satie employs a conceptual system of signs that communicate across and within artistic media, to create inherently material works. However, the issue of representation in Satie’s interart scores is rarely straightforward.

Fig. 4.3: Erik Satie, excerpt from ‘Ocean Bathing’ (left-hand accompaniment), Sports & Recreations, 1914, musical notation (excerpt).

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Fig. 4.4: Erik Satie, excerpt from ‘Ocean Bathing’, Sports & Recreations, 1914, image from score.

Representation and the compositional process A melody does not imply its harmony, any more than a landscape implies its colour. The harmonic potential of a melody is infinite, for a melody is only an expression within the overall Expression. Do not forget that the melody is the Idea, the outline; as much as it is the form and the subject matter of a work. Erik Satie, 191725

A number of scholars have remarked upon the difficulties encountered in trying to interpret Satie’s music in a meaningful way through conventional analytical approaches.26 Despite the deceptive simplicity of the music, the multiple, interweaving layers of aesthetic meaning in the interart works present a significant challenge for the analyst. Dayan highlights ‘the distressing overabundance of significance’ of meaning presented in Satie’s texts, ‘such that to analyse them, instead of seeming pointless, becomes an oppressively endless task’.27 The issue of representation was

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central to modernist debates surrounding art and literature and it informed Satie’s experimentations with subject and object in the interart genre. Avant-garde artists refused to consider representation as the primary function of art and in moving away from representational or realist art, the art object was prioritized over its subject. Satie’s declaration that ‘craftsmanship is often superior to subject’ demonstrates that subject matter was not necessarily his greatest concern in musical composition either.28 Picasso relates that in art ‘suggestion is the key’ rather than representation: ‘It’s not a reality you can take in your hand. It’s more like a perfume – in front of you, behind you, to the sides. The scent is everywhere, but you don’t quite know where it comes from.’29 In most cases, the abstract titles of the interart works often suggest or allude to, rather than depict or represent, the subject of a composition and they do little to assist the performer or audience in interpreting the work. Critical resistance to Satie’s ambiguous titles is evident in the reception of his works that immediately precede the interart genre. As one critic complains in 1912, ‘Erik Satie with his pieces for four hands, In Horse’s Clothing, will scandalise the reactionary minds that still persist in looking for some relation between the title of a collection and its content.’30 No clear pattern emerges that elucidates the function of titles in the interart works. Satie’s visuals often suggest a representational function but, like his titles, they are often quite abstract and their interpretation requires conceptual viewing and listening. Each work presents a new reality. Specific meanings attached to Satie’s visual signs within the score are reliant upon the other interart elements of the work for interpretation. Representational ends in Satie’s scores vary from piece to piece, and sometimes from movement to movement. His extant musical notebooks reveal that he did not always begin the compositional process with a clear representational intent or subject in mind. Satie’s approach to composition in this period exhibits striking similarities with that of Juan Gris. In his ‘deductive’ method, Gris would begin a new artwork in the realm of the purely conceptual and through a transformational process his abstract idea would be developed into a concrete one. His compositions often started out as two-dimensional coloured shapes, which served as the building blocks or the underlying architecture of the composition, which were then transformed into a threedimensional artwork on the canvas. Gris often added the subject and title at the end of the compositional process, awarding primacy to the art object over its subject. Satie’s interart works typically start out as a single melodic motif or multiple fragments of melody, which he then develops into a more extended musical piece. In most cases, Satie imposed meaning onto the finished musical sketch in its final compositional stages through the removal of key signatures and bar lines, and through the addition of multiple layers of text. This deductive method describes the compositional process that resulted in Hypocritical Descriptions, a piano suite that Satie ultimately titled Automatic Descriptions. In June 1913, two months after its completion, Satie refers to this work as Electric Vocations in letter to the pianist Ricardo Viñes.31 The fluidity of the subject matter of this work is further demonstrated in his sketches for the first movement, which reveal three changes to the title of the movement during the compositional process, from ‘On a Wolf ’, to ‘On a Tuna’, to ‘On a Vessel’.32 These revisions indicate that

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Fig. 4.5: Erik Satie, excerpt from ‘Wave’. Motif in the first line of ‘On a Vessel’, Automatic Descriptions, 1913, musical notation (excerpt).

the ‘wave’ motif depicted in the musical notation of the left-hand accompaniment only came to represent a wave through the addition of suggestive text and the movement’s title in the late stages of the compositional process. The accompanying text paints a description of a maritime scene ‘at the mercy of the breakers’ and concludes with the arrival of the vessel at the shore. The visual shape and kinetic impetus of this musical motif served as the primary musical architecture in the construction of this movement (see Fig. 4.5). This evolving process of signification leads one to question the representative role of the text in the interart works, which in most cases appears to suggest rather than represent concrete meanings. Satie’s movement away from subject matter in music would later lead him to create furniture music, music that presented itself as a decorative art object. This ‘music not to be listened to’ was conceived of as a form of furniture, a pleasant and functional object that was not meant to be perceived as art. Orledge relates that Satie’s concept of ‘furnishing music’ derived from Matisse, who ‘dreamed of an art without any distracting subject matter which might be compared to a good armchair’.33

Unity and the concepts of time and space For centuries prior to the advent of musical modernism, harmony and melody had served as the primary architectural pillars in constructing musical unity. Satie’s unique use of time and space in the interart genre presented an entirely new form of musical unity that broke away from musical tradition. He eschewed harmonic and motivic development and consciously avoided using musical forms or genres that were dependent upon conventions of harmony for their articulation.34 His avoidance of traditional forms of musical development created a sound world that was characterized by its simultaneous sense of mobility and immobility. Roger Shattuck relates that many of Satie’s ‘descriptive piano pieces are as much studies in immobility and secret movement as is still-life painting’.35 These works are

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Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl . . . enigmatic for this very reason: they have no beginning, middle, and end. They exist simultaneously. Form ceases to be an ordering in time like ABA and reduces to a single brief image, an instantaneous whole both fixed and moving. Satie’s form can be extended only by reiteration or ‘endurance’.36

In a similar observation, John Cage also highlights the unusual structural function of time and space in Satie’s interart music: Beethoven’s music is based on a marriage of form and content, involving beginnings, ends and middles, and all kinds of ideas and expressions of individual feeling that have nothing whatsoever to do with sounds, whereas Satie’s music is essentially based upon an empty space of time, in which one thing or another could happen. There is no other way to explain some of the pieces he wrote around 1912, which simply don’t do any of the things that German music told everyone that music should do . . .37

This notion of an empty space of time with no clear beginning, middle or end highlights the non-teleological character of many of Satie’s compositions and his rejection of narrative form. He denies the conventional linear approach to ‘reading’ music and the sense of organic unity that is achieved through the forward-moving directionality traditionally facilitated by harmony. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of music, text and visual art elements facilitates spatial and temporal fragmentation and interpenetration within Satie’s interart scores. Shattuck’s and Cage’s descriptions of musical form in the interart genre pieces resonate strongly with writings on Bergsonian art of the period. Henri Bergson was a central figure in the French cultural landscape prior to World War I and his philosophies exerted a profound influence on political, scientific, artistic, literary and aesthetic thought to such an extent that contemporary commentators coined the term Bergsonism to denote his sphere of influence. In Time and Free Will (1889), Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) and Creative Evolution (1907), Henri Bergson formulated the concept of durée (‘duration’), a form of qualitative time that he describes as the time of our unconsciousness. This concept of time differs from the quantitative time of the intellect and science, that is, the homogenous medium measured by clocks and stopwatches. Bergson explains duration with an analogy to music: Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former state . . . [pure duration] forms both the past and the present states into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting so to speak, into one another.38

Bergson popularized the idea of non-linearity in the perception of reality, positing that time in duration is experienced as multiplicities of interpenetration, in which the past, present and future coexist simultaneously. Duration can only be perceived by intuition,

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an effort on the part of the individual to find the rhythm of inner duration, and to intuit unity. Duration is a process, a state which involves constantly ‘coming into being’.39 Mark Antliff argues that in Bergsonian art, duration is not found in the structural properties of the painting, but in its ability to instigate the beholder’s creative faculties: ‘Unity resides in the eyes of the beholder . . . for an artist it is this rhythm [of durée] that serves to bind the pattern of colours and shapes that make up a painting into an integral, organic whole.’40 Musical unity understood as ‘duration’ provides a framework that permits the consideration of Satie’s unique approach to time and space in music and the impact of these concerns upon the audience’s perception of unity in the interart works. These pieces demand to be seen, heard and read simultaneously in a form of conceptual viewing in which the listener can behold musical unity from within this multisensorial experience. Bergson’s concept of unity in duration inspired the creation of avant-garde art and music characterized by its dynamism and simultaneity. In their 1912 treatise Du Cubisme, the explicitly Bergsonian Gleizes and Metzinger explain that ‘the fact of moving around an object to seize from it several successive appearances enables the artist to “reconstitute it in time.” ’ In 1913, Satie writes about his compositional process in very similar terms: ‘Before I compose a piece, I walk round it several times, accompanied by myself.’41 This statement illustrates that Satie considered his musical works as objects that can be viewed from different spatial and temporal perspectives. Satie’s interart genre also shares similar aesthetic concerns with Simultaneist art of the period in the way in which time and space are perceived. Simultaneist artists felt that time was a factor that dulled perception and needed to be countered at the moment of perception in the visual experience through a new consciousness of time and space.42 The Simultaneist preoccupations with consciousness or states of mind are evoked in Satie’s accompanying texts in phrases such as ‘Be unaware of your own presence’, ‘Consciousness’ and ‘Do not come out of your shadow’. Satie’s preoccupation with time and space spans his entire career: his first and final works – Ogives (1886) and Relâche (1924) – were both composed using a system based upon note values of pre-planned duration or ‘chronometric form’.43 Furthermore, the interart scores are littered with textual references to time and space, which Satie sometimes combines with image and music in evoking these themes. Performance directions in the interart works such as ‘Be an hour late’, ‘White and immobile’ and ‘Grandly forgetting the present’ hint at the Bergsonian concept of ‘duration’ in their instructions to the viewer to consider time in a non-linear fashion. Space-related references, which encourage the performer or viewer to think spatially about the work in question, are even more prevalent: for instance, ‘From the top of yourself ’, ‘Flat on the floor’, ‘Broaden your impression’, ‘Space’, ‘Alone, opposite’ and ‘Very far away’. The interart genre represents an intuitive rather than intellectual art. From a Bergsonian perspective, the Romantic concept of organicism in music represented a mechanical, overly intellectual form. Satie did his best to engage the beholder within the creative process in these challenging pieces, placing the responsibility of intuiting unity in works of the interart genre with their audience in the live performance setting.

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Conclusion Satie’s experimentation with an interart aesthetic resulted in the production of a unique body of artworks, which proposed radical new ideas of musical structure, form and unity, and broke free of the preceding traditions of absolute and programmatic music.44 In the interart genre, he pioneered the concept of the score as an art object in musical modernism, transforming the role of the passive listener into that of listener and active spectator. The significance of Satie’s new works were dismissed for a variety of ideological reasons, yet the most fundamental obstacle to the recognition of this new genre was the reluctance of critics to accept that the text and visual elements were not simply extra-musical effects that were extraneous to the music. Satie did not feel compelled to participate in critical discourses concerning his new interart genre in an amicable or straightforward manner and this inhibited constructive debate concerning their aesthetic significance. Music critics play a pivotal role in fostering a new aesthetic and these arbiters of musical culture did not embrace Satie’s interart works in his lifetime, nor did they recognize them as a new musical genre.45 Satie’s new works were devalued by assumptions concerning his compositional process and the integrity of his artistic intentions. Many of his contemporaries were simply not willing to engage with the new modes of listening, performance and interpretation they required. They avoided engagement with the aesthetic issues raised by Satie’s unconventional approach to style, unity, form and representation, as they felt that his intent as a composer was not to reform the traditions of art music, but rather to ridicule them. Moreover, Satie’s choice of artistic materials, his persistent use of humour and references to popular music in a high-art musical context distanced his musical art from the ‘pure’ aesthetic that many critics continued to promote. This new genre created a barrier between the composer and the critic on account of Satie’s refusal to express his ideas solely within the medium of music. The visual and literary components of the interart scores were treated dismissively as ‘extra-musical’ elements, implying that they were external to the music, and their intrinsic role in achieving unity within the work was overlooked. Reviews were predominantly based on public performances where critics and audiences only had access to the programme notes, the titles and subtitles of the works. In the short and often cryptic concert notes for these challenging new works, Satie would provide fantastical and often absurd introductions that refused explanation or analysis of the music. In a programme note of 1913 he advises his listeners: ‘Those who shall not understand are requested by me to observe the most respectful silence and to show an attitude of complete submission and inferiority.’46 In a 1917 article titled ‘Cubism and Music’, the respected critic Jean Poueigh retrospectively launches a tirade of abuse directed at Satie’s interart works, criticizing his visual concern for the musical score, his use of unnecessary enharmonic notation, musical borrowing and humorous expression.47 He is particularly dismissive of Satie’s pursuit of ‘the extra-musical effect’, a practice that he feels is a failed attempt at humour. The musical content of the interart genre was widely dismissed with the justification

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that the accompanying texts were more important to this composer than the music. In 1914, Gabrielle Buffet describes Satie’s ‘ultra-modern’ piano suites as works which are ‘no longer essays in pure music, but of semi-dramatic, semi-musical forms, that is to say the ideal architecture of old forms, sonatas, symphonies, etc., etc., is replaced by a literary motive to which the music is rigorously subjugated and which is the foundation itself of the work . . .’ .48 Many critics expressed the concern that Satie was leading French music in a dangerous direction and this aesthetic crossover between the arts was not a cause for celebration, but rather proof of the ‘maliciously facetious insignificance of Erik Satie’ and his interart music.49 The exclusionary nature of classification practices led musicologists to overlook the historical significance of the interart works, because they represented an aesthetic grouping that is limited almost exclusively to Satie’s musical output in this period. The Spanish composer Frederico Mompou is perhaps the only close contemporary to have engaged in replicating Satie’s interart genre in his compositions.50 Furthermore, the absence of accessible and faithful reproductions of the interart works remains a primary reason why this genre has not been explored in depth in modernist musical discourses. In a 1922 article titled ‘Publishing’, Satie laments that ‘Music will never have the same “published” qualities as Literature.’51 In the case of his interart works, they remain in the ‘ugly brother’ category for the time being.

Notes 1 Nigel Wilkins (ed.), The Writings of Erik Satie (London: Eulenburg Press, 1980), 119. 2 Peter Dayan coined the term ‘interart aesthetic’ in his book Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art: From Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). In this study, Dayan explores a common interart aesthetic in works by Satie, Whistler, Stravinsky, Apollinaire, Braque and Ponge. 3 For a complete list of Satie’s extant manuscripts, including neat publisher copies, see Robert Orledge’s ‘Chronological Catalogue of Satie’s Compositions and Research Guide to the Manuscripts’, in Erik Satie: Music, Art & Literature, ed. Caroline Potter (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 243–324. 4 Dayan, Art as Music, 2. 5 See Simon Shaw-Miller, ‘ “The Only Musician with Eyes”: Erik Satie and Visual Art’, 85, and Helen Julia Minors, ‘Exploring Interart Dialogue in Erik Satie’s Sports et divertissements (1914/1922)’, in Erik Satie, ed. Potter (2013). See also Shaw-Miller’s chapter on Satie in his book Eye hEar the Visual in Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 6 Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). More recent publications include the anthologies by John Mullarkey and Charlotte de Mille (eds), Bergson and the Art of Immanence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski and Laci Mattison (eds), Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). In her essay ‘Resituating the Spectral Revolution’, Jann Pasler explores how musical form in Debussy’s impressionist works may be Bergsonian, a line of enquiry inspired by Bergson’s confession that he had an ‘intuitive predilection’ for Debussy’s music. See

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Jann Pasler, Writing Through Music: Essays on Music, Culture and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 82–98. Nomenclature is addressed in a number of recent publications on music and visual arts, most notably in Tim Shephard and Anne Leonard (eds), The Routledge Companion to Music & Visual Art (London: Routledge, 2013), and Peter Vergo, The Music of Painting (London: Phaidon, 2012). Wilkins, Writings, 110. Wilkins, Writings, 84. These movements also include Impressionism, Esprit Nouveau and Orphism. Posthumously, Satie has also been labelled a minimalist and neo-classicist. For further information on Satie and the artistic milieu in which he lived and worked, see Caroline Potter, Erik Satie: A Parisian Composer and His World (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016). Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France: 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage, 1968(1955)), 28. Cited in Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 240. Cited in Sylvia Kahan, Music’s Modern Muse (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2009), 244. Such labelling practices have proven contentious amongst music historians in recent years. For an insightful commentary on the limitations of the philological tools of musicology, see Philip Bohlman, ‘The Canons in the Musicology Toolbox’, in Disciplining Music, ed. Philip Bohlman and Katherine Bergeron (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 10–22. Cited in Christopher Green, Art in France (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 28. This lecture was presented at the ‘Ateneo’ in Barcelona on 17 November 1922. Carol-Bérard, ‘Socrate, M. Erik Satie et les placeurs d’étiquettes’, Une Semaine à Paris, 26 January 1923, 9–10. ‘Erik Satie changerait “sa manière” simplement pour le plaisir de dépiter les placeurs d’étiquettes.’ Dayan, Art as Music, 3. These criteria exclude a small number of Satie’s works of this period that can also be classed as interart works, yet merit additional or differing aesthetic consideration that lies outside the scope of the present study. These are Medusa’s Trap (play and 7 dances for pf, 1913); Enfantines I, II & III (1913); Things Seen to the Right and Left (without glasses) (pf, vln, 1914); Three Little Love Poems (1914); Sonatine Bureaucratique (1917); and the collaborations The Puppets are Dancing (1913) and Three Melodies (1916). Alan M. Gillmor was the first Satie scholar to provide a list of ‘The Humoristic Piano Suites’ that all contain ‘the endearing qualities that have become virtually synonymous with Satie’s name: wit, parody, irony, fantasy’. Alan M. Gillmor, Erik Satie (Boston: Twayne, 1988), 147–8. Robert Orledge uses the term ‘humoristic’ in quotation marks to categorize a ‘new departure approach’ in Satie’s career between 1912 and 1915. See Orledge, Satie the Composer, 3. Steven Moore Whiting devotes a chapter of his book Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) to ‘Satie’s Humoristic Works for Piano’. Whiting notes that following Old Sequins & Breastplates (1913), ‘Satie seems to have dispensed with ironical quotation’, though he continued to marry ‘increasingly surrealistic narratives and abstruse titles with illustrative music’ (408).

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20 In the seminal work Satie the Composer, Robert Orledge is the first scholar to challenge the commonly held belief that Satie was not a serious composer in explicit terms. 21 For an in-depth discussion on the ideological issues pertaining to humour in Satie’s music, see A. M. Hanlon, ‘Satie and the Meaning of the Comic’, in Erik Satie, ed. Potter, 19–48. 22 For an extensive list of performance indications in Satie’s published piano works, see Ornella Volta (ed.), A Mammal’s Notebook (London: Atlas Press, 1996), 46–9. 23 A number of them also have forewords either at the start of a piece or an individual movement. 24 Volta, A Mammal’s Notebook, 41. 25 Cited in Orledge, Satie the Composer, 68. 26 For instance, see the introductions to Orledge’s Satie the Composer and Gillmor’s Erik Satie. Gillmor argues that most of Satie’s output is ‘recalcitrant’ to analysis. 27 Dayan, Art as Music, 49. 28 Cited in Orledge, Satie the Composer, 68. 29 Cited in Green, Art in France, 99. 30 V. P., ‘Le Mois’, Revue musicale S.I.M., 15 May 1912, 69. ‘M. Erik Satie avec ses Pièces à quatre mains, En Habit de Cheval, scandalisera les esprits arriérés qui s’obstinent encore à chercher quelque rapport entre le titre d’un recueil et son contenu’. 31 Ornella Volta (ed.), Correspondance (Paris: IMEC, 2000), 186. Orledge lists the various titles of this work found in Satie’s notebooks in his catalogue of Satie’s manuscripts and works in Potter’s Erik Satie, 285. Similarly, the works Thoughts Before Last and In Horse’s Clothing were originally titled Strange Rumours and Divertissement respectively. 32 Orledge, Satie the Composer, 298. 33 Orledge, Satie the Composer, 222. Satie first introduced his musique d’ameublement at a concert at the Galerie Barbazanges on 8 March 1920. 34 The striking exceptions to this general rule are in the instances of musical parody, where Satie’s subversive intent is clearly conveyed through titles such as Hypocritical Chorale, Groping Fugue and Bureaucratic Sonatine. 35 Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 183–4. 36 Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 140–1. 37 Peter Dickinson (ed.), Cage Talk: Dialogues with and about John Cage (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 50. 38 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, transl. F. L. Pogson (New York: Dover, 2001), 100. 39 Mark Antliff, ‘The Rhythms of Duration: Bergson and the Art of Matisse’, in The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 185. 40 Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighton, Cubism and Culture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 85. The Italian Futurists, Delaunay (the primary proponent of Orphic Cubism) and the Salon Cubists amongst others all acknowledged the influence of Bergson’s ideas on their work. 41 Wilkins, Writings, 79. 42 Simultaneism, or Cubic Orphism, was a short-lived and vaguely defined movement that encompassed a very diverse group of visual painters, many of whom Satie was acquainted with. Many artists associated with this movement denied that label for their work with the exception of Robert Delaunay and Francis Picabia. Satie’s final composition, a collaboration with Picabia, was titled Relâche (‘an instantaneist ballet’):

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instantaneism was another term for Simultaneism used by contemporary critics. This movement is also associated with bruitism (‘noisism’), a term synonymous with Futurism in contemporary musical jargon. In 1913, Blaise Cendrars collaborated with Sonia Delaunay to create the first Simultaneist book, Prose du Transsibérien, a precursor to Satie’s 1914 collaboration, Sports & Recreations. Critics frequently linked Satie to the bruitist group, who were dismissively labelled ‘noisemakers’ in the music press. See Gillmor’s discussion of ‘chronometric form’ in Erik Satie, 36. For an informative discussion on narrativity in modernist music, see Pasler, Writing Through Music, 25–48. The critic Gabrielle Buffet remains the only exception. She discusses Satie’s new ‘literary’ genre in the article ‘Musique d’aujourd’hui’, Soirées de Paris III, 15 March 1914, 181–3. Erik Satie, ‘Salle Pleyel, Guide du Concert’, 29 March 1913, 375–6. ‘Ceux qui ne comprendront pas sont priés par moi, d’observer le plus respectueux silence et de faire montre d’une attitude toute de soumission, toute d’infériorité.’ Jean Poueigh, ‘Le Cubisme et la Musique’, La Rampe: Revue Hebdomadaire des spectacles, 24 May 1917, 1. Poueigh published this article under the pseudonym Octave Séré. Buffet, ‘Musique d’aujourd’hui’, 181–2. ‘Plus d’essais de musique pure, mais des formes mi-dramatiques, mi-musicales, c’est-à-dire que l’architecture idéale des formes anciennes, sonates, symphonies, etc., etc., est remplacée par un motif littéraire auquel la musique s’assujettit rigoureusement et qui est la carcasse même de l’œuvre . . .’ . Paul Bertrand, ‘Musique pure et Musique dramatique’, Le Ménestrel, 17 June 1921, 249–51, 250. Mompou was a student at the Paris Conservatoire from 1911 to 1914 and would have first encountered Satie’s interart genre during this period. Wilkins, Writings, 119.

5

The ‘Figure in the Carpet’ M. K. Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts Spyros Petritakis

But he [the Demiurge] took thought to make, as it were, a moving likeness of eternity; and, at the same time that he ordered the Heaven, he made, of eternity that abides in unity, an everlasting likeness moving according to number – that to which we have given the name Time. Plato, Timaeus1

The ‘universal music’ of the arts In 1906, in the fifth issue of the Russian Symbolist journal Zolotoe Runo (The Golden Fleece), the ideological platform of the artistic group Golubaja roza (The Blue Rose), an article appeared by one D. Imgardt (a name believed to be a pseudonym) entitled ‘La peinture et la revolution’.2 Published at a time when Russia was seething with unrest after the mass social upheavals of the preceding year and the disastrous war with Japan fought between 1904 and 1905, the article sought to ease its readers’ fears that the wave of the proletarian revolution would sweep everything in its path, namely, both the old bourgeois order and its cultural traces. D. Imgardt asserts to his readers that: Science, art and mysticism – the three movable principles of social progress – cannot disappear suddenly without leaving a trace and without an internal cause . . . For that reason, I believe that such forces will attain a development and an extraordinary thriving in future societies . . . One can be assured that the new life of a yet unknown future will bring about, among other innovations, new rights, a new social role for art and ‘a new aesthetic with new laws.’3

In further elaborating his ideas of how the traditional type of artist as entertainer would disappear and a new aesthetic would emerge from the debris of the old, Imgardt argues that 103

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. . . new artists will be true prophets and priests – the heralds of the Universal Soul’s inspirations. With a language of visions, dreams, colours and sounds they will begin to prophesy where positive scientific knowledge will lapse helplessly into silence and, after having accomplished their secret mission, they will cede their place to mystics and ascetics, namely to the magicians of faith . . . The principal question of the aesthetic of the future will certainly be the problem of the harmony and union of the arts, the problem of a ‘universal music’ of the arts.4

Touching specifically upon the fields of painting and music, Imgardt remarks that painting has remained ‘unchangeable’ during the centuries and for a next phase to be anticipated in the evolution of art history, painters should have to diligently study the ‘musical theories of melody, harmony and rhythm’. Moreover, Imgardt continues, an art practitioner should be skilled enough to use his chromatic scales in the same way a musician composes a piece in minor or major tonality. Under these presuppositions, as Imgardt encouragingly puts it, a new generation of artists would come on the scene, who could practise and establish a kind of visual music (musique visuelle) and phonic painting (peinture musicale).5 The ideas expressed here pre-empt in many aspects those put down by Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) some years later in his seminal treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art, 1911). Similar aspirations to create a new artistic language, or to achieve a synthesis of the arts, also manifested themselves in the artistic output of other Central and Eastern European Symbolist artists, most notably the Czech painter František Kupka (1871–1957), the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1871–1915) and the Lithuanian composer and painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911). Nevertheless, the reconceptualization of painting from a subject-oriented art to a visual language with abstract forms cannot be understood independently from the social and cultural issues raised in Imgardt’s article. Namely, in their struggle for social and cultural renewal, these artists were motivated by deeplyheld political, social, as well as spiritual convictions. It is now well documented that these artists’ desire to create a new visual language which, like the abstract language of music, would express and evoke more profound feelings, also derived from a careful study of theosophical doctrine.6 The interest in theosophy, fuelled by a craving for religious and cultural syncretism, was also shared by a broad range of intellectuals in Russia at the turn of the century, a period of creative ebullience, widely known as the Silver Age. More specifically, the notion of the ‘universal music’ of the arts, that Imgardt discusses in his paper, was widely reflected in the works of the so-called second generation or wave of Russian literati, led by Andrey Bely (1880–1934), Alexander Blok (1880–1921), Georgy Chulkov (1879– 1939) and Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949).7 Equally significant for those intellectuals was the strong sense of ‘mission’ towards the moribund nineteenth-century society and the role of ‘prophet’ and ‘priest’ to their generation. As A. Pyman contends: [T]he ‘second generation’ of Russian Symbolists, was distinctly different. No longer voices crying in the wilderness, they came with a message – or a hope, or a

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warning – and they came with a rush. Where the forerunners had fought their way inch by inch, the breach they had made in public acceptance was suddenly filled by an exuberant brotherhood concentrated to change – not only in literature, but in culture, in life itself.8

In their quest towards a third path between individuality and communal religion, aestheticism and social reform, Western civilization and Eastern barbarism, these intellectuals thought that art ‘could actually alter life’,9 in the theurgical sense of the word, creating a new consciousness and a new society. In this light, art becomes a vehicle through which an individual can experience not only social change and reform but also a transit to the ‘other side’ – a ‘flight’ to a hidden reality.10 On Wednesdays, between 1905 and 1912, the Symbolist poet and philosopher Ivanov, revered as the ‘wise Prospero’ of the Russian Symbolist milieu, had transformed his famous Tower, a mansard roof apartment in the neighbourhood of the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg, into a cultural hub for artists, musicians, scientists, playwrights and art critics, all of whom were involved in artistic activities, lectures, musical performances and philosophical soirées. The legendary Wednesdays involved discussions on wide-ranging topics covering mostly ideological fields, from Mystical Anarchism, spiritualism, Orthodoxy, academia and social democracy. At these symposia, Ivanov, as M. Wachtel says, ‘was in his element as the master interlocutor, using his vast erudition to instruct and inspire’.11 It must have been with this audience in mind that Ivanov wrote his commemorative essay on the composer and painter Čiurlionis, titled ‘Čiurlionis and the problem of the Synthesis of the Arts’, published in 1914, in the special third issue of the Petersburg art journal Apollon, which was dedicated to the painter. Immediately following Čiurlionis’s untimely death in a sanatorium in 1911, at the age of thirty-six, his works, both musical and pictorial, were received with rapt interest by a circle of Symbolist painters and essayists located in St Petersburg. Moreover, many of his paintings were reproduced in Apollon from 1911 to 1916.12 Along with Ivanov’s essay, the critic Valerian A. Chudovsky wrote an extensive article focusing on the works of the painter, especially those shown in the posthumous exhibition organized in St Petersburg in early 1912.13 Ivanov’s essay aimed, on the one hand, to penetrate the philosophical core of Čiurlionis’s artistic output and, on the other, to expound on his own ideological purposes. Just as Imgardt laid stress on the artist’s mystic yet liberating role in society, Ivanov highlighted the dual penetrative perception that Čiurlionis possessed: ‘there are two mysterious features in Čiurlionis’s work: what, he, the clairvoyant of the unseen world, saw, and what he saw as a careful observer of our world’.14 However, while Ivanov extolled Čiurlionis’s ability to embody musical principles in the artistic process, he nevertheless argued that such a predilection should always respect the element of imagery in its pure form, unexposed to external aesthetic transformation.15 Ivanov’s analysis hovered tentatively between the unbearable burden of humanistic cultural heritage and the credo for radical social renewal. Čiurlionis’s case deserves special attention not only for his Doppelbegabung (double talent) as a painter and a composer – Kandinsky was also playing the piano and cello – but

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primarily because this double gift was consummated by his institutional training as both a musician and painter. The purpose of this chapter is to examine Čiurlionis’s reception by Ivanov. Three interrelated points of departure inform this analysis. The first concerns the importance of theosophical ideas in Ivanov’s essay. More specifically, the motif of ‘ascension’ provides a foil against which Ivanov’s reading of Čiurlionis can be examined in a new light. The second point concerns the application of the structural attributes of music to the practice of painting. The fact that in his paintings Čiurlionis incorporates techniques used in musical composition is also evident throughout Ivanov’s analysis. Lastly, Ivanov’s notion of the synthesis of the arts holds an important part in his world-view. I will argue that what Ivanov proposes in his essay is a suggestion of a hyper-space reality, a place where antinomies between the different artistic media, painting and music or space and time, are waived. The case of Ivanov as mediator of Čiurlionis’s work is significant, since it was Ivanov who sought to carve out a role for Čiurlionis in the years following his death, disseminating and promoting his works through various artistic and critical networks in the rest of Europe, an impulse that, to a high degree, reflected his own aesthetic preferences and choices.16

The composer and painter M. K. Čiurlionis During his lifetime, Čiurlionis wrote more than 200 musical compositions – symphonic, choral and piano works – and painted around 300 pictures, to most of which he ascribed musical titles, such as ‘Prelude’, ‘Fugue’, ‘Sonata’ or tempo markings such as ‘Allegro’, ‘Adagio’ and so on. In contrast to his musical output, his artistic one encompasses only six years of intense activity (1903–9).17 While, for the largest part of the twentieth century, Čiurlionis’s work fell into oblivion, over recent decades there has been a scholarly resurgence in questions relating to its philosophical background, the structural similarities between Čiurlionis’s paintings and his music, and the iconographical sources or the Lithuanian motifs that stimulated his artistic imagination.18 Čiurlionis’s paintings, which after the 1970s have been exhibited in many major European cities, are now the research subject of an expanding scholarly community.19 Born into a musical family in the little town of Varėna in southeastern Lithuania, then part of Czarist Russia, and brought up nearby in Druskininkai, Čiurlionis displayed a talent for music from an early age and, under the patronage of Prince Mikalojus Oginski (1849–1902), he received a diploma in composition (for cantata De Profundis) from the Warsaw Musical Institute (1894–9).20 In the summer of 1901, under the prompting of Prince Oginski, Čiurlionis set off for Leipzig to hone his compositional skills at the Leipzig Conservatory (1901–2) under the eminent German pedagogues and composers Karl Reinecke (1824–1910) and Salomon Jadassohn (1831–1902), the latter being a renowned master of counterpoint and teacher of famous composers, such as Edvard Grieg (1843–1907), Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), Frederick Delius (1862–1934) and Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909).21 Through Čiurlionis’s correspondence with his lifelong Polish friend and composer Eugeniusz Morawski

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(1876–1948), we learn that Čiurlionis was a fervent admirer of Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Wagner and that he regularly attended musical performances in the famous Gewandhaus Hall in Leipzig, where he heard George Frederic Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus, Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, Richard Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung and Franz Liszt’s Les préludes.22 Apart from forming his musical tastes, Čiurlionis also took an interest in the city’s art galleries and exhibitions, his first direct contact with Neoromantic and Symbolist trends.23 Even though no drawings or paintings survive from that period, we may surmise that it must have been in Leipzig where the idea of painting dawned on him.24 During Čiurlionis’s stay in Leipzig, two factors must have been crucial for his later artistic evolution: first, his espousal of structurally musical thinking, especially through the diligent study of counterpoint, fugues and canons; and second, his immersion in Symbolist aesthetics and more precisely the pictorial realm of Arnold Böcklin (1827– 1901), whose paintings he had seen in the city.25 In fact, Čiurlionis wrote a letter to his brother Povilas on a postcard reproduction of Arnold Böcklin’s Prometheus, boasting, ‘I have already painted one symbolistic painting.’26 At the turn of the century Böcklin’s paintings were believed to impart to the viewer a certain ‘musicality’ that emanated from the luminous colours of his canvas as well as from the depiction of accurately painted musical instruments in his works. After Böcklin’s death in 1901, in conjunction with commemorations in many cities in Germany, many performances were given in which some of his paintings were set to music. Early in 1902, Čiurlionis saw in Leipzig one such performance, namely the Böcklin Symphony (Op. 115, 1901) by the Swiss composer Hans Huber (1852–1921), whose fourth movement (Finale) consists of eight parts, each one of them illustrating a famous Böcklin painting. Nevertheless, Čiurlionis, who, in the meanwhile, may have been reflecting upon the parallelism between music and the visual arts, was not impressed by Huber’s endeavour, since he thought that the piece failed to serve its purpose.27 In one of Čiurlionis’s first painting attempts, Stillness (1904–5), an anthropomorphic, large rock formation or reef emerges from the surface of the water like a Triton or a sea monster envisioned by Böcklin. The two lights on the coast suggest the creature’s luminous eyes. While many commentators on Čiurlionis’s work have drawn comparisons to Böcklin’s Island of the Dead, I would like to suggest a possible visual derivation from the work Stillness of the Sea (1887). In Böcklin’s painting the reef and the sea monster constitute two different pictorial elements while in Čiurlionis’s work they merge into one. This type of anthropomorphization or animization, in which natural forms are depicted as though they were humans or animals, is indeed characteristic of both Böcklin and Čiurlionis. However, in Čiurlionis’s painting, the image loses its clarity and a new plastic language is introduced. The graphic contour of the reef resembles the melodic line of a composition that culminates in higher pitches in the right-hand area of the picture. But most intriguing is the fact that Čiurlionis literally inverts his theme, according to the contrapuntal technique, as the reflection of the beast-like reef on the surface of the water indicates.28 Upon returning to Warsaw in 1904, Čiurlionis declined a teaching post at the conservatory and, as a growing desire to study painting was taking hold of him, he

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enrolled together with his friend Morawski in the newly-established School of Fine Arts. The art school aimed at training painters, sculptors and specialists in the applied arts (ceramics, textiles, etc.) and was headed by Kazimierz Stabrowsky (1869–1929, also of Lithuanian origin), a renowned theosophist and expert in occultist matters, who established the first Polish lodge (Alba) of the Theosophical Society in 1905.29 Stabrowsky and the other teaching staff, among them the painters Konrad Krzyżanowsky (1872–1922) and Ferdynand Ruszczyc (1870–1936, another Lithuanian), were involved with the Młoda Polska (Young Poland) movement, which promoted new aesthetic principles, Symbolist tendencies and artistic freedom. Striving for a new modernist art that emulated the works he had encountered in his journeys, Čiurlionis gleaned in his first paintings (1903–5) elements from different visual sources and assimilated them in his work. In summer 1906, Čiurlionis travelled to the great artistic centres of Central Europe: Prague, Dresden, Nuremberg and Vienna. With his horizons expanded and deeply affected by the Lithuanian national movement of the time, Čiurlionis moved to Vilnius in the middle of 1907 to organize the First Lithuanian Exhibition. Lithuanian folk art would have a tremendous impact on Čiurlionis’s creative output. During that time, Čiurlionis devoted himself both to the artistic and musical coordination of Lithuanian cultural life: he led Lithuanian choirs in Warsaw and Vilnius, appeared in concerts as a conductor and pianist and even started composing a Lithuanian national opera, Jūratė (Queen of the Baltic), for which he made also sketches for its scenography.30 While still composing, Čiurlionis began creating his first pictorial sonatas, which were displayed in the Second Exhibition of Lithuanian Art in 1908 (Sonata of the Sun and Sonata of the Spring): both works are four-picture cycles divided in movements, ‘Allegro’, ‘Andante’, ‘Scherzo’ and ‘Finale’. In autumn 1908, in order to avoid a struggle with what he perceived to be the cultural backwardness and stodginess of his native country, which also stifled him financially, Čiurlionis headed to St Petersburg seeking a more sophisticated audience who would understand the depths of meaning communicated in his paintings.31 He arrived there with a letter of recommendation from the Vilnius sculptor Mark Antolovsky to one of the members of the Mir Iskusstva, the Symbolist painter of Lithuanian origin Mstislav Valerianovich Dobuzhinsky (1875–1957).32 Dobuzhinsky as well as Alexandre Benois (1870–1960), the founding member of Mir Iskusstva, supported Čiurlionis during his sojourn in St Petersburg, warmly expressing their admiration for his double talent. On 4 January 1909, Čiurlionis’s paintings ‘Allegro’ and ‘Finale’ from the Sonata of the Sea (1908), ‘Andante’ from the Sonata of the Stars (1908), ‘Finale’ from the Sonata of the Serpent (1908), the Fugue (1908), as well as his diptych Prelude and Fugue (1908) were exhibited in the Salon in St Petersburg alongside works by Alexej von Jawlensky (1865– 1941) and Kandinsky, causing a sensation.33 Several others exhibitions followed that year and the next in St Petersburg and Moscow, organized by the Union of Russian Artists. However, Čiurlionis’s expectation of establishing a clientele was disappointed, not least because the musical metaphors he applied in his paintings as well as the lack of subject matter were regarded by some founding and influential members of the Union of Russian Artists as ambiguous and abstruse.34

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The motif of ‘ascension’: Čiurlionis, Ivanov and the theosophical doctrine In his essay on Čiurlionis, Ivanov navigates various strands of Western European culture, from Neoplatonism to medieval philosophy and from esotericism to the Orthodox Church, whilst not referring directly to theosophy.35 Nevertheless, hints of Ivanov’s preoccupation with theosophy are evident in the text. The extent of Čiurlionis’s appropriation of theosophical ideas is still contested, with many commentators on Čiurlionis claiming that there is no hint of Čiurlionis’s immersion in theosophical thought.36 However, it seems reasonable to contend that Čiurlionis received and embraced debates and discussions on theosophy through their revival, circulation and filtration via Symbolist networks. It would be rather difficult, though, to prove that he was a practitioner of these ideas or that he communicated them programmatically through his work. If Ivanov’s ‘reading’ of Čiurlionis contributed to the shaping of an idiosyncratic ‘aura’ around the painter’s name, in the years following his death, this is an issue that needs to be discussed further by scholars. Čiurlionis, says Ivanov, is ‘the clairvoyant of the unseen world’.37 Emphasizing Čiurlionis’s religiosity, Ivanov cites the writings of the apostle Paul: ‘Were Čiurlionis not a religious man, all this would have been only “a sounding of brass and a clashing of cymbals” .’38 This remark echoes in many ways the theosophical doctrine according to which the artist assumes the role of the redeemer, seer or visionary. Furthermore, for Ivanov, Čiurlionis becomes the ‘signalman of the soul’, whose ultimate destiny would be the illumination and revelation of man’s upward path to spiritual enlightenment. His paintings become the visual carved blueprints upon which the soul undertakes its Odyssey – stigmata that can be palpated like ‘human scars’ (hulē).39 In Ivanov’s view, this peregrination of the soul, evident in the carved messages on the canvas, unfolds before the viewer as ‘upward movement’, a kind of idée fixe, which appears to return to the sources of Plato’s ideas and Pythagoras’s theory of numbers. Referring to Čiurlionis’s Sonata of the Pyramids (1909) (see Plate 9), Ivanov remarks that ‘the pyramids, the steeply ascending and competing obelisks, which aspire to the monad of monads . . . become lost in the clouds only to reappear again’.40 As Ivanov argues, the motif of ascension serves a dual function here: on the one hand, as a musical ascension, that is, interweaving motifs of helical chains and bridges evolving, unfolding, reposing and again reaching the summit of artistic creation; and, on the other hand, as spiritual ascension, as mystical union with the cosmic principle, by which the spirit navigates towards higher spheres of consciousness. Similarly, according to theosophical circles, the spiritual journey to higher levels of consciousness is a constant pursuit, whereby the individual accomplishes enlightenment and self-transcendence. In a lecture read at the Moscow Religious-Philosophical Society in December 1913, entitled ‘On the Limits of Art’, in which he expanded his thoughts on Symbolist aesthetics, Ivanov, to illustrate his arguments, incorporated sketches depicting large triangular shapes which extended, depending on their length, from the lower level to certain points in the higher level that was marked by parallel curved lines.41 Between these two realms of reality, the lower and the higher, a dangerous desert sprawled, ‘a

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membrane with reflective mirages’, like the ones the nomad sees when he desperately seeks for water.42 The artist, like Odysseus, has to carefully cross the desert of illusions and not tarry in this land of deceptive hallucinations. He will then receive revelation of the contours of higher realities lying beyond the desert, to which he shall again descend to form ‘its plastic mistiness into phantoms’, namely moulds based on the incorporeal idea – fleshless idea43 – which he previously envisioned in the realm of the real. Thus, the experience of the lower reality is indispensable since it enriches the artist with its experiential knowledge and consciousness which he needs to cross the desert. However, if one remains lost in the barren desert of mirror reflections he will produce a ‘dreamy, capriciously fantastic and whimsically misty’ art, based on emotional and psychological experiences, the type of symbolism Ivanov names ‘idealistic’.44 These Symbolist artists – ‘the conspirators of individualism’ – favour material culture and are thus trapped in subjectivism, because what they perceive is the reflection of their own passions and desires.45 In fact, that kind of criticism was often raised by intellectuals of the second Symbolist wave against decadent artists and aesthetes of the first generation, who mainly oriented themselves towards French culture and aesthetics.46 The unflagging battle between realism and nominalism, which dates back to medieval scholasticism, had been updated at the dawn of the twentieth century by the theosophist and later anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), who bemoaned the unflinching victory of nominalism over realism.47 A realist would posit that universals do exist and manifest themselves through perceivable objects – realia sunt in rebus, as Ivanov often stresses.48 By contrast, a nominalist would contend that no abstract objects or forms surround the physical particulars, which are concretely defined in space and time. Taking these remarks into account, it becomes evident that Ivanov recontextualizes the above debate in the bosom of Russian Symbolism, in the form of a polemic between Idealistic and Realistic Symbolism. An artist who crossed the boundaries of selfsame reality and descended back with a store of knowledge to sculpt from the dust is a representative of Realistic Symbolism, since he can recognize the ideal within the trivial earthly. In other words, while Idealistic Symbolism is a ‘musical monologue’, Realistic Symbolism is ‘a chorus and a round dance’.49 Taking these strands together, we can now return to Čiurlionis. Ivanov’s statement that the artist ascends from mundane reality to that which is more ‘real’ – a realibus ad realiora – must be read in this context.50 Čiurlionis painted humble things, like trees, bridges, huts and so on, which he had seen in real life, but, ‘when the seraph touched his prophetic eye’,51 he developed them to empty shells of a new reality. In a much earlier article of his, in 1905, Ivanov described the following vision: A soaring eagle; a breaking wave; the tension of a column and challenge of a tower; a four-cornered obelisk reaching toward the heavenly monad, narrowing in its ascent and refracted in its supreme proximity to the world’s boundaries; the mysterious ladders of the pyramids, rising from the four corners of the earth to a single pinnacle; the Sursum corda of mountain peaks, formed of the earth’s constant

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flight from the worldly, petrified like a snowy, radiant throne in the detached triumph of final achievement.52

Is there a more suitable image to juxtapose with this passage than Čiurlionis’s Sonata of the Pyramids (Plate 9). Moreover, the resemblance between these visual images, evoked by Ivanov in his essay, and Čiurlionis’s ‘Angels’ from Prelude (1908–9) is so striking that it suggests that an osmosis of ideas between the two intellectuals was simmering as early as 1906–7. The Sursum Corda (hearts lifted) is another term that often emerges in Ivanov’s essay on Čiurlionis.53 It derives from the Latin liturgy and denotes the upward movement of the soul towards a more real universe. It had gained a certain popularity within theosophical circles and, at that time in Europe, there were quite a few groups with that name. In 1922, Stabrowski, Čiurlionis’s teacher in the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw, founded a mystical group of artists under the name of Sursum Corda.54

Čiurlionis, Scriabin and Ivanov’s notion of the synthesis of the arts Ivanov’s stance towards the ‘synthesis of the arts’ remains, on a theoretical level, obscure and inconsistent till the end of his essay. While, on the one hand, he asserts that the two arts, painting and music, have separate characteristics and therefore that a synthesis would violate the sacred principles of each art, on the other hand he contends that such a synthesis would occur only in a liturgical sense, if the two arts became intertwined, as in the chorus of the ancient Greek theatre or in the Christian mystery.55 He later elaborated on this idea, involving the audience in the scheme. Ivanov seems to concede that if a crowd of spectators fused with the composer-painter into a choral body, then a harmonious motion of the worlds could be filled with singing colours and shining sounds. In the course of Ivanov’s essay, however, one thing becomes clear to the reader: Ivanov’s notion of ‘synthesis’ collides with that propagated by Imgardt. We have seen that the anonymous writer was pleading for a new grammar of painting that would emulate the rigorous structures of musical composition. In fact, he was never concerned with involving a collective audience in his analysis, let alone creating a collective myth that would show society the way into a new era of evolution. Although some of Ivanov’s theories hark back to Wagner and Nietzsche, both of whom he had studied thoroughly, there are some points within them that need further clarification. In his essay ‘The artwork of the future’ (Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft), published initially in 1849 in Leipzig, Wagner stated that the boundaries of the arts should not be violated, advocating more a collaboration of different forms of art in the service of a larger group. He declared that the three sister-arts, dance (Tanzkunst), music (Tonkunst) and poetry (Dichtkunst), could unite forces in one collective operation (Wirksamkeit), in which the highest faculty of each comes to its highest unfolding. In other words, by working in common, each one of them attains the power to be and do the very thing which, of her own and inmost essence, ‘she’ longs to do and

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be. Each ‘sister-art’, at the limit of ‘her’ own power, can be absorbed into the other – yet ‘she’ maintains her own purity and freedom, her independence, as that which ‘she’ is.56 Thus, Wagner’s main arguments revolve around two axes: on the one hand, the articulation of an ideal work of art; and on the other, the attempt to forge a unified audience from disparate groups of individuals.57 He also argued that the three arts had achieved a perfect unification in ancient Greek drama, an idea that Ivanov also employed in his writings on aesthetics. Ivanov rejects the idea of synthesizing the different branches of arts into a new organism, since the specific nature of each art would be violated and eventually atrophy. In that sense, Ivanov follows Wagner, who had also argued in favour of the collaboration of different art forms – poetry, music and dance – in a larger entity, without each individual art discarding its own, special identity. However, if each art should ‘rotate on its own axis and follow its own orbit’ so that it could gain its full potential, then the creation of a Gesamtkunstwerk would be unfeasible.58 But what if the artist were a prophet and could create a ‘new reality in which he could wake up to find that he is surrounded by another one’?59 In my view, Ivanov redefines Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk in a totally new context. A ‘site of artistic fusion’, he claims, would be feasible if a new reality were invented, into which different audiences, after attaining a collective consciousness, would fuse with each other. The terms in which Ivanov presents the synthesis of the arts recalls a cluster of ideas that were understood at that time by the terms ‘apocalyptic Christianity’ and ‘mystical anarchism’. Ivanov, together with his comrade-in-arms, the Russian Symbolist poet Georgy Chulkov (1879–1939), were the main advocates of mystical anarchism. Among the principal tenets of this movement were the rejection of physical reality and its socio-economic structure as well as the conviction that an apocalypse, couched in soteriological terms, was imminent.60 I showed earlier how Ivanov understood the rejection of reality on an aesthetic level. From his perspective, transcending the physical reality – in the quest for a more real one – was equivalent to bypassing conventional politics or institutions, namely liberal society, as well as institutional orthodoxy. In the crucial period, around 1905, after the failure to attract popular audiences through the revival of Dionysian theatre, some Symbolists, Ivanov among them, concluded that ‘eternal myths’ would have to be reformulated to address contemporary concerns.61 In order to bridge this gulf between themselves and society, they envisioned a new stage of communal evolution, through which individuals would participate in something like a ‘religious’ synthesis. The formation of eternal mythical symbols created by the artist-prophet would intensify the psychological impact on the communal body of believers. This notion of communion or conciliation is best described by the term Sobornost, an ecclesiological principle connoting a collective body in which the elements retain their individuality.62 The term, which harks back to the work of the Russian philosopher and theologian Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), was of enormous significance to Ivanov, who disseminated it among the Russian Symbolists. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Ivanov positions Čiurlionis’s name beside that of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915). Scriabin, who spent a great many years travelling in Central Europe and Belgium, re-established himself in 1909 permanently in Moscow, where, in 1913, he befriended Ivanov.63 Scriabin, who had

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close ties with the rich Belgian esoteric subculture, especially with the Belgian Symbolist painter and theosophist Jean Delville (1867–1953), became a member of the so-called White Lodge of the Theosophical Society, and researched, after the latter’s prompting, on synaesthetic art and colour-music, especially on the clavecin oculaire, the earliest colour organ, designed by the Jesuit mathematician Louis Bertrand Castel (1688–1757), which Imgardt also discusses in his paper.64 The product of this quest was the symphonic work Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (Op. 60, 1910) that features a part for a tastiera per luce (marked in the score as luce – light), a kind of colour organ. It was also Delville who painted the frontispiece for the first published edition of Prometheus, the premiere of which was held in Moscow in 1911. However, it was only later, in March 1915 at Carnegie Hall in New York, that the colour organ was included in the performance.65 Delville was also planning a larger project, in the form of a Gesamtkunstwerk, where other artists, among them Čiurlionis and the designer Séraphin Soudbinine (1870– 1944), would cooperate in exploring the figure of Prometheus, as it had been interpreted by Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891).66 For that reason, Delville asked Scriabin to approach Čiurlionis in St Petersburg. It remains unclear if the two composers ever met there, but we may surmise that Čiurlionis’s mental health must have permanently postponed these plans. After returning to Russia, Scriabin elaborated further on his theosophical ideas, visualizing a synaesthetic total work of art, the Mysterium, envisioned as a synergic merging of dance, light, colour, ritual, poetry and music that would encapsulate the Symbolists’ entire philosophical, theosophical or quasi-religious preoccupations. A ‘Prefatory Act’ (Acte préalable, 1913–15) would serve as a preparation for the Mysterium. After the ‘orgy of purification’, no one would survive to retell what he experienced, since a large conflagration would devour everything in its passage. The poetic text of this ‘Prefatory Act’ is heavily influenced by Ivanov’s ideas, something that it is not given much attention in the literature on Scriabin. Besides, Ivanov had dedicated various poems and essays to the composer, whose vision of a Gesamtkunstwerk, saturated with mystical elements, considered it as a manifestation of his own conception of Sobornost.67 In an earlier paper of his, read in the Moscow Society for Free Aesthetics on 17 March 1910, Ivanov declares that ‘Mysterium is victory over death, the positive affirmation of personality and its action; it restores the symbol as incarnate reality, and restores myth as an actual “Fiat,” let it be!’68 In his painting Rex (1909) (see Fig.  5.1), Čiurlionis explores similar concepts to those evoked by Ivanov. The painting depicts a divine entity engulfing a large globe at the bottom of the scene; a large rock formation, pointing to the Isle of the Dead by Böcklin, appears in the background. Above, seven parallel planes or friezes intermingle with each other, hinting at an inconceivable cosmic union. A chorus of angels appears on the uppermost layer while the layers beneath are overwhelmed by nebula, planets and stars. In the centre of the globe an altar emerges whose eternal fire is reflected on the surface of the water below. For his Mysterium Scriabin also intended to build a round temple, whose figure would be reflected on a water pool. Apart from the mood of communal religion or world union that Čiurlionis tries to evoke with this painting, the duplication of the various motifs of this painting and the interfusion of the different

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Fig. 5.1: Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Rex, 1909, tempera on canvas, 147.1 × 133.7 cm. spheres with each other reflect the essence of Ivanov’s theory of Realistic Symbolism. It seems that Plato’s renowned conception of time from Timaeus is also reflected in this painting. In a well-known passage, Plato denotes time as ‘a moving likeness of eternity, that abides in unity, an everlasting likeness moving according to number’.69 In an enigmatic statement, which echoes Timaeus, Ivanov hints at Čiurlionis’s attempt to transcend time and space through a ‘geometrical transparency’ and to ‘explore the possibilities of a visual signalization of such magnitude that the traditional three dimensions are inadequate’.70 These transparent forms, as we have seen them, for example, in Rex, are identical and rhythmically arranged. Moreover, they are painted in different layers as though they ‘absorbed one another’, giving the impression of ‘a transformed space’.

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Similar passages referring to space and time appear sporadically throughout the essay. Here is another one, more indicative: Divorcing itself from the fourth dimension, which we usually call ‘time’, painting assumes all objects as static and incapable of movement. Motion itself under the gaze of Gorgons becomes petrified into a moment that will last for all eternity. The kinetic nature of music unfolds over a period of elapsed time and thereby makes us forget space. In this manner the two sisters – Painting, which knows only space, and Music, which knows only time – oppose each other. This synthesis of the two is metaphysically possible as a comprehensible harmony of the spheres, as a harmonious motion of worlds filled with singing colours and shining sounds, something that in art is unfeasible.71

If the painter could transcend physical reality, then the antinomies of space and time would cease to exist. According to Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis forces us into a space which swallows up time and motion – into space which is a pure layer of vibrating, colourful forms.’72 In this supra-sensible dimension of space, of which our three-dimensional world might be merely a section or boundary, the singing colours and the shining sounds are ‘reality’ for the gifted spirit. It would be ambitious to state that Ivanov was aware of Einstein’s relativity theory at this point, even though later he seems to have been preoccupied with it.73 What I suggest is that Ivanov draws heavily on Pyotr D. Ouspensky’s seminal work, Tertium Organum (St Petersburg, 1911).74 When, in 1908, the mathematician Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909) formulated his theory on space-time continuum, namely a pseudo-Euclidian space with an additional time dimension, many theosophists, among them Ouspensky, indicated that the perceivable world was an illusory one, nothing more than the ‘Maja’ – the illusoriness of worldly being according to Hindu thought. In other words, in theoretical physics, the Minkowski space is something like a mirror upon which the real universe projects itself. This analogy of the mirror recalls Ivanov’s story of the desert and the Pyramids. In his book, Ouspensky announces that ‘the phenomenal world is merely a means for the artist – just as colours are for the painter, and sounds for the musician – a means for the understanding of the noumenal world and for the expression of that understanding’.75 This passage echoes again Ivanov’s description of the mirrors and the prototype: the phenomenon (duplicate) is the image of the noumenon (archetype or prototype), a mere reflection of it. Nevertheless, one needs to pass through the phenomenon (the land of desert with the mirrors) in order to gain knowledge of the ‘hidden function’ of the noumenon. Ouspensky concludes that only the artist, who has the gift of clairvoyance, can see what others cannot.76 However, as Linda Henderson has convincingly demonstrated, at the turn of the century there was a misunderstanding regarding the concept of the fourth dimension. By examining the dissemination of fourth-dimension discourse in the field of art and art criticism, Henderson concludes that artists were intrigued by something more in the direction of a fourth-dimension philosophy of space rather than Einstein’s theory

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of relativity.77 For those artists, who regarded reality as a flake of some higherdimensional existence, fourth-dimensional space signified a freedom from the restraints of the physical world.

The flight into the fourth dimension Čiurlionis, according to Ivanov, ascends from a reality, laden with ordinary forms and colours, to a greater reality, inhabited by archetypical, unchanging types. Yet Ivanov emphasizes repeatedly that the modus operandi for achieving this ascension is musical composition,78 in other words the composer’s ability to create a fugue or a canon emulating that of similar forms or repeating motifs. Interestingly enough, the word ‘ascent’ that Ivanov uses repeatedly to describe the mood of Čiurlionis’s paintings is rendered in the Lithuanian translation with the word kilimas which means both ‘ascent’ and ‘carpet’.79 Many commentators on Čiurlionis have noticed his ‘bird’s eye view’ of reality – a particular approach to pictorial space, evident in his painting ‘Allegro’ from Sonata of the Pyramids (1909) (Plate 9).80 In fact, both Čiurlionis and Scriabin shared the same fascination for levitation and vertigo, this need to defy gravitational laws and conventional thinking and soar to other realities. The term Sursum expresses these thoughts. But why carpets? The visual connotation between ‘ascent’ and ‘carpet’ is very vividly reflected by flying carpets which have appeared often in Russian folk tales, such as Baba Yaga. Nevertheless, there is something else here that needs to be considered. That is the notion of ‘mirror reflections’, to which I referred earlier. Reflection is commonly used to denote the duplication, almost identical, of an object that appears in a plane mirror. Although it is a concept of Euclidian geometry, and thus is mostly used in visual context, it obeys strict mathematical algorithms, allowing composers to also explore its potential.81 In 1903, the renowned architect and writer of several essays on theosophy and fourth-dimensional space, Claude Fayette Bragdon (1866–1946), wrote a short review in the literary magazine The Critic on the 1903 Henry James novel The Ambassadors, entitled ‘The Figure in Mr. James’s Carpet’.82 He there praised James’s mature style for its uncompromising vagueness, which invites the reader to seek for a central philosophical idea or a specific pattern, so implied and so interwoven as to pass unnoticed. Similarly, in James’s short story ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ the narrator is in a constant quest for the essential meaning of his best author’s books, which he identifies with the ‘figure in the carpet’, a pattern that lies hidden in the intricate and convoluted motifs of an elaborately woven Persian rug. This ‘figure’ – which also serves as a narrative schema – has the effect of a ‘hidden music’. One must decipher the pattern to hear the music that lies within it. The Russian Symbolist painter Michail Wrubel (1856–1910), whose work Čiurlionis knew well, treated colour distribution in his paintings in a way that resembled elaborate patterns on Persian rugs.83 Wrubel was also interested in drawing similarities between painting and music. Similarly, Reginald Machell (1854–1927), a renowned theosophist and painter who personally knew Madame Blavatsky, was fervently engaged in

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discovering a new art of colour-music, which he considered a dormant form of art in Western civilization. He notes: There were great creative artists in the past, in India and Persia and other Eastern Lands, who understood colour-music, and used their knowledge to create great works of pure decorative design on which were based the arts of carpet-weaving and embroidery that became traditional in races that have survived into our own time, and have preserved the formulas of the tradition for thousands of years after the creative impulse had passed on to create other forms of art in other lands. Today the carpets are manufactured solely as commercial goods: as works of art they are but records of a traditional art long since defunct.84

More astounding is Ouspensky’s recollection of a carpet seller who brought back carpets from his travels in the East and traded them for high prices in St Petersburg. Ouspensky displayed a great interest in the weaving procedure, the wool dyes as well as the rhythmic movements and dances in which the women spinners were engaged during their work: [P]erhaps the design and colouring of the carpets are connected with the music, are its expression in line and colour; that perhaps carpets are records of this music, the notes by which the tunes could be reproduced. There was nothing strange in this idea to me as I could often ‘see’ music in the form of a complicated design.85

Yet, can visual principles, such as mirror reflections, evince a structural similarity with the creative process in music? In Euclidean geometry, there are four kinds of rigid motions or ‘plane isometries’, as they are called: rotations, translations, (mirror) reflections and glide reflections. But one can also apply these transformations in musical space.86 In their intriguing survey on the translation of visual principles in Čiurlionis’s musical works, Kevin Holm-Hudson and Darius Kučinskas have demonstrated that strict, symmetrical chords and melodic patterns that appear in the composer’s work after 1906 derive from a profound interest in the formal aspects of decorative arts.87 By drawing mainly on the book Symmetries of Culture, which focuses on the classification of visual symmetries, the two authors have indicated that ascending and descending motifs in some melodic lines in Čiurlionis’ piano pieces can be visualized as geometrical shapes.88 Ascending and descending patterns that follow symmetric trajectories can also be found in many of Čiurlionis’ preludes. For example, a reflection symmetry would correspond to an inversion of a musical phrase. Are symmetrical principles also important in Čiurlionis’ practice of painting? Čiurlionis cultivated an interest in folk art, especially after his trip through Central Europe in 1906. Two years later he noted that ‘folk art plays an enormous role. It is . . . the primary discovery of spiritual interests, the primeval creative expression.’89 He also developed an intense interest in and fascination with weavings, sashes, aprons, woodcarvings and so on, and was particularly concerned about their collection and preservation. It is also suggested that he tried to embed folk art motifs in his late creations, especially in his graphic works, book bindings, vignettes, initials and the like.90

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In his cycle Sonata of the Sun (1906), the painting Flowers (1907–8), the Fairy Tale of Kings (1908–9), or more evidently in his graphic works, various motifs from folklore art are blended with musical means of expression. For example, in the painting Fugue (from the triptych Fantasy, 1908) (see Plate 8) flower formations are arranged in repetitive patterns similar to decorative surfaces on folk embroideries or oriental carpets.91 Examples of rotations or translations can be found almost everywhere. The ‘spikes’ are a perfect example for demonstrating an arrangement according to rotational symmetry. In the ‘Finale’ of the Sonata of the Sun Čiurlionis paints a large bell, whose clapper is covered by a symmetrical cobweb. Apart from alluding to Pythagoras’s discovery of physical and mathematical ratios, Čiurlionis visualizes in the motif of the cobweb the mystical weave of the sounding cosmos, propagated in various theosophical books. The mirror symmetry created by the horizontal and vertical axis is also very striking. An example of mirror reflection or glide reflection symmetry can be found in the reflected figure of the altar and in the cloud formations on the water surface in the painting Rex (Fig. 5.1). Moreover, in the seven friezes above the globe, we discern an example of horizontal translational symmetry; that is, identical figures moving in a certain direction. In Čiurlionis’s music, an example of horizontal translational symmetry may be found in his Prelude (VL . 187, 1901), where repetitive chord progressions appear in bass and repetitive melodic lines respectively. A subtler form of scale symmetry, or even fractal symmetry, one may say, is demonstrated in the figure of the duplicated Rex, who lies inside the enthroned king. An equivalent in music would be the augmentation and diminution, common fugal devices that are used to present a motif or a melody in larger note-values or shorter ones respectively. Finally, in Čiurlionis’s largest paintings, like the late Sonatas and Rex, such repetitions and duplications of figural elements, such as those described above, become more complicated, imparting to the viewer a sense of geometrical or mathematical logic. For theosophists such as Bragdon and Ouspensky, fourth-dimensional spaces were better understood and described with the aid of such symmetrical or even coloured patterns in two-dimensional space, with which they often illustrated their books. In other words, such books offered to their readership ways of visualizing fourth-dimensional space beginning with geometric progression, for example from line to plane, to cube and finally to ‘tesseract’ or hypercube. Pyramids were a favourite example.92 In a lecture delivered in Berlin in 1905, Rudolf Steiner, drawing heavily on Charles Howard Hinton (1853–1907), the British mathematician and promulgator of higher dimensions at the end of nineteenth century, set forth his theory according to which mirror-image symmetries, coloured or not, can help us perceive the fourth dimension, in which we ourselves live.93 Similar passages also appear in Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum. Thus the carpet is, like the surface of a Čiurlionis’s painting, the locus where different colours and patterns interweave with one another, disclosing a mechanism governed by the laws of numbers. The thematic development of a motif in Čiurlionis’s painting – take for example the various viaducts, obelisks, columns or other structures – is subject to the thematic development which can be found in a fugue. Čiurlionis may have drawn inspiration for this serial development from studying decorative objects, perhaps even carpets.

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On the other hand, Ivanov may have seen in these duplications and motivic repetitions something profoundly essential. To paraphrase Ivanov, the ‘figure in the carpet’, a trivial rhythmic or colour pattern found in our ordinary reality, repeats itself and multiplies, giving birth to a series of simulacra, or else it undergoes modification and ‘grows into a projection of its basic (one would say melodious) form’.94 Čiurlionis’s compositional technique serves as a modus operandi in this account of recurrent doubles, in which the viewer (or viewers) perceives the One through the adoration of the many. In this ‘eternal recurrence’ of the figure – to quote Nietzsche – Ivanov saw a manifestation of his own ideological aspirations, namely that the ‘ascension’ to another reality would be feasible if one studies these ‘recurrent returns’ of the figure. What would this reality be if not a fourth-dimensional space where colourful forms vibrate? It may be assumed that Ivanov’s schema is contemplative and does not involve transcendental meditational exercise. By 1910, Symbolism had reached a dead end and the model of the Symbolist poet philosophizing in his ivory tower had been seriously questioned by new ideological groups, such as Marxists. In this socio-political turmoil, Ivanov, recognizing the potential impact of theatre on human consciousness, and expecting that a greater revolution, other than political, would have to occur to transform this consciousness, radicalized his theses on aesthetics to such an extent that no practical implementations were possible anymore. Čiurlionis’s and Scriabin’s untimely deaths sealed this path of ‘theurgical’ explorations, while allowing other ‘-isms’ to undertake new flights to other realities.

Notes 1 Plato, Timaeus 36d, cited in Francis MacDonald Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (Indianapolis, IN, and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 98–9. 2 D. Imgardt, ‘La peinture et la révolution’, Zolotoe Runo 5 (1906): 56–9. This lavishly illustrated journal (1906–9) was financed by the wealthy bohemian Nikolai Ryabushinsky (1876–1951), a supporter of young Moscow Symbolist artists. The first six issues of the journal were published both in Russian and French, a venture that conveys its contributors’ aspirations to gain international recognition. For more on Russian Symbolism, see John E. Bowlt, ‘The Blue Rose: Russian Symbolism in Art’, Burlington Magazine 118, no. 881 (1976): 566–75. 3 Imgardt, ‘La peinture et la révolution’, 56. 4 Imgardt, ‘La peinture et la révolution’, 56. 5 Imgardt, ‘La peinture et la révolution’, 58–9. 6 The interest in the theosophical impact on twentieth-century artists was triggered by the seminal publication and exhibition The Spiritual in Art, held at Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 23 November 1986 to 8 March 1987. See Maurice Tuchman and Judi Freeman (eds), The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985, exh. cat. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986). 7 For more on this topic, see Avril Pyman, A History of Russian Symbolism, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 (1994)); James West, Russian

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Symbolism: A Study of Viacheslav Ivanov and the Russian Symbolist Aesthetic (London: Methuen, 1970). West, Russian Symbolism, 183. West, Russian Symbolism, 185. See F. Kupka’s painting of the same title: The Other Side, 1895, oil on canvas, 46 × 38 cm., Narodni Galerie Prague. The motif of flight was very powerful in fin-de-siècle Russian Symbolism. See the fascinating study by Felix Philipp Ingold, Literatur und Aviatik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980). Michael Wachtel (ed.), Viacheslav Ivanov: Selected Essays, trans. Robert Bird (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), ix. For the reproductions in Apollon, see Audrius V Plioplys, ‘Exhibits of Čiurlionis’s Works outside of Lithuania’, in Čiurlionis: Painter and Composer: Collected Essays and Notes, 1906–1989, ed. Stasys Goštautas and Birutė Vaičjurgis-Šležas (Vilnius: Vaga, 1994), 489. A great variety of essays concerning Čiurlionis’s creative output are gathered or translated in this volume. Both essays were published in the third issue of the journal Apollon in 1914. Although Ivanov’s essay was first presented at a public lecture in St Petersburg in 1914, the introduction to the essay had been conceived much earlier, in 1911, after the death of the painter, and had been jotted down in the form of a letter to the director of the journal, S. K. Makovsky. The article was subsequently reprinted in the collection of Ivanov’s essays Furrows and Boundaries. See Vyacheslav Ivanov, Borozdy I mezhy: Opyty esteticheskie I kirticheskie (Moscow: Musaget, 1916), 315–47. The English translation by R. E. Richardson omits the word ‘problem’ from the title. See Vyacheslav Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts’, in Čiurlionis: Painter and Composer, 74–95. A different translation appears in Vyacheslav Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Problem of the Synthesis of the Arts’, Lituanus 7, no. 2 (1961): 45–57. For an analysis of this essay, see Elizabeth Gillette Jackson, ‘Ivanov’s Čiurlionis and the Problem of the Synthesis of the Arts’, in Vjačeslav Ivanov: Russischer Dichter, Europäischer Kulturphilosoph, ed. Wilfried Potthoff, Beiträge des IV, Internationalen Viacheslav-Ivanov-Symposiums (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1993), 210–22. For Chudovsky’s essay, see Valerian A. Chudovsky, ‘The Poet of the Vertical Line’, in Čiurlionis: Painter and Composer, 96–159. Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Problem of the Synthesis of the Arts’, 76. Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Problem of the Synthesis of the Arts’, 92. Such was the case with the ‘Second Post-Impressionist’ exhibition held at the Grafton Galleries from 5 October to 31 December 1912. Three works by Čiurlionis were shown there: The Knight, The Mountain and Rex (Fig. 5.1). See Audrius V. Plioplys, ‘Čiurlionis’ Paintings in London in 1912’, in Čiurlionis: Mintys/Thoughts, ed. Audrius Plioplys (Vilnius: Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2004), 16; George Kennaway, ‘Lithuanian Art and Music Abroad: English Reception of the Work of M. K. Čiurlionis, 1912–39’, Slavonic and East European Review 83, no. 2 (2005): 234–53. At present, most of his surviving paintings and graphic works as well as the manuscripts of his musical compositions are housed in the National M. K. Čiurlionis Art Museum in Kaunas, Lithuania. The bibliography on Čiurlionis is very comprehensive and covers both fields of his artistic output. For a complete catalogue of his musical compositions, see Darius Kučinskas, Chronologinis Mikalojaus Konstantino Čiurlionio: muzikos katalogas (Kaunas: Technologija, 2008). A complete collection of Čiurlionis’s works for piano, with comments following each piece, is published by the prominent musicologist Vytautas Landsbergis; Vytautas Landsbergis, M.K. Čiurlionis:

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Kūriniai Fortepijonui – Visuma (Kaunas: J. Petronis, 2004). For a catalogue raisonné of his artistic output, see Nijolė Adomavičienė et al., Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis: Album (Kaunas: Šviesa, 2007). For a catalogue of his drawings, sketches and graphic works, in particular, see Milda Mildažytė-Kulikauskienė (ed.), Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis: piešiniai, kompozicijų, eskizai, grafika. Katalogas (Vilnius: Mokslo ir Enciklopedijų Leidybos Institutas, 2007). Several scholarly studies seek to contextualize Čiurlionis among his contemporary Symbolist painters; cf. Rainer Budde (ed.), Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875– 1911): Die Welt als große Sinfonie, ex. cat., Wallraf-Richartz Museum (Cologne: Oktagon, 1998); Wolfgang Storch and Josef Mackert (eds), Die Symbolisten und Richard Wagner, exh. cat., Akademie der Künste, Berlin (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1991); Bernd Apke and Ingrid Ehrhardt (eds), Okkultismus und Avantgarde: von Munch bis Mondrian 1900–1915, exh. cat., Schirn-Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (Ostfildern: Ed. Tertium, 1995); Ryszard Stanislawski and Christoph Brockhaus (eds), Europa, Europa. Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarde in Mittel- und Osteuropa, exh. cat., Kunsthalle, Bonn (Bonn: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1994); Osvaldas Daugelis and Henri Loyrette (eds), M. K. Čiurlionis, 1875–1911, exh. cat., Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Paris: Réunion des Musées nationaux, 2000); Birutė VerkelytėFedaravičienė (ed.), Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis: Gemälde, Entwürfe, Gedanken (Vilnius: Fodio, 1997); Alfred Erich Senn et al. (eds), Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis: Music of the Spheres (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1986). The first exhibition held in the Western world, after that in London in 1912, was in Berlin. See Christiane Bauermeister and Stephan Viola (eds), Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, exh. cat. Orangerie, Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin (Berlin: Berliner Festspiele, 1979). In commemoration of the centenary of the artist’s death, a conference was held at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, bringing together many art historians and musicologists from Europe as well as the US. See Gražina Daunoravičienė et al. (eds), Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911): His Time and Our Time (Vilnius: Lietuvos muzikos ir teatro akademija, 2013). For a biography of Čiurlionis see Alfred Erich Senn, ‘Čiurlionis: A Life’, in Čiurlionis: Painter and Composer, 30–43. For an account of Čiurlionis’s sojourn in Leipzig, see Adelbertas Nedzelskis and Georg Domin, Der litauische Künstler M. K. Čiurlionis in Leipzig. Der Studienaufenthalt des Meisters am Königlichen Konservatorium 1901–1902 (Berlin: Bodoni, 2003). Nedzelskis, Der litauische Künstler M. K. Čiurlionis in Leipzig, 24–6. Nedzelskis, Der litauische Künstler, 27. See also Alfred Erich Senn, ‘Čiurlionis’s Search for Spiritual Continents’, in Music of the Spheres, 11–13. For accounts concerning the acquisition of painting materials, see Nedzelskis, Der litauische Künstler, 29; see also Rasa Andriušytė-Žukienė, M. K. Čiurlionis: tarp simboliszmo ir modernizmo. Monografija (Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2004), 209. From a letter to his friend Morawski in Warsaw, one may surmise that Čiurlionis held Böcklin in high regard. Cf. Nedzelskis, Der litauische Künstler M. K. Čiurlionis in Leipzig, 27. Stasys Goštautas, ‘M. K. Čiurlionis, The famous unknown’, Lituanus 49, no. 4 (2003): 5–19. See letter to Eugeniusz Morawski, Leipzig, 17 February 1902; Vytautas Landsbergis, M. K. Čiurlionis: Time and Content (Vilnius: Lituanus, 1992), 135–6. Vladimir M. Fedotov, ‘Polyphony in the Paintings of M. K. Čiurlionis’, Leonardo 28, no. 1 (1995): 53–6.

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29 On the links between Stabrowsky and the Theosophical Society cf. Malgorzata A. Dulska and Karolina M. Kotkowska, ‘The idea of womanhood in the paintings of Kazimierz Stabrowski and its Theosophical inspiration’, paper presented at the conference ‘Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy and the arts in the modern world’, 25–7 September, 2013, Amsterdam. 30 For Čiurlionis’ activity in Vilnius, see Stasys Urbonas (ed.), Čiurlionis Vilniuje (Vilnius: M. K. Čiurlionio namai, memorialinis kultūros centras, Kronta, 2010). 31 For Čiurlionis’s reception in St Petersburg, see Johanna Roos, ‘Čiurlionis – Die Zeit in St. Petersburg’, in Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911): Die Welt als große Sinfonie, 56–65. 32 Andriušytė-Žukienė, M. K. Čiurlionis, 220–21. 33 See Audrius Plioplys, ‘Exhibits of Čiurlionis’s Works outside of Lithuania’, in Čiurlionis: Painter and Composer, 474–5. 34 Roos, ‘Čiurlionis – Die Zeit in St. Petersburg’, 64. 35 Ivanov’s link with occult and theosophical networks is very well documented. He also took an interest in transmutation. See Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ‘Political Implications of the Early Twentieth-Century Occult Revival’, in Occult in Soviet and Russian Culture, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 379–418. There was also a connection between Ivanov and Rudolf Steiner, even though much more research is needed in this area. One of Steiner’s most celebrated pupils, Anna Rudolfovna Minzlova, who was in close contact with Ivanov and Bely, often frequented Ivanov’s Tower. See also Ivanov’s correspondence with Erich Müller-Gangloff; Michael Wachtel, Viacheslav Ivanov: Dichtung Und Briefwechsel aus dem Deutschsprachigen Nachlass (Mainz: Liber-Verlag, 1995), 262–6. 36 For more on this topic, see Massimo Introvigne, ‘Čiurlionis’s Theosophy: Myth or Reality?’, paper presented at the conference ‘Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy and the arts in the modern world’, University of Amsterdam, 25–7 September 2013. Oswaldas Daugelis touches upon the same issue, claiming that it is difficult to assert to what extent Čiurlionis was interested in pseudo-religions, hypnotism or theosophy and how much of it he incorporated in his work. See Osvaldas Daugelis, ‘Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis’, in Okkultismus und Avantgarde: von Munch bis Mondrian 1900–1915, 92–5. One year after the death of the artist, B. A. Leman wrote a short monograph, accentuating the importance of pure geometrical shapes in Čiurlionis’s work, but his contribution has been rejected as too mystical; cf. Boris A. Leman, Churlianis (Petrograd: Butkovskaja, 1912). For an approach focusing on the mystical background of Čiurlionis’s paintings, cf. Gabriella Di Milia and Daugelis Osvaldas (eds), Čiurlionis: un viaggio esoterico, 1875–1911, exh. cat. (Milano: Mazzotta, 2010). 37 Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts’, 76. 38 Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts’, 85. 39 Hulē, as Aristotle would say. By contrast with the stages that would unfold later, the first stage of artistic activity is marked by materiality. Cf. Viacheslav Ivanov, ‘Two Elements in Contemporary Symbolism’, in Viacheslav Ivanov: Selected Essays, 15 and 238–9. Initially published in Zolotoe Runo (Golden Fleece) 3–4 (1908), 86–94. 40 Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts’, 74–5. 41 Vyacheslav Ivanov, ‘On the Limits of Art’, in Vyacheslav Ivanov: Selected Essays, 69–91. The lecture, which is Ivanov’s final statement on Symbolism, was presented later in Petersburg at a public venue on 22 January 1914. 42 Ivanov, ‘On the Limits of Art’, 84.

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43 Compare this idea with his thoughts on Čiurlionis; Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts’, 77. 44 Ivanov, ‘On the Limits of Art’, 83. 45 See also Viacheslav Ivanov, ‘Two Elements in Contemporary Symbolism’, in Viacheslav Ivanov: Selected Essays, 27–8. 46 See West, Russian Symbolism, 130. For Ivanov’s notion of art and reality, see p. 88. 47 Rudolf Steiner, Lecture, 27 January 1923, Dornach, GA 220. 48 Ivanov, ‘Two Elements in Contemporary Symbolism’, 22–33. Cf. also Wachtel, Viacheslav Ivanov, xv. 49 Ivanov, ‘Two Elements in Contemporary Symbolism’, 28. 50 Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts’, 76. 51 Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts’, 76. 52 Viacheslav Ivanov, ‘The Symbolics of Aesthetic Principles’, 5 (published initially in Vesy (Balance) 5 (1905): 26–36. Italics by Ivanov. 53 Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts’, 85. 54 Elżbieta Charazińska et al. (eds), Symbolism in Polish Painting, 1840–1914 (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1984), 109. 55 Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts’, 91–2. 56 Richard Wagner, ‘The Artwork of the Future’, in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works 1, The Artwork of the Future and Other Essays, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892), 189. 57 See Juliet Koss, Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 1–23, especially 14–19; also Vergo, The Music of Painting, 108. 58 Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts’, 93. 59 Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts’, 94. 60 For more on this topic, see Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ‘Theatre as Church: The Vision of the Mystical Anarchists’, Russian History 4, no. 2 (1977): 122–41. 61 Rosenthal, ‘Political Implications of the Early Twentieth-Century Occult Revival’, 385. 62 Rosenthal, ‘Theatre as Church’, 123. 63 For a brief reference to Ivanov’s influence on Scriabin, see Rolf-Dieter Kluge, ‘Vjačeslav Ivanovs Beitrag zu einer symbolistischen Theorie der Literatur und Kunst als Schlüssel zum Verständnis seiner Aufsätze über Aleksandr Skrjabin’, in Vjačeslav Ivanov: Russischer Dichter, Europäischer Kulturphilosoph, 240–9. 64 Imgardt, ‘La peinture et la révolution’, 57. 65 For a detailed account of Scriabin’s Prometheus, see James M. Baker, ‘Prometheus and the Quest for Color-Music: The World Premier of Scriabin’s Poem of Fire with Lights, New York, March 20, 1915’, in Music and Modern Art, ed. James Leggio (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 61–95. 66 Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, ‘L’indécis, les sons, les couleurs frêles: quelques correspondances symbolistes, in Symbolisme en Europe’, exh. cat., Takamatsu City Museum; Bunkamura Museum of Art, Tokyo; Himeji City Museum (Tokyo: Shimbun, 1996), 31–4. See also Massimo Introvigne, ‘Zöllner’s Knot: Jean Delville (1867–1953), Theosophy, and the Fourth Dimension’, Theosophical History: A Quarterly Journal of Research 17, no. 3 (2014) 84–118. I would like to thank both authors for sharing with me their thoughtful comments. 67 Ivanov published three essays on the composer. The essay ‘Scriabin’s View of Art’, which is the most extensive of the three, was read as a lecture at the Scriabin Society in

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St Petersburg on 11 December 1915. See Viacheslav Ivanov, ‘Scriabin’s View of Art’, in Viacheslav Ivanov: Selected Essays, 211–28. Viacheslav Ivanov, ‘The Testaments of Symbolism’, in Viacheslav Ivanov: Selected Essays, 49. Plato, Timaeus 36d. See Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 98–9. Plato, Timaeus, 74. Plato, Timaeus, 74. Italics mine. Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts’, 77. Viacheslav Ivanov, ‘On the Crisis of Humanism’ (1919), in Viacheslav Ivanov: Collected Essays, 164. P. D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World, trans. Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon, 2nd edn (Rochester, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922 (1920)). Bragdon has touched upon the issue earlier in his book A Primer of Higher Space (Rochester, NY : Manas Press, 1913). Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, 161. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, 162. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, rev. edn (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2013 (1983)). The theory of relativity dominated the artistic field during the mid-war period whereas the spatial, geometrical interpretation was more prominent at the beginning and the end of the nineteenth century. Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts’, 88. In the Lithuanian translation of Ivanov’s essay the word ‘kilimas’ denotes, depending on the intonation, either the carpet, if the accent falls on the first syllable, or the ascent/rise, if the accent falls on the second. For the Lithuanian text, see Stasys Yla, M. K. Čiurlionis: Kuu¯rėjas ir žmogus (Chicago: Lithuanian Library Press, 1984). Ivanov uses the word ‘восхожденія’, which is adequately rendered as ‘ascent’ in the English translation. Ivanov’s original text can be found in V. I. Ivanov, Borozdy I mezhy: Opyty esteticheskie I kirticheskie (Moscow: Musaget, 1916), 333. For the theme of flight, see John E. Bowlt, ‘M. K. Čiurlionis: His Visual Art’, in Čiurlionis: Painter and Composer, 267–94. The minimalist composer Morton Feldman (1926–87), a fervent rug collector, drew inspiration from antique carpets, whose ‘crippled symmetry’ allowed him to explore new ways of arranging repetitive patterns, not always discernible in his music. See B. H. Friedman (ed.), Give my Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (Cambridge: Exact Change, 2000), 134–49. Claude Bragdon, ‘The Figure in Mr. James’s Carpet’, The Critic 44 (1904): 146–50. James’s novel first appeared in the periodical Cosmopolis in January 1896 and was published in Henry James, Complete Stories, vol. 4, 1892–8 (New York: Library of America 1996), 572–608. Jürgen Harten and Christoph Vitali (eds), Michail Wrubel, der russische Symbolist, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Köln: DuMont, 1997), 127. Reginald Machell, ‘Music: The Soul of Art’, Theosophical Path 19, no. 2 (1920): 113. P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (San Diego, New York and London: Harvest Books, 2001 (1949)), 34–5. Wilfrid Hodges, ‘The geometry of music’, in Music and Mathematics: From Pythagoras to Fractals, ed. John Fauvel et al. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 91–111.

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87 Kevin Holm-Hudson and Darius Kučinskas, ‘Plane isometries in the music and art of Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis’, Musicae Scientiae, special issue (2005–6): 109–137. Available online: https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/handle/123456789/19343 (accessed 2 December 2016). 88 Dorothy Koster Washburn and Donald Warren Crowe, Symmetries of Culture: Theory and Practice of Plane Pattern Analysis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988). 89 Senn, ‘Čiurlionis: A Life’, 36. See also Valerija Čiurlionytė-Karužienė and Judita Grigienė (eds), Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, 2nd edn (Vilnius: Vaga, 1984), 21–2. 90 Jonas Umbrasas, ‘The Ideological and Artistic Views of Čiurlionis’, in Čiurlionis: Painter and Composer, 407–8. 91 Budde, Die Welt als große Sinfonie, 170, 172. 92 Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, 36. 93 Rudolf Steiner, Lecture, Berlin, 31 March 1905. Reprinted in Rudolf Steiner, The Fourth Dimension: Sacred Geometry, Alchemy, and Mathematics (Great Barrington, MA: Anthroposophical Press, 2001), 11–18. 94 Ivanov, ‘Čiurlionis and the Synthesis of the Arts’, 77.

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Music, Sound and Light Embodied Experiences of the Modernist and Postmodern Gesamtkunstwerk Diane V. Silverthorne

The Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk and its derivatives were the dream of that convergence as abstract utopia, before the media themselves permitted it. Theodor Adorno1 In ‘Outlines of the Artwork of the Future’, Richard Wagner addressed the contribution of the visual artist to create ‘the true Drama’. Wagner presciently predicted that he would bring to the total artwork ‘every known device of optics’ in its urgent purpose to make a direct appeal ‘to a common public’.2 This chapter examines two such manifestations of the convergence of light, sound and ‘the musical’ separated by exactly 100 years, firstly in the opera house and secondly in the spaces of the modern art museum, to consider the shared and competing aesthetics of music drama and installation art to manifest a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) and ‘its derivatives’ a term employed by Adorno. The Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk is always becoming, never ultimately achieved, Adorno inferred, ‘the dream of that convergence as abstract utopia’.3 The manipulation of light was a singular concern of the notable staging of Wagner’s music drama Tristan und Isolde at the Vienna Court Opera in 1903. This particular production, under the directorship of composer Gustav Mahler, was renowned for its brilliant manipulation of coloured lighting and other effects to create, in the words of one contemporary critic, ‘light-music’.4 In 2003, the artist Olafur Eliasson used what might be termed ‘every known device of optics’ in The Weather Project to draw spectators through the envelope-like opening of the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, downwards towards the light of his glowing sun. It is my contention that certain aesthetic and metaphysical impulses embodied in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk were brought together, and materially realized, in these two transcendent events. The purpose of this serendipitous juxtaposition of ideas is to understand better what the term Gesamtkunstwerk signifies not only in the context of Wagner’s music dramas, but more particularly when it is applied as an epithet to artworks outside the 129

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domain of music, as it most frequently is. Certain forms of installation art, particularly those attributed with an immersive quality, have attracted this characterization.5 It seems that the Eliasson event, despite the absence of music, called forth the spirit of the Gesamtkunstwerk from a different time and space. Installation art, notably the work of Eliasson, is three-dimensional, and inhabits a denoted space specifically tuned to its form and construction. It also commonly employs the fourth dimension of time in the demands it makes on its spectators, in similar ways to that of a performance. Commonly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories of phenomenology and the embodied experience have been used as an interpretative framework for Eliasson’s work, exemplified by the shimmering light of the indoor sun of The Weather Project.6 Beyond the phenomenological framework, this chapter sets out to show that the aesthetics of the Gesamtkunstwerk, rooted in Romanticism and now revivified in the light of postmodernism’s concerns, reveal a critical framework which more specifically acknowledges Frederic Jameson’s conviction of ‘the profound continuity of romanticism from the late eighteenth century onwards’.7 In particular, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which included an ecnomium to Wagner and his music dramas, in particular Tristan und Isolde, the term Schein (meaning 'semblance' or 'the appearance of things') takes on greater aesthetic significance than is suggested by the translation alone.8 In contemporary discourse, the term Gesamtkunstwerk tends to float free of its Wagnerian roots, yet is often used to account for synthetic artworks which lay claim to transcendence, in the sense of an experience which lies beyond the material, a transformative act which aspires to change our world and ourselves. This is certainly true of Eliasson’s art which has also been attributed with characteristics associated with the Sublime, after Edmund Burke’s account of ‘the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature’, manifested as an ‘astonishment of the soul’ accompanied by ‘some degree of horror’.9 Or, as reconfigured for a postmodern audience, the embodied presence of the spectator is ‘lured into a romantic positon of believing in something’.10 As the Guardian reviewer commented of the Weather Project ‘the shimmering light of an indoor sun filled the Turbine Hall with wonder and awe’.11

Nietzsche’s Schein Nietzsche’s expanded realm of Schein acquired the signification of light by association with the essential Apolline impulse in art.12 Schein, in its material embodiment as light and its immanent Apollonian state, mediated between the artwork and the spectator, in the mysterious spaces of affect and perception.13 Nietzsche associated this elision of the appearance of things and an aesthetics of light with the mask in Greek tragedy – a device for making the human element of the drama bearable to behold. In other words, Schein, with its emphasis on the surface of things, was the sign of the theatrical in art, a term of approbation in Nietzsche’s writings. Schein was the radiant and visible surface of great art that implies hidden depths below. Thus, surface is played off against what it conceals, a playfulness which is later mirrored by

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‘the intensity of experience’ emanating from ‘the shiny surfaces of postmodernism’s simulation’.14 The term Schein persists in modernist and postmodern critique, returning in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and then in Michael Spitzer’s work on music and philosophy.15 Drawing on Adorno’s use of the term Schein, Spitzer described its particular characteristics as ‘the vital quivering of aesthetic beauty, an image of freedom, the promise of reconciliation and harmony in many ways both musical and visual’.16 This affecting definition suggests that a reading of Schein draws together ‘the musical’ of Romantic thought, the philosophy of Nietzsche on the nature of great art and its essential musicality, with notions of community and the healing of divisions. Such notions are also embedded in Wagner’s own defining characteristics of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Notably, Wagner’s views on staging and performance seem to prefigure later theories on modes of perception, visuality and the arts. He named the physical and metaphysical spaces, the spaces of subjectivity between stage and audience as ‘the mystic gulf ’, and the space so created as a theatron as if anticipating a technological invention yet to be conceived.17 The combined effect of all these innovations would restore ancient mysteries to the modern world. In his essay on the opening of his purpose-designed theatre in Bayreuth, he wrote of the desired, total effect: that ‘between the spectator and the stage picture, nothing is plainly visible, merely a floating atmosphere of distance’.18 Whatever else the Gesamtkunstwerk evoked, its destiny was to appeal to all the senses, certainly sight and hearing and, more than that, it promised a transcendent experience which moved the individual from the realm of the physical world to the metaphysical. In other words, I am interested in the emergent forms of art that critic Michael Fried, writing in the mid–1950s, most eschewed when he asserted ‘that art degenerates when it approaches the condition of theatre’.19 Fried’s concerns about art that aspires to ‘a kind of stage presence’, and the way a work ‘extorts a special complicity from the beholder, the experience of coming upon the artwork in somewhat darkened rooms’ can indeed ‘be strongly, if momentarily, disquieting’.20 Indeed, Fried’s words precisely account for the effects of the postmodern Gesamtkunstwerk. This account of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a term which has taken on a life of its own in a postmodern context, reconnects the concept with its Wagnerian roots, following the path of light cast by and embodied in Schein from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries.21 It may be found firstly in the 1903 production of Tristan und Isolde in Vienna, which made plastic Wagner’s musical intent and meaning, uniting the visual, dramatic and musical arts in the service of greater expressive significance. The second part of this chapter examines the significance of the influence of landscape’s elemental forces – the embodiment of an experience of ‘the sublime’ – to Wagner’s art and to Eliasson’s. I then turn to the spaces of art, performance and their suggestive Wagnerian connotations, characterized by the light-filled experience of Eliasson’s The Weather Project in Tate’s Turbine Hall and its Dionysian reception.

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Vienna’s Gesamtkunstwerk There is an enormous body of literature on Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde which confirms the work as the most inwardly-driven of all the composer’s music dramas, definitively expressive of Schopenhauer’s ideas on music as the embodiment of the ‘will’, the innermost, most elemental drives of the human condition.22 Tristan und Isolde is widely acknowledged as the apotheosis of the Gesamtkunstwerk: in Adorno’s words, the work of ‘incomparable genius, an almost perfect unity’.23 It draws together music and words, the sung and orchestral lines, the seen and the heard, into a synthesis completely beyond any that had previously been known in dramatic form. Inner and outer states merge, triumphantly.The individual arts, coming together in strength, are no longer recognized as separate; neither do we still recognize the normal sight and hearing, sighting and sounding oppositions. The protagonists can only be in a state of becoming their transfigured selves, in numinous darkness, where ‘sound is inner vision, and hearing, seeing’, to cite Thomas Grey’s subtle analysis of this work, particularly evident in the momentous second act in which the lovers proclaim their love for each other in the transcendent darkness of night.24 It is as a result the most challenging in its staging.25 Wagner’s exegesis of Schopenhauer’s ideas was set out in The Artwork of the Future (1849), the first of his treatises on the dramatic arts inspired by Greek ideals of tragedy. He later acknowledged Tristan und Isolde as the exemplar of ‘music as the Will’.26 It was not quite that Schopenhauer inspired this work but that in Schopenhauer’s writings, Wagner found the articulation of his own innermost vision for a sublime synthesis of thought, emotion, poetry, drama and music, the sung and the orchestral lines. In these writings, Wagner freely made use of the term Schein to describe the subtle differentiation of the world of appearances and its other: that which existed in a parallel, noumenal state. Wagner insisted that music existed in the darkened world of the unconscious realm. The visual arts inhabited the world of light. The synthesis of these two worlds existed in those liminal moments when we fall from consciousness to unconsciousness, from wakefulness to sleep.27 We no longer see things parcelled off in time and space, Wagner declared, challenging the distinctions and boundaries between the musical and the visual arts.28 ‘The character (of the dream world) speaks out to us most straightforwardly from the works of the Plastic arts’ whose role is ‘to take the illusive surface [Schein] of the light-shown world, and by its ingenious play with “semblance,” lays bare the idea of music concealed beneath’.29 Schein, the old German term for beauty, also signifying bright, gleaming, magnificent, is connected with ‘show’ and with ‘seeing’. It seemed that aesthetic pleasure, the ‘show of things’, was invested in this transfigured Schein.30 Such beauty, joined to the transcendental experience of Wagner’s works, would bring his audience to a state of devotion. Wagner was the first, but certainly not the only, cultural figure to urge his audiences, or more specifically, his once-adoring acolyte, Friedrich Nietzsche, to watch Tristan und Isolde with eyes closed (or at least with his specs removed), and to listen to nothing but the orchestra.31 In the sphere of nineteenth-century thought which engaged with the aesthetic borderline where the visual and the musical converge, a parallel may be drawn between Wagner’s blinding of the sight, reducing the visual to the purely musical,

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and Baudelaire’s enthusiasm for the paintings of Eugène Delacroix. In his Salon reviews of the artist’s work he enjoined his readers to view the paintings from a distance to discern their innate musical qualities. This may only happen, Baudelaire seemed to suggest, as sight loses its power to discern the figurative detail of the work, a deliberate effect of Delacroix’s painterly techniques which revealed expressive qualities in abstracted colour, mood and form.32 The 1903 production of Tristan und Isolde was certainly not the first performance of Wagner’s music dramas to invoke feelings of spiritual transfiguration in its audiences. It was, however, the first to bring to reality Wagner’s very specific stage instructions for light and colour effects to evoke, in synthesis with the music, the innermost emotional states of the protagonists. Wagner’s injunction, that the artist as landscape-painter would bring to the total artwork ‘every known device of optics’, was taken up for the first time on the stage by designer, Alfred Roller, a founding member of the Vienna Secession.33 Secession artists were enthusiastic progenitors of Wagnerian ideas of the Gesamtkunstwerk transposed to the visual arts. The defining impulse of Vienna’s modernism was predicated on a non-hierarchical interest in the fine and applied arts, an artistic union representing something greater than the sum of each individual art form. Their ideas of the modern were also exemplified in the persistent use of gold and other metallic materials which run like a rich seam through their art productions to create a play of light on their glittering surfaces. For the 1903 production of Tristan, Roller turned to the newly electrified light systems in theatres and opera houses to orchestrate different light-and-colour effects prescribed by Wagner for each of the three acts of the opera: orange for the first act, deep violet for the ‘transfigured night’ of the second, and cold, silvery-grey for the Liebestod (love-death declaration) of the final act (see Plate 10). Cut-outs of numerous starry holes and the generous use of light-absorbing black velvet backlit by lighting instruments created the effect of a glittering night sky in Act Two. The star-filled night and the gushing colours of other lighting effects made it possible for the audience to appreciate the strange dissonances of Wagner’s poetic text, notably Tristan’s ‘How do I hear the light’, perhaps the effect of sensory correspondence which Wagner had wished for. Roller’s ideas had in their turn been influenced by the theories of the visionary Swiss stage designer and Wagner interpreter Adolphe Appia, with whom he corresponded. In a series of essays published in 1889, Appia had identified ‘the mysterious affinity between music and light, which would have the necessary transformative effect on the staging of Wagner’s music dramas’.34 In a long and detailed essay on the staging of Tristan und Isolde published in 1899, Appia described its effect on its audience as a heightened state of nervous sensibility. He also acknowledged the inadequacy of historic stage settings and, like Wagner, advised audiences that they would gain more of the drama’s essential dramatic intensity by closing their eyes and giving imaginative sight to the orchestral passages. Only lighting could summon up the ‘illusory nature’ of the phantom world in which the protagonists exist (see Fig. 6.1).35 Stage sets would be radically reduced using lighting to suggest the shimmering distances traversed by the protagonists via gently inclining ramps. Lighting would have a unifying function, dramatizing the action involved. The stage designer would draw

Fig. 6.1: Alfred Roller, Tristan and Isolde, undated, black ink and white pastel on paper. 134

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out the inner meaning of the work and translate this into a new visual experience. The use of light would give this new world its ‘wondrous unity . . . which enables us to live through seeing’. 36 Released from its previous existence as the flickering gas light into new spaces and forms by advances in electrical systems, light would play a dynamic new part in ‘the Artwork of the Future’.37 The reception of the 1903 Tristan was in the main ecstatic, and commonly greater attention was given to the new visualization of the music drama in the press than to Mahler’s musical interpretation. As music critics typically stated in their reviews of the production, one could see and touch the music.38 Roller had ‘created stage pictures full of atmosphere’ and ‘painted Tristan music’.39 One significant member of the audience recorded his experience in subjective terms: the composer Anton Webern wrote that ‘the second act décor is fascinating. A warm summer night, very dark blue, lit by the moon, breathes its magic onto your face.’40 It seemed that ‘the mystic gulf’, denoted by Wagner as the magical space between the performance on the stage and the audience, could be bridged.41 The transfigured role of light or Schein materialized the un-materializable: the gaze of the audience across space and through time, the sight of sound. The immersive artwork is often thought to be a product of a postmodernist sensibility. Yet, the embodiment of the self within the work indicated by Webern’s response to the 1903 Tristan was one further step on a path established by Wagner, who wanted to involve singers, orchestra and audience in the drama in one unified experience.42 The actors should subordinate themselves without reservation to the creator of the work (Wagner himself) and thereby paradoxically acquire the gift of selfabandonment (Selbstentäusserung), surely a Dionysian trope. The individual artist, divinely inspired, was compelled to communicate to his colleagues and through them, to the whole world ‘what in solitude filled him with ecstasy’.43 The ecstasy which had inspired the work would be imbued by the performers, and thus conveyed to the audience. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tristan und Isolde was the work which in Vienna in 1903 fuelled this sudden leap in creative execution. One hundred years later, similar aesthetic concerns were attributed to Olafur Eliasson’s ‘The Weather Project’ in the cause of an embodied experience in which states of perception were uniquely privileged, even if the ultimate effect was somewhat different. Madeleine Grynsztejn’s account of Eliasson’s engagement with museum and gallery spaces emphasizes the artist’s desire to drench the spectator in colour and light, ‘opening spaces of his work to the process of human vision’, in this way promoting a simultaneity of experience, and sensation, both internally and externally stimulated.44 The installation Room for one Colour (1997), with which Eliasson often opened his exhibitions, leaves the space empty apart from ‘a yellow light which seems almost solid in its chromatic density’.45 Eliasson’s multisensory experiences, activating a new perception of the self, and various mutable states of subjectivity between the self and others, suggest a community of sorts caught within Eliasson’s own ‘mystic gulf ’, in which the audience is fully immersed. Yellow Fog is now permanently installed in Vienna’s Am Hof Square, and so entranced is the city with his work that they have given over the Winter Palace, a glittering example of high Baroque, to his installations.46 Light’s immersive properties are the touchstone for Eliasson’s postmodern interpretation

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of the Sublime. An outer visible world of appearances is rejected in favour of an interior, subjective vision.

Landscape: the elemental forces in Wagner’s and Eliasson’s work A common concern for the aesthetics of landscape – ‘the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature’ – may be observed in Wagner’s music dramas and Eliasson’s art.47 Wagner repeatedly emphasized the importance of ‘fidelity to nature’ (Naturwarhkeit), in his instructions for the staging of The Ring. He wrote on the subject of landscapepainting, as he denoted the singular roles for the visual arts in their contribution to the Gesamtkunstwerk.48 Painting, unlike sculpture, which had to restrict itself to the depiction of a single figure, could draw on the ‘extra-human surroundings’, the scenes of nature herself. Landscape painting would become the very soul of architecture (in other words, the architecture of the stage), playing its part in the dramatic ‘Artwork of the Future’. It would fulfil the role of picturing ‘the warm background of Nature for living’.49 Nature captured in stage painting would allow ‘its loveliness to linger in a life to which it no longer belonged, as the unconscious, necessary expression of the life’s inmost soul’. The artist’s hand, ‘his glowing breadths of light, would compel nature to serve the highest claims of Art’. What had been invested in the narrow frames of panel pictures would now fill the expanded framework of ‘the Tragic Stage’, calling the whole expanse of the scene as witness to his powers.50 Eliasson’s works are famously informed by the elemental materials of Iceland’s dramatic and ancient landscape, particularly water in all its various stages, from liquid to solid, steam, fog, mist, moisture and ice.51 These elemental forces and the use he makes of colour, water and the prismatic effects of spotlights and other simple lighting equipment are the materials of his art. For example, Beauty (1993) used light, a prism and the effects of mist in an enclosed room, creating the effects of an astonishingly beautiful rainbow. For the work Double Sunset (1999), a great yellow disc was erected on top of a building in the city of Utrecht and lit by floodlights resembling a second, simultaneous sunset floating above the urban skyline. Eliasson’s art frequently inspires analogies with the Sublime, which ‘lingers within postmodernity’, Mieke Bal’s assertion, suggesting the persistence of Romanticism into the twenty-first century.52 Eliasson’s interest in the art of J. M. W. Turner further underpins the epithet of the Sublime as applied to his art. Turner’s shaping and framing of light is evident in a series of Eliasson’s paintings exhibited by Tate Britain, titled Turner Colour Experiments (2014). The concept of landscape, as a figurative, musical and metaphysical force in Wagner’s music, and the transformation of landscape into ‘pure perception’ in Eliasson’s art are central to their works.

Challenging the binaries of time and space Like Wagner before him, Eliasson challenged the distinctions between the temporal and spatial arts, declaring that ‘temporality is one of the few elements of my artistic

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practice that keeps growing in both meaning and implication’.53 His intent to involve the spectator in a transformative, performative experience releases the individual from the fixity of the theatre arena into the seemingly freer installation spaces such as the cityscape itself and in this case Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The architectonic spaces of museums and galleries activated by Eliasson’s installations, are themselves transformed and dissolved through the use of intense lighting effects and the intervention of natural materials such as water, moss and mist. Eliasson’s commitment to creating an embodied experience is evident in his insistence on artworks which imbue a particular subjectivity and self-reflexiveness, ‘a state of double-consciousness, to see ourselves seeing’.54 Like a work of theatre, Eliasson’s installations are transitory and ephemeral. Yet art forms which use space as a material of their art can only exist within the context of a framing device. In Wagner’s Festival Theatre (Festspielhaus) at Bayreuth (1876), new landscapes of the stage were created by the framing structures of not one but several proscenium arches, ‘enclosing the entire audience in the vista’ and altering perceptions of distance and nearness between the audience and the figures on the stage.55 For Eliasson’s The Weather Project, the Turbine Hall provided its unique structures. It is to these spaces that I now turn.

Framing the postmodern artwork: the Turbine Hall as Wagnerian space Beyond perhaps the metaphor of ‘a powerhouse for art’, there may be few obvious parallels between the architecture of the purpose-designed theatre at Bayreuth and the reinvented industrial spaces of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (2000), designed by Herzog and de Meuron from the fabric of Gilbert Scott’s power station (1952).56 Yet it is not too fanciful to suggest that even when the Turbine Hall is empty of installation, performance or people, it is always Wagnerian in its scale and effect. As a postmodern setting for Wagner’s The Ring it would need little alteration. Indeed, it is perhaps surprising that no one has yet thought to stage his music dramas in these spaces, bringing together audience with performers in one unified experience. Both Bayreuth and the transformation of power station to art museum were singular projects. The simplicity (and cost-effectiveness) of the wooden frame and internal structures used at Wagner’s Bayreuth signalled that the emphasis was not on comfort or splendour. The interior spaces were deliberately austere: ‘no draperies, no cushions, no florid decoration of any kind’.57 At the back of the stage (hidden from view) was an additional building for motors, engine and machinery. Visitors were brought efficiently into the auditorium, ‘cultural and linguistic differences overcome by the clarity of the architecture’.58 At Tate Modern, the architects’ intended effect was the permeability of the interior spaces. Entry is effected and facilitated at several levels and in different ways, in a new democracy of access. In the vast spaces of the Turbine Hall, no structures greet the spectator other than reconstructed spaces of the engine rooms, which the architects described as a great ‘people space’ intended to be inherently social. The intention here – the largest art space in Europe,

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further dramatized by the use of the floor levels below ground to create the ramp – was to house a unique series of installations which demand the participation of the audience in their completion. From the outset, several artists’ installations have relied on effects of darkness and light to convey double-meanings, ambiguities, continuities and discontinuities.59 Each time an artwork is installed in its spaces, the character of the interior is changed, as if by magic. A new experience greets the public with each new artwork. It is not recorded whether Tate’s architects considered how the structure of the entrance, proceeding from the long ramp walkway, eliding exterior and interior spaces, would affect the physical motion and experience of the public, or their engagement with the space. Yet there is something essentially ritualistic in the descent to its Nibelung-like depths, passing from daylight through the narrow opening of the vast hall, from the real world to some other place. The ramp both frees and orders movement. It suggests an approach towards, and always downwards. There is a sense of the processional. Ascending or descending, the body slows or alters pace, however minutely. It acquires an insistent rhythmic pace, a rhythmic break in normal walking pace. Time is measured according to an unknown or unseen law, space traversed. With the seeming lightest of touch, Tate Modern’s founding principles of the democratization of the art and its consumption are elided with a structure which regulates, if not controls.60 In the Turbine Hall, the industrial structures are exposed: what was traditionally hidden is revealed. Is this a theatron (space for seeing), turning the individual act of contemplation beloved of white cube architecture into a collective union of seeing?61 The air in the hall vibrates with the steady hum of the remaining turbines in the adjacent building, tuned to nothing more than the rhythmic flow of everyday occurrences.62 Groups form and dissipate. With or without an art installation, the space changed our ‘structures of visibility’ as well as our sense of what is heard and not heard.63 Both at Bayreuth and Bankside, there are ‘only the humblest of materials, a total absence of embellishment’, yet encountered are spaces which, as Wagner declared of Bayreuth, ‘will place you in a new relation’ to the work of art, ‘a relation quite distinct from that which you have always been involved’.64 These new kinds of relational possibilities were fully exploited by the Turbine Hall installation of The Weather Project in 2003.

The postmodern Gesamtkunstwerk – The Weather Project Heralded as a postmodern expression of the Sublime, Eliasson used various effects including a haze machine, 200 mono-frequency sodium streetlamps, mirror foil and scaffolding, effects which were partially revealed in his inversion of reality and appearance. In a state of ‘will-less’ knowing, the sun drew spectators downwards on the shining surfaces of the sloping ramp towards the light, like blind supernumeraries (see Plate 11). The processional descent suggested a flight from daylight into luminous night, from the realm of reality to subjectivity. The Turbine Hall was transformed into

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a Gesamtkunstwerk of the senses, a Wagnerian sensorium. The great orange ball of the sun floated in an aqueous substance, the mist or steam, which could be heard and seen, emitted from Eliasson’s hidden vents above and beyond the bridge. Every now and again the whole great space seemed to sigh or breath, and the mist would thicken again. Fugitive, fleeting and contingent, the orange light was made plastic, caught and held by the billowing mist, leaving darkness and light, but never warmth. As Tristan declares, in Act Two, ‘Oh, then we became votaries of the night! The devious day, so prone to envy might seek to divide us with tricks, but could not deceive us with lies!’65 Despite the sun, this world, framed by the structure of the hall, also hidden and camouflaged, was neither day or night, deep space suggestively deepened, fictive and falsified by the effect of a mirrored ceiling placed at some indiscernible point horizontally above. Eliasson’s Schein, conveyed in light, colour and mist, created a realm of heightened sensory experience. Lost in space, yet drawn together in a temporary community, people experienced the proximity of each other and their immediate environment with a preternatural intensity. Light, according to Schopenhauer in a passage on the distinction between beauty and the Sublime in The World as Will and Representation, ‘is the correlative and condition of the most perfect kind of knowledge through perception, the only knowledge which in no way directly affects the will’.66 Darkness was the state of willing, ‘light the largest diamond in the crown of all beauty, the most decisive influence on the knowledge of every beautiful object’.67 In unconstrained looking, ‘we lose ourselves in contemplation of the infinite greatness of universe in space and time . . . we feel ourselves reduced to nothing’.68 However, in contained space, Schopenhauer wrote, ‘the infinite becomes directly and wholly perceptible to us, an impression of the Sublime’.69 He referred to the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral as an exemplar of such effects, yet the Turbine Hall might do as well. In his Beethoven essay of 1870, Wagner wrestled with an exposition of the importance of embodied rhythm as a kind of bridge between the intangible temporal realm of music and the appearance of things in space.70 Dance or gesture would reveal to the eye what the orchestra conveyed to the ear, each converging through the common point of rhythm. ‘Dionysiac excitement’, Nietzsche wrote, ‘is capable of communicating to a whole crowd of people the artistic gift of seeing itself surrounded by a host of spirits with which it knows itself profoundly united.’71 These impulses seemed to be the affect of Eliasson’s Schein. Immersed, people behaved with a Dionysian selfabandonment, joining hands in circles and forming star-like configurations on the floor, in a primitive, ritualistic form of pattern-making (see Fig. 6.2). Star-shapes are amongst the most perfect composite forms. They transfer easily from one medium to another, crossing both time and space. The mirrored ceiling reflected the figures lying below, joined together in a celebration of some wordless drama, in an ecstatic state. The mirrored surface hinted at subversive depths below, hidden from sight, yet reflected back traces of the real world. Eliasson has professed great faith in spectators’ responses and in the self-reflexive experience that his installations inspire. In The Weather Project, he created an illusion, the fictive nature of which was deliberately shared with the audience – his embodied

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Fig. 6.2: Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003, mono-frequency light, foil, haze machine, mirror foil, scaffold, c. 15 m. Installation view: Tate Modern, London, 2003.

protagonists – by the way in which the structures were part-camouflaged and partrevealed. As Webern had felt the breath of a summer night on his face in the 1903 production of Tristan und Isolde, so were the spectators drawn into an immersive experience, senses heightened and disturbed. ‘We see ourselves seeing’, Eliasson’s mantra, is a defining statement of the subjective state of his audiences, the embodiment of the spectator, and in his reversal of values of the traditional role of museum and spectator, you ‘see yourself sensing’.72 The work is never complete without this engagement.

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Sensing and sounding Music was not a part of Eliasson’s Gesamtkunstwerk, even though one critic likened the experience to ‘the dreamy vibes of a rock concert in an art gallery’.73 It seems however, that one component of this unified artwork has been silenced in its reception. While sound has never been singled out as an essential element of this experience, yet sound it did. Eliasson’s susurrating atmosphere, conveyed in light, colour, mist and ambient noise, also included the throbbing of Tate’s turbine engines resonating, according to an exercise carried out by the contemporary music ensemble, London Sinfonietta in 2002, as A-flat. Arguing for the principle of sound as an immanent presence in the arts, Douglas Kahn draws the analogy of the passage of both sound and light through space, between an object and an observer, or the source of sound and the listener.74 Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner (1920) marvelled at the ray of sun, ‘the stillest of forces’, speeding at more than 300 kilometres a second and asked, of ‘the starry firmament’, ‘who hears it’? Kahn states, ‘sound is not only experienced as occurring in between but as surrounding the listener’.75 Acknowledging sight as the queen of the senses, universally evoked in Western culture, which assumes a state of being in the light, ‘actions that produce sound appear scattered in time and space’.76 It took John Cage, and his ‘silent piece’ 4ʹ33ʺ (1952) to show that regardless of whether a musical sound was present or absent in the piece, the performance still sounded. In the Turbine Hall, the audience and the space itself materialized non-intentional sound. Kahn uses the term ‘musicalization’ to evoke the transition from music to the embrace of all sound as music, echoing ‘the musical’ of Schiller.77 Thus music is turned into a process which transforms the artwork into a sounded entity, imbued with a Romantic expressiveness. Noises that happen to be heard, framed by institutional time and space, suggest a Cagean Gesamtkunstwerk of all-sound. Chance encounters between the audience and the work, and the audience members with each other (two million people visited Eliasson’s installation), completed the work as they were moved to do, in the moment, in silences and sound. We heard, as well as saw, Eliasson’s mechanical devices. This was a deliberate strategy to expose the workings of the Gesamtkunstwerk, unlike Wagner who sought to hide the workings of the orchestra and the stage effects. The monofrequency lights emitted light at such a narrow frequency that colours other than yellow and black were invisible, transforming the Turbine Hall into ‘a vast duotone landscape’.78 What might have been the impact of the audience in these spaces? In 2007, four years after Eliasson’s installation, a specialist sound engineering company carried out experiments in the Turbine Hall and found that certain ‘frequencies’ combined with the spatial effects of ‘pure sound’ in the Hall meant that the resonance of the space could be experienced audibly and physically.79 Transformers in an adjacent (working) power station, sited at either end of the Turbine Hall emitted a 100-hertz hum. The company reported that the hum was ‘omnipresent, and varied only by a few hertz over time, a fluctuation that was modulated by the activities of the people living and working around the gallery who draw on the electricity supply’.80 In the Turbine Hall empty of

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people, the acoustic response of its architectonic spaces to the omnipresent hum was ‘a series of pools of constructive and destructive interference revealing a landscape of sound that is dramatically opposed to the regular, linear nature of the architecture’.81 It is not known in what way Eliasson’s installation disrupted or changed the dynamic sound landscape of the Turbine Hall, yet it seems that in the interests of the social dynamic of his works, ambient sound should be recognized as an essential element, rather than the silent partner of this work.

In conclusion – Wagnerian aesthetics through time and space It is argued here that the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, rooted specifically in and framed by Wagner’s ideas, mediated by Nietzsche’s theories of aesthetics, throws light on postmodern aesthetics and the essential engagement of the audience in the completion of the artwork. As if reflecting on the Eliasson experience, Nietzsche declared in The Gay Science:82 We daredevils of the spirt who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of present thought and look around from up there – we who have looked from down there. We are the Greeks of this new generation, the adorers of form, and therefore, above all artists.83

In Vienna’s 1903 production of Tristan und Isolde, and Eliasson’s The Weather Project, the privileging of surface effects was exemplified by Schein, the appearance of things, making it possible to sense and experience the depths below. In light, unknowable states of being were perceived and embodied. The Gesamtkunstwerk was transformed, at Tate Modern, into an event of chance and contingency, a post-Cagean Gesamtkunstwerk of all sound, and all senses, framed by the Wagnerian structures of the Turbine Hall. To draw out these connections and contingencies, this account has followed the path of light, as the material and metaphysical manifestation of affect and perception, the sign of the Gesamtkunstwerk in its modernist and postmodern condition. Loosed from its Wagnerian bonds, it nevertheless owes its particular conceptual roots to traces of Wagnerism, a term first associated with Wagner-mania of the later nineteenth century and now often used in cultural discourse as a short-form for a stream of aesthetic sensations and ideals which flowed out of Wagner’s writings and the experience of his music dramas into the visual arts and beyond, powered by the lingering affect of Wagner’s ‘endless melody’.84 Wagnerism, as it is defined through this study, grew out of the ideas of an ‘expressive synthesis’ of the arts, brought together to realize a third state or condition, the immersive state in which the audience experiences the borderline spaces between art and life. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche again proclaimed his faith in Schein as the sign of the modern artwork.85 He asserted that Greek culture was based on a deliberate and philosophically ‘profound’ cultivation of the superficial, or the surface world of appearances manifested as Schein. The Greeks ‘knew how to live’.86 They were ‘superficial – out of profundity’, he declared, placing his

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faith in the Apolline mask and releasing it from its original role in Greek drama, to serve the new project of the modern, path-breaking artist. In the postmodern condition described here, the artist’s achievements remain mystical: the artist himself a hidden presence. An essential element of both works is to evoke a ‘sense of astonishment’ (or in Jed Rasula’s account of modernism, ‘a shiver’).87 Rasula asserts that ‘making the ephemeral affirmative is one of the legacies of modernism’, particularly in the context of ‘fireworks, ice sculptures, light shows and happenings’, and one might also make the same assertion for similar experiences after postmodernism.88 In the Turbine Hall, through the mist and the sense of internal and external vibrations, The Weather Project acquired mysterious acousmatic properties, some hidden from view but sensed, some visible. Above all, it made the ephemeral, affirmative. Inextricably linked to the Gesamtkunstwerk are its perceived utopian powers – an antidote to a fractured world – ‘an aspirational ideal never to be fulfilled in its totality’.89 An essential element of this utopian ideal is the seeming dissolution of boundaries between audience and the work. Wagner’s ‘Artwork of the Future’ would be a collective endeavour: a community joining practitioners of the arts in a spirit of fellowship.90 This experience chimes with Eliasson’s own sense of wonderment at the reception of The Weather Project, which engendered a sense of collectivity or community, emanating from a singularity of experience.91 In Hélène Frichot’s words, the work itself transformed by the participation of audience subsumed by the work is suggestive of ‘new modes of social interaction’.92 Space, framed by architectonic structures, is an essential and deliberate material of Eliasson’s art of synthesis, rendered plastic by light and colour. These principles join with Wagner’s almost unresolvable yet essential search for unity between inner and outer worlds, between the arts and their audience, and the notion of the postmodern artwork as revolutionary and redemptive. Such ideas live on in the work of the Danish-Icelandic artist. Bayreuth, take note. Eliasson should be commissioned to design the next ‘Ring Cycle’.

Notes 1 Theodor Adorno, ‘On Some Relationships Between Music and Painting’, trans. S. H. Gillespie, Music Quarterly 79, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 74. 2 Richard Wagner, ‘The Artwork of the Future’, in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. 1, trans. W. A. Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, 1892), 187. 3 Adorno, ‘On Some Relationships’, 74. 4 Cited by Henry-Louis de la Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 2, Vienna : The Years of Challenge (1897–1904) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 571. 5 See Claire Bishop, Installation Art (London: Routledge, 2005), and ‘Gestamtkunstwerk’, in Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 684. 6 See Susan May, ‘Meteorologica’, in Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project (London: Tate Publishing, 2003), 15–28; Mieke Bal, ‘Light Politics’, in Take Your Time Olafur Eliasson (London: Thames & Hudson with SFMOMA: 2007), 153–82, and many other accounts.

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7 Frederic Jameson (ed.), The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on Postmodernism 1983–1998 (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 26. 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music (1872); Friedrich Nietszche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Guess and Ronald Speirs, trans. R. Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 9 Daniel Albright, Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2014), citing Edmund Burke, 220. 10 Daniel Birnbaum, ‘Interview’, in Madeleine Grynsztejn, Daniel Birnbaum and M. Speaks, Olafur Eliasson (London: Phaidon, 2002), 10–11. 11 Jonathan Jones, ‘Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall of Fame: The Best and the Worst Artworks so Far’, Guardian, 16 October 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/ oct/16/tate-moderns-turbine-hall-of-fame-the-best-and-worst-artworks-so-far (accessed 14 November 2015). 12 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 14. 13 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 15. 14 Adam Roberts, Frederic Jameson: Routledge Critical Thinkers (London: Routledge, 2000), 130. See also James I. Porter, The Invention of the Dionysius: An Essay on the Birth of Tragedy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 33–6, for an exegesis on Nietzsche. 15 Michael Spitzer, Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 16 Spitzer, Music as Philosophy, 2. 17 Richard Wagner, ‘Bayreuth’, in Wagner on Music and Drama: A Compendium of Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (hereafter WOMAD), trans. H. Ashton Ellis, ed. Albert Goldman and Evert Sprinchorn (New York: Dutton, 1964), 366. 18 Cited in Diane V. Silverthorne, ‘Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk’, in The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, ed. Tim Shephard and Anne Leonard (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 247; see also for a fuller exegesis of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. 19 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers: 1992, 1998), 831. 20 Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 826. 21 See Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 684, for a characterization of Gesamtkunstwerk. The term ‘took on a life of its own, central to most projects that claimed a transcendental or totalistic dimension for art’, 684. 22 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J Payne (Indian Hills, CO: Falcon’s Wing Press, 1958). 23 Theodor Adorno, ‘Ver une musique informelle’, in Quasi un Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 306–7. 24 Thomas Grey, ‘In the realm of the senses: sight, sound and the music of desire in Tristan und Isolde’, in Richard Wagner: Tristan und Isolde, ed. Arthur Groos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 71. 25 See Lydia Goehr, ‘The Curse and Promise of the Absolutely Musical: Tristan und Isolde and Don Giovanni’, in The Don Giovanni Moment, ed. Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 137.

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26 Richard Wagner, ‘Music and Reality, Schophenhauer’s theory’, in Wagner on Music and Drama: A Compendium of R. W.’s Prose Works (WOMAD), trans. H. Ashton Ellis, ed. A. Goldman and E Sprinchorn (New York: Dutton, 1964), 179–86. 27 WOMAD, 181. 28 WOMAD, 182. 29 WOMAD, 181. 30 WOMAD, 183. 31 Goehr, The Curse, 139. 32 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Salon of 1846’, in Baudelaire, Selected Writings, trans. P. Charvet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 47–107. See also 136–7. 33 Diane V. Silverthorne, ‘Music and Immanence: The 1902 “Klinger: Beethoven Exhibition” and the Vienna Secession’, in Music and Transcendence, ed. Férdia J. Stone-Davis (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 147–58. 34 Richard Beacham (ed.), Adolphe Appia: Texts on Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 51. 35 Adolphe Appia, ‘The Staging of Tristan and Isolde by Appia’, in WOMAD, 377–9. 36 Appia, Texts, 43. 37 See Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London and New York: Verso, 2013), particularly chapter 7, ‘The Immobile Theatre (Paris 1894–95)’, for an analysis of Wagner’s foundational writings on ‘The Art-Work of the Future’, synthesized with those of Adolphe Appia. 38 Henri-Louis de la Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 2, Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 579–80. 39 de la Grange, Mahler, 580. 40 Cited in de la Grange, Mahler, 582. 41 Wagner, ‘Bayreuth’, in WOMAD, 366. 42 Henry Porges, Wagner Rehearsing the Ring: An Eye-Witness Account of the Stage Rehearsals of The First Bayreuth Festival, trans. Robert L. Jacobs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 43 Porges, Wagner Rehearsing, 4. 44 Madeleine Grynsztejn, ‘(Y)our Entanglements: Olafur Eliasson, the Museum and Consumer Culture’, in Take Your Time Olafur Eliasson, 15. 45 Grynsztejn, ‘Entanglements’, 15. 46 ‘Baroque, Baroque’, Winter Palace, Vienna, November 2015–March 2016. 47 Burke, cited in Albright, Panaesthetics, 221. 48 Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. 1 (RWPW), trans. W. Ashton Ellis (New York: Broude Brothers, 1892, 1996), 175, 176. 49 RWPW, vol. 1, 181. 50 RWPW, vol. 1, 174. 51 Madeleine Grynsztejn, ‘Attention Universe’, in Grynsztejn et al., Olafur Eliasson (London, Phaidon, 2002), 54. 52 Mieke Bal, ‘Light Politics’, 154. 53 Eliasson, ‘Take your time: A conversation’, in Take Your Time Olafur Eliasson, 51. 54 Olafur Eliasson, in Grynsztejn et al., Olafur Eliasson, 21. 55 Matthew Wilson Smith, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (London: Routledge, 2007), 39.

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56 This chapter was written before the opening of Tate Modern’s extension, the Switch House, in 2016, and does not take account of the structural alterations to the original building, now known as Boiler House. 57 Cited in Juliet Koss, ‘Invisible Wagner’, in The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments, ed. Anke Finger and Danielle Follett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 179. See also Juliet Koss, Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), for an analysis of the Gesamtkunstwerk, theatre architecture, the Bauhaus and art. 58 Koss, ‘Invisible Wagner’, 181. 59 Notably Juan Muñoz, Double Bind (2002); Anish Kapoor, Marsyas (2002–3), which filled the hall with redness; and Tacita Dean, Film (2011). 60 See Kenneth Sabbagh, Power into Art: Creating the Tate Modern, Bankside (London: Allen & Lane, 2000) and Rowan Moore and Ryan Raymond, Building Tate Modern: Herzon and de Meuron Transforming Giles Gilbert Scott (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2000), for accounts of the political, cultural and social implications of the building of Tate Modern. 61 Wagner, ‘Bayreuth’, WOMAD, 366. 62 These effects prevailed until the building was extended in 2016. 63 See Audialsense, ‘Mapping the Invisible Landscape: An Exercise in Spatially Choreographed Sound’ (extract), http://www.audialsense.com/tate.html (accessed 16 September 2014), for an account of acoustic soundings in the Turbine Hall, 2007. 64 Wagner, ‘Bayreuth’, WOMAD, 357–8. 65 Grey, ‘In the realm of the senses’, 87–8. 66 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Indiana Hills, CO: Falcon’s Wing Press, 1958), 199. 67 Schopenhauer, World as Will, 203. 68 Schopenhauer, World as Will, 205. 69 Schopenhauer, World as Will, 205. 70 Wagner, ‘Beethoven’, in Actors and Singers, RWPW, vol. 5, 61–126. 71 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 43. 72 Olafur Eliasson, ‘Artist’s Writings: Seeing yourself Sensing’, in Olafur Eliasson, 124–9. 73 Jonathan Jones, ‘Tate Modern Turbine Hall of Fame’, Guardian, 16 October 2015. 74 Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 27. 75 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 27. 76 Kahn, Noise Water, Meat, 158. 77 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 159. 78 Tate website, http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/exhibition/unilever-series-olafureliasson-weather-project/olafur-eliasson-weather-project (accessed 28 September 2014). 79 Experiments on standing wave phenomena carried out in the Turbine Hall by Audialsense, 5 April 2007. ‘The “fundamental mode” is the frequency corresponding to the lowest whole wavelength that can be accommodated in a space. Multiples of the fundamental are called harmonics.’ Bob Sheil (ed.), Prototype Architecture, 2000 (extracts), http://www.audialsense.com/tate.html (accessed 28 September 2014). 80 Sheil, Prototype Architecture (extracts). 81 Sheil, Prototype Architecture (extracts).

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82 Clayton Koelb refers to Frederic Jameson’s definitions in his introduction to Nietzsche as Post-Modernist: Essays Pro and Contra, ed. Clayton Koelb (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 5. 83 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Edited by B. Williams and J. Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 84 Jed Rasula, History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 85 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 38. 86 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 38. 87 Rasula, History of a Shiver, 2016. 88 Rasula, History of a Shiver, 253, author’s italics retained. 89 Silverthorne, ‘Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk’, 238. 90 Silverthorne, ‘Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk’, 246–54. 91 Olafur Eliasson, ‘Tate Shots: Olafur Eliassson’, transcript, 30 June 2011, http://www.tate. org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-olafur-eliasson (accessed 12 February 2017). 92 Hélène Frichot, ‘Olafur Eliasson and the Circulation of Affects and Perception: in Conversation’, Architectural Design 78, no. 3 (May–June 2008): 30–5 (32).

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Squaring the Circle Wilfred’s Lumia and his Rejection of ‘Colour Music’ Nick Lambert

Throughout the twentieth century, a variety of art forms emerged that shared a similar approach to abstract images in motion. They evolved with the medium of motion film from the 1890s to 1910s and also shared a root in the older area of ‘colour music’ although, as we shall see, some of their major practitioners distanced themselves from earlier attempts to make an equivalence between the scales of music and sequences of colours. The range of names for this practice of making animated abstract images reflects the breadth of approaches, but one overarching term that could probably apply to all of them is ‘visual music’. This is defined by Brian Evans as follows: Visual music can be defined as time-based visual imagery that establishes a temporal architecture in a way similar to absolute music. It is typically nonnarrative and non-representational (although it need not be either). Visual music can be accompanied by sound but can also be silent.1

This chapter will explore Thomas Wilfred’s relation to music in his self-defined art form of ‘lumia’, and compare him to contemporaries including the abstract animator Mary Ellen Bute (1906–83) and Oskar Fischinger (1900–67), as these two artists were the most successful and visible proponents of visual music in mid-twentieth-century America. They went on to influence a number of significant successors in the field, not least the pioneers of early computerized animation, James and John Whitney. Fischinger also influenced the young John Cage, whilst Wilfred had some impact on Jackson Pollock and was exhibited alongside him at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ), New York. As part of the general rediscovery of early twentieth-century technological art that has developed since the late 1990s, Thomas Wilfred’s ‘lumia’ artworks have benefited from something of a revival. ‘Lumia’ was the name for the overarching concept of timebased light art that Wilfred conceived from 1916 onwards; whilst his projection systems were called ‘clavilux’. These ranged from keyboard-controlled concert hall-scale arrays of theatrical lighting down to various domestic self-contained projection units that Wilfred constructed until the late 1950s. Several of the domestic units were purchased by MoMA and displayed in their own room until at least the 1970s, whilst others went 149

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to wealthy collectors on the West Coast of the USA . Although Wilfred benefited from his exposure at MoMA , he was adamant that his lumia performances should not be filmed, partly because he conceived of them as live events and partly because the typical filming equipment of the era was not sensitive enough to pick up the shifting light-forms created by the lumia. It is interesting, therefore, that director Terrence Malick’s recent film, The Tree of Life (2011), features an unusual image: a shifting red and yellow light at the beginning and end that might represent the creative force or the creator. It was mysterious to film critics who referred to it as ‘glimmers of unfathomable light’ or, less positively, as ‘the great whatsit’.2 Gregory Zinman, in the New Yorker, tracked it down through the credits as Malik himself never gives interviews about his films: The Tree of Life’s credits, however, reveal the image to be the light artist Thomas Wilfred’s ‘Opus 161’ (1965–66). Now largely forgotten, Wilfred’s ‘lumia compositions’, as he called them, are both feats of bric-a-brac engineering and ethereal works of art. He employed reflective mirrors, hand-painted glass disks, and bent pieces of metal – all housed in a screened wooden cabinet, or, in one case, mounted on a walnut ‘tea wagon’ – to transform beams of light produced by a series of lamps and lenses.3

It was filmed from the original lumia construct owned by American art collectors Eugene and Carol Epstein. Their private collection in Los Angeles houses nine of the surviving eighteen lumia pieces constructed by Wilfred. The Epsteins have been dedicated to the preservation of Wilfred’s works since Eugene first encountered the lumia at MoMA in 1960, where it was screened in a darkened alcove. Eugene described the ecstatic experience of watching ‘Opus 137’ for an extended period: ‘Sublime, ineluctable beauty. It’s a visceral joy.’4 Eugene Epstein’s expression of the Sublime could be seen in the context of David Nye’s conception of the ‘technological sublime’ as a peculiarly American manifestation that connects earlier forms of natural sublimity with technological expressions. One manifestation that Nye points to is the emergence of the electrically-lit cityscape at the turn of the twentieth century as a spontaneous kinetic form that engaged the popular imagination, in ways very similar to Wilfred’s clavilux: This vibrant landscape [of electric light] was the product of uncoordinated individual decisions, yet it had a collective effect – a kinetic impact – that no one had anticipated. Taken together, the myriad lights produced a lively landscape with strong popular appeal. Like the accident of the city skyline, the electrified city was something fundamentally new, an unintended sublimity.5

This aspect of the Sublime comes through in early writings about the impact of the clavilux on 1920s audiences examined by Jed Rasula, many from critics who perceived in the moving colour-forms of the lumia a continuity with the emerging area of abstract art, now animated and projected on a vast scale:

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[R]eviewers [used] lists of verbs to evoke the experience of a primal pulsation that could not be objectified:‘swirling and whirling and curling, twisting and untwisting, folding and folding, gliding, approaching and retreating, in that haunted and inexplicable space.6

Rasula sees in this the attempt to find a suitable descriptive language for the experience they were undergoing in viewing the lumia. Indeed, its closeness to the formal qualities of early abstraction surely assisted Wilfred’s standing with MoMA , which in 1971 staged a retrospective of his work featuring eleven programmed lumia compositions and concept drawings demonstrating his technical ideas, concepts and project development.7 Thirty years previously, the museum had purchased Wilfred’s Vertical Sequence II, Opus 137, the first of his works to enter a museum collection, and then in 1952 included him in an influential show, 15 Americans. This might be where Jackson Pollock is reputed to have seen Wilfred’s work; certainly, two of his associates credited Wilfred as an inspiration for some of Pollock’s later ideas.8 Wilfred was exhibited again in 1958 and 1962, and MoMA commissioned Lumia Suite, Opus 158 in 1963, which was the piece that Eugene Epstein saw in a darkened alcove in the Auditorium Gallery. Although this official recognition came quite late in Wilfred’s life – he died in 1968 – he had already been quite influential within the New York art scene as a result of his own efforts to showcase lumia both on theatre tours and in his purpose-built space, the Art Institute of Light on Lexington Avenue. Wilfred brought a range of skills to his lumia project, not least his wide-ranging technical knowledge and his continual refinement of the clavilux, the programmable mechanical projection system that made the lumia possible. Whilst the theatre installation version of clavilux had an extensive range of controls, the domestic version was more limited and used coloured discs as a kind of pre-recorded visual content. There is a very interesting photograph of a 1930s clavilux operated with a small controller that looks for all the world like a games console long before Magnavox developed the first T V interactive system in the 1960s. It is as if Wilfred anticipated this area of home entertainment by over thirty years. Although he conceived of a small-scale clavilux for widespread use, Wilfred had a very particular understanding of ‘lumia’: An eighth fine art is beginning its life in our generation, a silent visual art, in which the artist’s sole medium of expression is light. The new art form has been named lumia. Like its seven older sisters [painting, sculpture, music etc], lumia is an aesthetic concept, expressed through a physical basis of methods, materials and tools. In a complete definition the two aspects must be stated separately before a composite can yield a clear picture. The aesthetic definition must clarify the artist’s conception and intent, the physical one the means he employs in achieving his object.9

This ‘eighth fine art’ is positioned as a self-contained area of artistic practice that bears some relation to painting but is achieved entirely with light. Wilfred notes that it has

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both an aesthetic (or conceptual) component and a physical one in terms of its techniques and technological basis. The use of light, though not entirely novel, was positioned in contrast to the work of Scriabin and Rimington, and Wilfred was particularly concerned with the formal aspects of the lumia experience. Aleksandr Scriabin is today remembered primarily for his piano music and his symphonies, such as Prometheus (1915). However, his synaesthetic concepts have recently been re-evaluated and his attempts to produce a range of colour values corresponding to the tones of the scale – deriving more from personal experience than from previous ‘colour scales’ – resulted in an instrument intended to accompany his musical scores with light: In Scriabin’s case, this mode of perception resulted in the colour-symphony ‘Prometheus,’ a work which included an instrument he called the Tastiera per luce which would project coloured light according to the composer’s system of synthetic association. It was so natural for Scriabin to associate literal colour with tonalities that he did not bother to explain the color significance in the published orchestral score.10

Wallace Rimington, was a London-based professor of painting who in 1893 invented a coloured projection system, the ‘Colour Organ’, intended for accompanying orchestral works with a changing backdrop of colours. This was played with a keyboard like a standard organ, the keys operating a system of electric lights. Scriabin and Rimington were two key exponents of the concept of ‘colour music’, which also informed early abstract animators such as Fischinger. Wilfred’s opposition to ‘Colour Music’ had crystallized by 1947 when he wrote the first of two articles in the Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism. Whilst he praised Pythagoras as the first experiencer of lumia (in the sense that his theory of the ‘music of the spheres’ is about movement and proportion as seen in the night sky), he also blamed Aristotle for suggesting a basic equivalence between sound and colour: Aristotle unwittingly launched the unfortunate changeling ‘Colour Music’ with the following passage in De Sensu: ‘Colours may mutually relate like musical concords for their pleasantest arrangement; like those concords mutually proportionate.’11

In his article, Wilfred made further critical observations on the history of this ‘unfortunate changeling’, revisiting the eighteenth-century French experimenter Father Castel who produced a ‘colour harpsichord’. Wilfred pointed out that although Castel was influenced by Newton, he made the subjective decision to change some of his colour values to suit his preferred musical notes. In other words, all these colour–note correspondences were purely personal and did not relate to some fixed scale of colour. In this Wilfred claimed support from Goethe: ‘Goethe concludes with the statement that colour and sound act “in wholly different provinces, in different modes, on different elements, for different senses.” ’12 This connects Wilfred to the German Romantic tradition, emanating from Goethe, about the subjectivity of colour and its affective properties as opposed to Newton’s

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insistence on a fixed and universal scheme of colours taken from the splitting of white light. As Dani Cavallaro notes in relation to Goethe’s interest in synesthesia: Romantic art was profoundly inspired by Goethe’s emphasis on the subjectivity of colour, viewing it as a positive recognition of the role played by imagination and conjecture in the fashioning of empirical reality.13

Goethe also inspired Otto Runge to develop his ideas that linked music to visual art, so Wilfred was perhaps too hasty to claim him as a support for dividing the visual and sonic arts. This contrasts with Scriabin, perhaps the key exponent of visual music in the early twentieth century, even though he barely lived to see his music performed with colour machines. His mystically-informed attempt to find a scale of colour to match the musical octave included a very personal concept of synaesthetic correspondence between pitch, colour and the meaning of these links. In this way, Scriabin utilized a very old concept and renewed it for the twentieth century. His development of a colour machine, the luce, as a performance instrument to accompany his orchestral scores was also a new departure. He was a contemporary of others such as Rimington, who were moving towards the same concept, but they tended to use pre-existing music as the basis for their performances. By contrast, Scriabin aimed to compose simultaneously in both media and thus retained creative control over auditory and visual aspects. Wilfred – perhaps unkindly – noted that critical responses to both Rimington’s colour performance at St James’s Hall in 1895 and Scriabin’s first New York performance of Prometheus in 1915, with the tastiera per luce, were at best mixed. He attributes this to the formless qualities of the colours that accompanied the music in both cases. Rimington’s system was set up to be played like an organ, with rapid colour changes from lights; whilst Scriabin’s much more modest machine used coloured lamps onstage, arranged in a circular format. In the case of Rimington, Wilfred says: The draped screen pulsates with changing colour; there is no form, only a restless flicker, hue after hue, one for each musical note sounded. As the tempo of the music increases, the accompanying colours succeed one another too rapidly to be caught by the eye, while the ear readily accepts and enjoys the most rapid passage in the music.14

Wilfred averred that there was a basic incompatibility between the eye’s appreciation of colour and the ear’s registration of musical notes. The problem, he thought, was that the eye craves form and searches this out. With some surprise he noted that despite being a professor of painting, Rimington ‘realized too late that form is an indispensable factor in a visual art’. Wilfred made a clever reversal of the ‘colour organ’ premise to demonstrate this underlying weakness: by using a photoelectric cell attached to a sound generator, one could scan the light values of different paintings to render them into noise: ‘Even if we succeed in getting deep, basso-profundo rumblings from a Rembrandt and high, plaintive howls from a Picasso, we shall have proved nothing.’15

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Wilfred’s clavilux developed from primitive light-projecting devices he built in his youth in Denmark. As a student of painting in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, he received no support from his teachers for his ideas, so he abandoned painting altogether and supported himself as a musician and singer in order to keep his experiments going. From his early start in 1905, it took him the best part of seventeen years to develop the device he christened the ‘clavilux’ to a point where he could publicly perform. In the interim he served in World War I from 1914 to 1916 and then departed to New York, where he remained for the rest of his life. At this point there was an important development in Wilfred’s artistic evolution that was not mentioned in his 1947 article. One might speculate why this omission occurred. On his arrival in New York, Wilfred made the acquaintance of the noted architect and designer Claude Fayette Bragdon. An innovator who developed the ideas of Louis Sullivan and other forward-thinking American architects in the early 1900s, Bragdon was also deeply influenced by Theosophy, as was Wilfred. This found expression in Bragdon’s enthusiasm for sacred geometry and an underlying mathematical basis for various sensory experiences including music and art.16 From 1913 onwards he also became involved in Festivals of Song and Light, events using massed choirs and light projections through stencils. These incorporated the concept of a “democratic cultural form capable of uniting a crowd of individuals into a unified polity expressing itself with one voice”, owing something to Wagner, Bergson and various Theosophical thinkers.17 Bragdon’s projective ornaments used patterns synthesised from Eastern and Western architecture, and a palette of colours “based on correspondences between musical and chromatic harmonies”. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Bragdon also developed military festivals for soldiers departing for Europe. That year, Bragdon formed a society called the Prometheans with the painter Van Dearing Perrine and Thomas Wilfred, whom he already knew from his lute performances. The project was bankrolled by Bragdon’s wealthy associate, Walter Kirkpatrick Brice, who offered space at his estate in Huntington, Long Island, for the construction of a laboratory and ten-seat private theatre with a projection screen for the light art. Bragdon had already experimented with an early light machine that he had built in a converted hayloft “with the aid of carpenters, tinsmiths, and electricians” around 1917.18 However he was impressed with Wilfred’s enthusiasm and skill in the new space created for the Prometheans: A skilled mechanic and electrician, with clear-cut ideas of what he wanted to do and how to go about it, always on the job and utterly absorbed in it, Wilfred soon became the dominant member of our still incipient organization.19

It seems that Wilfred utilised the space and materials to build his first clavilux and went on to exhibit it as a solo endeavour. Bragdon hints at a disagreement over expanding the Prometheans to include such figures as Norman Bel Geddes, widely known for his stage designs and lighting, which Wilfred opposed.20 Wilfred’s focus seems to have been solely on his own machine and art. That said, Bragdon’s memoir does not seem bitter about his decision to pursue a solo career.

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Given their shared Theosophical background and points of reference in the history of projected light machines going back to Bainbridge Bishop’s ’Color Organ’, one can assume that Wilfred absorbed some of Bragdon’s ideas about colour and music. Not only did Bragdon oppose a simplistic correlation between colour and musical forms, he also averred: Music unfolds in time, Time implies succession. Colour music unfolds in space, and space implies simultaneity. If there should be a workable correlation between music and mobile colour it should be sought, therefore, rather in the domain of harmony, which involves simultaneity, than in melody, which is succession.21

Wilfred’s later writings certainly bear the stamp of Bragdon’s concepts, although this should not detract from his original developments in the area of light art. His clavilux performances achieved critical success and encouraged him to tour the USA and Europe, establishing a cycle where he performed during the winter and spent the summers improving his machinery. Although Wilfred recognized that much of the acclaim for his earlier work was merely a craving for novelty on the part of the public – he refused all requests to use the clavilux for advertising ‘Stockings, Chewing Gum, Laxatives, [and] Cigarettes’22 – he was also prescient in establishing his Art Institute of Light. Conceived as a lumia theatre with studios and laboratories, it was built at Grand Central Palace in New York and opened in 1933. Here he held regular lumia performances and also encouraged visits from local art schools such as the Pratt Institute. An account by Carolyn S. Ashbrook relates a visit by students from the Fine Arts Department of Pratt in 1939. She wanted them to see the potentials of colour in motion and talked about the ‘recital’ given by Wilfred in quite musical terms: Here were possibilities that stirred one to create rhythms of his own with the whole range of the rainbow to work with. Here were abstract and semi-representational forms woven into patterns, some suggesting objects in the world of nature, and some far removed from reality . . . All were made out of light, which broke into colours of every conceivable relationship . . . Mr. Wilfred happily uses the term ‘recital’ for his programmes. . . . To a great screen, by means of powerful projectors, light was thrown, in front of which patterns evolved, forming and reforming, swinging through orbits that gave them definite three-dimensional quality and introducing colour in great purity that changed by each movement into every imaginable tone.23

Clearly there was a distinctly musical concept at work but not one that was actually accompanied by music. The irony, given Wilfred’s later critique of colour music, is that he had begun as a musician and also gave early lumia performances accompanied by music. Writing in 1947, some 26 years after his first public lumia performance, Wilfred set out a series of parameters for lumia that emphasize its visual, even painterly, qualities: ‘Form, colour and motion are the three basic factors in lumia – as in all visual experience – and form and motion are the two most important.’24

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For Wilfred this constituted a new art form because motion and shape could be generated simultaneously by the use of changing light sources controlled by interchangeable slides, masks and the variations made possible by changing the electrical current. Nor was this constrained by a flat surface. He considered the projected image to be a materialization of the artist’s visual imagination that was present in three dimensions, even if the suggestion of volume had to be achieved by varying light intensity instead of actual three-dimensional shapes: The lumia artist conceives his idea as a three-dimensional drama unfolding in infinite space. In order to share his vision with others he must materialize it. This he may do by executing it as a two-dimensional sequence, projected on a flat white screen by means of a specially constructed projection instrument controlled from a keyboard. [He] strives to add, by optical means, an illusion of the missing third dimension to his flat screen image, and to perform it so convincingly in a spatial way that the screen creates the illusion of a large window opening on infinity, and the spectator imagines he is witnessing a radiant drama in deep space.25

In Wilfred’s 1948 article ‘Composing in the Art of Lumia’, he explained to the would-be lumia performer that the system uses light as a structural and temporal medium. It is therefore able to bring out a greater range of luminance and chromatic value from a dark background instead of having a white canvas as its backdrop. Wilfred framed the artist’s imagination as an imaginary journey through space, an advanced idea for the 1940s, and makes an implicit connection between the ‘mind’s eye’ and the glowing entoptic images that form when the eyes are closed; he also suggests an equivalence between inner and outer space. In lumia, your sole medium of expression is light. You must fashion it into form, colour, and motion by means of a projection instrument controlled from an organlike keyboard . . . In light, you have additional dimensions to work with – you are literally free of time and space. A white canvas is no longer your highest value; you may imbue a colour with dazzling, sun-like intensity, using for contrast an absolute and velvety darkness. But the time dimension is by far your most important new factor. You are to be a choreographer of motion in space and for this you must possess a dancer’s sense of grace, a musician’s feeling for rhythmic flow.26

The article was intended to provide the artist with a framework for lumia. Wilfred divides the imaginary space up by means of an XY grid and also creates temporal markers for the progression of the moving images. According to Wilfred’s diagram, the screen on which the lumia is projected is conceived as a transparent plane interposed between the spectator and the virtual space within which the lumia image moves. Wilfred did not see the lumia as a two-dimensional surface but as an image with volume, a kind of kinetic sculpture composed of light.27 Once the spatial element was established, Wilfred then described the sequential movements of the lumia in terms not dissimilar to motion film. Its changes were

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broken down into a series of frames and the filmic element becomes evident in his diagrammatic representations. The motions were plotted in advance, as a kind of programme, anticipating later developments in computer graphics. Wilfred conceived of a graphical form resembling that of the computer image space in both visual and structural terms. Although motion was a key part of the performance and Wilfred presented the lumia artist as a performer using the clavilux as an interactive instrument, he also stated quite firmly that lumia is ‘a silent visual art’. Indeed, the lumia performances at the Art Institute of Light, and later at MoMA , were silent. Thus the visual aspects of lumia were to the fore. In this he diverged quite sharply from many of his contemporaries who wanted to use similar technologies and concepts to unify music and imagery, and achieve the ancient aspiration towards ‘colour music’. Writing in the Leonardo journal in the late 1980s, Stephen Eskilson uses Dick Higgins’s term ‘intermedia’ to consider Wilfred’s contribution to the arts. Higgins, a key member of the Fluxus group in the early 1960s that also included Allan Kaprow and Nam June Paik, was convinced that the old divisions between various media were utterly outdated and inadequate to explain the performative art that Fluxus championed. For the last ten years or so, artists have changed their media to suit this situation, to the point where the media have broken down in their traditional forms, and have become merely puristic points of reference . . . This is the intermedial approach, to emphasize the dialectic between the media. A composer is a dead man unless he composes for all the media and for his world.28

However Eskilson also points out that throughout the 1920s, Wilfred did in fact perform with music and in 1926 he worked with the conductor Leopold Stokowski to accompany several orchestral pieces as a visual performer. As Rollin Smith notes: Leopold Stokowski’s interest in electronic technology – particularly with regard to recording, is well known. He was also interested in every kind of electronic instrument and through the course of his career he featured several recentlyinvented instruments at his concerts. The first was on 2 and 4 January 1926, when his performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade was accompanied by Thomas Wilfred playing his clavilux.29

It seems that the critical appreciation of these later performances was lacking and therefore Wilfred seems to have made a definite decision to work in the visual area only and not evoke the synaesthetic potential of combining music and imagery.30 However, Stokowski was very appreciative of the qualities of the clavilux and spoke of its ethereal, almost spiritual, dimension in a conversation with Jiddu Krishnamurti about the nature of creativity: It seems to me that music is the least material of the arts, and perhaps we could even conceive of an art still subtler than that. I was very impressed by a light-

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colour organ called the ‘clavilux’, invented by Thomas Wilfred of New York. He has developed what seems to me a new art of colour in form and motion, and it occurred to me that there are aspects of music that are extremely immaterial.31

Eskilson proposes that Willard Huntington Wright’s art primer The Future of Painting of 1923, which asserted that projected light would become the future of painting, might have influenced Wilfred. In his short book, Huntington Wright proposed that the evolution of painting was moving away from the dominance of drawing, towards a form appropriate for modern interests in colour. He considered that true expression of colour could never be achieved with pigments on a surface, but should instead be represented by light itself: That light is the logical means for the expression of colour is obvious, for colour is light; and only through light (that is: the heliotropic aspect of colour) can colour be made to function most effectively . . . Light, in fact, is the only medium which answers all the requirements of the colour-artist.32

The first manifestations of this were Wallace-Rimington’s colour organ, Scriabin’s luce and Wilfred’s clavilux, all mentioned by name. Given that the book was published in 1923, Huntington Wright was certainly in the vanguard of new media and in many ways ahead of his time. However, he was critical of all three attempts: he said the colour organ was underpinned by the wrong chromatic scale; Scriabin’s efforts were written off as ‘abortive and futile’ because he was ignorant of modern colour research (though arguably he worked from more personal colour values); and Wilfred’s concept was said to be ‘lacking in aesthetic value and is woefully restricted in the control of both forms and colours’.33 But Huntington Wright recognized that all these efforts had value: The aesthetic failure of these instruments does not, at the present time, matter. By the mere projection of mobile coloured lights they have proved the value – and, indeed, the inevitability – of this medium for the new art of colour; and, even in their present crude form, they are not so inherently inadequate a medium as oil paint.34

Would Wilfred have been in any way inspired by such faint praise? Even so, we find here an art critic who was very supportive of the medium of projected light; who appraised the non-figurative art movements working in the early 1920s; and who made some bold predictions about the future development of art and technology: The colour-instrument of the future will not merely throw pretty squares, circles, coils, and volutes of coloured light on a screen, but will be able to record the artist’s moods, desires and emotions along any visually formal aesthetic line. Only when such an instrument has been perfected can the modern artist’s creative conceptions be properly expressed. With the completion of this new medium the art of colour will have entirely dissociated itself from the art of painting, not only impulse and conception, but in the world’s attitude towards it.35

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Huntington Wright suggested that visual aesthetics are amenable to some kind of formal analysis that would enable them to be produced mechanically, and function as the direct expression of the artist’s imagination without any need for an intervening physical medium like oil paint. Yet he also thought that this new form might embody ancient concepts of visual art, and looked back to the canons of Chinese art formulated by Hsieh Ho that can be summarized as: rhythmic vitality; organic structure; conformity with nature, in a Daoist sense of conveying more than just the external form; and the arrangement or composition and the transmission of classic models.36 Despite his inherent dislike of the genre of ‘colour music’ and awareness of the flawed attempts by early pioneers, it is nevertheless arguable that Wilfred’s lumia arose from a tradition of musical performance. The name of the clavilux itself recalled the clavichord, a keyboard contemporary of the harpsichord, and its appearance strongly recalled a theatre organ with multiple keys and stops. Wilfred’s lumia were composed and controlled with this instrument and he clearly derived both compositional and performative elements from musical precursors. In her description for the MoMA catalogue, Donna M. Stein alludes to the continuities between musical instruments and Wilfred’s visual ‘instrument’: In 1919, after fourteen years of experimentation, Thomas Wilfred made his first successful instrument, the clavilux, a name derived from the Latin, meaning ‘light played by key.’ Wilfred’s ideas for the clavilux and lumia were dependent upon modern advancements in electrical and mechanical research. Technology has freed the artist by expanding the possibilities for his creativity. The clavilux is one of the earliest examples of this freedom – a creation unifying art and science. Beginning with Model A, Thomas Wilfred built eight variations on his first clavilux, of which the seventh variation (G) is on view in the Auditorium Gallery.37

Aside from noting the organ-like form of the clavilux itself, with stops and keys, Wilfred also used opus numbers for his visual compositions, and his pre-performance speeches explained his treatment of colour and form in harmonic and melodic terms. Not only Wilfred himself but critics who viewed his works concluded they had most connection to music than any other art form.38 A further aspect of this debate is the different approach that Wilfred adopted for his domestic versions of the clavilux, the clavilux junior. One of these machines was recently sold at auction by Skinner (April 2015, for $11,070) and is described as follows: Thomas Wilfred’s ‘Clavilux Junior’, Clavilux Laboratories, New York, May 1930, walnut veneered Art Deco cabinet housing the convex white screen, upper and lower colored bulbs in the upper section of the cabinet, bottom section with remote control, pierced disc turntable to allow light to filter through for projection of colored glass discs, light projection tube, and disc storage [with] clear 8-in. glass disc with five various prism shapes, six colored disc with labels reading in part Clavilux Junior with record numbers OP 72 through OP 76, six clear glass discs, cabinet ht. 68 in.39

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Eskilson proposes that these scaled-down optical machines were intended to play lumia automatically and were effectively pieces of kinetic sculpture. They marked a change in his attitude towards the concept of light art: Between 1929 and 1931, however, Wilfred altered his strategy and began work on self-playing claviluxes that could be displayed like paintings. Consequently, he recontextualized lumia, divorcing it from the context of musical aesthetics and realigning it conceptually with modernist painting.40

Wilfred primarily conceived the display of lumia as a performance, but he saw the potential for scaled-down clavilux systems for home use. He also started exploring programmed and pre-recorded performances to enable non-experts to experience the imagery using disks that had lumia colours inscribed on them. They could also produce variations using other settings that enabled the machine to project unrepeated performances for over a year. This alone should make Wilfred a true precursor of programmable computer graphics, even if what he was producing was really an analogue light-emitting system that made variations upon a pre-recorded theme. Although the light-forms projected by Wilfred’s system looked quite diaphanous, they are not: they had a range of underlying structures as per Wilfred’s grid system, to the extent that he conceived of several works as programmatic experiences intended to evoke the architecture of mid-century America and also a journey through various districts of New York at night-time when the office lights were being turned off. Wilfred’s description of Rhythm in Steel, Op.71 also shows a more abstract relation of form and evocative movement: Rhythm in Steel, Op. 71. The spectator is being transported slowly through a mobile tracery of characteristic steel structures-bridges, cranes, high-tension towers, transformer stations, and the like. A progressive rhythmic pattern is created by many diagonal braces moving at different tempi and producing a constant flux of expanding and contracting triangles. Now you are lifted high up for a view of a distant suspension span, then diagonally downward while a huge high-tension tower shoots its complex silhouette into an evening sky.41

This is very suggestive of David Nye’s ‘technological sublime’ as reflected in the American city at night. The evocation of architectural forms is in marked contrast to the light performances of Scriabin and Rimington, and illustrates exactly why Wilfred disdained their formless synaesthesia. Indeed there seems to be no evidence that he conceived of his art in synaesthetic terms. He acknowledged its musical element in terms of choreography rather than tone or harmony, and clearly differentiated the ‘eighth art’ of lumia in other ways: [Lumia] is neither composed nor performed like music. In music a group of instruments has been evolved, and long since standardized, by means of which any composition may be played instantly. In lumia the execution of nearly every new

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work means readjustments, changes, or new additions to the existing equipment. Lumia may never be played in the manner of music . . . and I see no reason at all for striving toward this goal. The two arts are so different in nature that attempts to design lumia instruments in imitation of musical ones will prove as futile as attempts to write lumia compositions by following the conventional rules laid down for music. We must shun all imitation and deal with lumia in terms of itself.42

Wilfred identifies a different model for the lumia performance. The mechanism is itself modified and adapted by the human performer, who conceives of the lumia composition with the system’s capabilities in mind. Illustrations of the system show its range of controls, extending far beyond the simplistic colour keyboard of Rimington’s instrument or the circle of lights utilized by Scriabin. Indeed, Wilfred also developed and constructed theatrical lighting systems for various venues. Although he made a clear distinction theatrical systems and his own light performances, Wilfred made several references to lumia in an article about stage lighting in 1951: I have designed a console for thirty standard Variac dimmers, with sliding keys on one-inch centres and steel wires running over pulleys to a dimmer room over the control room. The thirty control keys move within an area of only 18 by 30 inches, and a master provides proportional dimming of any set-up. I am very much in favour of a simple manual control board requiring some skill of its operator, and granting him in return the same latitude for personal interpretation we now grant the musician. Only in this way can the visual accompaniment for a play become a living thing.43

Wilfred wanted the operator of the console to achieve the same integration with the instrument as a musician might achieve with a piano or a violin. The ‘latitude for personal interpretation’ is that performative element that Wilfred brought to his visual ‘recitals’ at the Art Institute of Light from the 1930s onwards. Yet Wilfred’s own lumia demonstrations after the 1920s were deliberately silent and – perhaps after his own experiences with Stokowski – he decided against making visual correlations with music. This is in marked contrast to several other abstract animators, not least Mary Ellen Bute whose widely-distributed abstract films of the late 1930s are named after and accompanied by Bach’s Toccata and Fugue. The structure of the animation is tightly patterned after the music. Writing about her work in 1956, Bute attributes her lifelong interest in abstract animation to an early desire to construct dynamic visual forms within a musical framework: For years I have tried to find a method for controlling a source of light to produce images in rhythm. I wanted to manipulate light to produce visual compositions in time continuity much as a musician manipulates sound to produce music . . . It was particularly while I listened to music that I felt an overwhelming urge to translate my reactions and ideas into a visual form that would have the ordered sequence of music.44

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Mary Ellen Bute was also influenced by Wilfred around 1928 and herself had a background in theatrical lighting systems; indeed, their switchboards suggested to her new ways of controlling images and content in animated terms. This led to a brief collaboration with Leon Theremin to create a device ‘for the free control of light and form in movement, synchronized with sound’, that Bute intriguingly refers to as ‘an early use of electronics for drawing’. Bute’s work with Theremin was predicated in the fact that the clavilux didn’t offer her sufficient control over formal design elements (despite Wilfred’s intentions). With Theremin she developed a device for drawing with light on a screen: We immersed a tiny mirror in a small tube of oil, connected by a fine wire which was led through an oscillator to a type of joy-stick control. Manipulating this joystick was like having a responsive drawing pencil or paint brush that flowed light and was entirely under the control of the person at the joy-stick . . . The result on the screen was pristine and pure like a lovely drawing in kinetic light that developed in time-continuity.45

Theremin’s and Bute’s device (which was either some form of cathode-ray tube or a projection onto a sheet, it is not entirely clear) was publicly shown at a lecture, ‘The Perimeters of Light and Sound and their Possible Synchronization’, on 31 January 1932 at the New York Musicological Society where Theremin used one of his electronic musical instruments to control the light pointer, converting sound into visual form. This enthused the musicologists and Bute intended to do more because this advance was only an approximation of her vision. Lack of funds and Theremin’s subsequent return to Soviet Russia curtailed the project. It was around this time at Theremin’s studio that Bute encountered the mathematical compositional theories of Joseph Schillinger which could be applied to kinetic art. Searching for a way to develop these ideas in practical terms, Bute then moved away from lighting systems towards film: I felt keenly the limitations inherent in the plastic and graphic mediums and determined to find a medium in which movement would be the primary design factor. Motion picture sound film seemed to be the answer and I began to make films, most of them abstract in content.46

Several animated films emerged from her work with Schillinger. These were all accompanied by music, including a special arrangement of Bach’s Sheep may safely graze by Stokowski who was interested in Bute’s work. In the early 1950s, she also collaborated with Dr Ralph Potter of Bell Labs to utilize sound waveforms on oscilloscopes as part of her animations. Clearly, she perceived a strong underlying link between music, colour and abstract imagery that was also reinforced by her mentor.47 Schillinger was a Russian emigré to New York in the 1920s and ahead of his time in seeing the potential for electronic musical instruments. Indeed, he collaborated with Theremin and composer Henry Cowell to build the first automatic rhythm machine, the rhythmicon. Cowell was influential on the young John Cage in suggesting new

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technologies for music. Schillinger was particularly interested in the development of compositional systems with a strongly mathematical basis, including Benny Goodman and even George Gershwin amongst his students (Gershwin apparently made extensive use of the Schillinger system in Porgy and Bess). Schillinger’s development of musical constructions and his more general aesthetic theories formed the basis for his 1948 publication The Mathematical Basis of the Arts, which was distributed posthumously. His basic contention was that aesthetic forms in both music and the visual arts follow measurable and quantifiable schema that are often manifested as curvilinear graphic forms (such as the golden section), and those forms that are most appealing can be quantified. Whilst allowing for interpretation and human development, Schillinger thought that aspects of this process could be automated and systematized, as he said: As long as an art form manifests itself through a physical medium, and is perceived through an organ of sensation, memory and associative orientation, it is a measurable quantity. Measurable quantities are subject to the laws of mathematics. Thus, analysis of esthetic form requires mathematical techniques, and the synthesis of forms (the realization of forms in an art medium) requires the technique of engineering. There is no reason why music or painting or poetry cannot be designed and executed just as engines or bridges are.48

In a sense this turns Nye’s ‘technological sublime’ back on itself; instead of merely equating technological experiences with art, Schillinger looks to ways of executing aesthetic expressions with the same precision as manufactured objects. Schillinger went on to say that the temporal and structural aspects of music parallel the choreographic aspects of his abstract animations; he made several comparisons of kinetic projections – which sound very close to lumia – and music, linked with a common element which is their shared basis in time. In this respect at least, Schillinger was closer to the spirit of Wilfred’s choreographic conception of his lumia, especially in his listing of the ‘Elements of Visual Kinetic Composition’ which includes the trajectories of lines and solid figures, and the effects of illumination and texture, but also the component of time, which is also included in a list of the ‘Elements of Music’ that immediately follows.49 Schillinger considered the creation of ‘Combined Arts’ based around a screen divided into 24 × 24 units (576 squares). He took the 24 frames per second of a standard motion picture as the underlying temporal division and used this to generate both the music and the imagery. In a series of diagrams and formulae that were intended to calculate activity across each of the 576 visual units, he produced abstract imagery very close to that of Mary Ellen Bute and the early works of John and James Whitney. He also suggested that the 24-frame division is the key factor in the generation of sound and image.50 The correlation of the general component in both art forms may be assigned to different proportionate relations such as harmonic ratios, distributive powers, series of growth and so on. The entire manifold of synchronized components must

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be based on a standard space-time unit expressed through a single motion picture frame (1/24 of a second) and the common denominator of musical time.51

The natural outcome of this line of thinking is Schillinger’s prediction of several instruments for automatically generating imagery and music, including the ‘graphomaton’ – an instrument producing linear design, and ‘luminaton’ – an instrument producing design projected by light source.52 The point is that these systems are algorithmic and generative, and Schillinger anticipates the much later development of digital programmed art with a system designed to work with purely geometric, that is, analogue, calculations. Although this close connection of image and music was not Wilfred’s aim, it is clear that musical forms and an underlying temporal structure were essential to the development of his lumia. Where he intentionally departed from earlier attempts at a gross and obvious connection between musical scales and simple colour sequences was in the complexity and choreography of his generated images. In this he can be directly compared to his near-contemporary Oskar Fischinger, who echoed Wilfred’s denial that his images were simply illustrative of music. Although Fischinger, who did not communicate well in English, never explained his system as extensively as Wilfred had in his two articles, he was moved to respond to an article by Richter that made the assumption that his work had a direct and obvious relationship to music. Fischinger’s response was quite emphatic: Not all of my films are soundfilms. My films are no illustrations of music.53

He went on to explain in more detail that music functioned as ‘[an] architectural groundplan – time and rythmus were given and the mood and feeling were blown in the optical motions’. Here again, Fischinger meant that his images, which were both generated by specially-constructed mechanical apparatus and also marked out on rolls of film in units of 24 frames, just as Schillinger proposed, shared something of the music’s structure but did not simply follow its form or respond to its passages. This could again be usefully contrasted with Mary Ellen Bute’s works, which certainly are illustrative of music in a fairly straightforward way. [In] absolute film; music is used to put it over, but the development of optical expression, the invention of new ways of motion in coordination with the Rythmus given in the music . . . the invention of new Ways of motion is the main Idea, the main force, and the time – or Rhythmus coordination with music is secondary of less importance.54

Both Thomas Wilfred and Oskar Fischinger developed systems of dynamic abstract imagery that had an underlying connection to music and were derived in similar ways from the dynamic structure of musical composition. However, unlike Schillinger and other abstract animators such as Bute, they insisted on the separateness of their visual

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art from music and consciously distanced themselves from their precursors in ‘colour music’. In that sense, both ‘lumia’ and ‘absolute film’ do indeed point towards a new direction for visual imagery that would be more fully realized by the development of computer graphics in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet, as Leopold Stokowski intuited, there was still more than an echo of music in the way that the immaterial forms projected by the clavilux rose and fell in rhythmic patterns, and in the performative aspect of Wilfred’s work. If not simply visualizations of music then both he and Fischinger found ways to develop new optical forms that had within them something evocative of musical phrases and dynamics.

Notes 1 Brian Evans, ‘Foundations of a Visual Music’, Computer Music Journal 29, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 11. 2 Gregory Zinman, ‘Lumia: Thomas Wilfred’s Opus 161 (1965–66)’, New Yorker, 27 June, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/06/27/lumia (accessed 17 March 2017). 3 Zinman, ‘Lumia’. 4 Zinman, ‘Lumia’. 5 David E. Nye, The American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1994), 173. 6 Jed Rasula, History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 36. 7 Donna M. Stein, cited in press release for the exhibition Thomas Wilfred: Lumia (New York: MoMA , 1971), https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_ archives/4690/releases/MOMA_1971_0127_89A.pdf? (accessed 17 March 2017). 8 Stephen Eskilson, ‘Thomas Wilfred and Intermedia: Seeking a Framework for Lumia’, Leonardo 36, no. 1 (2003): 65. 9 Thomas Wilfred, ‘Light and the Artist’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5, no. 4 (June 1947): 252. 10 K. Peacock, ‘Synesthetic Perception: Alexander Scriabin’s Color Hearing’, Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2, no. 4 (Summer, 1985): 484. 11 Wilfred, ‘Light and the Artist’, 247. 12 Wilfred, ‘Light and the Artist’, 248. 13 Dani Cavallaro, Synesthesia and the Arts (Jefferson, NC , and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2013), 35. 14 Wilfred, ‘Light and the Artist’, 249. 15 Wilfred, ‘Light and the Artist’, 250. 16 Massey, Jonathan ‘Organic Architecture and Direct Democracy,’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2006 Dec., v.65, n.4, p.[578]–613, p581 17 Massey, ‘Organic Architecture and Direct Democracy,’ p595 18 Bragdon, C. F. (1938) The Secret Springs: An Autobiography (1938, Andrew Dakers Ltd; reprinted by Cosimo Inc. 2005), p119 19 Bragdon, The Secret Springs: An Autobiography, p121 20 Bragdon, The Secret Springs: An Autobiography, p121 21 Bragdon, The Secret Springs: An Autobiography, p118 22 Wilfred, ‘Light and the Artist’, 251.

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C. S. Ashbrook, ‘Inspired by the Clavilux’, Design 41, no. 1 (1939): 19. Wilfred, ‘Light and the Artist’, 252. Wilfred, ‘Light and the Artist’, 252. Thomas Wilfred, ‘Composing in the Art of Lumia’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 7, no. 2 (1948): 79. Wilfred, ‘Composing in the Art of Lumia’, 82–3. Dick Higgins, ‘Statement on Intermedia’, 3 August, 1966, http://www.artpool.hu/Fluxus/ Higgins/intermedia2.html (accessed 17 March 2017). Rollin Smith, Stokowski and the Organ (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2004), 111–13. Eskilson, ‘Thomas Wilfred and Intermedia’, 65. Jiddu Krishnamurti, ‘A Conversation with Stokowski’ (1928), http://www.jiddukrishnamurti.net/en/1927–1928–1929-early-writings/krishnamurti-early-writings–12a-conversation-with-stokowski (accessed 17 March 2017). Willard Huntington Wright, The Future of Painting (New York: B. W. Huebsch, Inc., 1923), 47–8. Wright, The Future of Painting, 49. Wright, The Future of Painting, 49. Wright, The Future of Painting, 51. Wright, The Future of Painting, 51. Stein, cited in press release for the exhibition Thomas Wilfred: Lumia (1971). Eskilson, ‘Thomas Wilfred and Intermedia’, 65. Skinner Auctioneers, ‘Thomas Wilfred’s “Clavilux Junior” ’, 25 April 2015, http://www. skinnerinc.com/auctions/2804M/lots/262 (accessed 17 March 2017). Eskilson, ‘Thomas Wilfred and Intermedia’, 66. Wilfred, ‘Composing in the Art of Lumia’, 91. Wilfred, ‘Composing in the Art of Lumia’, 89. Thomas Wilfred, ‘The Projected Setting’, Educational Theatre Journal 6, no. 2 (May 1954): 142. Mary Ellen Bute, ‘Abstronics: An Experimental Filmmaker Photographs: The Esthetics of the Oscillograph’, Films in Review 5, no. 6 (June–July 1954), http://www. centerforvisualmusic.org/ABSTRONICS.pdf (accessed 17 March 2017). Bute, cited in Albert Glinsky, Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 139. Bute, ‘Abstronics’. Bute, ‘Abstronics’. Joseph Schillinger, The Mathematical Basis of the Arts (New York: Philosophical Library, 1943), 6. Schillinger, Mathematical Basis, 432. Schillinger, Mathematical Basis, 429ff. Schillinger, Mathematical Basis, 442. Schillinger, Mathematical Basis, 673. Oskar Fischinger, unpublished typescript, ‘Corrections to Richter’s Article about the History of the Avant-garde’, http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Fischinger/ OFCorresp.htm (accessed 17 March 2017). Fischinger, ‘Corrections’.

8

In Concert The Emergence of the Audio-Visual Moment in Minimalism Meredith Mowder

This chapter derives from a seemingly straightforward, yet ultimately complex, question: what is the connection between minimalist music and minimalist art? These separate categories of music and art share the same forename, both emerged during the 1960s, and both involved many of the same key figures. Indeed, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the wake of John Cage’s influence, the worlds of art and music collided, not only problematizing the distinction between these media, but also proving them to be inextricably linked.1 The early histories of minimalist music and minimalist art together reveal a complex matrix of connections, ultimately calling for the examination of the two together, as an expansive audio-visual moment within the overall development of minimalism. Placing the sphere of Cage’s influence under a microscope exposes and amplifies how these minimalisms inform, interact with and influence each other, sharing a multitude of figures, concepts and formal similarities. Cage’s emphasis on perception, sound and silence, process and object, composition and chance, greatly affected minimalist musicians and artists alike, particularly as evidenced in the works of musician/composer La Monte Young as well as the visual artists Robert Morris and Walter de Maria. These figures not only connect and overlap through a series of social relationships, but they also share numerous formal and ideological affinities. At the nexus of these many connections are La Monte Young and John Cage, serving as the fulcrums of this inclusive history. Branden LaBelle suggests in Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, ‘to make music is not to complete an object of attention, fixed and frozen, but to engage on the level of audition, in the moment of sound’s becoming’.2 It is in following LaBelle’s statement – to engage in the moment of becoming – that my argument finds its framework. In this chapter, I propose that this moment of the convergence between art and music is not a singular, isolated time, but one seen as part of a continuum within the development of minimalism in particular and of postmodernism more generally.3 This endeavour is characterized by linking minimalism to more widely known and 167

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commonly studied moments of audio-visual convergences, such as Fluxus – an interdisciplinary group of artists founded during the 1960s – but is also primarily aimed to sustain a critical analysis of minimalism in its audio-visual facets. Certainly, this period also saw the emergence of novel dance and performance tendencies, instituted by Ann Halprin, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer and the Judson Dance Theater, among others. The examination of their work would add a significant breadth to this overall opening up of minimalism’s early history, further broadening the matrix of connections. However, for the purposes of this chapter, the focus will remain principally on the connections between musicians/composers and artists/sculptors. To begin, Tony Conrad, the musician, composer and filmmaker who emerged on the New York City art scene during the late 1950s and 1960s asked, retrospectively, ‘What about Robert Morris’ Box with the Sound of its Own Making? Shouldn’t that be considered part of the history of minimalist music?’4 Morris’s Box with the Sound of its Own Making from 1961 is, precisely, a box made of walnut wood, measuring 46 × 9¾ × 10 inches, playing the sound recording of its making. Although formally related to the trope of the minimalist box, Morris’s Box with the Sound of its Own Making complicates its status as a sculptural object: a speaker positioned inside plays the three-hour long tape recording of the box’s production. Adding a temporal and sonic dimension, Morris’s box conjoins the process of creating an object with the object itself. Certainly, as Conrad notes, the box includes sound, perhaps indicating its need for assessment alongside the history of minimalist music. Yet, there is more than just the obvious addition of an audible component that is indicative of Morris’s connection to the development of minimalist music. Morris, more closely aligned with the history of minimalist visual art, not only links socially to minimalist music through his relationship with the composers known as minimalists (such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Steve Reich), but also formally, and ideologically, to Young and John Cage as their mutual relationships progressed. As this chapter will further explore, the artist Walter De Maria, in addition to Morris, connects similarly with minimalist musician/ composer La Monte Young and John Cage, and it is through these figures that this audio-visual moment takes shape. The generation of artists working in the early 1950s, exemplified by La Monte Young, Robert Morris and Walter De Maria, struggled with the legacy of John Cage, increasingly blurring the boundaries between media, their work becoming generally unclassifiable. Their practice can be considered evidence of what Dick Higgins termed ‘intermedia’, and what Branden Joseph terms, in his book Beyond the Dream Syndicate, ‘intermedia hybridity’.5 In fact the term ‘intermedia’ has a long lineage dating back to the early nineteenth century. Higgins, an artist associated with both Happenings and Fluxus in the 1950s into the 1960s, wrote essays on the term’s contemporary meaning, crediting first the British Romantic writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge with the invention of the term in 1812. As Higgins articulates, both he and Coleridge use the term in the same sense – to give definition to the works that ‘fall conceptually between media that are already known’.6 Joseph elaborates on his update of the terminology with the addition of ‘hybridity’, stating:

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Such intermedia hybridity is, of course, common to all the art forms that evolved in Cage’s immediate wake and to which Morris’s development is genealogically related: Fluxus performances and objects, Judson Dance, and what would come to be minimal music and sculpture. And it would continue in a longer lineage of art/music hybridization such as De Maria’s Cross (1966)[,] a sculpture meant to operate as an instrument . . . and within the larger history of the period, both Ann Halprin’s summer workshops and the Judson Dance Theater would play pivotal roles in the development of what would come to be known as the minimal aesthetic . . .7

While much of the work produced during the moments to which Higgins and Joseph refer can be classified as ‘intermedia’ – conceptually living in the interstice between the known arts – and while Higgins has theorized at length about the term’s meaning and weight, it is Joseph’s addition of ‘hybridity’ that perhaps lends nuance to this complex kind of work.8 The audio-visual moment in minimalism is characterized not only by works that seem to exist in the space between – neither solely visual nor singularly audible – but are also hybrids, syntheses – both visual and audible – the two spheres profoundly linked in shared concepts, forms and social relationships. In his discussion on intermedia, Joseph refers to the art championed by Michael Fried in Art and Objecthood from 1967, positing that a certain group of more ‘radical’ minimalists were interested in the exact antithesis of Fried’s agenda which was to restore the distinctions between media.9 Artists working in the early 1960s, and influenced by Cage, were specifically interested in problematizing media distinctions. By setting artists working in a Cagean lineage in opposition to those defended by Fried, Joseph describes a crucial dialectic of artists working in the 1960s, highlighting that the production of an ‘advanced’ work after Cage was conditioned on challenging the status of the work as process, object or both. In addition, such ‘advanced’ work necessarily questioned disciplinary and institutional frameworks.10 For ‘radical’ minimalists La Monte Young, Robert Morris and Walter De Maria, Cage’s complication of the distinctions between music, sound, silence and the visual arts is translated into ‘intermedia hybridity’. Indeed, Morris’s Box with the Sound of its Own Making perfectly exemplifies Joseph’s articulation of an ‘advanced’ work after Cage, questioning the status of the piece as music or art, process or object, or all at the same time. Now Fluxus, a loosely knit group of artists, poets and musicians that formed in New York City in the early 1960s around the Lithuanian-born artist George Maciunas, further complicates this focus on minimalism’s audio-visual moment, for the two artistic impulses developed in tandem and share much in common. Fluxus, the archetypal media-defying moment, has arguably received more critical attention in the realm of audio-visual convergences than its counterpart, minimalism. Even more, this attempt to focus on the audio-visual moment in minimalism, especially through the examples of Cage, Young, de Maria and Morris, is made more complex by all their brief, yet complicated, involvements with Fluxus. The goals of Fluxus were outlined in Maciunas’s Fluxus Manifesto: ‘to purge the world of bourgeois sickness, “intellectual,” professional and commercialized culture,

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PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art’.11 Fluxus was not only fundamentally engaged with artistic practices that embraced the ‘act of flowing, as of a flowing stream; a continuous succession of changes’, but also saw the continuous fluctuation of group membership, as artists came and went.12 While the artists Robert Morris and Walter De Maria were both tangentially associated with the development of Fluxus, Young is often considered a centrally important member, written into Fluxus history in compendiums such as the Fluxus Codex, because of his compilation of the book An Anthology of chance operations, concept art, anti-art, indeterminacy, plans of action, diagrams, music, dance constructions, improvisation, meaningless work, natural disasters, compositions, mathematics, essays and poetry, published in 1962 with the help of George Maciunas.13 However, the latter project was not initially associated with Fluxus since Young began compiling the components for the book before his relationship with George Maciunas even began.14 An Anthology began in 1961, when Chester Anderson, the editor of the literary journal Beatitudes East, asked Young to guest-edit an issue. Young assembled pieces by twentyseven artists for the journal, later publishing the collection as the book An Anthology, with Maciunas. The book includes figures associated with Fluxus, yet also includes artists more closely aligned with minimalism, further confusing the classification of the book and Young’s role within Fluxus. Young is therefore a figure seemingly bifurcated by history, as a founder of both minimalist music and of Fluxus, embodying the difficulty of categorizing and defining these moments in time. Thus, even beyond its significance within the history of Fluxus, An Anthology also belongs to the early history of minimalism, providing evidence for the consideration of minimalism as a distinct audio-visual moment developed in the shadow of John Cage.

Cage and minimalism An extraordinary range of literature exists on the composer and performer John Cage, including, of course, writings by the artist himself. The breadth of scholarship on Cage is a testament to his impact, serving as the figure through which to understand the development of the minimalist moment and subsequent times where the audible and visual are inextricably linked. Born in 1912 in Los Angeles, California, Cage recalls that his first experience with music was through his neighbourhood piano teachers.15 When he enrolled in college he was not particularly interested in music, but determined rather to become a writer. Despite those aspirations, he ultimately decided to drop out of college, reasoning that there were too many conventions – everyone was required to read the same books.16 He headed to Europe, living in Paris for over a year. Returning to the United States in 1933, Cage began to study music with the composers Adolph Weiss, Henry Cowell and the strict structuralist twelve-tone composer Arnold Schoenberg. In 1941 Cage attempted to found a centre for experimental music, eventually setting aside his project to take a teaching position at László Moholy-Nagy’s Chicago Bauhaus, known at the time as the Institute of Design. One year later, in 1942, Cage and his then wife, Xenia

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Andreyevna Kashevaroff, moved to New York. That year Cage performed a concert of his own compositions at the Museum of Modern Art, solidifying his status within the New York art and music spheres. Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s Cage taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and the New School for Social Research in New York City. Among his many students at the New School were Jackson Mac Low, Allan Kaprow, George Brecht and Robert Whitman, all of whom became leading figures in the avant-garde scene.17 Cage was not only a noted teacher, but also maintained the status of a lifelong student in his study of Zen philosophy. He initially became interested in Zen Buddhism for personal reasons, only later integrating the philosophical principles into his musical compositions during the mid–1940s after he began studying with the Japanese composer Daisetz Zuzuki at Columbia University.18 Cage states of his time studying with Zuzuki: . . . the effect it had was first to change what it was that I was trying to say in my work. And, second, to change how it was I was making my work. And what it was that I was saying was very much influenced by such Oriental notions as creation, preservation, destruction and quiescence.19

With regard to his later investment in the process of chance, Cage asserted, ‘I made moves on charts, regardless of my intentions. In other words, a spirit of acceptance, rather than a spirit of control.’20 Cage began to focus on elements of chance, relinquishing control over the outcome of his musical pieces, centering on the process of creation. Cage’s seminal ‘silent’ piece 4ʹ33ʺ, from 1952, exemplifies many of his unconventional methodologies that were later adopted by numerous minimalist musicians and artists such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Robert Morris and Walter de Maria. 4ʹ33ʺ comprised three movements, the first consisting of only thirty seconds, the second lasting two minutes and twenty-three seconds, and the third one minute and forty seconds. The tripartite composition adds up to the total length indicated in the title – four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The piece is designed for a variable number of musicians and instruments; the only directive is that the musicians do not play their instruments, but rather sit in silence for the duration of the composition. Conceptually, then, the piece is simply four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. Yet, in his play with the conventions of musical performance and audience expectations, Cage created a novel experience – one that is not of pure silence, but one that highlights the everyday sounds present within the space of the concert hall and beyond – emphasizing not the virtuoso playing of the musicians, but instead the ambient sounds of coughs, sneezes, the rustle of a paper programme, the scratch of the cheek, shuffle of the feet and the heaviness of a breath.21 Cage’s 4ʹ33ʺ fully incorporated all sounds within the context of the music performance, embracing everyday sounds as music. In so doing, Cage emphasized a total art experience involving the simultaneous reliance on seeing and hearing. More specifically, he sought to foreground that listening is never an isolated activity, but rather a moment characterized by what is both audible and visible.

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John Cage’s 1992 New York Times obituary was titled ‘John Cage, 79, a Minimalist Enchanted with Sound, Dies’. However, he cannot be definitively characterized as a minimalist composer. In fact, a telling amendment was appended to the article: Correction: Because of an editing error, an obituary on Thursday about the composer John Cage characterized his music incorrectly. Though some of his works could be described as Minimalist and though Mr. Cage influenced the Minimalist movement in music and art, his works defied formal classification and were often intentionally chaotic.22

Keith Potter, writing on La Monte Young and minimalist composers Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, in Four Musical Minimalists, refers to Cage’s pre-chance compositions as ‘proto-minimalist’, in the ‘composer’s search for a music based on rhythm and, more generally, lengths of time rather than pitch, for instance, and in their evident borrowing from non-Western musics equally concerned with timbre as well as the vitality of pulse-based methods’.23 Furthermore, Potter notes, ‘Cage’s espousal of non-intention, which supplied the philosophical force that propelled his use of indeterminate techniques, links him with the aesthetic of minimalism, both in art and music.’24 Certainly, even subsequent to his death, Cage continues to evade specific terminology, definition and classification, similar to the work produced by other artists during the early 1950s and 1960s. As a result, he embodies the difficulties of this moment. Although a definitive categorization of Cage remains problematic, his influence on minimalist composers and minimalist artists is not only pervasive, but also quite traceable.

Characterizing ‘minimal’ art and music The term ‘minimal’ arose during the mid–1960s to classify certain trends in both art and music. ‘Minimal art’, ‘primary art’, ‘ABC art’, ‘reductive art’, ‘literalist art’ were all terms invented to address the ‘new sensibility’ in the arts which Barbara Rose outlined in her article ‘ABC Art’, published in Art in America in 1965.25 ‘Trance music’, ‘systems music’, ‘process music’ and ‘repetitive music’ were some of the expressions coined to address a new music trend that emerged in the early 1960s. The composer and critic Michael Nyman credits himself as the first person to use the term minimalism, with regard to music specifically, in 1968, although it remains difficult to pinpoint the exact origin of the term. Nyman stated, ‘When I introduced it to music in 1968, it was a valid art-historical term, and without thinking too much about it, it seemed that there was a musical parallel.’26 Beyond the obvious linear ‘parallel’ between what is now presented as minimalist art and minimalist music, to which Nyman refers, there is in fact an intricate matrix – a crisscrossing of shared figures, concepts and forms. The canonical perception of minimalist music arrives from an assessment of the dominant figures – La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass – and the similarities in their musical production.27 Minimalist music arrived, in part, as a

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reaction against European, academic serialism. Music critic Robert Schwarz describes the situation during the 1950s when Young, Riley, Reich and Glass were music students: [T]here were two alternative paths through the musical avant-garde. One, following from the twelve-note technique of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, was the path of serialism – a dogmatic, mathematical, super-rational approach to composition that resulted in atonal works of daunting complexity. Serial music, as refined by the American composer Milton Babbitt, was so hair-raisingly difficult that only the privileged few could understand it. Yet it became the enshrined academic manner . . . the other (and far less respectable) path was indeterminacy, the ‘chance’ music created by John Cage. Cage himself under the influence of Eastern philosophy, proposed a Zen-like acceptance of all the sounds around us as viable sources of music.28

Ultimately, there are many plausible ways to consider the development of minimalist music beyond the dialectic outlined by Schwarz; various components comprise the phenomenon and differences exist in the individual composers’ working methodologies. To begin more generally, minimalist music emphasized tonality and rhythmic pulses as well as the integration of non-Western music traditions. But more specifically, Young was influenced by Japanese Gagaku-theatre as well as Indian raga music. Both Young and Terry Riley became disciples of the Indian raga teacher Pandit Pran Nath. Steve Reich studied the rhythms of Balinese Gamelan music and Philip Glass looked to Indian tabla music.29 Like Cage, Young was also interested in Zen, especially in his dictum to ‘let the sounds be themselves’, emphasizing the Buddhist principle of realizing the essential nature of a thing in itself.30 Each composer took different approaches to their compositions of the 1960s; for example, while Young embraced single tones held for a long time, as exemplified in For Brass, from 1959, Riley used repetition and phases as a means for progression as heard in his hypnotic seminal composition In C, from 1964. Young and Riley also exhibit many acoustic similarities in their rejection of melody and the sparse use of tonal range. Perhaps as evidence of Cage’s influence, they increasingly embraced everyday sounds in their compositions and there was a decided shift in focus from the finished product to the process. Young’s 1960 composition Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc. is representative of the way minimalist musicians began to compose with commonplace sounds. The piece is indefinite in length and comprised of various people dragging furniture across a floor. Furthermore, the resulting sounds – scrapes, scratches and screeches – take a subsidiary role to the process of producing them. In a critical examination of his early years in New York, from 1960 until about 1965, La Monte Young emerges as the lynchpin of the New York avant-garde scene, an extremely complicated figure and the one who overlaps significantly within the histories of minimalist music, minimalist art and Fluxus.31 Young was born in Bern, Idaho, in 1935, growing up in a small wooden cabin located on the Western plains. Music historians and critics, often romanticizing the inspiration behind Young’s later drone works, cite his childhood recollection of wind whistling through the cracks in

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the cabin walls, crickets chirping and the constant hum of electricity running through telephone poles.32 During his childhood he played guitar, saxophone and clarinet, later enrolling at the University of California in Los Angeles to study jazz, music theory, composition and ethno-musicology. For the summer of 1959 Young travelled to Darmstadt, Germany, to take a seminar in music composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was known for working in the serialist tradition but was shifting more towards the chance compositions pioneered by Cage. It was during that summer in Darmstadt that Young was first exposed to Cage’s indeterminate scores.33 A short time later, in 1960, Young moved to New York City, emerging on the New York avantgarde scene. He formed working relationships and friendships with two artists who would later come to typify the minimalist sculptural sensibility – Robert Morris and Walter De Maria. Young’s relationship with John Cage was an important influence on his composition practices of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The effect of Cage’s chance scores on Young is particularly evident on his immediate return from Darmstadt, just prior to his move to New York. While in California during 1959, Cage introduced Young to the choreographer Ann Halprin. Young, together with Terry Riley, composed several pieces for Halprin’s dance workshops. In Young’s ‘Lecture 1960’, first delivered to the Ann Halprin Dancer’s Workshop, he divided his lecture into sections, to be read in any order, and the sequence was to be determined by chance.34 In one section of this lecture, Young states, ‘It is often necessary that one be able to ask, “Who is John Cage?”’35 Young’s lecture is indebted, formally, to Cagean indeterminacy, while simultaneously questioning Cage’s very being. Young’s question is particularly probing in his use of Cage to question Cage, exemplifying what Brandon Joseph dscribes as ‘Young’s conundrum: how to go beyond Cage while going through him, which was typical of his generation’.36 Henry Flynt, a close friend of Young and a prolific artist/theorist/musician during the 1960s in New York, states of Young’s predicament, ‘Cage would do, you know, something chaotic, phantasmagoria. And then La Monte had to knock him off the top of the mountain . . . and for whatever reason he was joined in that with the sculptors Morris and De Maria.’37 Young, Morris and De Maria embraced Cage’s radical alteration of the avant-garde, his hybrid approach to media, concerns for heightened audio-visual perception, incorporation of everyday sounds, and focus on process rather than finished product, yet sought to move beyond his influence, making work anew. Rather than following Young’s proposition to ask ‘Who is John Cage?’, the crucial question to raise is ‘Who is John Cage to La Monte Young?’ and later, ‘Who is John Cage to Robert Morris and Walter De Maria?’ It is with these questions that we can arrive at a comprehensive understanding of how the visual and the audible collided during the early development of minimalism. Accordingly, Young goes on to create compositions that fully embrace the Cagean idea that any sound is music. Furthermore, Young’s Compositions 1960 fully integrate the Cagean concept of using the eyes and the ears for a total art experience. His Compositions 1960, #2 involves building a fire in front of the audience, and #5, releasing butterflies into the performance space, all made with the intention of foregrounding that one’s experience of a music concert or a musical composition must always include

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the visual. To this end, Richard Kostelanetz asks Young in a telling interview, ‘Your point, then, in bringing into the concert situation a jar of butterflies and then releasing them, was that a butterfly makes a sound.’ Young responded: True. Another important point was that a person should listen to what he ordinarily just looks at, or look at things he would ordinarily just hear. In the fire piece, I definitely considered the sounds, although a fire is, to me, one of the outstanding visual images.38

In another example, Young recorded his composition 2 Sounds with Terry Riley, composed for the Ann Halprin Dancer’s Workshop, which involved the intense sound saturation of tin cans scraped on glass and a drumstick scraped on a gong. With this particular piece, Young combines Cage’s embrace of everyday sounds-as-music with the traditional musical sounds of a gong.39 It is also through Cage that Young arrives at a formal connection to minimalist visual art. Young’s Compositions 1960 #7, #9 and #10 are formally connected to one of the tropes of minimalist art: the line. Like Cage, Young transitioned from using notes on a staff as a means of producing a score, to a distinctly pictorial, graphic notation. By simply presenting a horizontal line for his piece Composition #9, Young visually reduced Cage’s graphic notations such as Fontana Mix Score (1958) and Variations Score I–III (1958–63). Thus, akin to Cage, Young is clearly engaged in a project of visualizing music and giving music a form: but not just any form – a specifically minimal form. In an interview with Kostelanetz, Young spoke of Composition #9, the straight line, stating, ‘I performed this work at one sustained pitch,’ clearly related to his Composition #7 which reads, ‘One note to be held for a long time.’40 Speaking of his Composition #10, dedicated to Robert Morris, which states, ‘Draw a straight line and follow it’, Young addresses the line’s connection to duration, mysticism and Daoism, maintaining, in the study of a singular event, in terms of both pitch and other kinds of sensory situations, I felt that the line was one of the more sparse, singular expressions of oneness . . . it was continuous – it existed in time. A line is a potential of existing in time.41

An analysis of Young’s relationships with sculptors Robert Morris and Walter De Maria, and their shared conceptual and formal investigations as influenced by Cage, further reveals the entanglement of minimalist music and minimalist art. In an exploration of Morris’s early career, his friendship with La Monte Young, his performances with him, and particularly his relationship with John Cage, Morris’s agenda of blurring the distinctions between disciplines and media becomes quite clear – making intermedia works as well as hybrids. When Young moved to New York City in 1960, he brought various musicians and artists together, collaborating with Yoko Ono in hosting a concert series at her loft on Chambers Street. The series involved performances by Robert Morris, Walter De Maria, Henry Flynt, and Simone Forti,

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among many. The concerts drew a significant audience mainly comprised of the New York avant-garde coterie; John Cage even attended a few such events, on Young’s recommendation.42 Beyond Morris’s and De Maria’s involvement in the Chambers Street concert series, they also travelled with Young to perform at universities across America. In fact, Morris premiered his Box with the Sound of its Own Making during a 1961 performance at Harvard with La Monte Young, Henry Flynt and Richard Maxfield. Exemplary of the critical response to Young’s and Morris’s radical art practices, William Weber states in a review of the Harvard performance: The second half of the programme was devoted to a ‘composition’ by La Monte Young. Almost soundlessly two men (Young and Morris) drew a line with two plumb-bobs, walked along it, and started all over again – for over half an hour. That was all. Young does not call such proceedings music, but rather, ‘art’ in general. In his own terms, he succeeded. The act fascinated the audience, drew them to find out what was going on, to jeer, argue and go away entertained and interested. It did indeed make a mockery of our formalistic notions of what ‘belongs’ in the concert hall . . . But Young’s denial of personal expression, his consequent search for newness, and his fear of immanent boredom have brought him full circle to the idea that perhaps only in extreme repetition is there innovation . . . He is not waiting for Godot. He is just waiting.43

Further examples of Morris working with La Monte Young include his designing and building of a gong for Young’s performances, premiering his Column during a 1962 performance organized by La Monte Young at The Living Theater, and performing in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with Walter De Maria, also in 1962.44 Branden Joseph establishes the likeness between the minimalist music of La Monte Young and the later minimalist sculpture of Robert Morris through their shared emphasis on the listener/viewer’s movement within a space, as well as their works’ unembellished qualities. Robert Morris’s later interest in gestalt psychology, asserted in his article Notes on Sculpture, Part 2, from 1966, emphasizes the importance of the viewer’s movement within the same space as his sculpture; the experience of the work is contingent on the viewer’s position and physical relationship to the object. The corollary, Joseph posits, is Young’s use of ‘architectural sounds – in which unornamented sound is transformed by taking environmental factors “into itself , ” as well as by the listener’s movement in the space’.45 Young’s use of one sustained pitch allows the listener to experience the various nuances within a singular note, just as a viewer may come to have a variegated experience of one geometric shape. Beyond overlaps with Morris, Young’s work also exhibits formal similarities with minimalist artist Walter De Maria.46 Connecting Young and Walter De Maria formally, Molleen Theodore postulates that De Maria’s interest in linearity was likely influenced by Young’s works like Composition 1960 #10, the effect of which is particularly evident in De Maria’s use of linearity and repetition as organizational devices in his works Mile Line Drawing, Bed of Spikes and his large-scale, long-term land art work The Lightning Field, featuring 400 stainless steel rods standing on end in a grid formation spread

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across a one mile by one kilometre plot of western New Mexico (see Plate 13).47 Moreover, with his compositions from the 1960s, Young emphasized the body’s physical interaction with sound-as-form within a given space. In fact, Young discusses inciting a more unusual, bodily audio-and-visual experience by listening through his later sustained tones or ‘drones’: A kind of hearing became necessary which I can only describe as going into the sound, going into the interstices of listening more carefully . . . Entering into a very, very attentive relation to the sound and listening to the subtleties very carefully, in the same way as you might look at a picture and begin to see that there are inflections in the overall colour.48

By addressing sound-as-form, Young’s work bears a likeness to minimalist sculpture, particularly that of Walter De Maria, ultimately connecting the two figures to Cage’s initial provocation and embrace of practices that both exist between and connect media. Young’s long sustained tones and the later audio-visual immersive environment work, the Dream House, suggests yet another connection to De Maria. As a precursor to the Dream House, Young, with Tony Conrad, John Cale and Terry Riley, created the Theater of Eternal Music in 1963. Their collective performances often went on for hours, each member of the group performing different sustained chords either through voice or instrument. A major tenet of their performances was to hold a chord for as long as possible; the longer it was sustained, the more a listener could perceive the many intricacies of that chord. Similarly, De Maria’s use of the line in his works Mile Long Drawing (1968), featuring two parallel lines drawn with chalk onto the cracked and barren surface of California’s Mojave Desert; The Lightning Field (1977), featuring 400 stainless steel rods standing at about 20 ft tall and spaced 220 ft apart in a grid formation; and Broken Kilometer (1979), with 500, 2-metre-long solid brass rods placed in five parallel rows of 100 rods each, in addition to the evacuation of any artist-driven subjective content in these works, allows the viewer to bring themselves to the pieces. The result is not only experience-based but also durational. Thus, De Maria, like Young, focuses on projects that encourage changes in individual perception through duration. The Dream House, Young’s collaboration with his wife Marian Zazeela, is the apotheosis of the drone.49 Visitors to the Dream House are encouraged not to speak to each other, signalling the space as one of personal, individual experience and even meditation. Upon entering the Dream House, the room seems flooded with what initially sounds like one incessant singular pitch. Yet, after staying awhile, the sounds begin to announce their differences. Indeed, there are thirty-two different frequencies of constant sine-wave tones created on a synthesizer emanating from four speakers individually placed in the four corners of the room. The Dream House is a perceptual experiment contingent not only on duration, but also the physical body’s placement within a given space. Even John Cage states of Young’s endeavours with sustained tones, ‘Young is able . . . through the repetition of a single sound . . . for a period like

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twenty minutes, to bring it about that after, say, five minutes, I discover that what I have been thinking was the same thing is not the same thing after all, but full of variety.’50 Similarly, with noted experiences of the Lightning Field, De Maria also works in extremes, aiming to heighten his spectator’s perception of site through isolation. Getting to Lightning Field, located in the remote plains of the western New Mexico desert, has been described as a pilgrimage, and the total experience of the piece as one of seclusion and contemplation. De Maria maintains strict control over the experience of the piece, maintaining that visitors must book an overnight stay at the location, may not take pictures and are to refrain from bringing electronic devices or ‘anything that may disturb other visitors’.51 Both Morris and De Maria demonstrate many similarities with Young, as well as engaging in their own individual relationships with John Cage and his concepts – prompting the question, ‘Who is John Cage to Robert Morris and Walter De Maria?’ Morris and De Maria both personally informed Cage about their work, in addition to making pieces that embraced key Cagean principles. As an indication of Robert Morris’s significant relationship with Cage, Morris invited him to experience the premiere of the Box with the Sound of its Own Making in New York. During this premiere, Cage famously sat and listened to the whole three hour-long recording of the box’s making. With the Box, Morris presents us with a finite art object but complicates it by including the sound recording of the box’s making, thus adding a temporal dimension. Through this work, Morris not only engages in a physical dialogue with Cage, but also a conceptual one, concerning the conjoining of art and the expanded field of all sound as music, as well as the merging of process and object. De Maria likewise produces work that encapsulates his personal and generational relationship to John Cage. For example, De Maria made a few sculptural versions of Cage’s portrait. Creating a multivalent visual pun, De Maria portrays Cage as a six-foot-tall, slender steel cage, alluding not only to Cage’s name and his physical characteristics, but also visually manifesting the entrapment felt by many artists working within the sphere of Cage’s influence. Certainly, the relationship between minimalist music and minimalist art is complex, identified by an intricate web of artists and musicians engaged in definition-defying practices. To a great extent, certain artists working in the shadow of Cage’s experiments reveal that the early history of minimalist music and art developed in concert. Cage had a profound influence on both artists and musicians alike, paving the way for the avantgarde’s endeavour to not only create ‘intermedia’ works that exist in the unknown between, but also to merge and link the worlds of visual art and music. Cage pioneered the artistic intention of foregrounding the way we ‘see’ sound and music in performance – in other words, that sight and sound are integrally related – emphasizing this change in perception by implementing indeterminacy and the quotidian in his work. Furthermore, through his integration of chance and everyday sounds within music, Cage underscored process over final product. Through a series of social relationships, Cage’s concepts are reformulated in the work of Young, Morris and De Maria – he is, in essence, the vehicle through which much of this work could be conceived and, now, historically understood. Moreover, Young embodied the social and ideological junctions

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Fig. 8.1: Robert Morris, Box with the Sound of its Own Making, 1961, wood, internal speaker, 116.8 × 24.8 × 24.8 cm, duration of recording 3.5 hours. Seattle Art Museum.

of music and art after Cage, providing a further framework for the analysis of avantgarde artistic production during the late 1950s and early 1960s in New York City. Not only do Young, Morris and De Maria share in the embrace and ultimate reformation of Cagean practices, but they also share similarities in their conceptual and formal articulations. It is only fitting, then, that the early history of minimalism be treated as a distinct audio-visual moment – a moment of becoming. In the words of Higgins, while artists continue to work both between media and in their junctures, ‘[t]here is still a great deal to be done in this direction in the way of opening up aesthetically rewarding possibilities’ – not only through the work itself, but also in its historical understanding.52

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Notes 1 Several key precedents exist in highlighting the relationships between minimal music and the visual arts. See Simon Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music (New York: Alexander Broude Inc., 1983); Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 2 Branden LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2006), 9. 3 In this way, my examination harmonizes with Simon Shaw-Miller’s contention that John Cage is a kind of bridge towards postmodernism, ‘sitting on the border of this “great divide” between the modern and the postmodern, between absolutism and pluralism’. Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds, 223. 4 Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 109. 5 Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 121. 6 Dick Higgins, ‘Intermedia’, Leonardo 34, no. 1 (2001): 52. 7 Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 121. 8 See Higgins, ‘Intermedia’, and Dick Higgins, Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). 9 See Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Art in Theory 1900–200: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010): 835–46. 10 Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 82–4. 11 Jon Hendricks (ed.), Fluxus Codex (New York: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection in Association with Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1995), 24. Emphasis original to the text. 12 See Ken Friedman, The Fluxus Reader (New York: Wiley, 1998), and Hannah Higgins, The Fluxus Experience (Oakland: University of California Press, 2002). 13 The extremely long title of An Anthology is emblematic of the difficulties in classifying art practices during the early 1960s in New York. La Monte Young, An Anthology of Chance Operations (New York: La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, 1963). In fact, Robert Morris initially submitted work to be included in An Anthology, but becoming disenchanted with the Fluxus project, he withdrew his work from the book just before printing. The book still bears his name on the title page, as well as including a page with his name on it, within the text, where his work would have been printed. 14 Henry Flynt, ‘Mutations of the Vanguard: Pre-Fluxus, During Fluxus, Late Fluxus’, in Ubi Fluxus ibi Motus 1990–1962, ed. Gino Di Maggio (Milan: Nuove Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 1990), 99. 15 Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Routledge, 2003), 2. 16 Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 4. 17 Many of Cage’s students from his time at the New School for Social Research became leading figures in the avant-garde scene, including Jackson Mac Low, Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, George Brecht, Robert Whitman, Dick Higgins and Toshi Ichiyanagi. LaBelle, Background Noise, 60. 18 Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 15.

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19 Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 17. 20 Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 17. 21 For extensive coverage of 4ʹ33ʺ, see Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds; Dieter Daniels and Inke Arns (eds), Sounds Like Silence, John Cage 4ʹ33ʺ: Silence Today (Santa Monica: Ram Publications, 2012). Cage’s experience inside an anechoic chamber, a sound-deprivation chamber, is often cited as the impetus behind 4ʹ33ʺ. Cage noted that instead of experiencing complete silence, he focused instead on the intense sound of his heart beating. This is further articulated by Joseph in Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 81. 22 Allan Kozinn, ‘John Cage, 79, a Minimalist Enchanted with Sound, Dies’, New York Times, 13 August 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/ bday/0905.html (accessed 17 March 2017). 23 Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4. 24 Potter, Four Musical Minimalists, 4. 25 Barbara Rose, ‘ABC Art’, Art in America 53, no. 3 (October–November 1965): 57–69. 26 Robert K. Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), 8. Keith Potter corroborates Nyman’s assertion while also complicating it in the introduction to his book Four Musical Minimalists. 27 Potter, Four Musical Minimalists, and Mertens, American Minimal Music. 28 Schwarz, Minimalists, 10. 29 Potter, Four Musical Minimalists, 13. 30 Molleen Theodore, ‘Beyond “Meaningless Work”: The Art of Walter De Maria, 1960–1977’, PhD diss., City University of New York Graduate Center, 2010, 56. 31 In an interview, Henry Flynt called La Monte Young’s apartment on Bank Street in New York, the ‘portal’ to the New York avant-garde. Benjamin Piekut, Interview with Henry Flynt, video recording, September 2005, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 4IfzftLO87E&feature=related (accessed 17 May 2011). 32 Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 492; Mertens, American Minimal Music, 19; Richard Kostelanetz, Theatre of Mixed Means (New York: Dial Press Inc., 1968), 186. 33 Mertens, American Minimal Music, 20–2. 34 Strickland, Minimalism, 135. 35 La Monte Young, ‘Lecture 1960’, Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter 1965): 79. 36 Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 91. 37 Piekut, Interview with Henry Flynt. 38 Kostelanetz, Theatre of Mixed Means, 192. 39 Henry Flynt, ‘La Monte Young in New York, 1960–62’, in Sound and Light: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, ed. William Duckworth and Richard Fleming (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1996), 51. 40 Kostelanetz, Theatre of Mixed Means, 195. 41 Theodore, ‘Beyond “Meaningless Work” ’, 46. 42 Flynt, ‘La Monte Young in New York, 1960–62’, 57. 43 Flynt, ‘La Monte Young in New York, 1960–62’, 63. The review originally ran in the Harvard Crimson newspaper. 44 Flynt, ‘La Monte Young in New York, 1960–62’, 64. 45 Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 126.

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46 It should be noted that Walter De Maria was also an accomplished musician, composing various pieces as well as performing as the drummer in the band The Primitives, an early version of the Velvet Underground. 47 Theodore, ‘Beyond “Meaningless Work” ’, 46. 48 Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 140. 49 The Dream House was first realized in 1969, in Munich, Germany, at the Galerie Heiner Freidrich. From 1979 to 1985, the Dia Art Foundation funded a version of the exhibition on Harrison Street in New York City. The Dream House is currently installed at 273 Church Street, in the same building that Young and Marian Zazeela live in. The exhibition is funded by the Mela Foundation, which Young and Zazeela initiated in 1985. 50 Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 144. 51 Dia foundation website: http://www.diaart.org/sites/page/56/1301 (accessed 17 March 2017). 52 Higgins, ‘Intermedia’, 49.

9

Riffing the Index Romare Bearden and the Hand of Jazz Nikki A. Greene

How is it that in Ralph Ellison’s literary masterpiece, Invisible Man, written in 1952, the main character listens to jazz, the music of Louis Armstrong in particular, and finds the same types of ‘breaks’ and moods that runs concurrently with the music of pianist Earl Hines?1 A basis for Ellison’s characterization of invisibility stems from the music of ‘black folk’, using W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk as a subtext.2 The protagonist introduces this idea at the beginning of the novel by remarking on the sensibilities of Louis Armstrong: Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music . . . Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music.3

Therein lies the phenomenological turn between the aesthetic reception of Armstrong’s music and the potential experience of Bearden’s photomontages. Don’t Romare Bearden, and here, Ellison, speak of the breaking down and revision of rhythm as some articulation and liberation of the African-American spirit, or better yet, the freeing of the human spirit?4 In the case of Ellison, he speaks of the music being articulated and understood from the point of view of one who is invisible. It is only in his recognition of his invisibility that the protagonist is able to note the articulation of invisibility of Louis Armstrong’s music. The syncopation that Armstrong incorporates into his songs is what made Louis Armstrong – Armstrong. Moreover, as Ted Gioia has explained in The History of Jazz, ‘Armstrong stokes the fire merely by repeating – with variations in length, placement, and intensity – a single note.’5 The notes, especially within an improvisational phrase, 183

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sometimes move ahead of or behind the anticipated rhythm within a jazz tune. To that end, a musician’s improvisational skill reflects how he or she would ‘slip into the breaks and look around’.6 Armstrong had a remarkable ability to play on the ‘breaks’. His ‘looking around’ was not prescribed or contrived. Neither the audience (nor his band members for that matter) knew exactly what direction Armstrong’s playing would take, or what he’d see in those breaks. What Louis Armstrong does musically, Ralph Ellison carries out literarily and Romare Bearden executes visually through collage.7 Romare Bearden transformed the modern technique of Western European and American collage and photomontage in his Projections photomontage series of the 1960s by borrowing the syntax and structures of jazz, wherein he sought to represent, and ultimately unify, fragments of the black American experience. Bearden’s Projections series has been researched thoroughly, and his process of selecting images from various sources is often highlighted. I directly treat this method as leaving behind his distinctive trace. By transporting elements such as masked faces cut from the cover of a book about African masks into American urban or southern landscapes, for example, Bearden created a decidedly idiosyncratic expression of black identity specifically through the compositional language of jazz. Inasmuch as this is true, then one must acknowledge not only the versatility of African-American music styles as it progressed to jazz, but also jazz improvisation’s usefulness as a musical model for visual language. In this chapter, I will first briefly outline the presence of jazz in Bearden’s life leading up to the Projections series, which served to resolve the articulation of doubleconsciousness as described by W. E. B. Du Bois. Second, I consider the medium of collage as a useful framework for unifying fragments of black life via the index, as promoted by the late nineteenth-century American philosopher Charles S. Peirce. Ultimately, I argue that the index, photomontage techniques and the implementation of jazz structures gave Bearden the intellectual and formal tools he needed to create a distinct style – a new, previously imperceptible visual voice.

Improvising within the veil Taking the broadest of definitions available to encompass the multiple meanings and styles designated by the word jazz, the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz provides the following definition: ‘A music created mainly by black Americans in the early 20th century through an amalgamation of elements drawn from European-American and tribal African musics.’8 Musicologist Portia K. Maultsby supports the assertion that the music itself combined the influences of the two cultural identities: Because the tempered tuning of these Western instruments differed from that of African instruments, black musicians were forced to deviate from African principles of melodic structure. Challenged to explore new means of melodic expressions, blacks unconsciously created new ideas founded on existing African musical concepts. The result was the emergence of ‘blue notes’ (flatted third and

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seventh degrees) and the production of pitches uncommon to Western scale structures.9

In other words, in jazz, African Americans created extensions of spirituals, or what W. E. B. Du Bois called ‘sorrow songs’, that transformed the dominant forms of Western traditions into a distinctive African-American sound and style.10 W. E. B. Du Bois was a prominent writer, speaker and founding editor of The Crisis magazine, established in 1910 as an organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP. In Du Bois’ 1903 groundbreaking book on African-American culture entitled The Souls of Black Folk, he introduced the idea of the double-consciousness of the African American. Double-consciousness took the form of what Du Bois called ‘the veil’. Du Bois described the veil in the following manner: ‘It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.’11 Through a variety of literary, political and visual media, African Americans strained under the weight of slavery and the era of Reconstruction to attempt to function and to prosper as citizens in the United States.12 By the turn of the twentieth century, Du Bois understood that one of the most powerful ways that ‘contempt and pity’ was manufactured was in America’s relentless stereotyping of African Americans, especially as a consequence of the United States’ institution of slavery. The term ‘double-consciousness’ had a long history before Du Bois adapted its use in reference to black American identity. Though the ideas of consciousness, identity formation in the eyes of others and the psychology of ‘double-identities’ were not new concepts, Du Bois attempted to make them his own. According to Du Bois, African Americans were veiled as they viewed life within white American society. As he explained the phenomenon, ‘one ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder’.13 In other words, the African American could view ‘the other’ more clearly from within the veil than ‘the other’ could ever view the African-American. The veil thus represented for the African American painful problems of identity, but also special advantages of perspective. He wrote convincingly for his late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century readers about double-consciousness as an identity crisis particular to the black American experience. To the eyes (and ears) of W. E. B. Du Bois, music was one mode of expression in which the consciousness of the black person could be reconciled within the veil of double-consciousness – reconciliation of the black person’s identity in America as both African and American. The paradox of the veil was a blessing and burden for the African American, including the artist. However, as a modernist, Romare Bearden’s location in Harlem and exposure to the genre of jazz music facilitated the development of his awareness of the need to suit the structure to the meaning in the visual arts as well as to negotiate the irony of his own double-consciousness as an African-American painter of the twentieth century.

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For Romare Bearden, living in Harlem provided access to an impressive range of social and artistic activism. It was here that the artist first glimpsed the vibrancy and creativity of a close-knit African-American community, especially during the 1910s and 1920s. This vibrancy, of course, included its music scene. Throughout most of Bearden’s youth and young adult life, he maintained close ties to the Harlem community. Although he was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, around 1911, his family moved to Harlem when he was three years old.14 The growth of Harlem’s black community in the 1920s was especially rapid because it received as many newcomers from elsewhere in the US as from outside the borders of the country.15 Bearden grew up with city and country experiences, attending fourth grade and high school in Pittsburgh, where he lived with his maternal grandmother, and spending many summers in Charlotte, North Carolina. Bearden received a BS c in education from New York University in 1935, and he made New York his primary residence for nearly the entirety of his life.16 In the 1920s, New York City had not yet created a distinctive local jazz style. There had been a diffuse jazz scene, mainly carried by white musicians. Most New York musicians relied upon phonograph records for reaching a wide audience, and New York listeners depended on this medium for hearing artists from different regions.17 Although many cities like New Orleans and Chicago fostered jazz, producing such renowned bands and musicians as the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and Louis Armstrong, respectively, New York City remained one of the premier centres for jazz music’s growth. Harlem served a specific purpose for musicians who made the journey to this area from various parts of the country as home of the recording industry. As historian Eric Lott notes, ‘For the musicians it was the logical place in which to coherently combine the various regional styles they had brought with them.’18 With several performance theatres within blocks of Bearden’s home, even as an adolescent, Bearden gained easy access to the most popular performers in and around Harlem.19 Charles Buchanan, the manager of the Savoy Ballroom, gave Bearden and some of his friends free admission to events there. The Savoy was known as one of the ‘country’s great dance palaces at a time when jazz and dance coalesced’.20 Bands that showcased there included Jimmy Lunceford, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Lucky Millinder, Earl Hines, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnet, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Erskine Hawkins and Fletcher Henderson. Thus, by the 1930s, Bearden was exposed to both the sounds and the dance movements of jazz. In fact, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington were among the earliest collectors of his works.21 This exposure to music later proved beneficial to his artistic training, providing crucial models of style, execution, process and themes that Bearden would transform from the aural iteration to visual form in the series Projections of collages, photomontages and photostats. With jazz improvisation one faces a number of challenges such as learning how to start and stop solos, how to conceive and perform patterns in time and how to gain mastery over the vocabulary and other materials required for any given piece of music. In what Paul F. Berliner calls ‘developmental breakthroughs’, arduous practice pays off; musicians ‘discover that they have acquired the control to manipulate phrases accurately in tempo in relation to a progression’s changing features’.22 The structural and performative elements in Bearden’s photomontages, as either a main

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or subsidiary framework for all of his subject matters, from music to family life, from urbanscapes to religious figures, are analogous to the aural creativity found in jazz improvisation. Bearden spoke specifically about pianist Earl Hines’s music in the following terms: Oh, yes. I studied the modernists, and then I in my own way, to relate modernism to the whole thing that was happening in the South . . . I studied a kind of spacing in my painting by listening to the music of Earl Hines. Going da, da, da, da, da would drive us crazy. I always think of a work as making a melody or the spacing of Earl Hines.23

Suffice to say, the freedom of creation lies not simply in jazz music itself, but within the ability to improvise within a measure. Bearden accomplished understanding this deliberate measuring through his exposure to jazz musicians, and visual artists have similar approaches to perfecting their art forms – both use the standard of individuals before them as an avenue for formulating their own style. Pianist Art Farmer spoke about his own approach to learning piano solos: I decided the best I could do would be to write the solos down, note for note, and line them up with the harmony of the song, analysing the notes according to the chords that were being played. Then I would learn, ‘Well, you can do this at this time. You can do that at that time.’ It was like getting your vocabulary straight.24

Musicians and visual artists must ‘get their vocabulary straight’ before they can proceed at the highest levels of proficiency to forge a unique way of approaching their own work. Musicians must also imitate masterworks and accumulate significant references from other musicians, often practising his or her craft under the tutelage of more established professionals. A painter, too, may look to the Old Masters for direction, take classes or serve as an apprentice in a studio. Any artist must make this process of learning a part of their training in order to find his or her own ‘voice’. Bearden studied life drawing and painting with the German Dadaist and political artist George Grosz sporadically from 1936 to 1937 at the Art Students League of New York. He credited the older artist with giving him solid instruction in the traditional methods of drawing. Grosz was the person responsible for directing Bearden’s interest toward the Dutch painters, Pieter de Hooch in particular. According to Bearden and artist Carl Holty, with whom he later wrote The Painter’s Mind, the use of photographs and materials for collages is reminiscent of work by Pieter de Hooch. They noted that de Hooch is ‘especially interesting for the way he unites diverse and apparently contradictory elements within his paintings’.25 As Bearden began studying the artist and some of the ‘masters’ of European art, he began to accumulate references that would form the foundation of his artistic knowledge. He continually built upon Western traditions even when his works did not necessarily align with contemporary art-making practices. As Mary Schmidt Campbell

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points out, Romare Bearden’s paintings, especially during his early career in the 1940s and the early 1950s, ‘always seemed to be slightly out of step with those of his peers’.26 Though one may wonder why Bearden chose to work with specific forms when he did, it is apparent he knew he had to master the form before moving on. For three years after his return from Paris in 1950, Bearden used enlarged photostats of works by different artists he admired and wanted to emulate – from Johannes Vermeer to Piet Mondrian – in order to study and copy them, changing the colours in many of them when making his own version. He was accustomed to the effect of a lightened or distorted palette and fewer details revealed. Yet, the enlargement of his photographic collages developed a sensibility of space within the frame of the picture; namely, the final product – the photomontage – stands as simultaneously photographic and painterly. As a result, the photomontages take on a different tone and intent. They operate separately from the collage. Photomontage was first used in the middle of the nineteenth century, but the term refers predominantly to the use of photographs by Dadaists and other artists beginning in the twentieth century. The photomontage as a photographed version of a collage converts the work back into a photographic print. Bearden’s Art Students League teacher, George Grosz, credited himself and John Heartfield with inventing the photomontage.27 However, Raoul Hausmann claimed that he and Hannah Höch invented the technique in 1918. Höch pointed out that the practice of photomontage was a familiar part of German pictorial life in the form of popular postcards.28 The German Dadaists’ syntax which was affected by ‘World War I and the era’s cultural and scientific revolutions . . . [wherein] the cut and torn refuse of urban life act[ed] as a metaphor for the divided and fragmented society of the Weimar Republic’.29 George Grosz would certainly have exposed Bearden to these principles when Bearden took classes with the older artist at the Art Students League.30 During the 1950s, Bearden composed jazz himself, and he published a number of songs with Larry Douglas and Fred Norman. About twenty of the songs were recorded, and he became a member of the ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) in 1954. One song, a beguine called ‘Seabreeze’ (which Seagram’s used to promote a gin and tonic of the same name) became a hit in the mid–1950s.31 Additionally, his understanding of Pablo Picasso’s and Georges Braque’s painted Cubism reflects Bearden’s adaptation of jazz rhythms to visual composition. Bearden understood the doubleness of this debt: Finally, I was able to block out the melody [played by Earl Hines] and concentrate on the silences between the notes. I found that this was very helpful to me in the transmutation of sound into colours and the placement of objects in my paintings and collages. I could have studied this integration and spacing in Greek vase painting, among many examples, but with Earl Hines, I ingested it within my own background. Jazz has shown me the ways of achieving artistic structures that are personal to me; but it also provides me continuing finger-snapping, head-shaking enjoyment of this unique, wonderful music.32

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Jazz was Bearden’s key to visual manipulation, which he had already learned from music played at places like the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. When Bearden was a young artist in the 1930s, he visited the studio of Stuart Davis, who had an impressive jazz album collection. Davis was influential for Bearden, according to Murray, because Davis ‘was no less deeply involved with native U.S. techniques, new materials and attitudes than with avant-garde experimentation, kept coming back to the music of Earl Hines and kept encouraging Bearden to seek out visual analogies for the way Hines did things on the piano’.33 Not coincidentally, Bearden made one of his earliest collages, Harlequin, in 1956, using various papers, paint, ink and graphite on paper.34 It was in 1964, in preparation for the Spiral exhibition, that Bearden seriously began using collage – a turn toward leaving his own visual-musical trace.

Riffing the Index Charles S. Peirce created a classification of signs that identified three principal relations to objects: index, icon and symbol.35 While icons signify by resemblance (i.e. a portrait painting), and symbols signify by convention or as a consequence of habit (i.e. flags), Peirce established that the index has a real, physical relation with its object. In other words, the index is a remnant an event leaves behind (i.e. footsteps, fingerprints) – or in the case of Abstract Expressionism, the skeins of paint left on the canvas. Indexes are complicated signs, especially when they are situated within aesthetic space, where sign types tend to shift toward the symbolic or conventional. Arguably, this definition provides that every work of art is an index, evidence of an event left behind by an artist and therefore visual evidence that may be examined and ‘read’ for various kinds of information by the viewer. However, I will discuss the index and its physicality within works that reflect especially the evidence of the impress of the artist’s hand (that is, part or all of the body or its products) because much work on index is related to photography and understood strictly as trace. As a trace, a sign becomes indexical when its form is the direct result of physical contact with that to which it refers (i.e. the footprint, the death mask, the chemical traces on the surface of a photograph, the smoke from a fire). To state it more precisely, the index, by being so directly a result of the form or action of the thing that caused it, evokes that thing or person so strongly that the thing or event itself seems nearly present – and thus can seem to be hardly a thing that stands for something, but a presentation of the thing itself made visible. The improvisational ‘breaks’ or ‘riffs’ in Bearden’s work force the viewer to once again decipher multiple meanings, and in this case, multiple rhythms. He chose to exploit the blanks by physically playing with the proportions of the figures. The indexed play within the works stands in for the artist and his heightened awareness of the manipulation of image, the representation of blacks and the influence of their culture within American society. Spiral, a group of several African-American artists who first came together in 1963, formed in response to A. Philip Randolph’s call for participation in the March on Washington in support of civil rights.36 The group included the president, Norman

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Lewis, along with Charles Alston, James Yeargens, Hale Woodruff, Emma Amos, Richard Mayhew, William Williams and Melvin Edwards, to name a few. Bearden’s initial proposal of a collaborative project by Spiral members using collage was eventually dismissed. As the Spiral artists strove to individually relate various meanings within their own work to events, ideas and principles of the Civil Rights movement, collage would have served as an efficient tool to present the multiple views of the artists. Conjur Woman was Bearden’s contribution to the Spiral exhibition, a career-defining piece in terms of his turn toward collage as his primary medium. The slight leaning figure of the ‘conjure woman’ emerges from the forest-like background created by the gathering of trees and the voluminous, disjointed branches that fill the frame. Her body structure, though fragmented, sustains the various parts of her body. The woman’s position directly to the right of a trunk imitates the strong support that a trunk provides for a tree’s branches. Her miniaturized right hand stretches across her torso, extending beyond a white cuff that is strikingly smaller in comparison to that of the other hand. Apparently, in addition to her strength, Bearden’s intention is to highlight the seeming harmlessness of her presence. Her disproportionately large head matches her large black left hand, which is held upright just below and to the side of her face. Bearden’s emphasis on the direct gaze of the woman and the looming black left hand illuminate the idea of the unknown prowess that she possesses as she ‘conjures’ spirits from beyond the forest. The ‘forest’ continues beyond her porch. Wood panels lie just to the left of her hip as if she were watching the viewer from the veranda of her house. This woman, in fact, brings to mind some type of African spiritual worker, but is based on an African-American woman who could be one’s next-door neighbour. Bearden recalled one such woman from his childhood: ‘Even in Pittsburgh, living in the house in back [sic] of my grandmother’s there was an old woman much feared for her power to put spells on people.’37 We would place the woman within an African tradition because the face’s compartmentalized sections recall African masks that Bearden would have seen in New York. ‘Professor’ Charles Seifert, a carpenter and art instructor, brought Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis to the 1935 exhibition African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art.38 Bearden went on his own several times after his initial visit. His use of mask-like forms not only referred to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and the birth of Cubism, but also participated in a growing tradition in the AfricanAmerican community that knowingly focused parts or all of its attention and practice on the ancestral arts.39 Certainly, as early as the 1920s, young African-American artists were encouraged by leaders such as Alain Locke to use African-inspired motifs within their work.40 Bearden owned several books on African art and culture and had a subscription to the journal African Arts by the late 1960s. He used these texts’ illustrations for images within collages.41 This method returns one to the principles of jazz that were at play for Bearden by the 1960s. Initially, Bearden arranged several photomontages and then, on the recommendation of his friend and fellow Spiral member Reginald Gammon, he enlarged five or six photomontages. Arne Ekstrom, Bearden’s dealer, suggested that Bearden create twenty

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more during the summer of 1964 to be ready for exhibition at his gallery. Projections was the title given to the collection of works not only because of the method of enlarging the arrangements, but also because of the compositions’ photographic and documentary quality.42 In the case of Pittsburgh Memory, the enlargement of the double-portrait, especially in the figure on the left, allows for a greater luminosity, magnifying the glistening parts of his dark skin. The two pairs of eyes gaze out much more directly and intensely at the viewer at this larger scale. While the photomontage loses the textures of the various mounted photographic papers, the smooth edges tone down the fragmentation of the faces (see Plate 14). The built-up nature of the collage disappears, but the array of pieces of paper coexist more cohesively. I believe the indexical impact of collage in Bearden’s photomontages, that is, its connection to specific events and places, still exists, but its impact is lessened as a result of the photomontage process. The loss of texture – the direct physical relationship to the evidence of fibres, tears and glue, for example – becomes a sign of the index by being photographed, but is nevertheless able to retain its meaning and effect. A primary goal of modernist painting was to display the moment in which it was both physically and philosophically made, and to make its medium so much a part of its image that it could temporarily suspend the knowledge of its determinations, producing the sense that it had been made outside of, but also within, the limits of conventionally historical practice. This goal of conveying the moment of creation within a work of art is the source of the ‘presentness’ that Michael Fried granted to modernism.43 Collage conforms to the modernist avant-garde due to its multiple materials and the numerous layers of meaning made available within a given work. Juxtaposing its disparate and fragmentary materials stressed its components as things, lessening their earlier functions even if they were representations in their original forms. Even postmodern theorists like Craig Owens recognized that the modernist avant-garde not only ‘sought to transcend representation in favour of presence and immediacy; it [also] proclaimed the autonomy of the signifier’.44 This element of the ‘presentness’ of modernism dimmed as a dominant ethos by the late 1960s. Therefore, one might be tempted to assume that photostat, as a photographed version of a collage work, would also answer the call of the modernist avant-garde. However, can Bearden’s photostats also be postmodern? When the edges and materiality of the pasted elements are softened due to the photographic reproduction of the original collage, does the presence and immediacy of the signifier in the collage still exist? The definition given by Francis Frascina, writing on the interface of modern art and its social and political significance gives the following definition: The signified is the meaning, what the signifier stands for . . . Thus the signified is (i) ‘a collection of objects’, (ii) their individual symbolism and – more importantly – (iii) the effect of their combination, the particular moral and social meaning of the whole picture. While we can distinguish between the signifier and signified for the process of analysis, in practice they act together, they are materially inseparable.

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Together they constitute the sign as a whole, which has a particular meaning for an audience or community.45

The indexical impact of collage in Bearden’s photomontages, that is, its connection to specific events and places, still exists, but its impact is lessened as a result of the photomontage process, leading to a more ‘postmodern’ kind of signification in which the conflict of the work’s material presence as ‘modern’ and the fragmented representation of its shattered elements constitutes even as it displays a refusal of the exclusivity and anonymity of modernism’s most autonomous forms. In Prevalence of Ritual: Conjur Woman, a later version of the same character, the break came precisely where Bearden uses only part of the eye and juxtaposes it directly to the neck. Visually, this area is not a blank, however, not a silence, because he chose to exploit the break or discontinuity by playing with the proportions. Evident in Conjur Woman, a different version of the same character, where he wanted to emphasize the hand, to exaggerate a gesture or movement, he enlarges or distorts even further. Albert Murray’s concept of the ‘breaks’ of jazz improvisation treats the reuse or repetition of found images within new contexts – as in the Projections series – which permits ‘play’ that leads to a new composition of sorts, but more importantly, to radically important new possibilities for meaning. The various connotations associated with play, according to Murray, suggest amusement, competition, vertigo and make-believe: ‘the jazz musician as one who approaches or creates or plays all music as if improvising the “break” in the traditional twelve-bar blues tune . . . the jazz musician improvises within a very specific context and in terms of very specific idiomatic devices of composition’.46 If Bearden wanted to depict the jazz musician – and he often did – he could simply paint, cut out or draw a full-figured man or woman with instrument in hand. However, he chose to ‘play’ with the images he pasted together. Bearden’s 1967 work Three Folk Musicians provides a solid example of his incorporation of jazz music as a structural resource. Bearden takes part of the image – halves it – and juxtaposes another image. The juxtaposed image may or may not ‘match’ the image with which it is connected. However, the juxtaposition of the images that do match creates a visual whole. He selects various reproductions of photographs of parts of the body, clothing and instruments of disparate people and puts them together in order to give the impression of one body. Many bodies have been used, but visually speaking, three whole musicians are created, each distinctive from the others. Rather than just painting the musicians, Bearden substitutes reconstituted cutouts from various sources for each whole body image. He compared his method to that of Picasso and Braque, noting the following: ‘[I]nstead of painting the whole thing – an orange or a bottle – you cut out and put it in the still life. But it was painting. They would just put it in, rather than painting it itself – or newspaper, if they wanted that in a particular place. So, I’m using [the cutout] in the collage, but I really feel that I’m painting.’47 He had found a way to knit together the immediacy and autonomy of each separate source of collage and the painterly control of colour and shape that formerly made it the ideal form for indexing visual authority and a daring and nearly miraculous control of an apparently improvisatory technique.

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The art of the ‘cut’ Black culture itself, in fact, revolves around ‘the cut’ as a productive interruption within which unexpected yet sophisticated new developments grow, according to James Snead. He analyses repetition as the defining aspect of black culture that distinguishes it from modern European culture, a culture that has traditionally suppressed, disguised or denied the need for and effectiveness of repetition. The cycle of repetition within black culture prepares the way for recognition of the ‘cut’ that leaves room for ‘accidents’ and ‘surprises’ (an aspect of black culture that Hegel frowned upon).48 In music, these cuts – accidents and surprises – come during improvisational riffs that always come back to an original series of notations. That is to say, the music circles back to repeat its initial structure. Repetition, Snead asserts, is transformation within culture, and within black culture (African and African American) repetition is a form of progression that has allowed for continuity, self-awareness and preservation of self-identity. While repetition confirms stasis by entrenching specific patterns, it also permits changes, however slight, that expands a pattern to innovation and ingenuity. Such diachronic potentiality of repetition is evident in black dance, speech and literature.49 Most obviously, music has historically been a clear marker of the effectiveness of the cycle of repetition. As noted above, in the modified African rhythms identified as ‘blue notes’ in what W. E. B. Du Bois called in 1903 ‘sorrow songs’, in Souls of Black Folk, ‘blacks unconsciously created new ideas founded on existing African musical concepts’.50 Snead explains the distinction of black culture as follows: ‘In European culture, repetition must be seen to be not just circulation and flow but accumulation and growth. In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is there for you to pick it up when you come back to get it.’51 The ‘cut’ in all its cultural manifestations allows for modifications and changes while reusing and reinvesting such transformations throughout time. Thus, Bearden’s communities indeed exist as ‘space in fragments’. However, when the photomontages – full of scraps of papers and photographs – are enlarged, the images repeated in a larger format, the communities – Harlem, Pittsburgh or North Carolina – come together more powerfully than in the collages themselves. The photomontages unify and aggrandize the communities represented not only because they are larger or because their limitation to black and white colour rules out the distractions of colour, but also because the overall syncopation of the various parts now may be seen as the engine that drives the cohesive whole, despite the cuts. Therefore, collage is a striking and empowering method for fusing communities since the medium arguably offers an almost literal application of such a principle of Snead’s ‘cut’ and ‘breaks’ as understood in jazz improvisation. This analysis does not come without some critiques, however. Louis Kaplan provides an alternative reading of Romare Bearden’s Projections series as a ‘community in fragments’. Drawing from the ideas of Jean-Luc Nancy’s chapter on ‘Myth Interrupted’ from his book The Inoperative Community, Kaplan analyses and dismantles Mary Schmidt Campbell’s original argument in the exhibition catalogue Memory and Metaphor for the Studio Museum in Harlem that Bearden’s Projections are

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representations of cohesive African-American communities that have relied on rituals and traditions that derive from African spiritual sources. Kaplan accuses Campbell (and those who have followed her in Bearden scholarship) of oversimplifying and perhaps over-glorifying Bearden’s work as projecting a seamless, purified mythology of African American-ness that evokes African and Christian roots. Kaplan claims that no one has truly taken into consideration the fractured, disjointed and interruptive nature of Bearden’s visual narrative in Projections. As Kaplan describes it: Bearden exposes the ruptured state of African American being-in-common circa 1964 as a space in fragments, as a place of tension, and resistance, as a locus of sharing and splitting – in the terms of a community-exposed photomontage.52

This description of splitting complements what James Snead claims of black culture, a kind of fragmentation resolved, which becomes evident within a structured form, like in jazz composition. Johannes Volz’s article, ‘ “Blues and the Abstract Truth”: Or, Did Romare Bearden Really Paint Jazz?’, critiques an oversimplification in the scholarship of Bearden’s ‘painted jazz’ through examples like ‘the uncritical equation of Hines’s musical space and Bearden’s visual space [which] only makes sense on a loose metaphorical level’.53 And, yet, I argue on a phenomenological level there is a space between that is paradoxically both physical and invisible. What I am concerned with here is Bearden’s physical presence within his Projections series that propels James Snead’s notion of ‘the cut’ along with Ralph Ellison’s concept of invisibility, and the music of Earl Hines. I have already acknowledged, of course, that many scholars have also addressed Bearden’s Projections series and references to jazz. Nevertheless, in an effort to determine how Bearden’s expression of black life and the techniques of jazz combine effectively, I want to confront Volz’s stance ‘that Bearden uses specific iconic means to evoke . . . cultural narratives, and without them any link to jazz or African American culture more generally would seem far-fetched’. Bearden noted in a 1946 article for Critique that the ‘Negro artist’s dilemma’ was ‘the disharmony between practice and ideals’.54 As the article contended, Bearden consistently resisted the confinement of Negro-only art shows and the (lowered) expectations of the portrayal of Negro subject matter which often played into contrived ideas, or worse yet, stereotypes, of a Negro style. Bearden believed that ‘however disinherited, the Negro is part of the amalgam of American life, and his aims and aspirations are in common with the rest of the American people’.55 Collage is a striking and empowering change since the medium arguably offers an almost literal application of such a principle. Through collage Bearden developed a rich and flexible presentation of different perspectives on the black experience. His cut-up parts of pictures of bodies, animals, buildings, trains, vegetation and so on lend themselves to resolving the socalled ‘dilemma’ of the Negro artist – and by extension, Volz’s twenty-first-century objection to ‘a purely formalist analysis [that] leaves no room for the dimension of aesthetic experience’.56 Through the ushering of his hands, Bearden addressed the personal and the aesthetic concerns of American life by implementing images which

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are open to various interpretations while reflecting African-American social, spiritual or political experiences. I want to reiterate here that this is not simply a matter of the evocation of cultural narratives, as Volz suggests, but more so about technique. Video recordings from the 1980s that directly capture what I am calling ‘Bearden’s hand of jazz’ in his studio reveal a process of selection and placement of images that make his improvisational approach more obvious, revealing that Bearden had a fairly methodical, yet very open, way of ‘playing’ with his collages. In Bearden Plays Bearden, the artist himself narrates much of the production, and directors Billie Allen and Nelson E. Breen blend snapshots of Bearden’s artwork with vignettes of the countryside and the cityscape, Bearden walking in New York City, working in his studio and talking with friends.57 In a posthumous production, Romare Bearden: Visual Jazz, one sees the artist paste one image, return to a book to hunt for another image, make straight cuts into the page to extract another illustration, and paste once again. Flipping through texts allows Bearden to stay open because he ‘wants the paintings to emerge as themselves’.58 The process is organic. He places layer upon layer of photographs and papers onto a board until he achieves the desired effect. Viewing this process on video allows one to observe how much building up a collage is like painting, clarifying Bearden’s description of these compositions as ‘montage paintings’. In response to Ralph Ellison’s observations, Kobena Mercer notes ‘the synthetic moment of re-assemblage whereby the photographic fragments that Bearden pulled out of antithetical sources are cancelled out and yet legibly preserved in his artistic re-articulation of signifying elements’.59 Master printmaker Robert Blackburn said that he learned from Bearden how not to ‘fix your idea’.60 Blackburn recalled how Bearden had magazines and newspapers all over his studio, and how ‘one colour grew out of another colour’ when it came to his selection process. Bearden was opposed to ‘fixing’ an image prematurely. Blackburn described Bearden as piling images together from which he selected pictures that attracted him, and then worked out a cohesive organization to contain them within the collage. After cutting from the book or magazine, he then chose what parts of the images he wanted, working with forms in a variety of shapes, colours and sizes in order to accommodate his arrangement in process. Certain symbols and images like the train, serpent and guitar recur from one collage to the next, but they do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, these repetitive images are nearly always orchestrated to direct the categories in which viewers will search for their meanings. The books held at the Romare Bearden Foundation retain their cuts, tears and bookmarks, as indexes of Bearden’s physical presence within them.61 Bearden relied on a great variety of sources from which to select images. As reproductions within a book or journal, the original images no longer retain much of the trace of the original photographer’s hand. Richard Shiff makes clear that ‘the index’ operates through the physicality of the hand (and at times the body), which asserts itself on the surface of the artwork. What the facture of early modernists painters suggested to the viewer was the combined interest and attention to formalism and primitive expressionism. Instead of eliminating evidence of the hand of the artist on the surface of the canvas, they deliberately and indexically demonstrated the hand’s painterly role in the forms taken

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by the paintbrush. The body that directed the hand, together with the mind that so intently directed the body’s action in this regard, was not far behind.62 Relating this to collage and the structures of jazz, does the index, therefore, represent the physical and visual markers of ‘breaks’ in jazz improvisation? Bearden reveals how a poignant fragment positioned in the right place transmogrifies the picture plane under his direction in the collage The Street of 1964 (see Plate 15). A woman’s face peaks out behind the protective screen of a man’s gaze that fills the bottom, right-hand corner. Her short, kinky hair and brown, decoratively painted face identifies her as an African person. The detection of her femininity derives primarily from two photographic sources: a lace pattern placed directly below her cropped neck and a small, delicate right hand, arranged beside the lace. The woman, situated on the street, but also arranged just below the bridge, conjures up ideas of the African diaspora in America, the migration of African Americans to urban areas like Harlem, along with the black woman’s role in African-American culture and society. Bearden must have had a related sense that photography serves to disrupt the individual, groups or society, in general, offering this understanding of a presence that showcases indexically within a photograph, but outside the present moment. The Street depicts urban life not with full representations, but rather as a composition of signifiers. In fact, The Street illustrates the autonomy of the signifier.63 The compact layering of (black) faces and bodies throughout the frame refer to the congested movement of a busy pavement in a city (i.e. Harlem). In the upper right-hand corner, a bridge alludes to one of New York City’s borough-connecting structures. The configuration of carefully arranged cutouts transcends an uncomplicated representation of a cityscape because of the disparate pasted materials. This complication propagates a sequence of reinterpretation for his work as both African American and more broadly art historical. The cultures that the fragments represent are indexes of Bearden’s attention to his own African and Western heritages and to Western and non-Western people and their cultural apparatuses. As he extracts and fragments iconic images of these cultures from books and magazines to make bodies (or parts thereof), their appearances index the mesh of European and African-American perceptions that Bearden himself experiences. This attention mirrors the very structure of the marrying of ‘sorrow songs’ of African-American work life with Western-style music in order to produce jazz. Bearden experimented and exposed himself to various techniques of artists while using his own ‘voice’ to translate the techniques with his experience. Albert Murray noted: Each of his paintings is evolved out of what the juxtaposition of the raw materials at hand brings to mind as he plays around with them in much the same way as, say Duke Ellington in search of a tune or in the process of working up an arrangement or composing a fully orchestrated blues sonata begins by playing around with chords, phrases, trial runs, and potential riff patterns on the keyboard.64

The chorus of Pieter de Hooch, Pablo Picasso, Earl Hines and Ralph Ellison, among others, encouraged Bearden’s play with images that exemplified a freedom within the

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works themselves that only jazz had heretofore been able to provide, but one made of the more forcibly fragmented African-American experience within it vis-à-vis the veil of double-consciousness. Bearden communicates with the viewer, and he intended for the dialogue between the viewer and the work to be present – an acknowledgement that indeed he has borrowed from other sources and marked their presences indexically through their reappearance within his photomontages. The cuts, the paint and the residual glue, which mark the borrowings, become something altogether different when photographed and made into prints. Bearden’s inventiveness in working with the various aspects of his personal and cultural history to fuse with his philosophical and modernist studies of art, be it African or European, becomes, in essence, an accumulation of indexes – traces – of his training, knowledge and experiences from which Projections arose.

Notes I am grateful to my colleagues, Alice Friedman and Martin MacNamara, who generously offered critical feedback in the early stages of this essay. 1 Earl Hines was known for his ‘trumpet style’ of piano playing, and he admired Louis Armstrong’s style in particular. Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 140; Stanley Dance, The World of Earl Hines (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977), 20. 2 Henry Louis Gates, introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, 1903, 1989), xiv. 3 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Modern Library, 1994 (1947)), 7–8. 4 Albert Murray, The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996); Albert Murray, ‘The Visual Equivalent of the Blues’, in Romare Bearden: 1970–1980 (Charlotte, NC: Mint Museum, 1980); Albert Murray, ‘Improvisation and the Creative Process’, in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) 111–13; and Ralph Ellison, ‘The Art of Romare Bearden’, in Chant of Saints: AfroAmerican Literature, Art and Scholarship, ed. Michael S. Harper and Robert S. Stepto (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979). 5 Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 56. 6 Ellison, Invisible Man, 8. 7 For more information on the exhibitions of Bearden’s collages and photostats, see Dore Ashton, Romare Bearden: Projections (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1965); M. Bunch Washington, The Art of Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1973); Mary Lee Corlett, From Process to Print: Graphic Works by Romare Bearden, 1st edn (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate, 2009); Gail Gelburd, Thelma Golden and Albert Murray, Romare Bearden in Black-and-White: Photomontage Projections 1964 (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1997); and Myron Schwartzman, Romare Bearden: His Life and Art (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1990). 8 Barry Kernfield (ed.), New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, vol. 1, 1st edn (London: Macmillan; New York: Grove’s Dictionary of Music, 1988).

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9 Portia K. Maultsby, ‘Africanisms in African-American Music’, in Africanisms in American Culture, ed. Joseph Holloway (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 187. 10 W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘Chapter XIV: The Sorrow Songs’, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1903), in The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 230–40. 11 Du Bois, Souls, 102. 12 See Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2005), and Gabor Boritt and Scott Hancock (eds), Gettysburg Civil War Institute Books: Slavery, Resistance, Freedom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 13 Du Bois, Souls, 102. Many scholars have found Du Bois’ characterization of double consciousness useful in African-American literature, philosophy and artistic production. For further information on this topic, see the following: Dickson D. Bruce, ‘W.E.B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness’, American Literature 64 (June 1992): 299–309; Bernard W. Bell, ‘Genealogical Shifts in Du Bois’s Discourse on Double Consciousness as the Sign of African American Difference’, in W.E.B. Du Bois on Culture and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics, ed. Bernard W. Bell, Emily R. Grosholz and James B. Stewart (New York: Routledge, 1996); Richard Cullen Rath, ‘Echo and Narcissus: The Afrocentric Pragmatism of W.E.B. Du Bois’, Journal of American History 84, no. 2 (September 1997): 461–95; and Michael D. Harris, ‘From Double Consciousness to Double Vision: The Africentric Artist’, African Arts (April 1994): 44–53. 14 Ruth Fine’s biographical chapter, ‘Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between’, in Washington, The Art of Romare Bearden, is an up-to-date, full analysis that elucidates much about his life and art. Fine’s thorough research clarifies many sticking points and obscure details about the artist, including the confirmation of a birth date of 1911. For a thorough chronology of Bearden’s life, see Rocío Aranda-Alvarado and Sarah Kennel with Carmenita Higginbotham, ‘Romare Bearden: A Chronology’, in Washington, The Art of Romare Bearden, 212–47. 15 Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, 1st edn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995). 16 Bearden’s major had previously been documented as mathematics. Ruth Fine discovered in her research that Bearden took a significant number of art courses while in attendance at Boston University (1931–2) and at New York University (1932–5); Fine, in Washington, The Art of Romare Bearden, 7. Bearden and his wife Nanette also built a house in her home country, St Martin in the Caribbean, in the early 1970s. Sally Price, Richard Price and Romare Bearden, Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 17 Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz (London: Continuum, 2001). 18 Eric Lott, ‘Double V, Double-Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style’, Callaloo 36 (Summer 1988): 599. 19 The Lafayette Theater’s stage entrance was across the street from his apartment on 131st Street, and the Lincoln Theater was on 135th Street, off Lenox Avenue. Murray, The Blue Devils of Nada, 122. 20 Schwartzman, Romare Bearden, 85. 21 Schwartzman, Romare Bearden, 85. 22 Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 177–8.

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23 Charles Rowell, ‘ “Inscription of The City of Brass”: An Interview with Romare Bearden’, Callaloo 36 (Summer 1988): 431–2. 24 Art Farmer as quoted in Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 95. 25 Romare Bearden and Carl Holty, The Painter’s Mind (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1969), 27. 26 Mary Schmidt Campbell, ‘History and the art of Romare Bearden’, in Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden, 1940–1987 (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1991), 7. 27 George Grosz in Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 117; first published in Blätter des Piscatobühne, 1928; and Dawn Ades, Photomontage, 1st American edn (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976, 1986), 19. 28 Ades, Photomontage, 19. Sharon Pruitt discusses in greater detail the Dada roots of photomontage and their aesthetic and political correlation to Bearden’s collages and photomontages and Spiral. See Sharon Pruitt, ‘Collage and Photomontage: Bearden’s Spiralist Reflections of America and Africa’, in A Century of African American Art: The Paul R. Jones Collection, ed. Amalia Amaki (Newark, DE: University Museum, University of Delaware; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 17–32. 29 Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: A History of Photography (New York: McGraw Hill, 2000), 228. 30 Ruth Fine has noted that Bearden took a class at the Art Students League in August 1933. In September 1935, he took a life-drawing class nightly, probably under Grosz’s instruction. Fine, in Washington, The Art of Romare Bearden, 9, 253, n. 21; as cited from ‘Romare Bearden: Visual Artist’, interview with Camille Billops and James V. Hatch, December 1972, in Artist and Influence 17 (New York, 1998): 32. 31 The song was recorded by Billy Eckstine, jazz cellist Oscar Pettiford and, later, by Tito Puente. Branford Marsalis made a new version for Bearden Revisited in 2003. 32 Romare Bearden; as quoted in Riffs and Takes: Music in the Art of Romare Bearden (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Museum of Art, 1988) n.p. Emphasis added. Earl Hines (1905–75) reached popularity beginning in the 1930s. His prominence within the jazz world was sustained throughout his lifetime. Bearden remarked that Stuart Davis ‘kept trying to make me appreciate the fact that so far as he was concerned the aesthetic conventions of Harlem musicians to which so many of my habitual responses were geared, were just as avant-garde as Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Mondrian, and all the rest’. Bearden as quoted in Albert Murray, Blue Devils of Nada, 130 33 Murray, ‘The Visual Equivalent of the Blues’, 20. 34 Fine, in Washington, The Art of Romare Bearden, 27. 35 There are several books about Charles S. Peirce and collections of his essays and other writings. They include: Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (vols 1–6) and Arthur Burks (vols 7–8) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58); Max Fisch, Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, 6 vols (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); and James Hoopes (ed.), Peirce on Signs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 36 Floyd Coleman, ‘The Changing Same: Spiral, the Sixties, and African-American Art’, in A Shared Heritage: Art By Four African Americans (Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indianapolis Museum of Art and Indiana University Press, 1966), 149. 37 Campbell, ‘History and the art of Romare Bearden’, 40. 38 Schwartzman, Romare Bearden, 84.

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39 Anna C. Chave, ‘New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: Gender, Race, and the Origins of Cubism’, Art Bulletin 76, no. 4 (December 1994): 596–611. 40 Alain Locke, ‘The Art of the Ancestors’, Survey Graphic (March 1925): 673. 41 I would like to thank Diedra Harris-Kelley, Co-Director of the Romare Bearden Foundation, for pulling a selection of books from Bearden’s private library for my perusal. I looked through a few examples of books and journals with brilliant colour and black-and-white photographs of African masks, dance and rituals, including Franco Monti, African Masks, trans. Andrew Hale (London and Milan: Hamlyn, 1969 (1966)); and V. Vasut, African Dance: A Book of Photographs by Dominique Darbois, trans. A. Jappel (Prague: Artia Prague, 1962). In the former text, he cut out the mask from the cover jacket. I am certain the glossy surface only added greater interest to the overall completed work in which it was included. 42 Schwartzman, Romare Bearden, 210–11. 43 Michael Fried, ‘Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings’, Artforum 5 (November 1966): 18–27. 44 Craig Owens, ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Post Modernism’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1993), 59. 45 Francis Frascina, ‘Realism and Ideology: An Introduction to Semiotics and Cubism’, in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century, Modern Art: Practices and Debates, ed. Charles Harrison, Francis Frascina and Gillian Perry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Open University, 1993), 90. 46 Albert Murray, ‘Improvisation and the Creative Process’, in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 112. 47 Charles Rowell, ‘ “Inscription of The City of Brass” ’, 440–1. 48 James Snead, ‘Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture’, in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr and Sunday Ogbonna Anozie (New York: Methuen, 1984), 59–79. 49 Snead uses several examples to clarify this point including the ritualistic ‘ring shout’ dance form, preaching styles in the black church, and the cinematic cutting style in Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Atheneum, 1988 (1972)). 50 Maultsby, ‘Africanisms in African-American Music’, 187. 51 Snead, ‘Repetition’, 67, n. 2. He references the description of the Dagomba ‘Atwimewu’ drum from John Miller Chernoof, African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 43–67. 52 Louis Kaplan, ‘Community in Fragments: Romare Bearden’s Projections and the Interruption of Myth’, in American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 113; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 53 Johannes Volz, ‘ “Blues and the Abstract Truth”: Or, Does Romare Bearden Really Paint Jazz?’, in The Hearing Eye: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Visual Art, ed. Graham Lock and David Murray (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 195. In the same text, Robert O’Meally writes convincingly regarding the intersectionality of art history and jazz studies in the work of Romare Bearden, ‘ “We Used to Say ‘Stashed” ’: Romare Bearden Paints the Blues’, 173–93, reprinted in Albert

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Murray, ‘Improvisation and the Creative Process’, in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Romare Bearden, ‘The Negro Artist’s Dilemma’, Critique: A Review of Contemporary Art (November 1946): 16. Bearden, ‘The Negro Artist’s Dilemma’, 20. Volz, ‘ “Blues and the Abstract Truth” ’, 196. Romare Bearden in Bearden Plays Bearden, prod. and dir. Billie Allen and Nelson E. Breen, 28 mins, Third World Cinema Productions, Seven-Up Company, Modern Talking Picture Service, Inc., 1981, videocassette. Romare Bearden in Romare Bearden: Visual Jazz, prod. Linda Freeman, dir. David Irving, 28 mins, Crystal Productions, 1999, videocassette. Kobena Mercer, ‘Romare Bearden, 1964: Collage as Kunstwollen’, in Cosmopolitan Modernisms, Annotating Art’s Histories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 139. Robert Blackburn in Romare Bearden: Visual Jazz. When Blackburn opened his own studio, the Printmaking Workshop in 1948 in New York, he launched the oldest and largest non-profit print workshop in the United States. Blackburn is credited with generating support for and interest in graphic art through his own experiments in colour lithography during the 1950s. For an examination of the printmaker’s life, see Deborah Cullen, ‘Robert Blackburn (1920–2003): A Printmaker’s Printmaker’, American Art 17, no. 3 (2003): 92–4. The Romare Bearden Foundation in New York City houses Bearden’s personal library, including books and journals from which he cut out pictures. The exalted position of Jackson Pollock within Abstract Expressionism is due in part to the indexical function Pollock’s body and his pours played as a performance – captured in photographs and film – that demonstrates this physicality of the index. See Richard Shiff, ‘Performing an Appearance: On the Surface of Abstract Expressionism’, in Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments, ed. Michael Auping (New York: H.N. Abrams in association with Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1987), 97–8. See also Amelia Jones, ‘The “Pollockian Performative” and the Revision of the Modernist Subject’, in Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 53–102. Thus, the photomontages are an example of the overlapping of two of Peirce’s representational categories: the index and the icon. Murray, Blue Devils of Nada, 119. Emphasis added.

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The Politics of Music and Image in Contemporary Iranian Art ‘The Impossibility of Putting One’s Body and Voice on a Stage’1 Kirstie Imber

The debate concerning music’s permissibility and status in Islam continues to play out across the cultural landscape in the Islamic Republic of Iran. As Bruno Nettl has summarized, Iranian society has often taken an ambivalent attitude towards popular music and dance, ‘revelling in its aesthetic but regarding it as dangerous and to be handled with care, prohibiting it in certain contexts and sometimes forbidding it totally in public’.2 In non-religious contexts, the display (and I choose my words carefully) of music-making, singing and performance by women causes the most debate: ethnomusicologists have concluded that women and music remain problematic areas and are ‘often positioned as [the] discursive “Other.”’3 As such, the practice of women making and being seen to perform music is often one of the most tightly controlled arenas of social activity.4 While the Reform period (1997–2005) saw the relaxation of certain restrictions on musical activity, including the legalization of various types of pop music,5 the ban on female solo singing still stands. Women can only perform in public if they cooperate with specific forms of official regulation: singing among a chorus or group of musicians, or participating in a state-sponsored women-only music festival. The restrictions and constraints faced by women singers in Iran, and the notion that their voices must be either regulated or remain silent, is the subject of Iranian photographer Newsha Tavakolian’s installation Listen (2010). Perhaps best known as a photojournalist, Tavakolian’s work is primarily focused on documenting social issues, global conflicts and natural disasters. To date, her photo essays have been published in a number of international newspapers and magazines including National Geographic, Le Monde and the New York Times. Tavakolian’s entry into the Iranian art world was prompted, however, when the Iranian government removed the photographer’s press card, a move that restricted her from working as a photojournalist yet also opened up new ways of documenting social issues in Iran. As such, since 2010 Tavakolian has produced a body of photographic work as an artist, and continues to exhibit her work both in Iran and internationally. 203

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Listen takes the form of six photographic portraits, a short film and a series of images designed as covers for CD cases. In the photographic portraits, six Iranian women are pictured in close-up, facing the camera. They are shown standing alone, in front of luminous sequined curtains, as if caught in the midst of their performance. Glancing at these images, it takes barely a few moments to recognize that these women are shown performing with their voices. With their eyes closed and their lips parted, as if poised on the cusp of the next lyric, their gestures and expressions suggest they are wholly immersed in the world of their song (see www.bloomsbury.com/xxxx). The images are very carefully stylized; each of the women’s faces are illuminated by a spotlight that throws them into sharp relief, contrasting with the dark fabric of their headscarves. This focus of light has the effect of drawing attention to the detail of their facial expressions – each of which seem to betray a sense of heightened concentration and emotion. The same portraits appear in the short film, where they are placed side by side at the top and bottom of a black screen. Running to just over eight minutes long, the film might be best described as a sequence of moving portraits: each woman is shown performing for the camera in front of the same sequined curtains and illuminated by the same soft spotlight (see www.bloomsbury.com/xxxx). Yet as the film continues to unfold the visual narrative of their performance remains silent; there are no voices or accompanying music to complement the images onscreen. Tavakolian has disentangled sound from its visual counterpart, leaving viewers to fathom the dynamic and rhythm of the performances through visual clues alone. The duration of the film is thus filled with an immediately discernible silence that emphasizes the visual and inherently embodied quality of music and performance. The third component of Listen, a series of photographs designed as inserts for plastic CD cases, depicts a young Iranian woman fully veiled in a long black chador standing in a variety of urban landscapes. In one of the photographs she stands motionless in the sea while the waves cascade around her. In another, she is pictured in a landscape of high-rise buildings and mountains, standing at a roadside next to an abandoned, derelict car and piles of rubbish. Tavakolian describes the images as covers for ‘dream albums’, yet they will be inserted into CD cases that will, for now, remain empty. While each component of Listen is concerned with picturing the performance of music, the presence of silence is palpable and compelling. In Tavakolian’s own words, the singers ‘perform through my camera while the world has never heard them’.6 Despite the silence that characterizes Listen, the title of Tavakolian’s piece functions as an instruction: to hear, attentively. With this in mind, this chapter focuses on the notion that the significant presence of silence within Listen merits theoretical reflection – a form of listening, so to speak. It suggests that the context of the image – where the performance of music and silence are given visual representation – provides an important opportunity to interrogate the politics and meanings surrounding women and music in Iranian culture. Indeed, once acknowledged, the representation of the silent female voice functions as a powerful metaphor for the continuous difficulties faced by Iranian women seeking to fulfil careers as a solo singers in present day Iran. Read in the light of Islamic definitions of music and gender, as this chapter will show, Listen offers a subtle critique of contemporary policies in Iran that seek to regulate

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women’s musical performance, such as the state-sponsored women-only music festival. A combination of close, attentive looking and listening thus helps to reveal the ways in which Listen reflects certain principles of the politics surrounding women and music in Iran – an issue that has, in the artist’s words, become ‘easy to overlook’.7 The photographic images appear to capture the briefest of moments: each singer stands motionless, as if frozen in time, their performances drained of temporality. The short film, in contrast, records the passing of time. It displays a linear narrative characterized by movement and duration. Yet following the logic that photographs are devoid of motion would be to reinforce the theoretical distinction between photography and film, often found in writings on photography and visual culture, and the contrasting temporalities with which each media has long been associated. In her book Death 24x a Second (2010), Laura Mulvey persuasively explores this polarity to consider ‘the representations of time that can be discovered in the relation between movement and stillness in cinema’.8 In her observation of delay in cinema, where ‘the scene is halted and extracted from the wider flow of narrative development’,9 Mulvey argues that unexpected meanings can be found: ‘key moments and meanings become visible that could not have been perceived when hidden under the narrative flow and the movement of the film’.10 Mulvey’s reflections on stillness and time are particularly fascinating when thinking about Listen, which records the same subject matter in both the photographs and short film. In the preface of the book, for example, Mulvey reflects on Dziga Vertov’s classic documentary film, Man with a Movie Camera (1929). She describes a well-known sequence where the image of a horse fills the frame, and then freezes into a still ‘photograph’.11 For Mulvey, Vertov complicates the concept that movement tends to assert the presence of a continuous ‘now’, by blending movement and stillness into a single image. This particular sequence thus confuses the often accepted notion that the photograph ‘relates exclusively to its moment of registration’, representing a moment extracted from ‘the continuity of historical time’.12 As Mulvey argues: When the image of a child is shown repeated in the individual frames of a fragment of film the sequence seems to touch the point between the aesthetic of photography and cinema. In their stillness, the repeated images belong to the photograph, to the moment of their registration, but in their sequence they signify poignantly the indivisibility of these individual moments from a larger whole, an integral part of the shift into movement.13

In this brief passage Mulvey clearly articulates the significance of the relationship between the still and moving image. I have quoted her words because they seem equally applicable to Listen, and the ways in which the photographs and short film relate and refer to each other: the photographs not only take on the quality of stills extracted from the short film, but are also contained within the film itself. The photographs, or ‘individual moments’ as Mulvey would have it, are held within the space of the screen, shifting into movement. While both elements of Listen remain distinguishable, they are nevertheless bound in a fascinating relationship, and seem to speak of that moment when the aesthetics of photography and film subtly combine. As Mulvey

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suggests, then, the task is to think about the relationships between these seemingly opposed mediums rather than labour to point out their differences, which are primarily based on outmoded notions of temporality. Reading Listen through Mulvey’s analysis, it becomes possible to acknowledge the presence of stillness and silence across each facet of Tavakolian’s piece, rather than focus on its existence within the short film alone.

Listen (2010) In a recent public presentation at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, Newsha Tavakolian spoke at length about the trajectory of her career to date and her very recent experience of being denied a permit to work as a photojournalist in Iran. Listen formed an integral part of the discussion, as this was her first project produced as an artist rather than a journalist. Tavakolian revealed that Listen was inspired by her own childhood ambition to become a singer, an ambition she knew would be difficult to realize because of her gender. This discussion around Listen prompted Tavakolian to reflect on the status of women and music in Iran, with the conclusion that the situation had failed to change for women seeking a career as solo singers. For Tavakolian it remains a career path fraught with complications.14 Aside from a series of short review articles, Tavakolian’s work as an artist has yet to receive any close critical attention from art historians. Her work is, however, often referenced in broader discussions of post-revolutionary Iranian art, particularly in relation to the increasing number of women artists and photographers documenting and exploring social issues in their practice.15 Moreover, a recent volume of arthistorical essays published in English, Performing the Iranian State (2013), confirms the significance of performance as a strategy and process in contemporary Iranian art. The essays focus not just on representations of the human body, but also on ‘the repeated discursive, material practices that various persons and groups act out in society that help define the state or subvert it’.16 Julia Allerstorfer’s contribution explores these ideas in relation to video and photography produced by Iranian women artists such as Simin Keramati (b. 1970) and Shadi Ghadirian (b. 1974), whose work is especially similar to Tavakolian’s. Allerstorfer argues that video and photography enable women artists to deconstruct and transform previously fixed cultural notions of gender, race and class. Citing Jean Fisher’s influential work on sound in women’s art, she suggests that video and time-based art provide a crucial means of ‘re-presenting subjectivity’, opening up new possibilities for women to express their ‘ever-shifting-identities’.17 While the Iranian contemporary art scene and the aforementioned (and very limited) body of scholarship provides the immediate context and theoretical framework for Tavakolian’s work, Listen is strikingly similar to another audio-visual installation produced by Shirin Neshat (b. 1957), one of Iran’s best-known and most prolific diaspora artists who has been living and working in New York since before the Revolution. Turbulent (1998) is a critical investigation of the relationship between music and gender in Iranian culture, which Neshat produced shortly after her popular

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and widely exhibited photographic series, Women of Allah (1993–7). The installation comprises a two-channel video in black and white, shot on 16 mm film and lasting approximately ten minutes. On the left side of the screen a man is shown dressed in a white shirt, standing in front of a microphone on a stage in a crowded theatre. A sea of faces gaze at him as he begins performing a passionate song based on Persian poetry. After he has finished singing he slowly turns away from the microphone, takes a bow and is loudly applauded by the audience. He then remains still, staring intently into the camera. The screen on the right then becomes the focus of attention, where a tall female figure stands in the middle of an empty auditorium with her back facing the camera, cloaked in a long black chador. Slowly, she begins to produce a range of vocal sounds – guttural, humming noises and shrill, jarring sounds devoid of coherent pitch, rhythm or texture. In contrast with the male singer’s solo performance, the woman’s voice is technologically mediated and distorted by layers of non-diegetic vocal sounds. Her unconventional song without words, coupled with her increasingly frantic physical gestures, render her performance a markedly strange and disconcerting one. In contrast, once again, with the conservative and controlled performance by the male singer, her performance seems tainted with an undertone of violence. Neshat’s strategic use of the female voice – the explicit lack of recognizable language and the complex layering of diegetic and non-diegetic voices – immediately gestures towards Iranian women’s subordinate status as singers and their collective experience under the state’s patriarchal culture. In essence, the artist’s treatment of music and image creates a powerful, multisensory piece that dramatically expresses the idea that women remain excluded from the domain of music. When compared with Turbulent, Listen arguably offers a far subtler contribution to the debate concerning women and music in Islam. While Neshat’s manipulation of the audible texture of film is palpable, Tavakolian’s use of silence is far less obvious, and certainly easy to dismiss. Yet both artists create a distinct visual space within which to think about why the performance of music by women remains so contentious. The silent female voice, much like the cacophony of strained and somewhat harrowing vocal sounds produced during the woman’s performance in Turbulent, forms a significant, if impalpable, component of the narrative of these photographs, functioning like an unseen marker for Iranian women singers’ experience of marginalization and exclusion. The veiled female figure is given prominence in both Turbulent and Listen, and operates as one of the strongest visual clues that both artists are referring to the debate concerning women and music in the context of Iran as an Islamic Republic. Yet beyond working to situate these works historically, I want to suggest that the image of the veiled female figure performs another function. As Fadwa El-Guindi reminds us, the veil is ‘a rich and nuanced phenomenon’18 and a language that can communicate a number of social and cultural messages; in the context of Tavakolian’s images and short film, it might be said to throw a spotlight on the ubiquitous presence of religious values in the realm of a specifically Iranian-Islamic culture of music. Focusing on the image of the veiled female figure alone can therefore lead, I would suggest, to a realization that Islamic values and beliefs continue to determine the role of women as musicians and performers. As such, Listen provides a space for asking further questions about the

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ways in which Islamic knowledge systems, with their origins in much earlier periods of history, continue to structure the wider discourse of music.

Women and music in Islam Across Iran’s history music has often been viewed with a sceptical eye. Since the Revolution in 1978–9 the religious authorities have often restricted or prohibited its use (although this is also true of much earlier periods). While musical activity has never actually ceased in Iran, certain limitations have remained, including the performance of popular music in places of entertainment, public performances by female musicians, and some forms of instrumental music.19 In a recent article reflecting on the overall status of music in Iran, Jean During confirms that there remains a ‘prohibition against men listening to the solo voice of a woman’.20 During reveals a particularly crucial issue in the subject of music in Iran and Islam more widely: the uneasy alliance between music and gender, which includes the gender of the performer and that of the listener (and observer). He highlights the notion that in the context of religious debates concerning music, a listener is always already imagined and in place. Indeed, During’s remarks on the issue of permissibility, and his emphasis on the fate of the listener, can be traced back through various historical texts, which prove illuminating for a further insight into the ways in which music is defined. Charting the philosophical writings on music by thinkers in medieval Islam from the ninth to the fifteenth century, Fadlou Shehadi establishes two distinct approaches to the study of music: the influence of the Greeks on the discourse on music,21 and the practice of listening to music in the context of Islam. Philosophers and thinkers during the period grappled with whether, from the view of Islamic law and general reason, a good Muslim should be permitted to listen to music – and if listening is permitted, then to which kind of music.22 Shehadi asserts that ‘the thought on these issues pertaining to the permissibility of listening to music is Islamic in substance and style, and not only in the case of those arguments that rely on the Qu’uran and Hadith’. He continues: A religion such as Islam which is inherently encompassing of every aspect of human life, will, all of its own, want to be prescriptively preoccupied with the believer-listener exposed to what is thought to be a most potent and potentially dangerous force on emotion and behaviour.23

Shehadi emphasizes that the question of listening to music is an issue about music in passing, for it is, above all, about the extent to which music can lure a believer away from their ‘straightforward path’ and life that is directed towards God in ‘every belief and every deed’.24 Music thus becomes a kind of intoxicating worldly pleasure – a source of ‘frivolous diversion’ leading believers to distraction.25 Shehadi reveals the concern among thinkers that listening to music is closely associated with drinking wine and engaging in illicit sex: ‘whoever submits to them is swept by their power’ and thus diverted from their moral path.26

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Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328), an Islamic scholar, theologian and philosopher, discussed his views on music in Kitab al-sama wa L-raqs (The Book of Audition and Dance),27 stating that music incites sensual pleasure and is closely related to zina (adultery and fornication). For Taymiyyah, both are thought to be pleasures ‘in the absence of reason’ and comparable to the state of drunkenness. Taymiyyah extends his exegesis on music by comparing the effects of related pleasures on the body: ‘the body’s drunkenness with wine, the self’s drunkenness with seductive images’.28 Al-Ghazzali (1058–1111), a theologian and philosopher, produced the authoritative work Ihya ‘ulum al-din (The Revival of Religious Sciences), which is an earlier example of a text that places a similarly significant emphasis on the listener rather than the composer or performer. When he does discuss the performer, however, Ghazzali passes negative judgement if the singer is a woman or a young boy. For Ghazzali, both have the capacity to incite temptation, even when they are not singing. As Shehadi tellingly extrapolates, ‘for then, if seeing by itself entices, hearing added to that magnifies enticement’.29 Shehadi’s clarification of these philosophical ideas, which he defines as both philosophical-moral and moral-religious in orientation, reveals how this controversy concerns the consumption of music and its bodily effects, rather than the specifics of its creation. These historical writings reveal a number of themes that have maintained currency far into the contemporary period: the complex question of music’s permissibility and lawfulness rests on the notion that music is capable of inciting chaos and distraction. Moreover, it is characterized as a precarious act related as much to the world of sight as it is to sound. Music is therefore defined, albeit implicitly, as an activity firmly entangled and implicated in the visual world – embodied, multisensory and powerfully affective. In the aftermath of Iran’s turbulent revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini echoed these medieval thinkers when he set down a number of blunt allegations concerning the role of the arts in society: a move that was part of a broader campaign to purge each branch of the arts of any outwardly corrupting influence (especially those of Western origin). In an article published by Keyhan, the conservative newspaper and voice of the leadership, Khomeini declared: Music is like a drug, whoever acquires the habit can no longer devote himself to important activities. It changes people to the point of yielding to vice or to preoccupations pertaining to the world of music alone. We must eliminate music because it means betraying our country and our youth. We must completely eliminate it.30

Khomeini’s remarks reveal a vehement anxiety over music’s potential power to corrupt people to the point of committing sin. Although these widely publicized views belong in the lexicon of Islamic political discourse, they nevertheless recall Plato’s assertion that when music shifted from ‘the rational control of language to a more emotive role’ it became an inherently dangerous mode of expression capable of inciting moral devastation.31Yet if Plato detected moral danger in certain types of music, Khomeini’s striking declaration deems the entire spectrum of music’s structural and aesthetic

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qualities as potentially poisonous, with the power to penetrate the body, course through the veins and incite both ‘worldly passions and sensual pleasures’.32 Driven by the belief that music – when experienced in all its aural and visual guises – possesses the capacity to exert an ‘irresistibly strong influence’33 on the audience, Khomeini enforced a number of sanctions that prohibited all public concerts of Iranian and foreign music, as well as the sale of musical instruments and related ephemera. Televised broadcasts were also heavily controlled; on the rare occasion a performance was broadcast, the screen would be accompanied by the motionless image of a flower or landscape rather than reveal the corresponding image of the musician or performer.34 By maintaining a degree of distance between music and its visual reference point, the authorities enforced a particular definition of music; namely, that it is expressed and experienced chiefly through the body, including both the human voice and the use of musical instruments. Revisiting Tavakolian’s photographs in the light of these reflections on music in the world of Islam is revealing. The notion that the sound of each of the women’s voices has been separated from its visual and tangible point of origin – the body and more specifically the mouth – becomes more pronounced. Tavakolian seems to be referencing the idea, prevalent in more recent interpretations of music in Islam, that the embodied display of music should be de-emphasized, if not concealed altogether. Yet rather than completely mask the representation of music by using an alternative, unrelated image, Tavakolian employs silence to reconfigure its visual and audible properties. By evacuating these performances of any discernible sound – or establishing a gulf between the image and sound of music – Tavakolian suggests that a true representation of musical performance remains impossible for women. It is this incorporation of silence into the photographs, as a means of establishing a ‘divide’ between the image and sound of music, that distinguishes Listen from Turbulent. While Listen may prompt questions about some of the historical discourses that continue to structure and influence attitudes towards women and music, it might also be read as a creative critique of contemporary policies and practices. By capturing each singer observing the correct hijab, Tavakolian suggests these women are adhering to Islamic modesty codes in order to be seen by a public audience. This suggestion of a public setting is further emphasized by the inclusion of the colourful sequined curtain – a modest attempt to replicate the interior of a theatre or concert hall which functions to harness viewers’ attention to the aesthetic spectacle of the performance. Taking note of these elements of Listen works to reveal the presence of a listener and observer, who, while wholly invisible, forms part of the world of the image. While the work may reference present-day policy that stipulates that all women should adopt the veil when appearing in public, it also refers to some of the conditions inherent in specific sites of musical activity reserved for women alone, such as the state-sponsored women-only music festival.

Women’s music festivals First established during the early 1990s, women-only music festivals emerged as part of a larger initiative by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (under the

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leadership of reformist Mohammad Khatami) to formalize some private music activities. Broadly speaking, these events were granted semi-official status as long as they conformed to and could be aligned with Islamic principles.35 Such a strategy ensured that, as Parmis Mozafari explains, these events were also used to promote the correct image of the Iranian Islamic government as ‘a progressive state that has inclusive and open minded cultural policies and is capable of giving Islamic taste to all aspects of life, including the arts’.36 The annual Jashnvareh-ye Gol-e Yas (Jasmine Festival), established in 1999, provides an important example of this government approach, where a series of regulatory measures were enforced to ensure the event reflected the state’s undocumented policy towards women musicians. The manipulation of the festival’s visual materials, including the interior of the performance space, provides a telling example. During the 2002 festival held at the Talar Vahdat (Unity Hall), the public concert hall in Tehran, viewers were surrounded by an array of national images and signifiers: portraits of Khomeini, the tulip-shaped emblem appearing on government issued documents, and delicate ‘feminine symbols’ such as the jasmine flower. On the festival promotional materials, as well as the interior of the hall, the names and images of women musicians were strikingly absent. Instead, the jasmine flower appeared across the event’s documentation (perhaps metaphorically), cleverly overlaid with a treble clef so as to bypass any direct representations of women and music. The festival thus became a space within which the visual representation of music was effectively disguised and even masked. The veil had an important part to play in this respect too, because all performers and musicians were required to adhere to correct hijab despite performing for a women-only audience. The embodied element of each performance was thus similarly de-emphasized.37 Despite recent suggestions that women-only music festivals provide important forums where concepts of musical tradition and gender are ‘actively debated, created and revised’,38 Listen seems to contest the ostensible freedom of such events. While the work frames the scene of a performance taking place, the lack of any audible voice or music, once again, implies that this performance is somehow lacking or partial. To recall Tavakolian’s words, these singers may perform, but the world will never hear them. Their performances go on, yet they are compromised. Tavakolian’s short film carries a further suggestion that women remain completely excluded from the world of music. As the film starts to unfold, the separate frames, or moving portraits, depict each of the women standing alone, facing the camera. Initially, only one of the women opens her mouth to sing, silently. The others remain still, as if waiting patiently for their turn. As the viewer is drawn to the quiet spectacle of her performance, one of the other screens slowly fades to black, concealing the image of the singer within. In another, only a red curtain can be seen, dominating the frame. This dynamic continues throughout the film; as another singer begins her performance, other screens disappear, as if collapsing into the wider expanse of black behind the six frames. At other moments, the screens remain visible, but only a sparkling curtain can be seen. Read collectively, then, the photographs and film, and the ways in which they visualize silence and absence, seem to speak of the ongoing failure of Iranian women singers to achieve representation and agency as solo performers.

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Conclusion Unusually for a work of visual art, it is the presence of silence – a kind of visual silence perhaps – that holds the key to a deeper reading of Tavakolian’s images and film. Perhaps more than any other aspect of Listen, the presence of silence is the most powerful suggestion that it remains impossible for women to put their bodies and voices on a stage. Silence therefore refers to strategies of control and regulation, and the masking of music’s embodied power. Silence ‘speaks’ of the politics underlying music and gender in Iranian culture. As Adam Jaworksi reminds us, silence can be replete with meaning, and not, as is often assumed, a signifier of nothingness or lack.39 Tavakolian’s provocative photographs and short film, while relatively unknown in the wider discourse on contemporary Iranian art, provide an important opportunity to question and critique the enduring definitions and meanings that continue to secure the Iranian state’s policies on women, music and performance.

Notes 1 Parmis Mozafari, ‘Carving a Space for Female Solo-Singing in Post-Revolution Iran’, in Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures: Literature, Cinema and Music, ed. Karima Laachir and Saeed Talajory (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 263. 2 Bruno Nettl, ‘Iran xi. Music’, Encyclopeadia Iranica, http://www.iranicaonline.org/ articles/iran-xi-persian-music (accessed 8 March 2012). 3 Laudan Nooshin, ‘Prelude: Power and the Play of Music’, in Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, ed. Laudan Nooshin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 3. See also Ellen Koskoff (ed.), Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987). 4 Nooshin, ‘Prelude’, 3. 5 Wendy DeBano, ‘Singing Against Silence: Celebrating Women and Music at the Fourth Jasmine Festival’, in Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, 231. 6 Artist statement obtained from the artist’s website, http://www.newshatavakolian.com/ index.php#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&p=2&a=0&at=0 (accessed 8 March 2012). 7 Newsha Tavakolian, ‘Prix Pictet Conversations on Photography’, presentation at Whitechapel Gallery, London, 19 July 2014. 8 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion, 2006), 7. 9 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 144. 10 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 147. 11 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 13. 12 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 13. 13 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 15. 14 Tavakolian, ‘Prix Pictet Conversations on Photography’. 15 For an overview of these developments, see Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives (London: Saqi, 2013), 305. 16 Staci Gem Scheiwiller, ‘Introduction: Setting the Stage’, in Performing the Iranian State: Visual Culture and Representations of Identity, ed. Staci Gem Scheiwiller (London, New York and Delhi: Anthem Press, 2013), 11.

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17 Julia Allerstorfer, ‘Performing Visual Strategies: Representational Concepts of Female Iranian Identity in Contemporary Photography and Video Art’, in Performing the Iranian State, 177. 18 Fadwa El-Guindi, Veil: Modesty, Privacy, Resistance (Oxford: Berg, 1999), xii. 19 Nettl, ‘Iran xi. Music’. 20 Jean During, ‘Third Millennium Tehran: Music!’, Iranian Studies 38, no. 3 (2005): 373–98, 376. 21 Shehadi considers how ‘the Greeks set much of the agenda for the philosophers of music in Islam’, looking at three sources of influence: Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, who analyse music in terms of numbers and numerical ratios; Aristoxenus, who attempted to make a science of the study of music; and the wide-ranging influence of Plato and Aristotle. Fadlou Shehadi, Philosophies of Music in Medieval Islam (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1995), 3–4. 22 Shehadi, Philosophies of Music in Medieval Islam, 1. 23 Shehadi, Philosophies of Music in Medieval Islam, 4–5. 24 Shehadi, Philosophies of Music in Medieval Islam, 4–5. 25 Shehadi, Philosophies of Music in Medieval Islam, 4–5. 26 Shehadi, Philosophies of Music in Medieval Islam, 4–5. 27 For a French edition of the text, see Musique Et Danse Selon Ibn Taymiyya: Le Livre Du Sama Et De La Danse, compiled by Shaykh Muhammad Al-manbiji (Paris: Vrin, 1999). 28 Shehadi, Philosophies of Music in Medieval Islam, 99. 29 Shehadi, Philosophies of Music in Medieval Islam, 128. 30 Statement from ‘Radio and Television must strengthen the young’, Keyhan, 1 mordad 1358/1979, quoted in Ameneh Youssefzadeh, ‘The Situation of Music in Iran since the Revolution: The Role of Official Organisations’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology 9, no. 2 (2000): 38. 31 Simon Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 41–2. 32 Amnon Shiloah, Music in the World of Islam: A Socio-Cultural Study (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 34. 33 Shiloah, Music in the World of Islam, 34. 34 Youssefzadeh, ‘The Situation of Music in Iran since the Revolution’, 57. 35 Mozafari, ‘Carving a Space for Female Solo-Singing in Post-Revolution Iran’, 266. 36 Mozafari, ‘Carving a Space for Female Solo-Singing in Post-Revolution Iran’, 267. 37 DeBano, ‘Enveloping Music in Gender, Nation and Islam: Women’s Music Festivals in Post-Revolutionary Iran’, Iranian Studies 38, no. 3 (2005): 441 (doi:10.1080/ 00210860500300812). 38 DeBano, ‘Enveloping Music in Gender, Nation and Islam’, 441–2. 39 Adam Jaworski, The Power of Silence: Social and Pragmatic Perspectives (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1993), xi.

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Contemporary Feminist Art, the Musical Listening to the Visual Legacy of Riot Grrrl Cara Smulevitz

In 1996, United States performance artist Miranda July took the stage between punk bands at the Portland Oregon Supergrrrl convention. Costumed in a dress shirt and tie, and with a bulky headset wrapped around her shaven head, she proceeded to deliver an intense, part-sung but mostly shouted, multi-character narrative to an audience that seemed in equal parts bewildered and supportive. In 1997, Canadian multimedia artists Jane Farrow and Allyson Mitchell taught fifty first-time filmmakers, mostly teens, to make three-minute Super 8 films on the subject of being a rock star. The results became the 3-Minute Rock Star film festival, staged to great acclaim (and with live-performance soundtracks) in a Toronto bar.1 In 1998, a celebrated young video artist named Sadie Benning collaborated with Kathleen Hanna (the former frontwoman of an influential early 1990s punk band called Bikini Kill) to create a music video called Aerobicide. The video was a parody of the way that female-driven, anti-establishment youth trends were being commodified by male-dominated big business. Each of these artists was profoundly influenced by early participation in a punk and feminist youth subculture called Riot Grrrl, and the three projects which are mentioned here all occurred within milieus closely associated with that movement. These artists have all moved on to careers in contemporary visual art that push disciplinary boundaries, and each engages with feminist or queer activist subject matter as a central part of her artistic practice. The contemporary feminist art world to which these women contribute is particularly (and deliberately) blurry when it comes to boundaries between mass culture and high art, and its interdisciplinary crossings occur, more often than not, in those grey areas that the multimedia visual arts share with music. Riot Grrrl created a space in punk culture in which aural and visual production were closely intertwined, and the commonality of art-music hybrids in recent feminist art can be accounted for, at least in part, by the participation of these – and dozens of other – prominent contemporary artists for whom the movement was a formative influence. Art historian Claire Bishop’s study of participatory art in contemporary culture works to reframe the history of twentieth-century visual art through the history 215

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of radical theatre, and positions the artist ‘less as an individual producer of discrete objects than a collaborator and producer of situations’.2 In this, Bishop provides an alternative both to modernist art-historical frameworks based on painting and associated with critics like Clement Greenberg, and to those frameworks’ deconstruction by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss and other influential art theorists who sought (in their 2007 book Art Since 1900) to replace painting with the Readymade as the central metaphor for art’s recent history.3 My approach to the artists I discuss in this chapter follows from Bishop’s understanding of radical theatre as a key source for multimedia and participatory art in the present, but with a focus on those elements of the theatrical that intersect both with music (through musical performance) and with visual art (through the broad category of performance art). The persistent appeal of such hybrid forms for women artists – particularly women artists whose works engage explicitly feminist themes – makes Riot Grrrl an important force in the art-historical narrative of multimedia feminist practice in the present. The particular iteration of feminism which concerns most of the artists discussed here is associated with and commonly referred to as US feminism’s Third Wave: a multifaceted, flexible mobilization of feminist activism that emerged in the early 1990s and was spearheaded by women who grew up accustomed to the benefits won by earlier feminist generations, but within a mass culture that had undergone a decade (the 1980s, roughly) of widespread anti-feminist backlash.4 Many visual artists associated with this Third Wave came to their politics through popular culture and, as Maria Elena Buszek explains, through popular music in particular. As Buszek observes, ‘One only has to go to the cathartic musical vomiting of Courtney Love and Diamanda Galas to get a sense of where Tracy Emin’s purges in paint, sculpture, and video come from.’5 A ‘Third Wave’ in feminist visual art has yet to be clearly delineated in art historiography, but the appearance of the term regularly accompanies artists whose work either directly draws on or overlaps with Riot Grrrl’s punk-driven, do-it-yourself ethic, its interdisciplinary aesthetics and its expressive, highly personal and performative version of rock and roll.6

Early Riot Grrrl The first Riot Grrrl bands were formed in 1990 and 1991 in the American Pacific Northwest, particularly in Olympia, Washington, where several of the movement’s founders attended Evergreen College. Over the next five years scores of other bands were formed and reformed across the United States and even, in a smaller way, internationally.7 Many among Riot Grrrl’s founders in Washington understood the movement to have dissolved (or evolved beyond recognition) by 1994, but its widespread influence, accomplished through the exchange of ‘zines’ (handmade photocopied-and-stapled pamphlets) along with a few short bursts of mainstream press attention, gave the movement a momentum that propelled it through to the end of the millennium.8

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Punk musical performance is built around the idea that anyone can pick up an instrument or compose a song, regardless of their training, funding or experience. The raw, amateurish aesthetic that emerges from such efforts amounts to a critique of elite culture: of its exclusions, of its formal polish and of its distance from the lives of its consumers.9 Riot Grrrl’s version of punk combined these DIY values and aesthetics with the kinds of feminist and queer theory that many of the movement’s college-aged adherents were learning in their women’s studies classes. American punk culture in the 1980s (which was dominated by hardcore bands) was especially misogynistic, but the style held clear promise for feminists, in part because it featured a potent combination of sex and anger’ that opened ‘a fertile space both for women’s feminist interventions and for the politicization of sexuality and female identity’.10 A 1991 issue of the Bikini Kill zine (a publication the band’s members made and distributed at shows and through pen-pal networks) includes a note about the appeal of punk for Riot Grrrl, in spite of the dismissal of women that was so common in the style’s 1980s variants. ‘We are,’ the author writes, ‘patently aware that the punk rock “you can do anything” idea is crucial to the coming angry grrrl rock revolution.’11 Though Riot Grrrl is best known for its contributions to 1990s music culture, its impact on feminist visual art in the present is significant, and is beginning to be recognized among historians of late twentieth-century art. In Alien She, a 2013–14 exhibition at Carnegie Mellon University, co-curators Astria Suparak and Ceci Moss dedicated the whole of the college’s three-storey Miller Gallery to an exploration of Riot Grrrl’s legacy for visual art. It was the first exhibition dedicated to this subject, but given that a recent surge of interest in historicizing Riot Grrrl has produced several major publications, a documentary, and the founding of a substantial archive dedicated to preserving the movement’s visual ephemera, it is unlikely to be the last. Productive overlap between music and visual art figured in the movement from the beginning: the earliest Riot Grrrl performances occurred at Rekomuse, a DIY art gallery established by Kathleen Hanna and Tammy Rae Carland.12 Riot Grrrl musical performance maintained a strong visual component as it evolved. Hanna and others were known, early on, for scrawling words onto their flesh as part of their onstage costumes. Phrases like ‘no fat chicks’, ‘slut’ and ‘property’ were markered onto arms and midriffs, creating shocking images that dramatized the ways women’s bodies are invisibly marked, but marked nonetheless, by their treatment in the broader visual culture.13 The bodies of the musicians became visual (and political) art, activated within the live performance of their songs. Sarah Marcus’s 2010 history of Riot Grrrl, Girls to the Front, explains this trend in relationship to the history of explicitly feminist art, noting the ways that women artists in the 1960s and 1970s sought to ‘use their own bodies to look at how the culture uses women’.14 Pioneering Austrian performance artist Valie Export’s 1970 work, Body Sign Action, provides an especially clear example of what Marcus is pointing to here. For this piece, the artist staged a public performance in which an image of a garter belt was tattooed onto her thigh ‘as a symbol’, the artist explains,‘of membership in a caste which demands conditioned behaviour’.15 When they imprint their flesh with such symbols, Export (and then Hanna and her contemporaries later on) literalize the ways in which women are marked as ‘other’ under patriarchy.

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Export was an early adopter of performance art techniques, but she was quickly joined by many other women who found the medium especially well suited to the exploration of gender, sex and the cultural politics of both. Performance art and feminist art have been closely associated since the 1970s – so much so that, as Jayne Wark notes, ‘it is inconceivable to speak of one without reference to the other’.16 Musical performance within the world of feminist visual art also has a significant, if less well documented, history: prominent Second Wave feminist artists Martha Wilson, Diane Torr, Donna Henes and Ilona Granet collaborated, for example, in a performance-artpiece-as musical-act called Disband (active in the late 1970s and early 1980s). They performed as a rock band, but the performance of being a band took precedence over the music they produced, and they stayed within the bounds of the visual arts by staging their concerts at New York City galleries and art events, rather than at music venues. Most of their songs were clearly worded and accessible condemnations of sexism, delivered with a conscious sense of visual presentation: a combination that anticipated much of what was to develop more than a decade later in Riot Grrrl. It is very unlikely that the women of Riot Grrrl were familiar with Disband: their performances were rarely documented and they operated within an insular late 1970s New York City art world. Riot Grrrl did, however, anoint a few elder women artists – from both music and visual art contexts – as patron saints for the movement, and Yoko Ono was among the most prominent. In issue #1 of the Bikini Kill zine (from 1990), Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail wrote about the regular sexism she faced as she tried to participate in her local punk scene. She explained that as a ‘girlfriend’ she was considered to be the ‘opposite’ of the band, and a threat to its sanctity. ‘It all comes down to YOKO ONO,’ she explains: You see, part of the revolution (girl style now) is about rescuing our true heroines from obscurity, or in Yoko’s case, from disgrace. So part of what your boyfriend teaches you is that Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles. And as his girlfriend, according to this, you could very easily do the same thing to him and he has to be careful that this doesn’t happen.17

A few sentences later, Vail extends her analysis to the broader popular culture, pointing out the way that movies about bands always frame ‘the girlfriend’ as ‘the evil diversion’. She connects to Ono here through her recognition of the elder artist’s marginalization and dismissal in a male-dominated music culture that discourages and devalues its female practitioners. Vail and other prominent figures in Riot Grrrl celebrated Ono for more than just her position in one of rock-and-roll’s archetypal gender narratives; they also recognized what was groundbreaking in Ono’s intermedia explorations of music, performance art and film, and they saw her work as anticipating their own.18 In 1990, at the very beginning of the Riot Grrrl movement, Vail referred to Ono as ‘the first punk rock girl singer ever’.19 Years later, Vail’s Bikini Kill bandmate Kathleen Hanna addressed Ono in the lyrics of a song called ‘Hot Topic’, singing ‘you’re getting old, that’s what they’ll say, but don’t give a damn, I’m listening anyway’.20

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Miranda July Beginning in 1995, and as part of the expanded version of Riot Grrrl that persisted beyond the life of the original bands, multimedia artist Miranda July organized and managed a women-only, DIY video-art exchange project called Big Miss Moviola that was designed to encourage women and girls to make their own movies and become one another’s supportive audiences. In a 1997 zine made to accompany a Big Miss Moviola compilation tape, July writes about having just encountered a film – Film No. 4 – by Yoko Ono. She includes an extended quote from Ono, in which the artist argues that the majority of the film world has maintained an ‘aristocratic’ and exclusive attitude, while its contemporaries in painting and music have become much more ‘inconoclastic’: This film [Film No.  4] proves that anybody can be a director. I’m hoping that after this film people will start to make their own home movies like crazy . . . My ultimate goal in film-making is to make a film which includes a smiling face snap of every human being in the world. I cannot go around the whole world and take the shots myself. I need cooperation from something like the post offices of the world . . .21

July’s Big Miss Moviola was itself dedicated to encouraging amateur and very low budget experimentation that might help to make the worlds of film and video less ‘aristocratic’ and more ‘iconoclastic’, and it also circulated video tapes and zines via the US postal service. Recognizing her own ideas in Ono’s work and words, July called her Big Miss Moviola project ‘Familiar and Unoriginal’, but then immediately transformed that defeated tone into a celebration of cross-generational connection. ‘Familiar,’ she continued, ‘like: Destiny. Unoriginal like: Us ladies use E.S.P. to send schemes thru history.’22 Miranda July’s artistic career refuses disciplinary categorization in the same way that Yoko Ono’s does: both artists have been recognized for their audio recordings, their writing, their interactive and performance art experiments and their films. July is a few years younger than Kathleen Hanna, Toby Vail and the other ‘original’ Riot Grrrls; she entered the movement in the mid–1990s when she dropped out of her sophomore year at a California film school and relocated to Portland, Oregon (a city where Riot Grrrl’s influence was still running strong). July’s participation in the punk-feminist subculture began as a vocalist with the short lived Cece Barnes Band (1995–6), and then with The Need, another short-lived collaboration, but one that produced an album – Margie Ruskie Stops Time – and a concert tour. In those same years, she began making and circulating low-budget short films and performing semi-musical, character-driven spoken word pieces, usually at concert venues and as an opening act for more traditional Riot Grrrl bands. She performed alongside Pacific Northwest mainstays like Sleater-Kinney and Dub Narcotic, and with the occasional act from farther afield, like the Munich-based visual art/pop music ensemble Chicks on Speed. In the mid–1990s (and within the queer and feminist punk

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scenes that July inhabited) a performance like hers, staged before or between bands, would have been strange to many in the audience. It was not, however, without some ready-made cultural context: Henry Rollins, the former front man of California Hardcore act Black Flag, had been presenting his spoken word poetry on tour for much of the 1990s, and performance artist/musician Karen Finley had become well known outside of the art world – by reputation at least – in the wake of North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms’s public attacks on her work for what he perceived of as its obscenity and immorality. July’s short performances from this period (the mid–1990s) were both literary and musical; they tell complex stories with layers of finely crafted dialogue and deploy a range of punk rock screams, guttural gasps and moans and vocal caricatures that convincingly represent conversations between multiple figures. Words and sentences regularly break down into unhinged shrieks or staccato grunts, giggles and sighs in dozens of distinct types.23 She often repeats a single word over and over again until it becomes an abstract sound, or makes multiple returns to a conversational exchange between characters as though it was the chorus of a pop song. The dozen or so separate short performances she developed in these years vary in the complexity of their visual presentation, but even the most simple of them are striking to watch, as the artist’s physical presence manages to command attention even when her costumes and props are very minimal (which was often the case in her earliest performances in 1995 and 1996). When July produces the myriad voices of her characters her face and body change too, creating the impression of a schizophrenic one-woman band, with at least a rhythm section’s worth of personae crowding the stage. These works are shakily situated somewhere between the sort of performance art that developed as part of a visual art avant-garde in the 1970s, and the kinds of intense, expressive, vocal performances associated with punk rock. Riot Grrrl offered a rare cultural context for this kind of hybridity, and in a setting that had very little connection to mainstream art or art-world institutions. The permissiveness of DIY and punk allowed the idea of the ‘rock star’ to become a platform for all manner of intermedia experimentation. July gestures towards this in-between-ness in a very short untitled performance from around 1996 in which she voices two characters: a breathy, wobblyvoiced woman painfully answering questions, and the authoritarian interviewer who barks the questions at her in rapid succession. When he shouts ‘movie star or rock star?’ she responds weakly, ‘movie . . . movie’.24 Her performances do feel like movies in a way: their meaning emerges through scripted exchange, and the longer works unfold complex, multi-scene stories with discernible structures, conflicts and resolutions. Her later success as the writer, director and star of her own feature-length films attests to her abilities in those domains. And yet the way these performances were presented and distributed fall clearly on the side of the ‘rock star’ – they were performed in music venues, usually as the only hybrid art/music act on the bill – and they were collected, in 1997 and 1998, on two albums released by Portland’s influential independent record label Kill Rock Stars.

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Lena Beamish is the title of one such performance. It is an eleven-minute mix of live and recorded voices – all July’s – artfully deployed echoes and static and a synthesizer that imitates the sound, at various points in the piece, of both an organ and a theremin.25 A short break in the narrative at the work’s halfway point is filled by a collage of lush electronic noise that is hypnotic without being especially rhythmic or melodic.26 The performance opens with July speaking in a child’s voice, playing make-believe with a friend. It is a one-sided conversation, in which the child determines that she will play all four of the make-believe characters in their game, while the disappointed friend is directed to play the role of ‘the at-home audience’. The child’s greedy claim on all of the story’s roles amounts to July poking gentle fun at herself: the odd individual figure amidst a sea of multi-performer bands, refusing to collaborate within a movement that placed a premium on collaboration. Once July’s child character has determined that she will play all of the parts herself, she begins to enact the complex narrative that accounts for the bulk of the performance. The setting is a TV talk show in which an overly cheerful, slightly menacing host is interviewing three young siblings – the Beamishes – who are noted daredevils, and who claim to be impervious to pain. The voices of the four characters are each distinctive, and are woven together through July’s feedback loops and echo box in a way that is eerily futuristic, creating an impression of sound being issued from across a vast distance. As the story progresses, the talk show host puts the children through a physical test to ensure that they are telling the truth about their immunity from pain. When one of the brothers is electrocuted and cries out, the siblings’ story quickly falls apart: we discover that Lena is the only Beamish child who is genuinely pain-free. Her first brother was faking his stoicism so that Lena would not feel alone, and the second brother was a robot that the two real children had built to complete their act. He blew his own cover by running low on batteries in the middle of a sentence, an effect July achieves in an especially dense section of words and noises during which the texture of the sound competes with the story for dominance over the audience’s attention.27 In a 2000 interview, July was asked about the roots of her style of performance dialogue and her tendency to stage complex conversations with herself through the embodiment of multiple characters. The artist referred to an idiosyncratic habit of her youth as a way of explaining the technique: ‘A few years ago,’ she recounts, ‘I suddenly remembered – and was sort of horrified – that I used to make these tapes where I would leave spaces so I could talk to myself . ’28 The solitary, self-contained style of creativity that this anecdote reveals is a clear presence in Lena Beamish: it is apparent in the voice of the child who opens the performance by dominating a game of makebelieve, and it emerges in the character of Lena as well, who has, after all, invented two brothers who are ‘like her’ so that she can feel she is part of a group of three who are a team and who are also all the same. July’s attribution of her performance style to a lonely childhood habit exposes something about her personal sensibility that is useful in interpreting her work. Yet her particular mode of using of her voice in performance builds on significant musical and art-historical traditions as well, and connects her work to larger debates about the role of women’s voices in artistic production.

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The voice in Second Wave feminism The voice as an expressive medium is uniquely situated in its ability to unfold and trouble one of the central questions of Western feminist art in the late-twentieth century. Broad historical surveys of feminism and feminist art tend to construct a series of generational oppositions in which artists associated with the 1960s and 1970s (Second Wave) sought to foster a universal feminine aesthetic or sensibility, goals that were rejected by the artists who came of age within the poststructuralist-inflected feminisms of the 1980s.29 The 1990s are often positioned as a synthesis of these two opposing perspectives. Closer study of artistic production in these periods quickly demonstrates the inaccuracies in this model of feminist art history – and it has been thoroughly debunked by many scholars in the field – but it is a narrative that has really stuck nonetheless, and that turns on the problem of ‘essence’ and of the extent to which feminist art understands ‘woman’ as a coherent entity that pre-exists its representation.30 The voice comes into interesting play within this debate because it seems in many ways to be definitively essential: it issues, after all, from the inside of the body. It can therefore appear to naturalize gender: what is feminine or masculine about a voice is often perceived as preceding symbolic representation of woman or man. And yet the voice, as literary theorist Annette Schlichter explains, ‘cannot be clearly positioned as either sensible or intelligible; it is not necessarily contained by culture or nature’.31 The presence of a pre-symbolic body in the voice seems clear, and yet linguistic research has consistently shown that gendered nuance in its use – in its rhythms, pitch and timbre – are strongly determined by cultural context. Even the transformation of boys’ voices during puberty, Schlichter reminds us, is not fully accounted for by biology alone.32 When July represents gender in her performances, her clothing and hair (which are often styled as unisex) stay the same. The multiplicity of interpersonal relationship types evoked in her stories block her audience from using narrative context to illuminate the gender identities of her characters. Her posture and gestures do help to communicate elements of masculinity and femininity, but the bulk of that representational work is accomplished by her voice. July has a relatively high-pitched speaking voice, and she does not drop her pitch significantly when she represents vocal masculinity. Her evocations of male voices are extremely convincing nonetheless: their success seems to lie in the way that she paces her sentences and shapes the spaces between her words and phrases. Her representations of vocal femininity are equally precise, and they tend to be just as carefully mannered: she is sparing in her use of her regular, uninflected speaking voice. Listening to her perform an interaction between a feminine and a masculine character becomes, then, an explicit illustration of the constructedness of gendered vocalization. But when those gendered voices dissolve, as they often do, into visceral shrieks or clicks or sighs, July’s non-representational noises simultaneously block our interpretation of vocal gender codes and remind us of the base, bodily and (arguably) pre-symbolic materials from which those noises issue. Riot Grrrl’s precursors in feminist punk made regular use of such deliberately ‘ugly’ noises, subscribing, perhaps, to the belief that, as feminist philosopher Karina Eileraas

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suggested in 1997, such expressions can constitute a ‘revolt against the grammar and syntax of phallogocentrism’ and can open up a space in which a feminine, prepatriarchal language (along the lines of Helene Cixous’ l’écriture feminine) might thrive.33 Artist and music critic Dan Graham writes about punk and post-punk ‘girl groups’ from the late 1970s in a similar way, noting how late–1970s and early–1980s acts like The Slits, Ut and The Raincoats ‘approached playing as a nonperfectionist and not so tightly ordered system’. 34 The embrace of amateurism is, of course, a crucial part of all punk performance, regardless of the genders of its producers, but Graham observes that there is a different, even less ordered approach in the musical and narrative structures composed by these all-women acts. He notes a ‘deliberate use of mistakes, silences, and personally motivated or arbitrary shifts of pattern/feeling’, as well as overlapping phrases that contradict the central vocal line and ‘may also run counter to the main narrative flow’.35 The earliest Riot Grrrl acts had a lot in common with their late 1970s forbears. Bands like those Graham discusses demonstrated the way that the openness of punk to amateurism and embrace of convention-shattering chaos could be a platform for subverting normative female gender expression. The genre’s appeal for Riot Grrrl was also very likely linked to the impression that it gives of cathartic, barely mediated expression. The vast majority of creative work that emerged from the Riot Grrrl movement was highly personal. Confessional, first-person zines, exchanged at concerts and through the mail, became the glue that bound the movement and its primary mode of recruitment. Riot Grrrl operated as a subculture on a currency of intimacy, and the truer and more expressive your voice was in your lyrics or your zine, the better. These conventions within the movement reinforced, however, a long-standing and often dismissive tendency towards the compulsory identification of women’s art and writing as autobiographical. Schlichter discusses this bias towards autobiographical voices in women’s creative work, suggesting that it is part of a broader ‘feminist phonocentrism’ that ‘construct[s] “the female voice” as the representation of an authentic female self ’.36 July’s early narrative performances – like Lena Beamish – ring resoundingly true in their representations of the ways that people interact, and in their many moments of startling emotional acuity. And yet those moments emerge from stories that are often overtly fantastical: aliens and robots, humans whose backstories are mysterious or absurd, abstract shapes with personalities, and submarines that call in to radio shows all populate the stories she was telling in the mid- and late 1990s. Her performances of these characters frustrate and deny autobiographical transparency: July evokes a particular kind of yearning so precisely articulated that everyone in the audience can strongly identify, but when she does so in the voice of a desperate, lovelorn submarine (as in WSNO from 1998) it becomes nearly impossible for the spectator to see backwards through the character to an ‘authentic’ or ‘essential’ Miranda July. In this way, her performances accomplish a critique of Riot Grrrl’s compulsory narratives of self, and of feminist phonocentrism more broadly. At the same time that July’s embodiment of multiple, often starkly opposed characters resist some elements of Riot Grrrl convention, they build on a strong

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tradition established by the prior generation of feminist performance artists in which the adoption of fictional personae became a tool in the examination and deconstruction of normative gender roles. Lucy Lippard was among the first to recognize this trend; in a 1975 article in Ms. magazine she discussed the commonality of role playing and transformation in recent women’s art, identifying Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, Martha Wilson and about a dozen others as exemplars of this tendency.37

Influences Of the artists Lippard discusses, Laurie Anderson in particular is an important influence for July, and for other multimedia artists whose work emerged from a Riot Grrrl milieu.38 Anderson was a prominent figure in the visual art avant-garde of 1970s New York City, and though she arrived in the city significantly after the establishment of the Fluxus circle with which Yoko Ono was associated, her work engaged with some of the same ideas and materials. For example, Anderson collected cast-off electronic supplies from merchants along Canal Street and repurposed them as art materials, and that same street had been a source for many of the little objects – widgets, spools and so on – that had found their way into Fluxus assemblages during the prior decades.39 Anderson’s earliest performances were staged in independent alternative spaces across Europe and the United States: spaces that weren’t often clearly dedicated to either visual art or music, and that encouraged fertile crossings between the two.40 Live storytelling and musical performance have been mainstays in Anderson’s work, and she has exhibited her customized instruments and performance accessories as standalone sculptures. The violin has been an especially important element in her work throughout her career and she has invented various customizations of that instrument, including, in the late 1970s, a violin with a tape head in its bridge made to be played with a bow that was strung with recorded magnetic tape.41 As with July, Anderson’s voice is a central focus in most of her performances, though unlike the younger artist, she has a more conventionally ‘pretty’ voice, and eventually enrolled in formal vocal training. She often sings for long passages of her pieces, and she occasionally voices characters in dialogue in the same way that July did later on. Anderson’s creation of the vocal personae in her sung and spoken narratives usually involves technology – like custom-built voice-altering microphones – that is much more sophisticated than what July had at her disposal in her low-budget performances in the 1990s (though the latter artist sometimes used electronic feedback noise to similar effect). Anderson has regularly performed with her voice-altering devices in a way that drops her voice to a lower octave and makes it sound much more male, and also more robotic. In this, as she has explained, her characters can evoke the power associated with both masculinity and technology, creating what the artist has called ‘the voice of authority’42 and demonstrating the ability of vocalization to deploy and subvert elements of perceived gender.43 Anderson’s work is also very visual, integrating sculptural props and carefully timed series of projected images that become important elements in the stories that she tells.

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The technological sophistication and multisensory complexity of her most ambitious performances are often presented in histories of contemporary art as features exemplary of hybrid artistic practice in the age of electronic media.44 When Miranda July’s budget began to increase in the early 2000s, the longer, more complexly staged performances she began to produce borrowed heavily from Anderson’s visual techniques (though the mood, content and aesthetic of the two artists’ works could not be more different: where July embraces frenetic punk-rock agitation, Anderson is cool, calm and deliberate). July’s Riot Grrrl peers in the early and mid–1990s probably came to know Anderson’s work through O Superman, an eight-minute section of her much larger multimedia performance United States.45 O Superman (inspired by Massenet’s Au Souverin) became an unexpected mainstream hit in 1981: it reached number two on the UK pop charts.46 The vocal performance is delivered through a voice-altering device that gives most of the song a robotic tenor, but with a melodic, clearly human and emotionally charged under-layer. Pieces of a conversation between an answering machine and another robotic voice that identifies itself as ‘mom’ are ominous, warning of approaching planes, and promising to hold us in uncomforting electronic arms. The lyrics are packed full of cryptic references – to opera, to literature, to the United States Postal Service – and the visual presentation (taken from the live United States performances and presented as a music video) is similarly loaded. In the early 1990s, there was a renewal of art-world interest in both interdisciplinarity and so called ‘new media’ visual art. In a trend that paralleled the situation of 1970s art, an increasing reliance on technology in everyday life had attracted many young artists to multimedia projects that integrated elements of video and audio. Museums and galleries responded to this trend, launching dozens of exhibitions dedicated to new media experimentation. As a pioneer in these areas, Anderson was regularly asked to participate in the exhibitions, and she often agreed, ‘signalling’, as Roselee Goldberg notes, ‘a return of sorts for her to the art-fold’.47 To those in Riot Grrrl who encountered her work in that period, Anderson provided a singular model of art/music hybridity. And given that she also engaged, on occasion, with explicitly feminist politics, her presence equalled Yoko Ono’s in its relevance to their own aesthetic experiments. Anderson’s body of work is extremely varied, but her live performances consistently merge music and visual art in ways that feel more like seamless and unified wholes than combinations of separate disciplines. Artist and musician John Corbett argued in 1990 (and in response to the popular ascendance of music video that had occurred throughout the prior decade) that a long-standing disjunction between sound and image in pop music was responsible for the important role that music video had begun to claim for listeners. Music, Corbett stresses, is not an ‘autonomous sphere of creation’ in which aural elements float independently of material structures, but it has, nonetheless, been regularly constructed as such.48 The materiality of the musicproducing body or apparatus is typically repressed in our experience of music, and the visual lack that this creates serves to ‘initiate desire in relation to the popular music object’.49 The album cover, the rock poster and eventually the music video become the fetishized replacements for those visual, material elements that are repressed in the way that recorded music is produced and distributed. Anderson’s work provides an

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interesting alternative in that the audio and the visual elements of her performances are made to be inseparable: they constitute one another. Her instruments are sculptures as well as sound-producing devices, and her performances layer visual and lyrical symbolism together: neither is appended to the other as an afterthought.

Wynne Greenwood July’s performances from the 2000s (Love Diamond and The Swan Tool in particular) combine spoken word performance with carefully timed and crafted video projections and accomplish something similar to what I’ve been describing in Anderson’s work, but another Riot Grrrl-influenced multimedia artist, Seattle-based Wynne Greenwood, has made the synthesis of music and visual art the central element of her practice, and the interaction between the two provide the majority of her projects’ content. Greenwood performed, from 1999 to 2006, as an electro-punk trio called Tracy and the Plastics. The band’s members – Tracy, Nikki, and Cola – were all characters played by the artist. Greenwood would set up a projector at a house party or a punk club (and, within a few years, at museums and theatres too) and play carefully timed videos in which Cola and Nikki – each of whom were actually Greenwood – would have conversations, perform back-up vocals, play air guitar and operate a drum machine and keyboard. Both of those characters existed only within the video footage. Tracy, the lead singer, was performed live by Greenwood and in real time: she built empty spaces into Cola and Nikki’s scripts, during which she could hold up her end of the conversation. All of this created a platform for complex three-way interactions in which Greenwood could speak to the two videotaped versions of herself and they would appear to speak back. The embodiment of multiple characters that Greenwood enacts in these works has something in common with Miranda July’s dialogic style of performative storytelling (and the two artists were in contact: Greenwood contributed a video to July’s Big Miss Moviola project in 1998).50 But while July works to create distinctive voices for each of her characters, Greenwood’s trio all speak in close to the same voice. This lack of differentiation appears to be deliberate, and it is supported by the characters’ uncomplicated costumes: we can recognize each of them because one is blonde, one has black hair and one is a brunette, but that is where the disguises end, and we can easily see that they are all the same person beneath their wigs. In a 2001 essay, Greenwood described some of her ideas around Tracy and the Plastics, and she stresses that her characters are her – fragmented, but still her – and that the metaphor of talking to her projected self (or selves) is an important part of what the project is doing. She writes that as a queer and feminist artist she is marginalized within mainstream culture, and must thereby endeavour to reconstitute herself in fragments. As the artist explained in 2001: By fragmented, I mean a cohesive identity that’s constructed from different, often conflicting, parts of society, culture, and life that we relate to because popular culture has no whole identity to offer its audience other than one that resembles the ruling class.51

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The songs Greenwood wrote for Tracy and the Plastics aren’t typical punk: her ‘Tracy’ has a sweet and melodic voice (though Cola and Nikki do contribute the occasional punk-rock scream) and most of the music is performed via synthesizer and drum machine. The look of the videos and the overall content and tone of the project clearly connect it to Riot Grrrl, though Greenwood came late to that movement and participated in it mostly through elements of its afterlife. She produced videos for Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna to perform with in concert, for example, but they were for Le Tigre, one of Hanna’s post-Riot Grrrl bands. Greenwood’s Tracy and the Plastics videos all feature footage of Cola and Nikki, but they also integrate photographs and drawings as elements of the setting in which the characters interact. Arrows, thought bubbles and other useful symbols occasionally enter the frame to clarify or contribute to the narrative. Watching the handmade-looking, cut and paste aesthetic of the videos’ visual environments progress from frame to frame feels a lot like flipping through the pages of a Riot Grrrl zine. Gut Tracer – the Tracy and the Plastics performance that Greenwood toured with throughout 2002 – opens with a collage in which crude drawings of two bodies with Xeroxed photographs for heads have a conversation about nipple hair, and whether or not it is a normal thing for a woman to have.52 The two voices that discuss this pressing question are caricatures of a particular type of feminine speech pattern. There are frequent uses of ‘likes’ and ‘ums’, and every statement ends with a vocal question mark. This voice, which Greenwood uses in the speaking parts for all three members of the trio, might sound mocking in another context, like someone making fun of a teenage girl, but in these videos it operates as a marker of the thoroughly, unapologetically feminine world of these characters. The embarrassing intimacy of the opening conversation and the caricatured girlishness of the voices work together to mark the environment of the video as feminine. After this initial conversation the live Tracy appears and argues with Nikki about the merits of a painting that she has made, and then the two begin to perform one of their songs. They have several false starts in which one or the other of them misses a cue or gets off pace before the song comes together. These ‘mistakes’ are, of course, carefully scripted and elaborately timed, and they are an element that is featured in several of the Tracy and the Plastics videos. Greenwood’s multiple versions of herself struggling to get in sync and play the song as one coherent unit speaks to the experience of trying to reconcile pieces of a fragmented self.53 The calculated messiness of these scripted failures also recalls Dan Graham’s observations about the all-women punk bands of the late 1970s. Graham posited that mistakes, pauses, accidental overlapping and so on were used deliberately by bands like The Raincoats to create a structuresubverting aesthetic that was explicitly feminine: a kind of ‘musique feminine’ in the mould of French feminist theory’s écriture feminine (an idea that gained currency just a few years before the late 1970s wave of all-woman punk bands).54 Greenwood’s version of this messiness – intricately calibrated through video editing as it is – both embraces and gently mocks the enthusiastic disorder of her punk feminist forbearers. A strong interest in collaboration and collectivity was another significant trend in both late 1970s feminist art and music. Many working within feminist visual art circles

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in the 1970s endeavoured to create models of collective practice that could offer alternatives to the canon of art history that tracked the development of art through the contributions of individual male ‘geniuses’. New York-based post-punk act UT attempted something similar, subverting the implied power dynamics within rock bands by switching instruments and roles for every song.55 When Greenwood acts as a collective (through Tracy and the Plastics as a band) and dramatizes their struggles to work together smoothly, she connects her project to the experiments with collectivity undertaken by the previous feminist generation. Her mode of positioning the self as the collective recalls July’s little-girl character who insists on playing every role at the start of Lena Beamish. By portraying multi-character collaborations in these ways, both artists gesture towards, but then dismiss, the impulse towards collectivity associated with earlier feminist art. About five minutes into Greenwood’s Gut Tracer performance the character of Cola appears in the video projection: she is dipping a large slice of wood into a bucket of paint. When Tracy turns to the screen and asks what she is up to, she says that it is time for her to ‘dye a log’. ‘Oh come on,’ Tracy responds, ‘don’t dialogue now . . . we’re in the middle of a show!’56 The three band members go back and forth about whether or not now is an appropriate time to dialogue (or dye a log), a pun that points again to the pitfalls of collaborative methods. That theme recurs throughout the performance. Later on, Cola appears again to interrupt a song, this time with her arm in a sling, announcing plaintively to the others that she has broken her ‘collaborate bone’. Tracy and the Plastics stopped performing in 2006, but Greenwood’s work continues to merge aural and visual content in interesting ways. Her 2013 project More Heads staged paper, clay, found object and fabric sculptures of heads as a band of ventriloquist’s dummies. Arranged on the floor, they are animated by audio tracks of dialogue in a range of human voices (all Greenwood’s, of course) that loop and overlap and repeat, and are backed by a techno beat. This soundtrack alternates between character-driven conversations that we can follow and cacophonous walls of nearly abstract sound.57 In this, as in most of Greenwood’s work, the interaction between aural and visual elements is central, but it does not feel forced, or even particularly novel: instead it feels like the most natural vehicle for the artist’s message. This fluid, unlaboured union between music and art characterizes Miranda July’s mid–1990s performances as well as those of the earliest wave of Riot Grrrl performers like Kathleen Hanna and Toby Vail. The ease with which these Riot Grrrl (and Riot-Grrrl-influenced) artists interweave visual and aural media was not available to their forbears (like Yoko Ono, Martha Wilson and Laurie Anderson) who were coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, before MTV normalized the experience of coordinated looking and listening in pre-recorded pop music. The boundaries which were broken by these earlier artists were taken for granted as broken by Hanna, July and Greenwood, who entered both art and music through a post-MTV mass culture. The availability of models for visual/musical hybridity in popular culture combined, in the late–1980s and early–1990s, with a set of mainstream teen idols that included, for the first time, women who foregrounded their independence and sexual power as central elements of their pop personae. ‘Riot Grrrl,’ as Joanne Gottlieb and Gayle Wald

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observed in 1994, ‘emerged from punk via Madonna.’58 What has become clear from Riot Grrrl’s legacy as it develops in the twenty-first century is that their combination of punk aesthetics and a kind of feminism that sprung from within the popular culture owes as much to the intermedia avant-gardes, with which Yoko Ono and Laurie Anderson were associated, as to videos by pop stars like Madonna and Janet Jackson, whose careers reached their peaks in a moment when MTV had made the visual elements of popular music increasingly central to artists’ success.

Pussy Riot Combinations of visual art-based performance and pop music – particularly in its punk-inflected variants – have continued to provide fertile platforms for feminist activism. Moscow-based punk band and feminist art collective Pussy Riot is among the most prominent recent examples of this persistent impulse. Founded in 2011, Pussy Riot consists of a shifting membership of about twelve women, most of whom have remained anonymous. They became the subject of international attention in 2012 when a February anti-Putin performance that they staged to disrupt services at an Orthodox church led to arrest and a subsequent two-year prison sentence for three of the group’s members. Pussy Riot’s songs address institutionalized sexism in Russian politics and religion, and their performance style (which is modelled on 1970s punk) is designed to disrupt, with lots of yelling, jumping and kicking. Their costumes – bright dresses and tights, with colourful balaclavas on top disguising faces and hair – are visually striking and read well from long distances and from within a crowd. Their live performances are primarily visual, with the aural elements appended later. Pussy Riot is, as New Yorker culture critic Ann Friedman observes, ‘of the Internet’, and so their real-time demonstrations are always presented with the subsequent internet version in mind: footage from the protests are quickly edited and overlaid with music to be widely distributed via YouTube.59 The video for the group’s 2012 performance in the Orthodox church – entitled, in its original posting, ‘Punk Prayer, Mother of God, Chase Putin Away’ – is typical of this style. The video intercuts passages of choral singing from Sergei Rachmaninoff ’s ‘Ave Maria’ with the band’s three lead singers’ vocals, delivered at high volume in a typical punk-rock style and layered over electric guitar. Pussy Riot’s mode of combining feminist politics, visually-oriented performance art, punk music and punk aesthetics includes clear echoes of Riot Grrrl, and several within the Russian collective have noted the influence of that movement on their work.60 Their choice to bring a Riot Grrrl-influenced aesthetic to bear in their performances, their videos and even their costume choices – Kathleen Hanna appeared in a balaclava for a 1992 interview – speaks to the persistent resonance and impressive reach of Riot Grrrl’s legacy.61 The thread that Pussy Riot picked up in 2011 has woven together visual art and musical performance in feminist contexts from the 1970s to the present, drawing on artists like Disband, Yoko Ono and Laurie Anderson to Bikini Kill, Miranda July and Tracy and the Plastics. These and other successful combinations of

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performance art, musical performance and feminist expression attest to the continued utility of interdisciplinary frameworks for looking at (and listening to) contemporary feminist art in the present.

Notes 1 Tara Mateik, ‘Surveying the Scene: Excerpts from the D.I.Y. Distro Resource Guide’, Felix: A Journal of Media Arts and Communication 2, no. 2 (2000), http://www.e-felix. org/issue5/mateik.html (accessed 19 September 2014). 2 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso Books, 2012), 2–3. 3 Hal Foster, Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007). 4 See Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006). 5 Maria Elena Buszek, ‘ “Oh! Dogma (Up Yours!)”; Surfing the Third Wave’, Thirdspace 1 (2001): 95. 6 Though it falls outside the scope of this chapter, it is important to note that similar Third Wave feminist art/music hybrids occurred in hip hop culture as well. 7 See Kristin Schilt and Elke Zobl, ‘Connecting the dots: Riot grrrls, ladyfests, and the international grrrl zine network’, in Anita Harris, Next Wave Cultures: Feminism, Subcultures, Activism (New York: Routledge, 2007). 8 Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 253. 9 See Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (London: Faber, 2002); Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London and New York: Methuen, 1979); Amy Spencer, DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2005). 10 Joanne Gottlieb and Gayle Wald, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution, and Women in Independent Rock’, in Microphone Fiends: Youth Music & Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (New York: Routledge, 1994), 253. 11 ‘Bikini Kill no 2, circa 1991’, in The Riot Grrrl Collection, ed. Lisa Darms (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013), 143. 12 Rekomuse was in downtown Olympia, Washington, and was active as a venue from about 1990 to 1993. http://www.letigreworld.com/sweepstakes/html_site/fact/khfacts. html (accessed 1 June 2015). 13 Alison Piepmeier, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 51. 14 Marcus, Girls to the Front, 146–7. 15 Valie Export, ‘Body Sign Action’, Media Art Net (2004), http://www.medienkunstnetz. de/works/body-sign-aktion/images/2/ (accessed 31 August 2014). 16 Jayne Wark, Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 1. 17 Tobi Vail, ‘Bikini Kill no 1, 1990’, in Darms, The Riot Grrrl Collection, 42. 18 The term ‘intermedia’ originated in the Fluxus movement, with which Yoko Ono is associated, and was first used in Dick Higgins’s 1966 ‘Statement on Intermedia’ to refer

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to artworks that emphasize dialectics between established media. See Dick Higgins, ‘Intermedia’, in Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 1984. Tobi Vail, ‘Bikini Kill zine issue 1, 1990’, in Darms, The Riot Grrrl Collection, 42. Vail does not mention a specific work by Yoko Ono, but it is likely that she is referring to the 1970 album Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. Among Ono’s body of recorded audio work, this album most strongly resonates with punk music (though some punk elements featured in Ono’s performances on Two Virgins, a 1968 album collaboration with John Lennon). Hot Topic (1999) is by Le Tigre, a post-Riot Grrrl electronic music trio. Yoko Ono quoted in Miranda July, Umatic Zine, 1997, 3. Joanie 4 Jackie archive, Bard College, Department of Film and Electronic Arts, Annandale on Hudson, NY, 3–4. July, Umatic Zine, 1997, 3. Roland Barthes’ discussions of a ‘grain’ in the voice which amounts to the ‘body in the voice as it sings’ is useful here, as is Douglas Kahn’s understanding of ‘meat voices’, a characterization he applies to discussions of embodied voices in the works of Antonin Artaud and other mid-century avant-garde figures. See Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, in Barthes: Selected Writings (London: Fontana, 1983,) 188, and Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999,) 345–54. Miranda July, ‘Untitled’, 10 Million Miles an Hour (Kill Rock Stars: 1997). Lena Beamish was performed live throughout 1996 and 1997, and then included on an album – The Binet Simon Test – released by Kill Rock Stars in 1998. John Cage’s 1937 talk on ‘The Future of Music’ suggested that ‘the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments’. July’s use of electronic noise in her mid–1990s performances is part of the legacy of Cage’s ideas. John Cage, ‘The Future of Music: Credo’, in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 3. This foregrounding of static and other incidental electronic noise builds on the kinds of avant-garde musical experimentation associated with John Cage’s circle, but probably came to July by way of that avant-garde’s influence on Noise Rock bands like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and Sonic Youth. Johnny Ray Huston, ‘The Marvelous World of Miranda July’, in Hers: Video as Female Terrain, ed. Stella Rollig (New York: Steirischer Herbst, 2000), 123. Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews, ‘The Feminist Critique of Art History’, Art Bulletin 69, no. 3 (1987): 338. Such trends are strongly linked with poststructuralist theories rooted in the works of Julia Kristeva and others that investigate the ways in which gender is comprised by social (and textual) constructions. See Julia Kristeva, Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, ‘Women’s Time’, Signs 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1981): 13– 35. Catherine Grant, ‘Fans of Feminism: Re-Writing Histories of Second-Wave Feminism in Contemporary Art’, Oxford Art Journal 34, no. 2 (2011): 265–8. Annette Schlichter, ‘Do Voices Matter? Vocality, Materiality, Gender Performativity’, Body & Society 17, no. 1 (2011): 43. Schlichter, ‘Do Voices Matter?’, 46. Karina Eileraas, ‘Witches, Bitches, and Fluids: Girl Bands Performing Ugliness as Resistance’, Drama Review 41, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 125. Hélène Cixous, Paula Cohen and Keith Cohen, ‘The laugh of the medusa’, Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–93. Dan Graham, ‘New Wave Rock and the Feminine’, Open Letter 516 (1984): 93–4.

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35 Graham, ‘New Wave Rock and the Feminine’, 93–4. 36 Schlichter, ‘Do Voices Matter?’, 37. 37 Lucy Lippard, ‘Making Up: Role Playing and Transformation in Women’s Art’, in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (New York: Routledge, 2010). 38 July did not, however, learn of Anderson’s work until she was in her mid-twenties and had already begun performing the narrative spoken word pieces discussed here. See Miranda July and Lynn Hershman, ‘Women, Art, Revolution: Interview with Miranda July’, ‘Women, Art, Revolution’ digital collection, Stanford University Libraries (31 December 2014). 39 Roselee Goldberg, Laurie Anderson (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, 2000), 14. 40 Goldberg, Laurie Anderson, 13. 41 Tape-Bow Violin (1979) and other of Anderson’s violin customizations may be seen as following from Fluxus artists Charlotte Moorman’s and Joe Jones’s various 1960s sculptural alterations of cellos and violins, respectively. 42 Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 150. 43 As Sayre observes, Anderson’s combination of these vocal transformations with visual signifiers of masculinity (via her hair and clothes) works to ‘submit her own identity to perpetual nomadism’. Sayre, The Object of Performance, 154. 44 See Sayre, The Object of Performance; Michael Rush, New Media in Late 20th-Century Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999). 45 United States was a two-evening performance in four parts, and was seven hours long in total. Its integration of various media created, in Sayre’s words, ‘the heterogeneous space of the new Gesamtkunstwerk’. Sayre, Object of Performance,147. 46 This move into popular culture was relatively unusual among avant-garde artists between 1979 and 1981 when Anderson signed a six-album contract with Warner Brothers and also found herself at the top of the pop charts. Laurie Anderson, Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective, 1972–1992 (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 155. This willingness to use the mass media to increase access to her work anticipates similar moves in the work of the Riot Grrrl-influenced artists discussed in this chapter. 47 Goldberg, Laurie Anderson, 15. 48 John Corbett, ‘Free, Single, and Disengaged: Listening Pleasure and the Popular Music Object’, October 54 (1990): 88. 49 Corbett, ‘Free, Single, and Disengaged’, 84–6. 50 Cherry Cherry Chainletter, VHS tape, 1998. Joanie 4 Jackie archive, Bard College, Department of Film and Electronic Arts, Annandale on Hudson, NY. 51 Wynne Greenwood, Tracy + the Plastics, 2001, http://www.tracyandtheplastics.com/ about/about.html (accessed 3 September 2015). 52 Gut Tracer, 2002, http://www.tracyandtheplastics.com/livevideo.html (accessed 3 September 2015). 53 Wynne Greenwood, Tracy + the Plastics. 54 Anne Hilde Neset, ‘ “Is it important for you to put forward a strongly chauvinist agenda?” Women, Experimental Music, and the Her Noise Archive’, in I Wish This Was a Song: Music in Contemporary Art, ed. Ingrid Krogvig (Olso: Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design, 2012), 29. Graham, ‘New Wave Rock’, 92. 55 Neset, ‘ “Is it important for you to put forward a strongly chauvinist agenda?” ’, 92. This technique was also adopted by Riot Grrrl band Team Dresch in the early 1990s. As zine

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writer Tamra Spivey recounts, ‘I saw Team Dresch and they all switched instruments, and I was like, “That’s it!” I saw the freedom there. It goes beyond punk rock. I see the limitations of patriarchy, and I won’t play that. I don’t have to.’ Tamra Spivey, quoted in Jessica Rosenberg and Gitana Garofalo, ‘Riot Grrrl: Revolutions from within’, Signs 23, no. 3 (1998): 22. Gut Tracer. More Heads was staged at the Carl Soloway Gallery, NYC, in November 2013. Gottlieb and Wald, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, 260. Ann Friedman, ‘Pussy Riot Grrrls’, New Yorker, 14 September 2012. Henry Langston, ‘Meeting Pussy Riot (interview)’, Vice, March 2012, http://www.vice. com/read/A-Russian-Pussy-Riot (accessed 17 September 2014). That interview was included in Tamra Davis’s 1993 short film, No Alternative Girls.

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When Tate Modern opened its Switch House extension in June 2016, it celebrated with the commissioning of a piece of choral music enacted and sung by a multitude of community choirs drawn from across the country. It was titled The Bridge.1 The act of commissioning and the performances carried a plenitude of metaphors for postmodern bridges between art, music and performance, as well as the practice of explicit and implicit convergences and collaborations. Surrounded on all sides by members of the public, as well as volunteer acolytes, the public enjoined with the singers in the act of performance. In its physical embodiment, ‘The Bridge’ is that same highflying walkway which stretches across the Turbine Hall, and the site of its most memorable installations. Now it joins together the two parts of the building, the newest of which is intended to provide the spaces in which art from the last thirty years or so, to which music, sound and performance are integral, will be seen, heard and experienced. Immersive by implication, the artworks will be exhibited in ‘The Tanks’, previously used to store oil when the gallery was a power station. Art museums and galleries have often been particularly hospitable to other art forms.2 The Vienna Secession staged a singular tribute to Beethoven in their exhibition pavilion, in 1903. John Cage performed his 4ʹ33ʺ no 2 (1962) in the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. Merce Cunningham’s earliest ‘events’ were performed in art museums in Vienna and Stockholm. In the last ten years or so, music, dance and other modes of choreographed performative works have been deliberately introduced into mainstream art museums in many different ways. These have included extraordinary cross-disciplinary collaborations – such as Metamorphosis: Titian 2012 at the National Gallery, London, a collaboration between three notable contemporary artists and one further institution, The Royal Ballet (2012), and the National Gallery’s staging of the Soundscapes exhibition (2015), which invited five composers to create an immersive piece inspired by a work of art in the gallery.3 In 2003, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performed Anniversary Event accompanied by live performances of music by Akehisa Kosugi, William Winant and Christian Wolff, during the Olafur Eliasson installation, The Weather Project, in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, providing a living example of Cunningham’s concept of ‘common time’. Tate Modern acknowledged and highlighted the inextricable relationship between Alexander Calder’s mobiles and jazz in Alexander Calder: 235

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Performing Sculpture (2015–16) with a performance of Earle Brown’s homage (yet puzzlingly, the importance of music and musical formalism to the paintings of Paul Klee was barely mentioned in Tate’s major 2013 retrospective). Music is now often used as contextual listening by galleries and museums around Europe – leaving the spectator/listener to make their own connections. Critical exploration and theorization of the impact, affect and reception of music and dance in museum spaces, explored by Henry M. Sayre in his 1989 work on performance and the American avant-garde, is certainly due for a post- postmodern revival.4 If it is a truism to say practice develops ahead of theory, the synergies between art and music have been, and are being, explored and interrogated by practising artists well beyond that of theorists. Musical institutions and their teaching of the history of music have remained steadfastly impervious in the main to the significant synchronic events in the visual arts which illuminate music’s histories and its development. Philosophical and aesthetic debates dealing with music together with the ‘sister arts’ are still en creux (in the gap), a scholarly space forged on the borders of the histories of art and music (with the notable exception of sound art scholarship and practice which is not dealt with here).5 As this collection of essays has set out to show, however, artists themselves have been quick to challenge established (dominant) paradigms not only of genres and boundaries, but of the senses, of temporality and of objects and their becoming. Indeed, if we accept (as is increasingly the case now in academe) that research by creative practice is a valid form and method of inquiry, we could (mischievously) conclude that the field of music and art has been thoroughly researched by artists, and yet it remains for ‘traditional’ scholars only to articulate in their pet discourses what practitioners have already uncovered. As a model for further research in this field, the example of science’s engagement with the world and the outer limits of our knowledge is instructive. Let’s indulge in an admittedly rough comparison with two methods: seeking knowledge of objects through examining their behaviour in extreme conditions, and exposing the nature of (unseen) objects through its influence upon (seen) objects in proximity. For example, the nature of one type of object can be explored through the mechanisms of another, cognate one. The temporality of visual art is expressed through the overtly temporal one of music, or the assumed formalist and segregated nature of music is expressed through gestural and embodied response in visual or plastic arts. Likewise, the ofttimes potent politics of music can be measured by the virulence of political control and censure. In trying to deny the ‘body’ and ‘gender’ in music we see the institutionalization of denial or control in both. Visual art and music together can be immersive, dealing with objects made through gesture and time. This phenomenon can perhaps best be understood when not ‘looked’ at or ‘listened’ to directly. In other words, contemporary theories of ‘affect’ may provide useful paths for further deliberation in the theorizing of music-and-art ‘after the post’. On this theme Julian Johnson discusses the aria ‘O dolcissimi lumi’ from Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607) as a cautionary moment in the opera, signalling that ‘the power of music lies in its figuring of what cannot be refigured, its representation of

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what cannot be revoked, but the lure of the visual divests music of all its power’.6 In teasing out a parallel thread to this realization, we have shown here the benefits of contemplating one art form in relation to another, and conversely of the dangers of reification through staring too hard at (or listening too intently to) the object. Perhaps we can learn from the cautionary tale of Orfeo’s mistake. Rather than expecting to find something essential and immediately present in music – only for it to be lost when looking directly – we should seek truths about it by also examining the shadows cast, the echoes created, and representations and responses through other media. The point is about the continuing imperative to watch vigilantly over the spaces between the arts as they mutate and change through the decades, and find ways of theorizing these new forms of art or newly exposed significant outcomes of their partnering. The challenge that lies ahead for academia, then, is in large part to develop methodologies to engage with the liminality of the musical in art while avoiding the reductionism and formalism that has been challenged by artists in the first place. Moreover, if the musical in art can shed light on the shifts occurring from Romanticism to postmodernism, then the value of understanding intermedia and its related forms is all the greater in developing a more nuanced yet dynamic understanding of cultural history. Debating the medium-specificity of Greenberg’s stance on modernism, T. J. Clark described the insistent emphasis on modernism and its medium, as both ‘the fact of Art in modernism and its negation’.7 This description ‘is the only one which can include Mallarmé alongside Rimbaud, Schoenberg alongside Webern, Duchamp beside the Monet of Nympheas’, although Clark doesn’t place Schoenberg alongside Kandinsky, nor does he acknowledge the music of Duchamp or the importance of Monet to Debussy, as we would have him do here.8 He does acknowledge, however, that ‘we have an art in which ambiguity becomes infinite, which is on the verge of proposing – and does propose – another which is comfortably ineffable, a vacuity, a vagueness, a mere mysticism of the sight’.9 The ineffable, the vagueness, the mysticism of the sight are themes which have been dealt with here. We hope, however, that with the bringing together of music, art and performance – from Liszt to Riot Grrrl and from Romanticism to postmodernism – some further clarity emerges.

Notes 1 The Bridge (Choral Piece for Tate Modern), cycle of songs written by Peter Liversidge, 18 and 19 June 2016. 2 See also Patrick Coleman, ‘In the Music Room’, in P. Coleman (ed.), The Art of Music (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press with The San Diego Museum of Art, 2015), 216–220 for the Romantic tendency amongst artists who aspired to exhibit their works in music rooms, chapels and other space. 3 Metamorphosis: Titian 2012, National Gallery, London, 11 July–23 September 2012 (part of the Cultural Olympiad’s London 2012 festival). The exhibition featured three

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6 7 8 9

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works by Titian plus new works by Chris Ofili, Conrad Shawcross and Mark Wallinger in collaboration with the Royal Ballet. The artists also collaborated with choreographers and composers to create an evening of three new works performed at the Royal Opera House by the Royal Ballet in July 2012. As part of the project, the National Gallery commissioned fourteen poets, including Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage, to respond to Ovid’s ‘Metamorphosis’ and Titian’s paintings depicting stories from the epic poem. Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1989. See David Toop, Sonic Boom: The Art of Sound (London: Hayward Gallery, 2000); Alan Licht with Jim O’Rourke, Beyond Music Between Categories (New York: Rizzoli Publications, 2007); Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterfeld (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and other recent surveys. Julian Johnson, Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 13. T. J. Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, Critical Enquiry 9, no. 1 (September 1982): 152, 154. Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, 154. Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, 154.

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Index Adorno, Theodor W. 60, 131, 132 ‘affect’ 12–14 African-American culture see Bearden, Romare: jazz and art Aguado, Dionisio 56 Albright, Daniel 7, 12, 14, 15 ambiguity (Schweben/dédoublement) 5 The Ambassadors (James) 116 Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colours (Kupka) 76, 77–8, 80 Anderson, Laurie 11, 224–6, 229 animation 149, 161, 162 Antliff, Mark 87, 97 Apollinaire, Guillaume 76, 78–9 Armstrong, Louis 183–4 ‘ascension’, motif of 109–11 see Čiurlionis, M.K. Ashbrook, Carolyn S. 154 authenticity 37–8, 46 Badt, Kurt 60 Barlow, Paul 37 Baudelaire, Charles 5, 13–14, 69, 73, 133 Bayreuth (Wagner) 131, 137–8 Bearden, Romare: jazz and art 183–4 art of the ‘cut’ 193–7 improvising within the veil 184–9 riffing the index/indexical signs 189–92, 195–6, 197 Beethoven, Ludwig van 4, 5, 6, 12, 107, 140 and postmodernism 10–11 Vienna Secession 5, 69, 235 and Wagner 69, 140 Bennett, Sterndale 40 Bergson, Henri duration/durée 18, 68, 76, 79, 87, 96–7 Time -based light art 149–50 in fin-de-siècle painting 67–80 fourth dimension 115–19, 130 in painting and music 61–3

and space 95–7, 114–16, 137, 138–9, 142–4 Berlioz, Hector 54, 62 Bernstein, Leonard 12 Big Miss Moviola (July) 219, 226 Bikini Kill 215, 218, 227 Bishop, Claire 215–16 Blanc, Charles 52, 54, 63 Böcklin, Arnold 107, 113 Body Sign Action (Export) 217 Boulevard des Capucines (Monet) 67 Box with the Sound of its Own Making (Morris) 168, 169, 179 Britten, Benjamin 1 Burke, Edmund 5, 130 Bute, Mary Ellen 149, 161–2, 163, 164 Cage, John 96, 142, 149, 162 and minimalism 167, 169, 170–2, 173, 174–6, 177–9 and postmodernism 11 carpet motifs 116–17, 118–19 Cavallaro, Dani 153 Les chants de la nuit (Osbert) 74, 75–6 Charchoune, Serge: Painted Film Based on a Folk Song 29 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon 50, 51, 52, 54 Čiurlionis, M.K. (Mikalojus Konstantina) composer and painter 106–8 fourth dimension 115–19 motif of ‘ascension’ and theosophical doctrine 109–11 synthesis in arts 111–16 ‘universal music’ of arts 103–6 Clair de Lune (Richards) 15–16 Clarke, T.J. 237 collage and photomontage 188, 190–2, 193, 194–7, 227 ‘colour scales’ 152–3 colour theory 70–1, 73, 74

261

262

Index

‘colour-music’ 116–17, 152–4, 158 Conjur Woman (Bearden) 190, 192 Conrad, Tony 168, 177 Courbet, Gustave: Studio 59–60 Cubism 29, 62, 76, 88, 188, 190 and Futurism 76 ‘cut’, art of the 193–7 Dada 88,188 dance 140, 168, 174, 175 Danhauser, Josef: Franz Liszt Fantasizing at the Piano 4, 6 Dayan, Peter 86–7, 89, 93 De Maria, Walter 167, 168, 169, 170, 174, 175–7, 178–9 Debussy, Claude 1–2, 7, 14, 15, 75d deductive method of compositional process 94–5 Delville, Jean 113 Devéria, Achille 42, 43, 46 Disband 218 ‘double-consciousness’ 185, 197 Du Bois, W.E.B. 183, 185, 193 concept of ‘double-consciousness’ 19, 137, 185–6, 197 duration/durée 18, 68, 76, 79, 87, 96–7 see also Bergson, Henri Einstein’s relativity theory 115, 116 ekphrasis 15–16 Eliasson, Olafur 136 The Weather Project, Turbine Hall 129, 130, 132, 137–44 Ellison, Ralph 183, 184, 195, 196–7 Epstein, Eugene 150, 151 Eskilson, Stephen 156, 157, 159 Evans, Brian 149 Export, Valie 217–18 Farmer, Art 187 Farwell, Beatrice 41 feminist art and music 215–16 Laurie Anderson 11, 224–6, 229 Wynne Greenwood 226–9 Miranda July 215, 219–21, 222, 223–4, 225, 226, 228 Pussy Riot 229–30

Riot Grrrl 216–18 Second Wave feminism 222–4 see also Iranian art Fénéon, Félix/Portrait of Félix Fénéon (Signac) 69–72, 73, 74 Ferandiere, Fernando 55 Fétis, Joseph 56 film 29, 150, 211, 212 animation 149, 161, 162 see also video fin de sièles 27–8 time in painting 67–80 Fischinger, Oskar 149, 163–4 Flaubert, Gustav 49 Fluxus 169–70, 173, 224 Focillon, Henri: The Life of Forms 29–30 folk art motifs 117–18 Foster, Hal 6, 9–10, 216 fourth dimension 115–19, 130 Frascina, Francis 191–2 Fried, Michael 11, 131, 169, 191 Frontispiece for an Edition of Etchings (Manet) 57–60 furniture music 95 Futurism 76, 88 Gesamtkunstwerk 129–30 Eliasson 130, 132, 136, 137–44 landscape 136–7 Schein 130–3, 134, 139, 140, 143 sensing and sounding 140–2 time and space 137, 138–9, 142–4 see also Wagner, Richard Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 27, 152–3 Graham, Dan 223, 227 Greenberg, Clement 6, 8, 63, 237 Greenwood, Wynne 226–9 The Great Wave (Hokusai) 1–2 Gris, Juan 94 Grosz, George 187, 188 Habermas, J. 3, 6 Halperin, Joan Ungersma 70–1, 72 Halprin, Ann 168, 174, 175 Hanna, Kathleen 215, 218, 227, 228, 229 Hanslick, Eduard 7–8, 28, 62–3 Henry, Charles 70–1, 73

Index Higgins, Dick 156, 168, 169, 179 Hines, Earl 187, 188, 194, 196–7 Hokusai: The Great Wave 1–2 ‘humouristic works’ 90, 98–9 Huntington Wright, Willard 157–8 iconological nominalism 36–8 Idealism, Symbolist 73, 75 Idealistic and Realistic Symbolism 110–11, 114 Imgardt, D. 103–4 imitation in painting and music 55–9 Impressionists 67–8 neo-Impressionists 70–1, 73, 74 and Symbolism 79–80 improvising within the veil 184–9 indexical signs 189–92, 195–6, 197 infinite (das Unendliche) 4 Innerlichkeit (inwardness) 4 installation art: The Weather Project, Turbine Hall (Eliasson) 129, 130, 132, 137–44 interart genre see Satie, Erik ‘intermedia’ 156, 168 ‘intermedia hybridity’ 168–9 inwardness (Innerlichkeit) 4 Iranian art Listen (Tavakolian) 203–8, 210, 211, 212 women and music in Islam 208–10 women’s music festivals 210–11 Ivanov, Viacheslav 105, 106, 109–15, 116, 119 James, Henry: The Ambassadors 116 Jameson, Frederic 9, 10, 13 jazz see Bearden, Romare: jazz and art Jeannerat, Pierre 15–16 Johnson, Julian 7, 8, 12, 236–7 Jordanova, Ludmilla 39–40 Joseph, Branden 168–9, 176 July, Miranda 215, 219–21, 222, 223–4, 225, 226, 228 Kahn, Douglas 13, 141–2 Kandinsky, Wassily 7, 69, 104, 105–6 Kaplan, E. Ann 9–10

263

Kaplan, Louis 193–4 Khomeini, Ayatollah 209–10, 211 kinetic art 149, 159, 161–3 Kobbé, Gustav 38 Kramer, Lawrence 7, 10–11 Kriehuber, Josef 42, 43, 44, 46 Kupka, František 76–9, 80 landscape 136–7 language and meaning 14–16 Lena Beamish (July) 221, 223, 228 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 6, 8, 16, 67, 77 light Lumia (Wilfred) 149–64 see also Gesamtkunstwerk Listen (Tavakolian) 203–8, 210, 211, 212 Liszt, Franz 4, 5, 6, 41, 42–6, 56 lithographic portraits 35, 41–6 London 34, 35, 152, 153 National Gallery and Royal Ballet 235 National Portrait Gallery 37 Tate Modern 129, 130, 132, 137–44, 235–6 V&A 11 Whitechapel Gallery 206 longing (Sehnsucht) 4 Lumia (Wilfred) 149–64 Lyotard, Jean-François 9, 10 Machell, Reginald 116–17 Maciunas, George 169–70 Malick, Terrence: The Tree of Life (film) 150 Mahler, Gustav 10, 129, 135 Man Ray 88 Manet, Edouard: Still Life with Hat and Guitar 49–52, 63–4 imitation in painting and music 55–9 painting and performance 53–5 realism in Courbet and Manet 59–60 time in painting and music 61–3 touch in painting and music 52–3, 54–5 Marx, Karl 3–4 mathematics geometry 114–15, 116, 117, 118 and kinetic art 161–2 Pythagoras 109

264

Index

Maultsby, Portia K. 184–5 La Mer (Debussy) 1–2, 7, 14 metaphors 14–16, 62 minimalism 167–70 and John Cage 167, 169, 170–2, 173, 174–6, 177–9 characterizing ‘minimal’ art and music 172–9 mirror reflections 110, 115, 116, 118 modernism 6–8 and lateness in musicology 8 and postmodernism see Gesamtkunstwerk and Romanticism 6–8, 27 Satie and interart genre 85–6, 87–8, 93–4 vita nuova 29–30 Mole, Tom 35–6 Monet, Claude 2, 55, 67 mood (Stimmung) 13 More Heads (Greenwood) 228 Morris, Robert 167, 170, 174, 175–7, 178–9 Box with the Sound of its Own Making 168, 169, 179 Mulvey, Laura 205–6 Murray, Albert 196 music festivals, women’s 210–11 musicality 5–6, 13, 130 musicology 8 mystical anarchism 112 mysticism/spirituality see Čiurlionis, M.K. neo-Impressionists 70–1, 73, 74 Neshat, Shirin: Turbulent 206–7, 210 New York 159–60 Art Institute of Light 151, 154, 156, 160 Romare Bearden and African-American culture 186–7, 197 John Cage and avante-garde coterie 175–6, 178–9 colour organ performance, Carnegie Hall 113 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ) 149–50, 151, 171, 190

Nietzsche, Friedrich 13, 111, 119, 140, 142–3 Schein 130–2 The Birth of Tragedy 130 Nocturnes for Violin and Orchestra (Debussy) 2 non-Western influences 171, 173, 184–5, 190 Nye, David 150, 160, 162 O Superman (Anderson) 225 Ono, Yoko 175–6, 218, 219, 224, 229 organicism 85–6, 112 Osbert, Alphonse 72–6, 80 Ouspensky, Pyotr D. 115, 117, 118 Owen, Craig 9, 191 Painted Film Based on a Folk Song (Charchoune) 29 painting and performance 53–5 Paris 50, 55–6 fin-de-siècle painting 70, 76, 77, 78 lithographic portraits 35, 41, 42 performance art 215, 217–18, 219–21, 222 photography photomontage and collage 188, 190–2, 193, 194–7, 227 see also Iranian art ‘physiognomic paradox’ of portraits 40–6 Picasso, Pablo 29, 62, 69 and Romare Bearden 188, 190, 192, 196–7 and Erik Satie 88, 94 Pierce, Charles S. 189 Pierrot Lunaire (Schoenberg) 28 Pittsburgh Memory (Bearden) 191 Plato 103, 109, 114, 209–10 Pliny: Natural History 56–7 politics see Bearden, Romare: jazz and art; feminist art and music; Iranian art postmodernism 8, 9–11, 13–14 see also Gesamtkunstwerk; modernism printed portraits see Romantic musical celebrity and printed portraits Projections series (Bearden) 184, 186, 191, 192, 193–4

Index Prometheus (Böcklin) 107 Prometheus (Scriabin) 113, 152, 153 Proust, Marcel 76 punk culture see feminist art and music Pussy Riot 229–30 Pyman, Avril 104–5 Pythagoras 109 Rancière, Jacques 5, 20 Rasula, Jed 6, 7, 12, 143, 150–1 realism: in Courbet and Manet 59–60 Realistic Symbolism 110–11, 114 repetition: in black culture 193 Rhythm in Steel, Op. 71 (Wilfred) 159–60 Richards, Ceri 1, 15–16 Riley, Terry 171, 172–3, 174, 175, 177 Rimington, Wallace 152, 153, 157, 160 Riot Grrrl see feminist art and music Roller, Alfred 133–4, 135 Romantic musical celebrity and printed portraits 33–6 iconological nominalism 36–8 ‘physiognomic paradox’ of portraits 40–6 synaesthesic awareness 38–40 Romanticism 3–5 late 13–14 and modernism 6–8, 27 musicality 5–6 Russian Symbolism 103–5, 109–10, 112, 116, 119 St Petersburg 105, 108, 113, 115, 117 see Čiurlionis, M. K. Satie, Erik and interart genre 85–7, 98–9 image, music and text 90–3 nomenclature 87–90 representation and compositional process 93–5 unity and concepts of time and space 95–7 Schein 130–3, 134, 139, 140, 143 Schiller, Friedrich 5, 13, 130 Schillinger, Joseph 161–3 Schoenberg, Arnold 7, 28, 173 Schopenhauer, Arthur 4–6, 69, 132, 139–40 Schwarz, Robert 173

265

Scriabin, Alexander 112–14, 116, 119, 152, 153, 160 sensing and sounding 140–2 Seurat, Georges 70, 71, 73–4 Shattuck, Roger 88, 95–6 Shaw-Miller, Simon 3, 7, 11, 12, 77–8, 86–7 Shehadi, Fadlou 208, 209 Shiff, Richard 55, 79–80 Signac, Paul 69–72, 73, 74, 77, 80 Smith, Rollin 156 Snead, James 193, 194 Sor, Fernando 55–6 ‘sorrow songs’ 185, 193 sounding and sensing 140–2 space and time 95–7, 114–16, 137, 138–9, 142–4 spaces of reception 16 Spanish Singer (Manet) 49, 51, 53, 54, 56, 63, 64 Spiral 189–91 spirituality/mysticism see Čiurlionis, M.K. Stein, Donna M. 158 Steiner, Rudolph 110, 118 Still Life with Hat and Guitar see Manet, Edouard Stokowski, Leopold 156–7, 162, 164 The Street (Bearden) 196 Studio (Courbet) 59–60 Sublime 5, 136, 139–40, 150–1 ‘technological sublime’ 150, 160, 162–3 Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte (Seurat) 70, 71 Symbolism 76, 77 Idealist 73, 75 Idealistic and Realistic 110–11, 114 and Impressionism 79–80 Russian 103–5, 109–10, 112, 116, 119 synaesthesia 27, 28–9, 152, 153 synaesthesic awareness 38–40, 46 synthesis in arts 111–16 Tate Modern Turbine Hall 129, 130, 132, 137–44, 235–6 Tavakolian, Newsha: Listen 203–8, 210, 211, 212 ‘technological sublime’ 150, 160, 162–3 theosophical doctrine 109–11

266

Index

Theremin, Louis 161, 162 Three Folk Musicians (Bearden) 192 Time -based light art 149–50 in fin-de-siècle painting 67–80 fourth dimension 115–19, 130 in painting and music 61–3 and space 95–7, 114–16, 137, 138–9, 142–4 see Bergson, Henri touch in painting and music 52–3, 54–5 Tracy and the Plastics 226–7, 228 transcendence 4–5 The Tree of Life (Malick) 150 Tristan und Isolde (Wagner) 129, 130, 132–4, 135, 140 Turbine Hall see Tate Modern Turbulent (Neshat) 206–7, 210 ‘universal music’ of arts 103–6 Vail, Tobi 218, 228 Velázquez, Diego 51, 54, 63 video 195, 206, 207, 215, 219, 226, 229 see also film Vienna Court Opera: Tristan und Isolde (Wagner) 129, 130, 132–4, 135, 140 lithographic portraits 35, 42 Secession 5, 69, 235

visual music definition of 149 and phonic painting 104 voice in Second Wave feminism 222–4 Wagner, Richard 2, 6–8, 13–14, 28, 69, 140 Bayreuth 131, 137–8 Gesamtkunstwerk 111–12, 129–30, 131–7, 142–4 Wagnerian space and time 137, 138–9, 142–4 Wagnerism 6–7, 73 The Weather Project, Turbine Hall (Eliasson) 129, 130, 132, 137–44 Weber, William 34–5, 176 Webern, Anton 2, 134, 140, 173 Wilfred, Thomas: Lumia 149–64 clavilux/colour organ 113, 149–50, 151, 152, 153–4, 156–7 clavilux junior 158–9 women see feminist art and music; Iranian art Young, La Monte 167, 168, 169, 170, 172–9 Zinman, Gregory 150

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Plate 1: Katushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, c. 1831, colour woodblock oban print.

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Plate 2: Édouard Manet, Hat and Guitar, 1862, oil on canvas, 77 × 121 cm.

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Plate 3: Édouard Manet, Dead Toreador, 1864, oil on canvas, 75.9 × 153.3 cm.

Plate 4: Paul Signac, Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890, 1890, oil on canvas, 73.5 × 92.5 cm.

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Plate 5: Alphonse Osbert, Les chants de la nuit, 1896, oil on canvas, 76.5 × 123.2 cm.

Plate 6: František Kupka, Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colours, 1912, oil on canvas, 211 × 220 cm.

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Plate 7: Erik Satie, ‘Golf ’, Sports & Recreations, 1914, image from score.

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Plate 8: Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, ‘Fugue’ from the triptych Phantasy, 1908, tempera on paper, 61 × 70.7 cm.

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Plate 9: Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, ‘Allegro’ from Sonata No. 7 (Sonata of the Pyramids), 1909, tempera on paper, 76.6 × 59.7 cm.

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Plate 10: Alfred Roller, set designs for Tristan und Isolde, 1902 (date of performance 1903), gouache and ink on card.

Plate 11: Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003, mono-frequency light, foil, haze machine, mirror foil, scaffold, c. 15m. Installation view: Tate Modern, London, 2003.

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Plate 12: Thomas Wilfred, Elliptical Prelude and Chalice, 1928, maple table, metal, fabric, glass and electrical and lighting elements.

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Plate 13: Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977, long-term installation, western New Mexico.

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Plate 14: Romare Bearden, Pittsburgh Memory, 1964, photostat.

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Plate 15: Romare Bearden, The Street, 1964, paper collage on cardboard, 32.7 × 39.05 cm.

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Plate 16: Installation view of Zines and distribution catalogues (1991–2013) in the Alien She exhibition at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University curated by Astria Suparak and Ceci Moss.

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