From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1998 19:18:06 -0500
Subject: Re: Re. Cage and Nietzsche & the unnameable & etc B


Malgosia, you wrote-

>In Boston, where I used to live, there was an excellent classical guitarist 
>who played on subway platforms.  When subways came, he would simply continue
>playing through the noise.  He would play Giuliani or Sor or Bach, or
>whatever he was playing at the time, through the noise, and when the subway 
>left the music would re-emerge on the other and of the noise, simply 
>continuing its continuity.  I wanted to say "asserting its continuity".  
>Was the music "asserting" anything?  Was the playing-through pedagogical?  
>Would he have "played through" if there had been nobody on the platform 
>at the time?  I don't know; I never thought of asking him.  

It seems every city has these incredible musicians hidden in plain view
at every corner, in every nook and cranny.  We remember a black
saxophonist on the Spadina tunnel in Toronto - a long, booming set of
corridors which, many years back, was a fairly abandoned passage from 10
pm onwards (not anymore).  This fellow used to play there for hours on
end, whether there were people or not - in fact, we once sat at one of
the entrance steps from the street and heard a whole 'concert' without
him ever knowing we were there.  That was our way of answering that same
question - he was playing, not for the sake of playing, not for the
people or the pennies that were [not] thrown his way, but 'for his own
sake'.  Most musicians will tell you that music is addictive - it is a
physiological necessity.  Like oxygen.

Somehow we really do not feel that this radical 'experiencialism' stands
against the 'realization' of art, in the situationist sense of the term
(did not the 'construction of situations aim precisely at displacing the
center of perception towards such an 'experiencialism', a drift-line, a
mapping of the unknown emotions resulting from a unity of behaviour in
time, a psychogeography in process?).  What it stands against, or
better, indifferent to, is the notion that art could ever be subject to
an aesthetic valuation - a way of being in the world, a style of
producing, an emotion of the beautiful, a need even to teach others. 
For, we hold, that the realization of art is inseparable from the
artist's realization that art cannot teach anything to anybody, that it
can only be a means to teach oneself what powers Life, in control of its
conditions of production, can bring forth, and the consistent means
(tekne) to do so.

Vercors correcting the imperfection in the line of the breast stands for
the artist's realization that one cannot teach, one can only learn, and
by learning make one's selections, ie transform.  His was an aesthetic
selection (following your storytelling) and aesthetic selections are
always a source of horror - but there are other kinds of selection (even
if by itself, anti-aestheticism does not qualify as one).  Which
experience and how - those are the difficult questions that emerge when
technique presents at last its political nature - and we get back to
what is life-affirmative and what is life-denying, not by a formal
canon, but as a function of the consistency of a process, its
'coefficient of transversality'.

LC

Was Soutine an extreme case of the autism of painters?  Soutine saw an
entire century of the most depraved butchering...the avenue of blood
cutting through the picturesquely deformed village.


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