The Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue is one of the leading art galleries devoted not only to 20th-century American art but also current artists who are making a significant mark on the art world. I went to the Whitney on this particular Sunday (September 26) to experience the final day of what had been a 3-month long festival devoted to the multimedia media works of Christian Marclay, an American artist and composer who followed in the steps of John Cage and also the French dadaists. Marclay hears sounds in everything he sees. In creating his works he therefore begins with the visual and the moves to the aural. Much of the music he creates is aleatoric and calls for improvisation on the part of performers (which is why he is often considered more of a visual artist than a composer despite the fact that the creation of sounds is his ultimate goal). I was able to experience four performances on that Sunday.
The first work was Screen Play, which visually consisted of black-and-white clips from films of all sorts. It was fun to try to see if I could recognize the film the clip was taken from. (Scarlett O'Hara's hand grasping the soil while Tara burned from Gone with the Wind was instantly recognizable!) Superimposed over the clips were dots and lines, both of which refer to music notation. Performers are supposed to improvise on what they see. In this particular case, two performers, the legendary saxophonist and composer John Zorn and a trombonist improvised in response to the images. Appreciating their style of improvisation takes a degree of experience and just say that I felt the the images overwhelmed the sounds (as seeing often trumps hearing).
The next work was quite different. Called Shuffle, Marclay created a large number of cards from found objects (such as a page from a menu or an old greeting card). The performer or performers are asked to shuffle the cards and improvise on as many or as few as they wish. Today, the pianist Michael Snow chose about twelve cards to improvise upon. (I learned later that Snow is a highly regarded visual artist as well as jazz pianist in his own right). Snow's improvisations revealed an encyclopedic grasp of jazz ad 20th-century piano styles. Each improvisation was developed very convincingly. This time, the audience could not see the cards so it was the sounds that were the focus. This would be a terrific work for performers to explore.
It is often said that much contemporary art and music sounds as though a child could do it. In some ways this is true in that the artist is trying to strip away the restrictions and inhibitions "learned" in the process of "growing up." On the other hand, successful works in this area require tremendous imagination and, more to the point, ranges of experience that most children to not have. It actually takes a great deal of effort (and courage) to get to the place where one can create or perform such works with the naturalness and fluency required, just as is the case with traditional "classical" music. How much of one's practice time is spent working on accuracy and dependability and "correct" interpretation and how much time is spent exploring the imagination and creativity involved in a work?
The final work I experienced that day is called Manga Scroll. It an extended sheet of paper (42 feet in length) on which Marclay meticulously copied out portions from Japanese comics (intended for adults and children's comics). The portions he copied out all made references to sounds (sucy as "kaboom"). The performer, a vocalist, is to produce the sounds he or she hears while reading the scroll. For this, the last event of the festival, two different performers, one male and one female, interpreted the work. The differences between the two performances were astounding. For one thing, the male performer used a large battery of devices (such as different sized megaphones and hoses) to alter the sounds. The female only used her voice (with some manipulation created through the use of a microphone). The male performer tended to emphasize hard consonants (such as "t" or "d") while the female focused on vowels. Both performances were, in my opinion, equally effective and engaging. They were also quite different. I learned later that the female performer (well-known avant garde singer and composer Joan LaBarbara) performed the work three times during the course of the festival and that each performance was completely different.
While visiting the gallery I also became acquainted with the work of painter Charles Burchfield. His work tends to alternate between realism and mysticism and it was especially interesting to the same object (such as a house) painted from those two different perspectives. This example (along with the two performances of Manga Scroll) is an object lesson in learning how to express different aesthetic goals using the same fundamental reference point.
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