Unhook The Stars / And Take Them Down

Whatever you do, don't call it Kafka-esque. Just call it the Kafka Effect: the willful destruction of an artist's work, either by the artist himself / herself, or by others working via the sanction or under the command of the artist. After all, it was Franz Kafka who told his dear friend and de facto literary executor Max Brod:

"Of all my writings the only books that can stand are: The Judgment, The Stoker, Metamorphosis, Penal Colony, Country Doctor and the short story "Hunger-Artist"... When I say that those five books and the short story can stand, I do not mean that I wish them to be reprinted and handed down to posterity. On the contrary, should they disappear altogether that would please me best."

Brod did not do as Kafka asked, but Dora Dymant did as he ordered; she burned whatever manuscripts were in her possession. His body wasting away from tuberculosis, Kafka, ever the enigmatic counter-irritant-- no accident he should turn his back on the bourgeois virtues of posterity -- made sure there was something cataclysmic about his life's undoing. I'm not one to speculate on what were without doubt complicated motives, but it was almost as if Kafka grew weary of, and, more to the point, bored with waiting for his demise and settled upon the idea of spurring it on by disposing of all those fictional characters who were, in miniature, in distortion, in abstract torment, in abject anonymity, him. Or at least could bear witness for and against him. More chilling is the fact that, like some middle manager whose compromises have led to his individual will becoming indistinguishable from the "responsibilities" associated with his sinecure, Kafka' delegated the murderous deed. He transformed a single, dismissive wave of the authorial hand into the reaper's scythe. Kafka's acts were private, situated well within the realm of self-determination, but they smack of fascism: impersonal, ruthless, and fixated, all rhetoric to the contrary, on the mind-altering power of aesthetics.

I was prompted to think of Kafka recently not just because I went back the "The Great Wall of China" for inspiration, but also because I've been reading a new Spanish novel, The Shadow Of The Wind by one Carlos Ruiz Zafón, the plot of which turns on the systematic, copy by copy, destruction of an obscure author's oeuvre. The terrifying figure who is, yes, burning these books is himself charred. In his presence, cigarette smoke takes on the qualities of brimstone. And, as if he weren't demonic enough already, he operates under an alias -- a pseudonym? -- drawn from one of the novels of which he is in pursuit, a name which is itself an alias adopted by Satan. Of course, Kafka himself -- rather, the conditioning I have been subjected to after havind read Kafka -- ruined the mystery of this book for me; 50 pages of rather brisk exposition into The Shadow Of The Wind and it was obvious to me that Laín Coubert was really the author himself, Julian Carax, or an individual in Carax's possession. Is there something archetypal about this idea? And is it a purely modern archetype, a critical piece of collective unconscious infrastructure that is nevertheless entirely post-Gutenberg?

I don't think it is too much to use the adjective "demonic" here, for there is the sense that, as much as the destruction of art is a destruction of human work and not life, it is still destruction undertaken in extreme disobedience of some natural law. But subtle variations on the core notion exist, such as works of art whose demolition is built-in and / or whose maladaptation to the ephemeral is enshrined as virtuous decadence. Jean Tinguely's "Homage To New York" is perhaps the most famous example of the former, while Andrew Goldsworthy's various constructions made from pebbles, icicles, leaves, stamens and petals do not completely defy being interpreted in the context of the latter. However, Tinguely's piece is capable of evoking disgust -- one friend of mind likened the "homage" to an act of public masturbation, by which I suppose he was indicating his distaste for spectacular but specific and measurable displays of wasteful energy -- while Goldsworthy's works prompt deep reflections on the endurance of forms despite the fleeting of nature of that on which we rely for the externalization of those forms. The eternal dance of concepts and precepts... Goldsworthy's assemblages may be the ultimate -- but which I mean paradoxical -- image of aesthetic imperviousness we have. (The trouble is, I have not quite worked out all of the how this is so just yet, though I do know that there is internal debate on the subject of technology ["with a small 't'"] standing between myself and egress from this question.) In this respect, his work is not unlike that of free improvisers in the British musical community; there is something quintessentially "English" at work in these creative endeavors.

Back on track with more straight-forwardly troubling or just plain perplexing cases, consider the man who is now arguably considered to be the most significant Russian artist of the Modern era, Kazimir Malevich. Encouraged by political or economic circumstances to "remake" many of his most important, and several of his lesser paintings, Malevich habitually antedated these works. For the arch-Suprematist, the process of canonization itself was a work of art, chronological accuracy aside. According to Elena Basner:

"[Malevich] embarked on the unprecedented step of reconstructing his own creative path in accordance with the theoretical ideas being professed at the time. Here we have a phenomenon without analogies in the history of twentieth-century art, whereby an artist reinterprets his entire oeuvre at the end of his life, from the point of view of a mature master, theoretician, and teacher. He rewrites his own story life story and creates a new, theoretically adjusted chronology, as if attempting to go back through his life and make a 'fair copy' of it."

In spite of the confusions thus engendered, of course, the leap from the "work" to the "body of work" is a logical, not theological, one. For had Malevich not been working with a summation in mind ever since he began his career in earnest? So he might have us believe. Of course, Malevich was also (re-)painting from memory as he painted over what once was, in one respect capitulating to the whims of recollection rather than, as in Kafka's case, subjecting those predilections to scorn and abuse. But there is a dark side to the decorative. Embellishment and revision, vital to the finish one puts upon a production, can, in their cumulative scope and weight, become destructive elements, especially when plied by the evil genius of an artist tempted into collusion with the notion of the "second chance". Malevich elected to confound rather than consume for all time. The effect has been about as equally devastating, but the pace with which you experience the unease of learning that there is no more is very different. Ripples outward, oozing, you follow one example into multiple examples. With Kafka, the effect is that of stumbling blindly through dense forest, violently fighting forward, only to ultimately put your foot down into black, bottomless emptiness.

But aren't artists entitled to the suppression of completed works? Isn't their work their personal property? Whether or not the artist is the best judge of his or her own output, doesn't he or she have both the authority and the power to apply those judgments? Another contrarian, Foucault, suddenly springs to mind, specifically his observation that the "influence" networks of power (here meant less despotically that my previous use of it suggests) have "on the often insignificant aspects of the hierarchy" is most in need of comprehension. When tools -- modes of knowledge, circumscribed natural forces, other artifacts designed to meet the specifications of a unique utility or set of utilities -- are employed in order to generate wreckage, what we witness is as much the exertion of power over one's self as power over something external and objective to the self. Actions cause behaviors to be reproduced in very organized ways. This connection is made with a cold clicking. Kafka could not stop the penalties he exacted upon himself, whether he intended them to be punitive or not, from proliferating.

None of those questions yields up a definitive answer, really. I want to say that bad work is self-suppressing, and, moreover, such censorship can never be complete. As with Malevich's chronological bowdlerizations, history, in the sense of collective knowledge active not just in other cultural artifacts but alive in individual, happening human perceptions, eventually rejects all such efforts. The truth seeps out no matter how cleanly swept the grave appears to be. And, as Italo Calvino points out, censorship is an act of violence against the very process of artistic production, and the lasting wound it leaves takes on the character of an addiction:

"To be sure, repression must... allow an occasional breathing space, must close an eye every now and then, alternate indulgence with abuse, with a certain unpredictability in its caprices; otherwise, if nothing more remains to be repressed, the whole system rusts and wears down." (If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, 236)

As well, and in many cases, those works -- failed experiments, juvenilia, fragments, commissions that don't pan out -- which artists choose to downplay in or excise from their c.v.'s serve as the good, old-fashioned Shakespearian "foils", reflecting just how one actually did emerge into the light of greatness (or competency) from out of shadows of anonymity. All comparisons imply the presence of a nothing -- nothing in common, nothing to differentiate the work from a predecessor work, the out of left field / out of nowhere / ex nihilo that abolishes context and isolates works within the open space of the character for "naught", the negation of tradition. All evaluations carry zeroes in their columns, and those digits don't just hold places in the operations of addition and subtraction.

By what means do accomplishments become apocrypha? Is such relegation less a destruction than an undoing? The latter, as a verb, augurs a make-the-film-run-backwards action in which original form is still hinted at. Imagine pulling the pins out of a marionette and letting the limbs, head and torso tumble into one another as they make their way down into an inanimate heap. However, when the "work", such a musical work, is less an object and more of an event, and therefore more reliant upon performance for its manifestation, maybe it becomes folly to make statements about suppression and obliteration.

Of course, music is not singular in being a performance-centric art. Drama and dance also rely on agents -- I don't mean personal representatives -- and upon very corporeal means of recreation. One could argue that to read a novel is to "perform" it privately, to stage its action in one's own consciousness, but the points-of-view, characters, deeds, settings, and props that accrete in one's mind as one reads grow like quartz in the most lightless of caverns. You may be able to feel the smooth transparent surfaces of the crystals, you may even be able to imagine how the transparencies of various thicknesses overlap to craft bright, cloudy patterns, but, in this space, you'll never be able to see much more than a jangling mass of dim glimmerings. (Of course, works of fiction that are nothing but illumination can be read once, if that many times, and then safely put away; in such cases, there really is nothing worth returning to.) Such an argument also ignores how the act of reading takes such a very long time, days, weeks, months, other chunks of time taffy-pulled and -twisted even further if one factors in re-readings -- longer than the time it takes to listen to music "in one sitting", even if the music in question is Wagner's Ring cycle or LaMonte Young's The Tortoise, his dreams and journeys. Moreover, reading is an activity the pleasures of which are normally accepted only to be amplified by huge interruptions, by tiring, by obstacles to making enough time to finish (interacting with) the damn thing (I suppose one could build a strong case that John Cage was interested in making music more like literature by concentrating on these paradoxical delights in music.) And, too, on going back over (what the...) and peeking forward. This you can do with a CD, but in not a live performance (those prepositions are absolutely vital) -- the latter at least not in any literal sense, even though music allows artists to mold the plastic forms of anticipation and tedium in ways artists laboring in other media cannot.

At first, I thought my next question would be: "is the phenomenon of artists deliberately disowning, concealing, and / or destroying their works more or less common in music?" But I see my question is whether composers and especially contemporary musician s would even be able to alter the features of their oeuvre using such methods. As more and more critically important musical works exist only as magnetic impulses on tape and as one and zeros digital files (the precise nature of those ones and zeros defined by meta-ones and meta-zeros), musical works therefore impossible for a number of reasons to reproduce in the aesthetic, not industrial, sense of the term, is music is more or less susceptible to the vagaries of artist's will?

Let's say that I burned a hypothetical last existing copy of the score to Alan Hovhaness' Mysterious Mountain. Someone could still hire a transcription agent who, working from a either a widely available or private recording of the piece, could produce a score reasonably close, perhaps even identical, to the original. Scores, being primarily instructions, are always approximations anyway, however structured and codified the system of notation may be. But let us go further and imagine that I somehow managed to cause every known recording of Mysterious Mountain to disintegrate. An individual could still perform the necessary research into symphony concert programming and, if allocated the requisite amount of time and money, locate enough musicians who know the piece, can play it accurately from memory, and can produce a new recording which in turn can be transcribed. Admittedly, in this last case, our conjectural patron will end up with something lesser than the lost original, yet still recognizable as being closely -- very closely -- derived from it.

Equally hypothetically, let's say I destroy the "master" digital file of Steve Roden's Resonant Cities. Resonant Cities is a piece of music realized without the benefit a score written in any sort of vernacular. The music in this case is inseparable from an artifact. Roden's is a piece that can never be duplicated in the sense that the substances incorporated into its construction are too "natural" to be reproduced. One of the bases for Resonant Cities are field recordings of specific events, particular places, unique visitations of sites, and one-of-a-kind climactic conditions. More crucially, the identity and attributes of the recording and post-production equipment utilized, what settings were applied to that equipment, how these settings and the physical parts of the machinery were adjusted in the process of crafting the sounds... that is, those variables that are inconsequential to the transcriber's consideration of the movements of Mysterious Mountain are constitutive of Resonant Cities. Unless all those details are logged in some interpretable fashion, and recorded so minutely that their reading guarantees the "experiment" can, in part, be replicated, then the finished product really is finished. However, with his understanding of the nature of digital files, Roden could have made a potentially infinite number of copies of his work and secreted those copies all over the world; reproduction of digital media, if executed minus the interference of file compression, renders each copy a "master", each equivalent in the richness of the information it contains. In effect, every CD of Resonant Cities ever manufactured is an exact copy of the original, and, as long as one copy still exists, so does the work itself. But what if, with a wave of my hand, I make it impossible for all playback devices in the work to parse or decode those discs? Although far-fetched, it is still much more likely than every musician in the world suddenly becoming musically illiterate, or ever trumpet player in the world having their memory of how to hold and blow through their instrument erased. The point I wish to make is that purely mechanical means are adequate to the complete destruction of Roden's music, while Hovhaness', while nothing much more than a baggy collection of symbols, is more obdurate. A recollection of Resonant Cities (memory is one of Roden's themes) by even its creator can at best render a description of how the piece's sounds were experienced, singularly and in toto, whereas a memory of Mysterious Mountain shared by an individual possessing non-unique expertise can contribute to the actual reconstruction of that piece. And again, although the Mysterious Mountains thus cobbled together above are "different" from Hovhaness', they are not radically different, I trust, in either body or spirit. In the Hovhaness cultural continuum, performance does not exist just for performance's sake, which actually does apply in Roden's case, despite the apparent "hard" material reality of his post-modern musique concrète. One consequence of his musical reasoning is that he transforms every sonic episode to which he turns his attention into performance. In order to make himself an artist, he first must make himself an audience. All composers / improvisers behave in this manner, of course, and are even instructed to pursue it as a discipline. But I cannot help but feel that the conceptual schools that have sprouted up around the fringes of electronic music lift the sanctions held against "mere listening" by more conservative practitioners and critics. Understand too that these considerations have no real bearing on the aesthetic quality of the work being discussed; they only open one path to be explored in the question of what a musical work is, and how, as fluid as the musical work has always been, it may be in the process of becoming even more fluid and yet simultaneously more susceptible to marginalization.

Sounds, such as those that populate Resonant Cities, are sounds that a large percentage of listeners would be quick to say are strictly not music, are noise, organized noise but noise nonetheless. Yet somehow Resonant Cities constitutes the more unique "work of art" and expression of individual "genius" than Mysterious Mountain in that the instabilities the former's maker have introduced into the thing made, into the techniques, the methods of making, themselves, and even into "his" raw materials are unmistakably distinctive. As generative as these subversions of hegemonic technological practices may be, however, they still perpetuate specific technologies. For these works to survive, a certain amount of the artist's creative power must remain invested in the networks that prevent the artificial illumination cast by certain devices, applications, and consensual apprehensions from waning towards obsolescence. Such methods keep technologies -- and here I want the disreputable connotations associated with that concept to be at play -- on life support. The "movement" or "school" of contemporary electronic music has no center other than the virtual one of the personal computer, perhaps, more specifically, the laptop, and, most specifically, the Apple PowerBook and the social, culturally, intellectually, geographical and economic -- and all historically over-determined -- predispositions of one Steve Jobs. (A related question is whether "sound art" of this sort demands that the listener know as much as possible about how the work was made -- it never discretely is made in the sense of being recreated with each new performance, a predicate which means much less here than re-played, so I leave the making in the past tense -- in order to appreciate it / an experience of it? But I think that question is a whole other essay in and of itself.) On the other hand, the "big ideas" of the Western canon which gird Hovhaness' composition -- scales and modes, counterpoint, tonal centers, tempo, etc. -- endure with impressive efficiency. Though these are capacious abstractions, they are wide and thin, and theirs is a very tensile, blade-like austerity. They can and have slotted into every conceivable verbal, musical and graphical discourse by which musical knowledge can be transferred. Both scenarios are parasitic, but the fault may lie in my choice of conceit.

So which is more perishable, the Hovhaness or the Roden? From an more musicological perspective, it appears that, historically, fashion has eroded Hovhaness' work already, and so perhaps the specific traditions with which his work is aligned (American mysticism, alea, "exoticism") is more precariously positioned within the institutions that sustain "classical" music: symphony orchestras; music schools; recording companies. Meanwhile, there are hundreds or even thousands of artists spanning the globe who are working with the materials and in the manner of Steve Roden. These individuals may not even be aware that they are colleagues, divided as they are by socio-political factors, language, and physical distance. At the risk of sounding anthropologically and economically naive, technology -- not technological innovations or even teleological actions, but rather the impulse to design and make actual things -- transcends cultural barriers. One could say technology outpaces culture in its spread, but how does something that is universally "grass roots" spread, exactly? True, technological artifacts can carry any number cultures within themselves, and thus technological artifacts are serviceable, within certain limits, in terms of technological determinism. But expressions of culture that are truly artistic... I think they are easier to ignore, and to reject than the utilitarian contrivances that provide them entree into new cultures. If I am in the Sudan, I may choose to block all broadcasts of American pop music within my immediate surroundings. (Minorities can filter and censor in this as easily as majorities do, and perhaps do it more often and conscientiously than we would like to admit.) Kelis' lyrics may be unintelligible to me as a native Sudanese, but, even if I the words to "Milkshake" [?] translated for me, they would still be desperately decontextualized and thus possess little significance for me beyond the alien character of the point-of-view they communicate. I may, effectively, hear "Milkshake" and still keep it at bay without killing it. I still have my radio, and on it I may somehow be inundated with stray signals. Worse, I may discover that Sudanese pop musicians have been listening to Kelis and have been seduced by her. Their music may begin make audible reference to American pop music. If I smash the radio, I smash more than an appliance on which to receive music. I have destroyed one of Keith Rowe's primary instruments: a means with which to capture, manipulate, and transmit sound. Whether those "sounds" are of Kelis or not is of secondary... or tertiary... concern. I've just committed overkill, my resistance has failed insomuch as it has cut off one potential source of support, and I've just contributed a little more waste to the world, an amount equal to or surpassing what I would have contributed if I had just gone out a bought a bigger, fancier shortwave set.

The question remains: if I am out to destroy music, what am I out to destroy? Scores? Records? Inventors? Microchip manufacturers? Do I go chasing vibrations? Do I hunt down musicians? I fear the answer is that I target entire cultures. I fear the answer involves striking at human consciousness and human sacredness in the form of a human habit of being Agostino Di Scipio has described this way: "the work of art is always created by creating the technique of its making." I fear the answer involves fascism, the corruption of culture, the co-optation of the cultural apparatus, the promotion of what Veblen termed "trained incapacity" over artisanship and creative curiosity, and the tidy elimination of cultural dissidence. I fear it involves the coddling of a kind of selectivity that, fed imprudently, distends and gluts with the impulse towards genocide.

I've not been circumspect in brandishing this word "fascism". Is my aim to link, as in some intelligence report, artists and tyrants -- even if metaphorically? Have we truly lost musical traditions to the machinations of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Milosevic, even Sadaam Hussein? Didn't these evil men -- Hitler the postcard painter, Hussein the romance novelist, Mao the storefront philosophizer -- also break and demolish cultural artifacts and cultural relationships by means of exhaustion, abuse, by over-playing their hands? Among other things, fascism is pageantry perverted. Art can also be made to say and to do more than it can nefariously, leaving certain aesthetic operations and notions and exemplars threadbare, frayed, broken-down, tainted, or bludgeoned into caricatures of themselves. "Social realism", Heidegger, Furtwängler, the "UFA Style"... And yet, in a grander moral / aesthetic accounting, haven't we gained new artistic traditions from the opposition that met these regimes? The 80's and 90's have seen a great renascence of "degenerate art" the Nazis pilloried, defaced and demolished, from George Grozs' caricatures [?] to Ernst Krenek's opera Jonny Spielt Auf. As is so often the case, the battle against art is a losing one. Not even Kafka could call himself a champion, or, qua The Hollies, a King Midas in reverse; he changed our vocabulary, he gave us a name for experiences we had previously kept in the dark, allowed us to yelp out these names so as to warn others and, simply, so as to signal our distress. Kafka-esque. An adjective whose continued real-world efficacy is disquieting, though in the final analysis I am glad to have it at my disposal. An adjective I actually saw applied to the predicament faced by Tom Hanks' character in the recent Steven Spielberg film The Terminal, which, I protest, is much more Capra-esque. After all, both Franz and Frank confronted the horrors of being human, and both deflected those horrors into view using mirrors; their favored angles of reflection were quite divergent and the comforts they kept with them in their observation posts would have been frightening and even a bit painful had they switched places.

I can be calm. My paranoia is baseless, even if my fears are not. Destruction of any given work of art is till not the complete annihilation of knowledge of how that work of art functioned, nor of the proficiencies vital to the making of new works of art. Maybe the large-scale forgettings, then rememberings we label "discoveries" and "insights", those wrought imitations of what has already been wrought before us, and perhaps four our benefit, are our cultural fate (as the Hindus believe, nothing is perfectible in this life). Whenever a work of art passes from history -- into ahistorical time? into nothingness? into what? -- some other work always takes that work's place. We just have to be mindful of this process, and remorseless in our assessment of gaps and gaps apparently filled. Art really is too important to be left to artists, just as religion is far too significant to be given over to the clergy. Art is release, and art is released. Every time we interact with a work of art, we have the opportunity to acknowledge art as technology: as that which grounds certain obligations, such as recognizing the highly evocative overtones that, eliding each other only to converge here and there, arise from the mutual recognition of each other's essential humanity. We cannot play at being Prometheus forever.

~ Joe Milazzo

Posted by joe on July 4, 2004 11:41 AM