Derridean Composition in the Avant-Garde

            Alvin Lucier’s piece I Am Sitting in a Room (1970) is an example of the deconstructive techniques used by the avant-garde to address the limits and interrogate the position of language as a mode of communication. Lucier tape records himself speaking a phrase in an empty room and then continues to double the recording on itself in a process of art creation that at the same time is a deconstruction of language.  Solie points out “that with each repetition the natural resonant frequencies of the room are reinforced, until eventually the speech patterns [read language] are entirely obliterated by emergent, eerily surrealistic sounds.”

    It is possible to substitute the semiotic and read this work as a comment of the destruction of humanity (language being unique to humans) by technology, or the mass reproductions of capitalism.  Ruth Solie, however, has analyzed the unique text-music relationships that exist in the avant-garde and takes the piece as less symbolically layered, she describes it this way: “The composition has a number of features emblematic of postmodernism… Lucier explains the process he will go through in making it, a strangely Derridean procedure in which the composition may be said to deconstruct its analysis.”[1]  This is certainly layered, there is more to the piece than simple aural experience, but it avoids projecting on to the object.     

            Lucier is employing the deconstruction of the language medium to achieve a greater communicative effect.  Interesting to note is the “speech impediment” that Lucier possesses.  As the piece continues, this “defect” in his speech is essentially removed, but instead of being “another layer of textual deconstruction in the process,” as Solie comments, it is a humanistic approach to questioning the assumed superiority of language in the mediation of communication.  If language is the “natural” way humans communicate, if it is intrinsic, why then would deconstruction remove flaws?  Why is it flawed to begin with?

            What Lucier seems to be suggesting, and what others in the avant-garde music scene also suggest, is a reconsideration of the stress western thought places on words.[2]  Through the melting of the text/music or language/music dichotomy Lucier is able to reveal just how much is missed when we pick favorites.  This technique allows us to approach in some form whatever exists before mediation.  The inevitability of mediation and the folly of a hierarchal preference of its forms, namely language, are addressed and forcibly reconsidered. 

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[1] Ruth A. Solie, "When the Message Becomes the Medium: Text-Music Relationships in the Avant-Garde," Ars Lyrica 4(1989): 16.

[2] Ibid., 7-18.

Harmony as Habermasian Critique of Postmodernity in Laurie Anderson’s O Superman

            Theodor W. Adorno begins his Aesthetic Theory like this:  “Today it goes without saying that nothing concerning art goes without saying, much less without thinking.  Everything about art has become problematic: its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.”[1]  A semester spent discussing the nuanced topics of women, performance, and the avant-garde make Adorno’s statement all the more acceptable.  It is not surprising, then, that Laurie Anderson’s crossover success, O Superman, requires approach from this take nothing for granted perspective.  McClary certainly recognizes the broad range of interpretation: “Depending on your point of view, then, Anderson’s strategy of simultaneously evoking and denying classic structural dichotomies is nihilistic, transgressive, or exuberant.”[2]

            Earlier in that work McClary offers a harmonic analysis of O Superman:  “Two alternating chords inflect the pedal [middle C] harmonically: an Aᵇ major triad in first inversion and a root-position C minor triad.”  This strikingly simple harmonic structure can reveal a larger and certainly more complex statement (if one refuses to take it for granted).  Anderson’s middle-C pendulum is commenting on the historical movements that influenced 20^th-century culture.  She is, in fact, offering a Habermasian critique of modernity versus post-modernity.  Habermas has suggested “that instead of giving up modernity and its project as a lost cause, we should learn from the mistakes of those extravagant programs [earlier he mentions various avant-garde approaches to art] which have tried to negate modernity.”[3]  How does the cycling of two chords reveal any critique in line with these words, particularly when the piece as a whole addresses issues of gender, technology, the body, and American politics?[4]  McClary’s analysis of this harmony as a comment “about the premise of Western musical discourse and our own postmodern condition,” proves supportive and applicable to a Habermasian critique.

            If we, as is the tradition of the Western binary thought process, divide tonality into semiotic dichotomies, then major/minor might equal happy/sad.[5]  Major/minor in this piece actually equal postmodernity/modernity.  McClary comments:  “the fact that the major alternative is always unstable (because it is in inversion) and the minor always stable suggests that the security lies in the negative option.”[6]  She continues, “Thus although the major triad was established first (and has some claim to the status of “tonic”) it is increasingly hear as an inflection poised to resolve to C minor.”[7] 

            It is possible then to read Anderson in terms of the statement made by Habermas above.  The postmodern tendency to remove questions of right, or objectivity, allow the artist to effectively destroy history, thus forgetting where they are in the stream of time.  The major chord of O Superman, then, gets accepted as tonic initially just because it is heard first.  Postmodernity has tried so hard to destroy modernity that it has positioned itself in the same manner as that Aᵇ triad.  Because the difference of one tone is such a drastic one, Anderson can use the minor chord to bring the postmodern back to consciousness and the listener realizes that temporality is often perceived.  The C-minor triad is actually the tonic, despite its flaws, just as, for Habermas, flawed modernity is where solid enough ground can be found to offer art “a way out.”[8]

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[1] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, International Library of Phenomenology and Moral Sciences. (London ; Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1983), 1.

[2] Susan McClary, "This Is Not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laurie Anderson," in Feminine Endings : Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 145.

[3] J Habermas and S Ben-Habib, "Modernity Versus Postmodernity," New German Critique (1981): 11.

[4] McClary, "This Is Not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laurie Anderson," 141.

[5] Ibid., 142.

[6] Ibid., 142.

[7] Ibid., 142.

[8] Habermas and Ben-Habib, "Modernity Versus Postmodernity," 11.

Objectification as Utility in Martha Wilson’s Painted Lady

            It is no stretch to say that cosmetics, the make-up products found in retailers worldwide, are often tools of objectification.  Make-up, when applied to the face, creates a mask, a “made-up” appearance, one that is supposedly more appealing to those who might find that face in their line of vision.  Altering the visual appearance of the face with these substances is not intrinsically gendered, but given that women are the dominant consumers of these products, and that certain made-up facial appendages on women are fetishized in western culture (red-lips, rouged cheeks, etc), it is safe to assume that the focus of these tools of objectification is the feminine countenance. 

            If a goal of feminism is an attack on the idea of woman as object, it seems unlikely that any feminist artist would willingly reproduce images easily mistaken as antagonistic to that goal, art that might appear sympathetic to male fetishization of female form.  Martha Wilson’s Painted Lady (1972), out of context and for mere face value, does just this.  Wilson’s willing submission to objectification, however, does not reify male hegemony.  Wilson situates objectification as utility; she puts masculine notions of the required feminine aesthetic to work for her. 

            That Wilson does this is not completely lost on her audience, but the goal of Painted Lady has been misinterpreted, particularly early on in its existence, despite any awareness of objectification as utility.  Jayne Wark comments:  “works like Painted Lady (1972), in which Wilson transformed herself into a paradigm of hyperbolic femininity, have given rise to interpretations of her work as preoccupied with how beauty myths objectify and oppress women.”[1]  That these types of interpretations exist indicate just how deep the objectification of women runs; this is actually what Wilson was addressing.  Wark continues, “By manipulating the binary framework and naturalizing narratives of gender identity, Wilson revealed how they obscure and authenticate the masculinist assumptions of artistic identity.”[2]  Wilson makes use of the Brechtian dialectic, within which Wark quotes Elin Diamond as arguing, “the performer-subject disappears neither into a representation of the character nor into a representation of the actor: each remains processual, contingent, incomplete,” to situate herself in a position of hyper-consciousness.  From this vantage point Wilson is able to guide objectified notions of identity through social signifiers of beauty into the realm of utility, and once there, society’s, men’s, the audience’s, whole mess of intertwined expectations is forced to address itself.

            Not every viewer is aware of the critical churning of expectations that objectification creates, or that Wilson employs, this would negate the need to (and/or the possibility to) utilize these notions to artistic effect.  Wilson, conscious of the existence and deep rootedness of objectification, summons enough artistic wherewithals to maintain a double-consciousness while sending her performative body deep into a situation of immanent masculine/social assumptions about female/artist identity.   Objectification, subsequently, becomes a tool to address objectification.

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[1] Jayne Wark, Radical Gestures : Feminism and Performance Art in North America (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006), 149-49.

[2] Ibid., 149-150.