From Chris Fahey Sent Thu, Jun 4th 1998, 19:24
From Chris Fahey Sent Thu, Jun 4th 1998, 19:24
This is a great thread.
>If you have to blatantly define what you're doing over 6 panels of
>liner, you're a liar and a fraud.
>
>... Thaemlitz had to actually explain the song's
>construction to support the invented meaning! This is piteously phony.
Or maybe he's a phony for needing to include a full CD worth of music to
support his manifesto? It sounds like the two are of equal importance to
him, as the words and pictures are to a cartoonist. I would imagine that if
the text were the kind of writing you normally enjoy you would not make an
argument like this.
I can't speak for Thaemlitz, but a similar effort is made by DJ Spooky,
and in his case I do not protest the intellectualization of his music -
rather I protest the nonsensical posturing and obfuscation in his writing. I
think that the practice of overwrought postmodern lit-crit writing is in
most cases employed to make the writer look well-read and to make the text
look more like there might be an original idea contained within. There are
certainly complex ideas which can only be expressesed in many pages of
obscure language, but I look forward to the day when the goal of actually
communicating an idea is held in higher esteem than expressing ideas in the
most obscure terms possible.
For a great statement on this trend, go to:
http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/postmodern
Reload several times and you'll get what this is.
> Considering that music may be understood as a form of symbolic language,
> it's not surprising that one would have to define new words or expressions
< of the language before the listener can understand their intent.
A 70's conceptual artist, Les Levine, once said "Learn to Read Art".
For many consumers of art production, the expectation is that a reaction
must be immediate and visceral, not time consuming and conceptual. While
most readers aknowledge that there is such a thing as illiteracy, and that
there are degrees of literacy, the same is seldom said of art and music.
Conceptualism in art goes way back. Renaissance artists often included
allusions and symbolic structures which required a great deal of knowledge
to understand. Can you look at The Last Supper and identify each one of the
people at the table? When it was painted, I don't think anyone who saw it
had any question who they were. I'm not a classical music expert at all, but
from what I understand about Bach, a great deal of pleasure can be had from
his music if you understand music theory and can picture his structures on
the paper, or if you understand certain mathematical concepts. When I hear
Bach, I kow I'm missing something and someday I intend to know enough to
appreciate this music fully.
> I have always thought that the
> beauty of art is the fact that any interpretation can (and should) be
> different for everyone. There should never be a "failed interpretation".
I agree that there is no such thing as a "bad" or "wrong" interpretation
of music - some of the best critiques of art I have read are by critics who
understand the work in a completely different light than the artist ever
intended. Nonetheless, many artists do have precise, or even imprecise,
intentions when they present their work publicly. And most artists have a
personal interpretation of their own work. All of these are interesting to
me. And just because there are lots of people with opinions about something
doesn't mean that any of them are "right". But it also doesn't mean that
ideas aren't worth arguing over - some of my best ideas reside in my head
because some articulate person put it there against my own protestations. Is
it so strange for an artist to want you to understand a work in a certain
particular way? Or is the role of an artist to create random meaningless
stuff and hope that someone else gives it meaning?
Art criticism should not usually be a process of "decoding" art,
especially if the artist is alive and perfectly able to talk about their
work. Criticism is, for me, an art form in itself. And if an artist or
musician wants to also practice the art of interpretation and criticism,
especially of their own work, more power to them. I mean, some of my
favorite artists do their own album covers, which to me is an important part
of the whole album thing.
Anyway,
-Cf
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