Boring Formless Nonsense

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eldritch Priest
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Magical Thinking ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Negative Capability

Boring Formless Nonsense intervenes in an aesthetics of failure that has largely been delimited by the visual arts and its avant-garde legacies. It focuses on contemporary experimental composition in which failure rubs elbows with the categories of chance, noise, and obscurity. In these works we hear failure anew. We hear boredom, formlessness, and nonsense in a way that gives new purchase to aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical questions that falter in their negative capability. Reshaping current debates on failure as an aesthetic category, eldritch Priest shows failure to be a duplicitous concept that traffics in paradox and sustains the conditions for magical thinking and hyperstition. Framing recent experimental composition as a deviant kind of sound art, Priest explores how the affective and formal elements of post-Cagean music couples with contemporary culture's themes of depression, distraction, and disinformation to create an esoteric reality composed of counterfactuals and pseudonymous beings. Ambitious in content and experimental in its approach, Boring Formless Nonsense will challenge and fracture your views on failure, creativity, and experimental music.

Contemporary Art and the Problem of Music: Towards a Musical Contemporary Art

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
G. DOUGLAS BARRETT
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Art Form

Abstract This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of ‘the contemporary’ along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art. Contemporary art emerges from the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to post-conceptual art – a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process – while contemporary music struggles with its status as a non-conceptual art form that inherits its concept from aesthetic modernism and absolute music. The article also considers the category of sound art and discusses some of the ways it, too, is at odds with contemporary art's generic and post-conceptual condition. I argue that, despite their respective claims to contemporaneity, neither sound art nor contemporary music is contemporary in the historical sense of the term articulated in art theory. As an alternative to these categories, I propose ‘musical contemporary art’ to describe practices that depart in consequential ways from new/contemporary music and sound art.

scholarly journals Digitizing artist periodicals: new methodologies from the Digital Humanities for Analysing Artist Networks

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-11
Author(s):  
Thomas Crombez
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Digital Archive ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Socially Engaged Art ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
Post War

The research project Digital Archive of Belgian Neo-Avant-garde Periodicals (DABNAP) aims to digitize and analyse a large number of artists’ periodicals from the period 1950–1990. The artistic renewal in Belgium since the 1950s, sustained by small groups of artists (such as G58 or De Nevelvlek), led to a first generation of post-war artist periodicals. Such titles proved decisive for the formation of the Belgian neo-avant-garde in literature and the visual arts. During the sixties and the seventies, happening and socially-engaged art took over and gave a new orientation to artist periodicals. In this article, I wish to highlight the challenges and difficulties of this project, for example, in dealing with non-standard formats, types of paper, typography, and non-paper inserts. A fully searchable archive of neo-avant-garde periodicals allows researchers to analyse in much more detail than before how influences from foreign literature and arts took root in the Belgian context.

From Site-specific to Site-responsive: Sound art performances as participatory milieu

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Hayes
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Relational Aesthetics ◽  
Third Order ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
The Social ◽  
Live Electronic Music ◽  
Three Stages

This article concerns context-based live electronic music, specifically performances which occur in response to a particular location or space. I outline a set of practices which can be more accurately described as site-responsive, rather than site-specific. I develop a methodological framework for site-responsive live electronic music in three stages. First, I discuss the ambiguity of the termsite-specificby drawing on its origins within the visual arts and providing examples of how it has been used within sound art. I then suggest that site-responsive performance might be a more helpful way of describing this type of activity. I argue that it affords an opportunity for music to mediate the social, drawing on Small’s idea of music as sets of third-order relationships, and Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics. Third, I suggest that with the current renewed trend for performances occurring outside of cultural institutions, it is important to be mindful of the identity of a particular site, and those who have a cultural connection to it. I make reference to a series of works within my own creative practice which have explored these ideas.

The avant-garde’s visual arts in the context of Santayana’s idea of vital liberty

Human Affairs ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Skowroński
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Universe

AbstractIn the present paper, the author looks at the political dimension of some trends in the visual arts within twentieth-century avant-garde groups (cubism, expressionism, fauvism, Dada, abstractionism, surrealism) through George Santayana’s idea of vital liberty. Santayana accused the avant-gardists of social and political escapism, and of becoming unintentionally involved in secondary issues. In his view, the emphasis they placed on the medium (or diverse media) and on treating it as an aim in itself, not, as it should be, as a transmitter through which a stimulating relationship with the environment can be had, was accompanied by a focus on fragments of life and on parts of existence, and, on the other hand, by a de facto rejection of ontology and cosmology as being crucial to understanding life and the place of human beings in the universe. The avant-gardists became involved in political life by responding excessively to the events of the time, instead of to the everlasting problems that are the human lot.

scholarly journals Fragments Over Experimental Film: Liminal Zones of Cinema, Art and Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miško Šuvaković
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Music ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Experimental Theater ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Institutional Power ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Singular Event ◽  
Unknown Control ◽  
Second World

In what follows, I will point to theorization of concept of the experimental film. My main thesis is that experimental art is based on the project, research practice, innovation and open transgressive or subversive artworks. Art focused on subversion of institutional power features as a singular event performed within a particular social relationship, as a critical actionist, engaged, or activist practice. Transgression – literally – refers to: infraction, violation of a law or an order, while in geological terms it implies penetration and expansion of the sea over the mainland. The notion of transgression relates to excess, overrunning or, more precisely, departing the familiar for the unknown, control for freedom. Experimental art was created in different disciplines such as experimental music, experimental film, experimental theater, etc. John Cage’s concept of ‘experimental music’ has been the starting point for new experimental art and artistic practices since 1950. Experimental film (experimental, new, avant-garde or neo-avant-garde cinema) has featured since the Second World War. The concept and term describe a range of filmmaking styles which are generally quite different from, and often opposed to, the practices of mainstream commercial and documentary filmmaking and entertainment-oriented cinematography. In the second and third part of the essay, I will present an analysis of the experimental films of the artists the OHO group and Neša Paripović. Article received: December 2, 2017; Article accepted: December 18, 2017; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Šuvaković, Miško. "Fragments Over Experimental Film: Liminal Zones of Cinema, Art and Theory." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies no 15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.225

The Sounds of Zombie Media

2021 ◽  
pp. 229-252
Author(s):  
Lauren Flood
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Electronic Waste ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Multimedia Art ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Tools And Techniques

This chapter investigates how do-it-yourself (DIY) cultures in New York City and Berlin make sound and music with “zombie media,” or physical materials rescued from obsolescence that are recycled, repurposed, and reanimated. In situating DIY repurposing practices within a context of conspicuous production, or the tendency to obsess over constant invention and fabrication, it explores zombie media as experimental instrument building, sound art, and multimedia art. Through solo tinkering, group workshops, concerts, and exhibits, participants employ the DIY ethos present in underground and experimental music and art scenes, as well as maker and hacker cultures, to explore the aesthetic, material, and cultural value of electronics at various life stages and afterlives. Some of their tools and techniques of repurposing include: circuit bending, hardware hacking, scavenging electronic waste, and repairing broken audio equipment. Drawing on discussions of the zombie, ranging from its original Haitian context to its widespread use as a symbol for the anxieties of late capitalism and overconsumption, the chapter shows how participants engage infrastructures of waste through an ethic of aversion, cultivating sustainability skills that demonstrate “productive” uses of time and materials, but which nevertheless embody conspicuous production. The lure of zombie media is its reanimating power—a resourcefulness-through-resistance that operates via sincerely held beliefs about labor, frugality, and conserving material goods.

Klee, Paul (1879-1940)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie Bourneuf
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Music Teacher ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Paul Klee ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Swiss German ◽  
Tone Color ◽  
Blaue Reiter ◽  
Artistic Self ◽  
Walter Gropius

Paul Klee was one of the most important and inventive figures in the development of Modernism in the visual arts. The Swiss-German artist's unusual oeuvre drew on the work of other modernist painters while also challenging foundational tenets of Modernism in painting. The son of a music teacher, Klee was a talented violinist. As an adolescent growing up in Berne, Switzerland, Klee was interested not only in the visual arts but also in poetry and music. After graduating from the Berne Gymnasium in 1898, Klee moved to Munich to study art at the academy. In 1906, Klee married the pianist Lily Stumpf; their only child was born the next year. Relatively isolated from avant-garde art, Klee undertook a prolonged artistic self-education, attempting to break down pictorial art into its elements—line, tone, color—and master them one by one. In 1911 and 1912, Klee became friendly with the artists of Der Blaue Reiter, including Vassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and August Macke, who accompanied Klee on a trip to Tunisia in 1914. Through these new connections, Klee became familiar with a broad spectrum of modernist art. In 1916, Klee, a German citizen, was drafted; he served as a clerk in Bavaria, far from the front. During the war, the Berlin dealer Herwarth Walden energetically promoted Klee's work. By 1920, many in the German avant-garde acknowledged Klee as a major artist, and Walter Gropius invited him to join the faculty of the newly established Bauhaus.

Xul Solar (1887–1963)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fernando Cortés Saavedra
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Semiotic Systems ◽  
San Fernando ◽  
Modernist Project

Associated with the most important figures of the literary and artistic avant-garde of Buenos Aires, the Argentinean painter and polyglot Xul Solar was key in connecting European movements like Expressionism, Constructivism and Dadaism to Latin American modernism. He contributed to the modernist project via the convergence in his work of depurated (simplified) flat colorful figuration and a complex iconography of pre-Columbian and religious derivation. Xul Solar lived during his youth in San Fernando, Argentina, and was equally inclined towards music and the visual arts. During a long period of travel throughout Europe, he encountered several artistic movements—from the Italian Renaissance to die Brücke—and studied linguistics and theosophy. Enthralled by his experiences abroad, Xul Solar returned to Argentina in 1924, joining the artist group Martín Fierro and elaborating on projects begun in Europe such as the creation of his artificial language, Panlingua. His fascination with elaborate semiotic systems also led him to create the game PanChess. Xul Solar’s visual works varied throughout his career from geometric abstraction to schematic figuration, from fantastic paintings to symbolic portraits. Xul Solar remains one of the most influential Latin American artists of the modern period.

Carl Michael von Hausswolff

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Cascella
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Installation Art ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Sound Installation ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Art Photography ◽  
Conceptual Research ◽  
Audio Production

AbstractFor over twenty years, Swedish artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff (born 1956 in Linköping) has been giving shape to a range of works which push the boundaries of sound experimentation and reach out into installation art, photography, video, performance and curating projects. Stemming from his experiments with tape and investigations into EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and setting up a number of ongoing collaborations with artist Leif Elggren and with a wide range of experimental musicians in the collective, site-specific sound installation freq_out, von Hausswolff's work spans the undefined territory between sound and the visual arts – he has done so, also by organising exhibitions such as the 2nd Göteborg Biennial in 2003. His audio production, using devices such as oscillators, tone generators, microphones attached to electricity circuits, is inextricably linked to his visual and conceptual research, always addressing issues of borders, interior/exterior, liminal states and hidden fluxes of energies. At the forefront of international experimentation, his work has been featured in some of the most important exhibitions and museums in the world, and his audio pieces have been published by the most remarkable avant-garde labels.

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