History:
"It was
in this Darmstadt environment of advanced musical experimentation, at
which Adorno was a frequent participant, that Cage caused a major sensation
in 1958 with his Zen-inspired challenge to the extreme rationalization
of the musical material in the serialist enterprise. As against Western
musical rationalism, which Max Weber had already analyzed and which Adorno
had made into a theoretical pillar of his music philosophy Cage demanded
to free the pure materiality of sound and to emancipate noise from its
oppressive exclusion from the realm of music. For sound to emerge, music
had to be silent; thus the title of Cage's seminal 1961 book, Silence.
The avant garde's demand to abolish the boundaries between art and life
had finally entered the realm of the most advanced music in a major way."
148
"Cage's
Zen-inspired focus on the sounds and noises of everyday life seems to
offer a striking contrast in sensibility to that of the post Webernian
European music scene. And yet Cage's uncritical celebration of change
and the I Ching call to mind Walter Benjamin's paradoxical comments,
in his essay on Baudelaire, on the structural proximity of assembly-line
work and gambling. The insidious dialectic of mere
accident and total rational control is perhaps nowhere as evident as in
the ultimate Fluxus event of the 1950's, one performed millions of times
over...schooolchildren lined up, arms coving their heads, in nuclear war
drills. Nuclear war was, after all the trauma of the 1950's generation:
the possibility of MAD (mutually assured destruction) revealed the inherent
absurdity and danger of technological progress and the politics of deterrence—or
in aesthetically coded terms, the dialectical closeness of chance and
determination ....Total rational control and the status quo may be exploded
by chance, but chance in the 1950's always had these two sides: the life-affirming
side, with its focus on the simple acts and events of everyday life and
with its cutting critique of an oppressive logic of modernization and
consumerism: and the apocalyptic side of the nuclear accident that would
blow up the world and generate a silence beyond art and any life."
149
Andreas Huyssen.
"Back to the Future: Fluxus in Context." |
Paul
Virilio
"The
innovation of the ship already entailed the innovation of the shipwreck...the
beginning of wisdom would above all mean recognizing the symmetry between
substance and accident, instead of constantly trying to hide it....To
expose the accident so as no longer to expose oneself to the accident
is now, in fact, the principal function of simulators used to drive technological
engines..."
"For
our anti-museum of accident simulation —unlike the all too common
museum of substance dissimulation, which display is used to cover up the
truth—it would be a matter of reversing
the relationship to exposure, to exhibition, as with experimental
methods of approximation whereby, unable to attain the object, you keep
testing to determine what it cannot be."
"Aristotle's
phrase "There is no science of the accident" should be immediately
rejected, for the new generation of image simulators constitutes just
such a "science" gradually unmasking the accidental.This was
once almost impossible to imagine, the options for scientific exposure
and speculation being too narrowly restricted (like those of art) to the
sphere of human accessibility. In other words, to our capacity to
perceive the environment, a capacity tied exclusively to our organs of
perception. Today those organs are wired to an impressive array of (audiovisual
or automobile) prostheses that enable us to indirectly access
another space-time in order to grasp limit phenomena."
"From
this preventative angle, the accident is no longer to be identified solely
with its disastrous consequences, its practical results—ruins and
scattered debris—but with a dynamic and energetic process,a
kinetic and kinematic sequence that has noting to do with the vestiges
of objects destroyed, with wreckage and rubble."
"No,
it would be a matter of creating a new kind of scenography in which only
what explodes and decomposes is exposed. A
paradoxical mise-en-scene of the obscene in which decomposition
and disintegration would finally supersede the compositions of advertising
and high-tech "design".
An
"aesthetic of disappearance," whether gradual or instantaneous;
no longer an aesthetic of appearance, of the progressive emergence of
a style, genre, or scientific author...the exhibition space would itself
have lost its interest, its museographic appeal, in favour of an exposure
time, of a time depth comparable to that of the widest horizons,
the most immense landscapes: a landscape of events that would
thus replace the former exhibition hall...In the end, as we have just
seen this Tuesday, 18 February, on the one o'clock TV newscast, with the
live demolition of the frame of the Debussy building at La Courneuve—an
eight-second transmutation of a public housing block on hundred and eighty
meters high into seventy thousand tons of rubble—the accident
museum exists. I've come across it: it is a TV screen."
Ch.
8 "The Accident Museum", A Landscape of Events |