{"id":25,"date":"2008-05-25T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-25T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp\/?p=25"},"modified":"2008-05-25T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-25T13:00:00","slug":"purposeless_purposefulness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/2008\/05\/purposeless_purposefulness\/","title":{"rendered":"Purposeless Purposefulness"},"content":{"rendered":"
by guest blogger, Corey Dargel<\/a><\/p>\n

Greetings, everyone, and thank you to Molly for the invitation to drive this thing while she’s away.  <\/p>\n

I’ll shift into third gear immediately by raising an issue that has caused much internal conflict for me, as a composer\/performer and especially as a writer of songs — my desire to balance personal expression with multiplicity of meaning.  This conflict of mine was recently reinvigorated by a performance of Sean Griffin<\/a>‘s piece, Buffalo ’70<\/i>, at the final concert of the 2008 MATA Festival<\/a> in Brooklyn, NY.<\/p>\n

\"Buffalo70.gif\"<\/span>Buffalo ’70<\/i>
\nis a fine piece of music.  It is intricate, funny, smart, theatrical,
\nand thoroughly engaging.  The performers at the MATA concert — a
\ncombination of musicians from the New York-based ensembles Newspeak<\/a> and Either\/Or<\/a> — executed the piece with precision and conviction, and the audience responded very positively.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Griffin said some things about the piece that drastically restricted my experience of it.  In the program notes, he writes:<\/p>\n

[Buffalo ’70<\/i>] is a musical question about an encounter between John Cage and Julius Eastman… I hope to dramatize a shift in aesthetics and political strategies employed by composers at the time.  My intention is to have this work speak to the broader cultural shifts in expression and identity in the political landscape of the late 1970s and the return to a more brutally conservative America in the 1980s. <\/p>\n

In 1970, composer\/performer Julius Eastman was performing sections of John Cage’s Song Books<\/i> and included gay references in his realization of the work. Although allowed by the score itself, Cage became angry and famously objected with a violent outburst…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Before the performance, Griffin spoke briefly to the concert audience.  He clarified his intent by announcing that Julius Eastman was his favorite composer and that Buffalo ’70<\/i> is comprised of a number of John Cage’s pieces all realized with deliberate inappropriateness.  He also put forward a dubious theory that Cage’s outburst<\/a> somehow led to Eastman’s tragic personal unravelling<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Knowing that Buffalo ’70<\/i> was, at least in part, a disparaging parody of John Cage’s music all but erased its potential for multiple interpretations.  This constriction of meaning is, I think, one of the things that upset Cage about Eastman’s performance of Song Books<\/i>.  And Cage was not the only one who was upset.  The conductor of that performance, Petr Kotik<\/a>, described Eastman’s behavior as “sabotage.”<\/p>\n

All of this got me thinking: It may be that Cage represents the epitome of one kind of high-modernism — the desire to create works of art in which the personal identities and emotions of the artists are completely absent.  The opposite of that, I suppose, would be art as purely a vehicle for self-expression, or what I like to call “art as therapy.”<\/p>\n

Is the incorporation into “fine art” of identity politics and self-expression the kind of “cultural shift in expression and identity” that Griffin is referring to in his program notes?  Is the “more brutally conservative America” a reference to the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s during which Senator Helms et al attacked artists who received government funding to create so-called blasphemous works of art?  That is what I assume Griffin is talking about.  <\/p>\n

But there’s another side to that argument.  The mentality of art-as-self-expression, combined with the politically correct, uncritical acceptance of identity politics in art, has led to plenty of overly sentimental vanity projects.  This is another kind of “brutally conservative” approach to making art which is just as lamentable as the reactionary philistinism of Helms and company.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by guest blogger, Corey Dargel Greetings, everyone, and thank you to Molly for the invitation to drive this thing while she’s away.  I’ll shift into third gear immediately by raising an issue that has caused much internal conflict for me, as a composer\/performer and especially as a writer of songs — my desire to balance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-25","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}