Audio Poverty

Diedrich Diederichsen is a German author, music journalist and cultural critic and currently professor for Theory, Practice and Communication of contemporary art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

The article Audio Poverty is translated from German by James Gussen.

From the beginning Marxist thought is drawn in with the notions of ‘value’ and’ use’ in respect to music and how it is both produced, received and controlled and enjoyed, or not enjoyed to the fullest possibilities. Diederichsen has the idea that music is capable of more than it is currently doing.

Diederichsen suggests the music world is controlled by digital reproduction and the economies that are escorted by the internet, and that because of this a type of liquefaction, a homogenised music results. That music is all but emptied of its original substance or force that evoked it in the first place. He suggests a utopian model for music that isn’t restricted by history but is instead instinctive and present, anchored in reality.

That we are encased in a manmade restrictive structure that prevents a pure experience (in this instance music) isn’t new, in western thought Plato’s Republic proposed a new way of being towards enlightenment, proposing the leaders of society have a fifty year education, so they’d be qualified to construct a suitable structure for this way of being to come into fruition, we are still waiting.
I was interested to discover the Greek origins of the word utopia, it unpacks into eu=good, ou=not and toppos= place, resulting in the double meaning of good place and no place. Confirming that utopia is but a dream, or suggesting that utopia can be found in more than one way, perhaps relating to the Buddhists thought of perfection as state of mind and way of being.

Diederichsen’s idea that music evolves when someone or group revolts against the existing music because it fails to represent for them their experience of living, could be said for all arts. But in the revolt the sound becomes part of the history of sound, and then the history becomes greater than the sound. This idea is expressed by Milan Kundera in the following quote.

“There were long periods when art did not seek out the new but took pride in making repetition beautiful, reinforcing tradition, and ensuring the stability of a collective life; music and dance then existed only in the framework of social rites, of Masses and fairs. Then one day in the twelfth century, a church musician in Paris thought of taking the melody of the Gregorian chant, unchanged for centuries, and adding to it a voice, but the counterpoint.....The counterpoint was a new thing that gave access to other new things....Because they were no longer imitating what was done before, composers lost anonymity, ... their names lit up like lanterns marking a path toward distant realms. Having taken flight, music became, for several centuries, the history of music....In anguish I imagine a time when art shall cease to seek out the never-said and will go docilely back into the service of the collective life...into the uniformity of being.”

The headiness of the talk and the slotting of it into the history overshadow the art as experience.

Bibliography
Diederichsen, Diedrich. "Audio Poverty." e-flux (2010): p. 1-10.
—. "Music—Immateriality—Value." e-flux (2011): p. 1-10.
Kundera, Milan. The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. Trans. Linda Asher. London, UK: Faber and Faber, 2007.
Wikipedia. "Utopia." 25 April 2011. Wikipedia. 25 April 2011 .

The Untutored Eye

Stan Brakhage was an American experimental non narrative filmmaker, born in 1933 and died in 2003. He made over 400 films. This reading comes from the opening paragraph in his first book Metaphors on Vision (1963). His films searched for unpredictable and unplanned spaces, each instance of perception a vital part of the experience.

At first reading I was excited by the idea of trying to imagine what it would be like if we could experience things as though for the first time. Then upon rereading I became aware of the attack on the man-made reframing of sight, through religion and it’s prioritising of language over sight. As seen in the last few words of the paragraph “beginning was the word” which could be a quote from genesis 1:1 or from John 1:1

Which begs the question if one has something to write about one must have first experienced it? This paragraph speaks of a loss of innocence with sight, in that to name something not only locks it within a frame, but also blunts our perception to other possibilities or nuances, resulting in an inability to see or experience things in full. Thus the idea that bonds language and reality together comes under fire, questioning the value of the signs in the form of names and language.

Brakhage alludes to a way of seeing and being which is foreign to language, more in line with an encountered dynamic experience. This explains why I as a painter find the translation into words of that which occurs within a work in the heat of the moment to always fall short of the experience. In the following quote Foucault discusses the relationship of language to the visual

‘The relationship of language to painting is an infinite relation...neither can be reduced to the other’s terms...But if one wished to keep the relation of language to vision open, if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as a starting-point for speech instead as an obstacle to be avoided...then one must erase those proper names and preserve the infinity of the talk’

(Foucault p.6)

This supports Brakhage’s idea that we must erase the definitive nature of the word and replace it with a process that allows openness and possibility. An emergent process that is different with each encounter, and one which allows a multiplicity of relations.
As a visual artist, I feel the weight of carrying the tradition of vision and visualisation forwards, the ways to achieve this may not be found in asking the right conceptual questions, but in the ability to be in the moment and open to the experience of being.

Bibliography
Brakhage, Stan. "From Metaphors on Vision." 1978. 5 April 2011 .
—. "Metaphors of Vision." Film Culture (1963).
Camper, Fred. Stan Brakhage on the Web. 2002. 3 April 2011 .
Foucault, Michael. Les Meninas. 2002.
The Bible. New Jersey: Thomas Nelson, 1972.