[microsound] making/erasure

[Stephen Hastings-King]

hello charles.

thanks for the tip on morawski: i haven't heard of him before, so will check
out his work.

i'm  also pleased that the notion of open work is on the table again because
that's at the center
of what i was thinking (but did not write below) about aesthetics as a
problem.

an open work is reassembled, it changes and it's meanings are made
differently each time. the varying character of such works migrate them
outside the object-orientation of aesthetic theory, it switches the relation
of making to the work. meanings--which lean on ways of determining
provisionally what a piece is---become as varied as those who experience the
piece.
the boundary between experiencing and composing gets blurred.

i like the idea that one can present layers of sound or other forms of
information simultaneously without obvious markers as to hierarchy
amongst them (but with attention to detail and clarity at each layer--that's
my preference anyway) and put an audience in the position of organizing for
themselves what they experience (or read) such there is no object or
phenomenon---there are only versions.  eco talks about this mostly in the
context of fixed media---stockhausen's klavierstucke 11 (i remember the
excerpt in audio culture better than the book as a whole because i used
audio culture multiple times in courses) and texts---but i've also found it
a really interesting hook for thinking about improvisation and pieces that
use environmental sound (scrambling scale for example)---in an improvised
context, thinking what you're doing through a notion of open work puts
performers and audience in the same situation--the resulting versions are a
numerous as is the audience, the meanings explicitly made in the process and
the whole is transient.

this pushes an interesting wedge between performance and recording that i
like to think about--it's through this that i got interested in making
recorded environments unstable by making pieces that one would layer--play 4
cds simultaneously say---which requires a bit of planning that's not at odds
with improvising---such that every choice a listener would make with respect
to sound systems, how to deal with slightly varied lengths of the component
recordings, how well they know individual recordings as separate
environments etc. would change the outputs.
i like to think that no two playbacks would be the same.
i know that the whole is other than the sum of the parts.

i think there's a pretty basic critique of traditional aesthetic theory
performed in all this.

stephen

On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 5:33 PM, Charles Turner <vze26m98 at optonline.net>wrote:

> On Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:37:39 -0500, Stephen Hastings-King wrote:
> > 1. the category of aesthetics is a problem. classical aesthetic
> > theory takes the work as given for it's point of departure.
> > bourgeois and materialist forms of aesthetic theory differ primarily
> > in the interpretive frameworks they bring to bear on the artwork.
> > in both, the processes of making are erased behind the work as
> > totality and are replaced with one or another version of the mythical
> > Artist.
> > it seems to me that one of the many conceptual tasks that await
> > us--whatever that means--out there in the world is to undo this
> > category and the constraints that enframe it.
> > this isn't exactly a new idea---lots of folk have addressed it one
> > way or another since the 60s at least--in alot of cases, the way folk
> > went at it was to tack on autobiographical statements after fairly
> > straightforward aesthetic pronouncements.
>
> Hi Stephen-
>
> I've always found Stefan Morawski's distinction between "artistic
> value" and "aesthetic valuation" to be useful. (The first chapter of
> his 1974 _Fundamentals_ book sets it out.)
>
> Morawski was trying to justify both an historical materialist approach,
> and an aesthetics that could encompass neolithic cave art, Poussin, and
> Duchamp/Cage/Fluxus.
>
> Briefly, he posits artistic values as those attributes that an artist
> instills in an "object" that cause us to relate to it as such. Artistic
> value is then prior to any aesthetic understanding of the art object.
> (As he points out, people were making art objects long before there was
> any body of aesthetic thought.)
>
> Aesthetics is essentially a judgement of these artistic values, and an
> attempt to come to terms with how general and particular values
> instilled in art objects come to be significant.
>
> But maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.
>
> Best, Charles
>
>
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