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The Ballad of John (Cage) and Yoko

May 19, 2010 in Music, Neighborhood Scenes, Teaching by Bryan

Today my “Downtown Scenes” class will be considering conceptual art and performance and the stirrings of minimalism in music, painting, and sculpture. Some analogies and overlaps with the world of poetry we’ve been talking about and will continue to talk about as we move into the Second Generation New York School later this week. The first two figures we spent intensive time with were Ginsberg and O’Hara. Today we’ll think about the vast influence of John Cage.

Here’s my favorite early Cage clip. I know I’ve posted it before, but in case you weren’t reading at that point — trust me. It’s worth the time:

Here’s a 2007 performance of the same piece at Brown University.

Our reading for today includes Calvin Tomkins’s seminal New Yorker profile of Cage, originally published in 1965 and later included in his book Bride and the Bachelors. It’s not the most academic take on Cage, but I wanted to use it in part to consider it as a product of the period itself: it’s chatty, gossipy, and works to create Tomkins’s persona almost as much as Cage’s. But it also allows us to think about Cage before the longevity of his influence could have been known.

Our primary text, though, is Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, originally published in 1964 and expanded in 1970, with a new introduction by John Lennon (“Hi! My name is John Lennon / I’d like you to meet Yoko Ono”). Grapefruit is primarily a book of instructions, what some performance scholars call “event scores.” They are conceptual pieces that present themselves variously as instructions for music, dance, painting, film, or other artistic performances. Like musical scores, they do not depend on the composer being present to perform them, often blurring the line between artist and audience. (To what degree that’s actually true will be part of our discussion.) A number of these instruction pieces are collected as part of her website; she also regularly tweets instructions that work in the same vein as these early pieces.

Ono met John Cage through her first husband, the Japanese avant-garde composer Ichiyanagi Toshi, who had taken part in Cage’s seminar on Experimental Composition at the New School (along with a host of others who would become important to the Downtown Scene). She made her loft space on Chambers Street available for early experimental performances and loosely affiliated with Fluxus artists, based more or less in SoHo, who also operated under Cage’s influence. (The MoMA blog just last week ran a feature on Yoko’s Fluxus wallpaper featuring an imagine from her famous Film No. 4.)

Here’s a fairly recent clip of Ono reading from her instruction pieces:

I can’t remember where I read it, but somewhere I’ve encountered the claim that John Lennon thought of the lyrics to “Imagine” as akin, generically, to Yoko’s instruction pieces, which I suppose makes it appropriate to wrap up this post with Yoko singing that song:


P.S. If we have time at the end of class today, we’ll take a quick field trip to SoHo to see Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room. This class is turning out to be pretty fun — at least for me!

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California Here We Come? Hollister Wipes Out DKNY

June 9, 2009 in Neighborhood Scenes by Bryan

Bowery Boogie reports that the six-story DKNY mural that has dominated the corner of Broadway and Houston since 1992 is, as of yesterday, history:

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I somehow missed that fact when I pedaled home after work at the end of the day.

Here, for archival purposes, is what had been there for almost two decades:

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(Photo from Flaming Pablum‘s “Vanishing Downtown” pages)

Arriving close on the heels of Donna Karan’s corporate founding in 1989, the mural must have been viewed by survivors of SoHo’s transformation in the 80s as the coup de grâce of the fashion industry’s takeover of an art neighborhood. (Anyone have documentation of the neighborhood’s original reaction? I’m curious.) It’s not the sort of landmark typically mourned by those who mourn the lost city. And yet, almost twenty years ain’t a bad run, especially in this neighborhood, and I’m sure it will be missed by many.

As the Times reported a few years ago, the mural took on new meanings after 9/11, due to the prominence of the World Trade Center peeking through the sign’s oversized letters:

No thought was given at Donna Karan International [after 9/11] to changing the
DKNY mural that has overlooked Broadway and Houston Street since 1989 [sic].
Hand-painted from a Peter Arnell photograph taken out of a seaplane
window, it shows a panorama of Manhattan Island as seen through four
cutout letters. The World Trade Center, framed by a soft cloud bank, is
unmistakable in the upper crook of the N.

“The critical thing is
that you don’t change history,” said Mr. Arnell, the founder and chief
executive of the Arnell Group, the advertising agency responsible for
the DKNY campaign. “You don’t see it differently. You understand it
differently.”

Racked reports on the design for what will come next: it’s more than a little annoying that New York’s unofficial colors — black and white (what better typifies New York fashion, high and low?) — are being replaced by a boring, if wholesome, California beige, the “NY” of Donna Karan’s corporate logo replaced by Hollister’s (and parent company A&F’s) geocultural orientation: California.

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Blech.

Also: DKNY’s Facebook memorial to the mural!

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An Ego the Size of Manhattan

December 8, 2008 in Art, Television by Bryan

A painter friend pointed me in the direction of last night’s 60 Minutes profile on Julian Schnabel (described, by said friend, as a fifth-rate painter, a second-rate conceptual artist, and a first-rate film director, which I think is apt).

It’s an interesting overview of his career, which skyrocketed in the early 80s, and it culminates in a bit of spleen-venting over how badly Robert Hughes trashed him back in the day (now almost three decades ago).


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When his third film, the exquisite The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, came out in 2007, the New York Review of Books ran what I thought was a terrific overview of his career by Sanford Schwartz. His first film, the biopic Basquiat, offers a shrewd glance backward the downtown painting scene in the 80s (and certainly is more watchable than the terrible, terrible 1980 Merchant Ivory film Jane Austen in Manhattan, whose only redeeming feature is that it captures the grit of a few street scenes and unfinished loft spaces that now are valued in the millions). Schnabel’s second film, Before Night Falls, also has New York content — though mostly at the end, when the Cuban exile novelist Reinaldo Arena, played by Javier Bardem, kills himself in the city in 1990. It’s the only one of Schnabel’s films I’ve only seen once, which means I probably need to give it another viewing.

If Schnabel’s films are virtually flawless, his painting might be described as merely interesting. But as the critic Sianne Ngai has argued, even conceptual art that is merely interesting is probably going to be more interesting than aesthetic judgments (like Hughes’s) that claim a sort of finality on the subject. “[A]esthetic judgments are not in
themselves interesting,” she concludes, though “their time-consuming and ongoing justifications are.” As my painter friend pointed out, Schnabel has clearly won the old Schnabel-Hughes feud of the 1980s. Probably because his work — and his ongoing ego-driven autobiography — turned out to be more interesting than anyone else’s claims to the contrary.

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Everybody ♥ Banksy

October 3, 2008 in Art, Neighborhood Scenes, Politics by Bryan

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Seems like all NY media are fixated on Banksy, NMTE. Suddenly every piece of street art downtown’s being fixated on with attribution speculations abounding. The comments sections of blogs (regrettably not ours — we need to have a lurker amnesty post soon!) bristle with debates about the more identifiable points of his style.

Gawker, Gothamist, and the Times report on the above mural, which went up earlier in the week in SoHo (Wooster and Grand). One of the painter’s girlfriend (as reported on another blog) told a passerby that Jeffrey Deitch had something to do with it.

The super cool SuperTouch blog smells another rat a few blocks away, on Broadway just above Canal; they report that Banksy’s gone legit, rented the wall space, and hired a painting crew to put these up:

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Of course this has raised the eyebrows of the worldwide legion of the
Banksy faithful that follow the Bristol Bad Boy’s every clandestine
move with baited breath. Has Sir Banks given up his usual M.O. in favor
of going legit? Has he made so much money that it’s safer to rent space
and hire commercial painters than bomb? Is he qualified to run for Vice
President of the USA?

Probably not. But if he were, we hope he’d be wise enough not to follow Cheney’s Imperial Vice Presidency lead, unlike another candidate we could name …

And speaking of street art and politics: The Times also has a piece this week about Shepard Fairey, of Obey Giant fame. (I’ve always thought it looked more like Nixon than like Andre the Giant, myself.) Mr. Fairey, of course, is responsible for the best political art of this presidential season, beating out even MBW’s SuperObama:

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