I've been reading a little more deeply into the history of Conceptual Art lately, as part of a broader investigation into imperative / instructional language. (I'm working on a series of poems written in the form of "instructions.")

The history of Conceptual Art is important to students of instructions because somewhere in that history the emphasis shifts from the production of actual, material, "artistic" objects to instead the production of plans or instructions for artworks. The plans themselves, then, become the artist's work; whether the artwork that they posit is ever realized, or whether it even can be realized, is immaterial.

Ideas alone can be works of art. ... All ideas need not be made physical.
—Sol LeWitt, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," 1969

The main book I'm reading is Conceptual Art : A Critical Anthology, edited by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson. It picks 1966 as the starting date for Conceptual Art (the same date Lucy Lippard starts with in her excellent book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, 1966-1972). The figure presented as the central figure with reference to instruction pieces, in the Alberro & Stimson anthology, seems to be Lawrence Weiner. In 1968, Weiner begins to present the artwork only in the form of a statement, say for instance his 1969 piece ONE QUART GREEN EXTERIOR INDUSTRIAL ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL. (Interestingly, Weiner doesn't use the imperative form, which he describes as "fascistic.")

Weiner receives a lot of praise from various writers contributing to the book for the way that his pieces de-commodify art (since the text is the art, they can be transmitted by any medium, including word of mouth; in addition, anyone who wants to "actualize" the piece described can do so by simply buying the materials and performing the action). All of these things are true, but I'm puzzled as to why he's presented as the vanguard figure here, as his pieces do not seem substantially different from work being produced nearly a decade earlier by artists associated with the Fluxus group, most notably Dick Higgins and Yoko Ono.

In 1962, Yoko Ono exhibits "instructions as paintings" at Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, the earliest piece anthologized in the Instruction Paintings anthology dates to 1961.

PAINTING TO SEE THE SKIES

Drill two holes into a canvas.
Hang it where you can see the sky.

(Change the place of the hanging.
Try both the front and the rear windows,
to see if the skies are different.)

Summer 1961

Occuring concurrently is Higgins' Danger Music series, a set of linguistic scores for conceptual "music":

DANGER MUSIC NUMBER ONE

Spontaneously catch hold of a hoist hook and be raised up at least three stories.

April 1961

I find the total omission of Higgins and Ono from Conceptual Art : A Critical Anthology to be peculiar at best and troubling at worst. Why aren't either of them mentioned even in Joseph Kosuth's essay "Art After Philosophy," in which he cites pre-66 forerunners to Conceptual Art such as Robert Morris' Card File (1962) or Rauschenberg's Erased DeKooning Drawing (1953)? (I wonder particularly if Ono's omission can't be chalked up to art-world sexism and racism.)

Labels: art, conceptual art, instructions

Saturday, May 29, 2004
2:02 PM
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Regular readers of this weblog know that I'm interested in rule-generated music, and in the process of making any kind of art. These two ideas dovetail in the Oblique Strategies, a deck of creative suggestions designed by musician Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt.

I've used the Oblique Strategies with some regularity for a long time now, and I recommend them to everyone. But when I used them in my recording sessions with Chris, I found myself occasionally craving a set more tailored to the specific possibilities of group improvisation.

So a few weeks ago I made up a deck of 56 cards derived directly from my own musical process. I call these strategies the Possible Moves, and they can be found here.

If there's any interest, I'll put these up as a series of PDFs so that people can print them out and make their own decks.

Labels: creative_process, instructions

Saturday, May 11, 2002
11:20 AM
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From the liner notes to Karlheinz Stockhausen's Hymnen (a recording that I can't find available anywhere):

"Hide what you compose in what you hear.
Cover what you hear.
Place something next to what you hear.
Place something far away from what you hear.
Support what you hear.
Continue for a long time an event you hear.
Transform an event until it becomes unrecognizable.
Transform an event that you hear into the one you composed last.
Compose what you expect to come next.
Compose often, but also listen for long periods to what is already composed, without composing.
Mix all these instructions.
Increasingly accelerate the current of your intuition."

Labels: creative_process, instructions

Sunday, May 05, 2002
4:57 PM
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Instructions from Otomo Yoshihide:

"Play loudly and create new sounds before the previous sounds disappear." (governing the musicians on tracks 1 and 4 on this record)

"Do not respond to the sound of others." (governing the musicians playing tracks 2 and 3 on the same record)

This reviewer writes: "[This music] becomes difficult on a whole other level than normally difficult music."

Labels: instructions

Saturday, March 16, 2002
10:26 PM
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John Zorn: "My concern is not so much with how things sound, as with how things work."

Reasonably thorough notes on John Zorn's "game pieces" can be found on this John Zorn FAQ, if you scroll down.

"A game piece ... is a method of group improvisation where the structure of the piece (the rules of the game) is set by a prompter at performance time, and the players have complete freedom within the structure. ... Just as people playing games or sports must follow certain rules which determine how they interact, but not exactly what they do (in baseball, for instance, the infield fly rule says what to do when one occurs, but there is no rule governing when a player must hit an infield fly), in his game pieces, Zorn creates structures and situations for improvisors to perform in, while providing little, if any, actual notated music."

Feel free to splurge on this 7-CD set of Zorn's game music, or just click on this link to hear a minute or so of Hockey.

Further reading: this article goes into greater detail about the inner workings of the game piece Cobra (the title is taken, I believe, from an old TSR wargame).

Labels: creative_process, instructions, music_commentary

Friday, March 15, 2002
2:32 PM
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In considering how a band could operate "from a formal manifesto," Douglas suggests some basic rules that have been of some benefit to other bands, including "Not everybody has to be playing all the time. If it makes sense to sit out part or all of a song, do," which reminds me of this piece of acting advice from Christopher Walken, quoted secondhand over at Consumptive: "When you're in a scene and you don't know what you're gonna do, don't do anything."

As for myself, I've always found Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies to be a pretty good set of rules for any creative endeavor, and music-making is no exception. In addition, I like some of the mottos that come from the Zen Guitar Dojo, especially their "Simplicity and Repetition," and the more mystical "Fill yourself with the sky, then play."

As you draw closer to the world of conceptual music, of course, you begin to find works that are generated by nothing more than musicians following a particular set of rules, perhaps most notably Terry Riley's minimalist compostion In C. The score of this piece is available here (as a PDF) and it consists of one page of 53 short musical clusters and two pages of rules for how the musicians (on "any number of any kind of instrument") should use them.

Labels: creative_process, instructions, music_commentary

Wednesday, March 13, 2002
6:46 PM
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