Between Sound and Vision
But as the 53 works by 45 artists (another 10 contribute live or recorded performances) in “Between Sound and Vision” at Gallery 400 reveal, such artists were making work as thoughtfully considered as any old master, though their ethos and approach couldn’t be more different. While this magnificent, enlightening, and just plain joyous exhibition concentrates on artists who came of age in the 50s and 60s, pieces by some younger and lesser-known artists show that childlike utopianism has at least a few heirs today.
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Higgins, the daughter of Fluxus artists Knowles and Dick Higgins, has wanted to do a show like this for years. Central to the exhibit are 26 original “scores” by various artists from the book Notations, which Cage and Knowles edited in 1969. Alan Kaprow’s Self-Service (1966), written on scraps of lined yellow paper, describes events to be performed in three different cities (and they were performed, Hannah Higgins says). Kaprow’s events start with the stuff of industrialized life–cars, subways, supermarkets, laundromats–and dictate actions that create a frame for the mundane setting, making the performers and spectators alike more aware of daily life. He suggests that participants “begin to whistle in the aisles of a supermarket,” then “go back to their shopping.” Torn paper is to be released “from a high window piece by piece, and slowly watched.” The performers are to “watch cars pass,” counting red ones.
The performances on CD here suggest the freedom and vitality, the mixture of structure and chaos, that these nontraditional forms of musical notation make possible. Corner’s piece, and most others, may lack the careful ordering of great classical music, but in its place is a sense of untamed energy, reconnecting art and the world. I was reminded of this attitude when Knowles told me, “Mozart is a wonderful composer, but his music is enhanced by those little sounds in the audience such as a cough or sneeze here or there.” But she agreed with a laugh that watch alarms going off and cell phones ringing did not enhance Mozart–these artists’ openness does not mean that anything goes.
Yet it seems the routes mapped out by Cage and the Fluxus artists in the 50s and 60s have largely become roads not taken, as the art world has increasingly returned to the manufacture and sale of objects. Two wonderful sound installations seem to acknowledge this fact: lacking the physical and philosophical scope of works by Kaprow and Cage, these pieces carve out a small part of the gallery in which to make their music.
