Sound Events

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Turim ◽  
Michael Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Installation Art ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Andy Warhol ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Comprehensive Survey ◽  
The 1960S

This article appears in theOxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aestheticsedited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. This chapter is a comprehensive survey of sound practices in avant-garde film, video art, and installation art since the 1960s. It addresses a series of artistic approaches to sound: silence, tone and drone, antic and aleatory, multilayering and cacophony, work with voices, legacies of cinematic exhibition, and resonant spaces in galleries and museums. It is broadly chronological, beginning with major figures of the 1960s and ending with artists currently working. The chapter does not deny medium specificity, but moves easily among celluloid film, video formats, and gallery installation. Theoretical perspectives derive from the debate between Deleuze and Badiou on the nature and frequency of “the event,” a restaging of the discussion on the value of experiment and innovation. The chapter is wide-ranging enough to be synoptic, but also provides detailed discussion of works by Larry Gottheim, Abigail Child, Andy Warhol, Christian Marclay, Janet Cardiff, and Bruce High Quality Foundation.

The Screen Scene: Andy Warhol, the Factory and Home Movies

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Monteiro
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Andy Warhol ◽  
Strict Adherence ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personality Differences ◽  
The People ◽  
Family Home ◽  
Intimate Relations ◽  
The 1960S

In his prodigious output of hundreds of films throughout the 1960s, Pop artist Andy Warhol cultivated an approach to making and viewing movies that borrowed heavily on the conventions of family home-movie culture. Warhol’s Factory studio in New York and his entourage of so-called “Superstars” functioned much like a family of misfits. This chapter explores film’s role in this context, analysing how Warhol combined improvised scenarios with personality differences to forge or reinforce intimate relations through filmmaking. It argues that his tendency to screen these films in the Factory—often before the people who appear on screen—functioned as a means of identifying, describing, and securing a nucleus of close social relations. Through comparison with the rhetoric of home-movie advertising and guidebooks, it teases out ways Warhol’s films paradoxically became avant-garde distortions of home-movie practices through strict adherence to suggestions and tips given to home-movie practitioners.

Arata Isozaki: the architect as artist

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-250
Author(s):  
Hyunjung Cho
Keyword(s):  
Information Theory ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Japanese Society ◽  
Design Concept ◽  
Planning Method ◽  
Cybernetic Model ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The World ◽  
Comprehensive Survey ◽  
The 1960S

This paper is not a comprehensive survey of the architectural career of Arata Isozaki, one of the most distinguished practicing architects in the world today and the 2019 winner of the Pritzker Prize, but a specific look at his formative years of the 1960s when he began to build his own design methodology. It delineates Isozaki’s encounter with the avant-garde art movement of the 1960s, collectively called “Anti-Art, ” against the backdrop of the “anti-spirit” of Japanese society. Although Isozaki’s artistic side has been overstated at times, previous studies rarely addressed how his intensive interactions with art circles played a role in shaping his design methodology. I would like to examine the convergence of creative individuals and cross-disciplinary connections to understand Isozaki’s architectural thinking.This study examines how Isozaki’s collaborations with his artist contemporaries enabled him to formulate the notion of the “invisible city, ” a radically new design concept characterised by the expansion of the nature of architecture from producing isolated built-forms to all-encompassing natural and manmade environments. However, after drawing on communications and information theory, which prevailed in 60s architectural circles, Isozaki’s destructive and anarchistic connotation of “invisible city” was channeled into a systematic cybernetic model and eventually transformed into a constructive planning method. I will discuss the realisation of a cybernetic environment at the Festival Plaza of Expo’ 70 and trace the legacy of “invisible city” in his later postmodern work.

From the Periphery to the Interstices: Avant-garde Film, Medium Specificity and Intermediality, 1970–2015

2021 ◽  
pp. 73-87
Author(s):  
Christopher Townsend
Keyword(s):  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Technical Competence ◽  
Film Analysis ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
Contemporary Study ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Important Shift

This chapter surveys an important shift in the last fifty years in the study of avant-garde film within academia. It explores the move from study at the margins of widely separated disciplines, notably Art History and the nascent field of Film Studies, to the interstices between increasingly connected disciplines, but focused upon English and Modern Languages. As a consequence of this move, the author argues, avant-garde film has become the object of a form of scholarship that scrutinises the intermedial relations of films and texts. With this attention, mostly from scholars trained in literature and textual analysis, there is a risk of losing the technical competence in film analysis that characterised the earlier mode of scholarship. In the 1960s and 70s, much of the crucial work in the field was undertaken by practising, experimental filmmakers who understood the material possibilities and constraints of their medium. Both approaches and sites of scholarship bring particular benefits and problems, and contemporary study of the intermedial relationships of experimental film in the wider, intermedial, culture needs to account for both in its historiography.

Cinema Expanded

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Film History ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Art World ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
History Of

Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia is a comprehensive historical survey of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the present. It offers an historical and theoretical revision of the concept of expanded cinema, placing it in the context of avant-garde/experimental film history rather than the history of new media, intermedia, or multimedia. The book argues that while expanded cinema has taken an incredible variety of forms (including moving image installation, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light shows, shadow plays, computer-generated images, video art, sculptural objects, and texts), it is nonetheless best understood as an ongoing meditation by filmmakers on the nature of cinema, specifically, and on its relationship to the other arts. Cinema Expanded also extends its historical and theoretical scope to avant-garde film culture more generally, placing expanded cinema in that context while also considering what it has to tell us about the moving image in the art world and new media environment.

SOUND, MEANING AND MUSIC-DRAMA IN LACHENMANN'S DAS MÄDCHEN MIT DEN SCHWEFELHÖLZERN

Tempo ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (268) ◽  
pp. 20-33
Author(s):  
Laurence Osborn
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Musique Concrete ◽  
Cultural Baggage

AbstractThis article argues that Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern demonstrates a unique approach to music-drama that stems from the perceptual capacities of listeners, and their desire to search for meaning in what they hear. Beginning with the claim that Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern can be viewed as the culmination of an aesthetic project begun at the point of Lachenmann's emergence as a distinctive voice of the European avant-garde during the 1960s, the article first examines two major aspects of Lachenmann's aesthetics – musique concrète instrumentale and aura – outlining a composing philosophy that has been at the heart of Lachenmann's practice throughout his career. The article claims that Lachenmann sought to establish a rejuvenated semiotics, freed from cultural baggage and tied to the perceptual and cognitive capacities of listeners. Drawing upon the studies of Naomi Cumming and Luke Windsor, it outlines a theoretical framework that takes into account this composing philosophy and its implications, applying it in analyses of various excerpts from Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern. My analysis illuminates a music-drama that forms around the interplay of internally represented images and sensations, the emergence of which is facilitated by a musical language that prepares sounds to take on certain types of meaning. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the possible implications this has for audience members.

Zwischen Heroismus und Antiheroismus Ligetis Mikropolyphonie in 2001 revisited

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Beate Kutschke
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The 1960S

This article re-investigates the use of Ligeti’s second movement of his Requiem “Kyrie” (1963/1965) in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 — A Space Odyssey (1968). It does so in light of allusions to heroic models and the – obviously – heroic Zarathustra fanfare, both of which are pervasive in Kubrick’s film. The article aims at determining compositional means that refer to heroic ideas in avant-garde music of the 1960s, a time period in which radically new and skeptical views of heroism came to the fore that also affected the articulation of the heroic in music.

scholarly journals Whose Voices? The Fate of Luigi Nono's Voci destroying muros

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Adlington
Keyword(s):  
Compositional Style ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Text Setting ◽  
Factory Workers ◽  
Female Prisoners ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Music ◽  
Small Orchestra ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Current Reality

Luigi Nono's Voci destroying muros for female voices and small orchestra was performed for the first and only time at the Holland Festival in 1970. A setting of texts by female prisoners and factory workers, it marks a sharp stylistic departure from Nono's political music of the 1960s by virtue of its audible quotations of revolutionary songs, its readily intelligible text setting, and especially its retention of the diatonic structure of the song on which the piece is based, the communist “Internationale.” Nono's decision, following the premiere, to withdraw the work from his catalogue suggests that he came to regard it as transgressing an important boundary in his engagement with “current reality.” I examine the work and its withdrawal in the context of discourses within the Italian left in the 1960s that accused the intellectuals of the Partito Comunista Italiano of unhelpfully mediating the class struggle. Nono's contentious reading of Antonio Gramsci, offered as justification for his avant-garde compositional style, certainly provided fuel for this critique. But Voci destroying muros suggests receptivity on the part of the composer—albeit only momentary—to achieving a more direct representation of the voices of the dispossessed.

scholarly journals Beethoven Returns to Bonn: Origins, Belonging and Misuse in Mauricio Kagel’s Ludwig van (1969)

2021 ◽  
Vol 107 ◽  
pp. 29-61
Author(s):  
Elaine Fitz Gibbon
Keyword(s):  
West Germany ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Adobe Acrobat ◽  
German Government ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Legacy ◽  
East German ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
One Year

In 1969 West Germany, the country was abuzz with anticipation of the approaching Beethoven bicentennial. That year the composer and experimental filmmaker Mauricio Raúl Kagel, born in Argentina to Russian- and German-Jewish parents in 1931 and living in Cologne since 1957, was commissioned by the State to commemorate the momentous occasion. What resulted was a film that surely no West German official had anticipated. Entitled Ludwig van: A Report and strongly inflected by Kagel’s absurdist aesthetic, Kagel’s film critiques the fetish object that Beethoven’s music and person had become in twentieth-century West Germany, touching upon, amongst many topics, East German claims of Beethoven’s “misuse” by the West German government, as well as the rise in the 1960s of the theory that Beethoven was Black. While Ludwig van has been recognized for its sendup of bourgeois music culture, it has yet to be analyzed from the perspective of diasporic experience. Simultaneously a love letter to and deconstruction of Beethoven’s cultural legacy, Ludwig van asks its audience to consider the complex diasporic experiences of avant-garde artists in the wake of WWII. Drawing on work by Brigid Cohen, I argue for the centrality of the theme of migration and displacement in Ludwig van. And in reading two central scenes from the film, I consider, in dialogue with Scott Burnham, what light the fifty-one-year-old film’s critique of the fetishization of origins and genealogy might shed on the celebration of Beethoven’s 250th birthday in 2020, and such acts of memorization more generally. [Please note: This article contains embedded video files. These files cannot be played on all PDF readers. Current Musicology recommends Foxit PDF Reader, Adobe Acrobat, or any other PDF reader capable of reading "enriched" media.]

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