Music
4'33" (pronounced "four minutes, thirty-three seconds") by John Cage.
"Cage's most famous musical composition is entitled 4'33". It is played at the piano and is divided into three movements. All of the notes are silent. The composition takes its name from the fact that it requires four minutes and thirty-three seconds to perform. The pianist uses a stopwatch to control his tempo. For those interested, there are a couple of CD recordings available."[1]
"I found out by experiment... that silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around."[2]Indian musician Gita Sarabhai taught Cage about Indian music and aesthetics in exchange for his lessons to her on Western music. "The purpose of music is to quiet and sober the mind, making it susceptible to divine influences."[5]
"I wanted my work to be free of my own likes and dislikes, because I think music should be free of the feelings and ideas of the composer."[3]
"I saw art not as something that consisted of a communication from the artist to an audience but rather as an activity of sounds in which the artist found a way to let the sounds be themselves."[4] — John Cage
"I also came to see that all art before the Renaissance, both Oriental and Western, had shared this same basis, that Oriental art had continued to do so right along, and that the Renaissance idea of self-expressive art was therefore heretical."[6]
"My work became an exploration of non-intention."[7] "I was intent on making something that didn't tell people what to do."[8] "[T]o me, the essential meaning of silence is the giving up of intention."[9]
"Music, as I conceive it, is ecological. You could go further and say that it IS ecology."[10] — John Cage
Painting
"Minimalism derives its name from the minimum of operating means. Minimalist painting is purely realistic—the subject being the painting itself."[11] — David Burlyuk
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The Paintings of Ad Reinhardt |
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Minimalism in both painting and music come together. One of Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings juxtaposted with the score to John Cage's silent compostion, 4' 33''. | |||||||
| Modrian on painting: "He maintained that all subject matter 'must be banished from art,' because 'representation [of physical objects]... is fatal to pure art,' which must henceforth embody only 'pure relationships'" "[A]rtists must avoid the danger of 'express[ing] something 'particular,' therefore human'"[15] |
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More recently (2021) an "artist" has taken the white painting further with a blank canvas on which he didn't even deem to add paint. The piece by Jens Haaning is appropriately titled Take the Money and Run. The title refers to the amount he was paid by the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Denmark to produce two paintings for an exhibition. "It wasn't what we had agreed on in the contract," [museum director Lasse] Andersson said, "but we got new and interesting art." (emphasis added)
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| A museum patron contemplating one of Jens Haaning's works |
Sculpture
Henry Moore
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| Working Model for Three Way Piece No.2: Archer |
"Our [The National Gallery of Art's] goal is to ignite the imagination, to build character, and to inspire young people to aim high and reach for greatness. All accomplishments begin with the imagination of a single individual, whose powerful new ideas lift civilization to undreamed-of heights. Henry Moore was one such individual, and it is in this spirit that we celebrate his remarkable achievements" — Catherine Reynolds, chair of the National Gallery of Art foundation board.[17]
| "Inspired by mathematical models, these [stringed] works, such as Stringed Figure (1937), illustrate another important theme--the interaction between internal and external forms."[18] |  |
Literature
A lot could be written about the collapse of literature in the late 19th and throughout 20th century (and continuing in the 21st), but surely the outstanding example is Ulysses by James Joyce, ranked number one on Modern Library's ranking of the 100 greatest English-language novels of the twentieth century.
From an article by Edward Cline:
"Here is just a brief example, chosen at random:
You move a motion? Steve boy, you're going it some. More bluggy drunkables? Will immensely splendiferous stander permit one stooder of most extreme poverty and one largesize grandacious thirst to terminate one expensive inaugurated libation? Give's a breather. Landlord, landlord, have you good wine, Staboo? Hoots, mon, wee drap to pree. Cut and come again. Right Boniface! Absinthe the lot. Nos omnes biberimus viridum toxicum diabolus capiat posterioria nostra. Closing-time, gents. Eh? Rome boose for the Bloom toff. I hear you say onions? Bloo? Codges ads? Photo's papli, by all that's gorgeous!And so on. This is one of the more comprehensible passages; one can guess that it has something to do with drinking."[19]
Poetry:
Minimalist Poetry - a discussion by Bob Grumman:
"When a poem's words are so 'poorly' spelled as to be close to 100% 'wrong', I term the result 'microherent.' An example is the following by Michael Basinski:
Ook
OKG
Oon
eOa
dOKIt has no title that I know of. Perhaps it isn't even poetry but pure music; I consider it suggestive enough of proper words like 'oak,' 'eon' and 'ode'" to count as poetry, however--superior poetry, in fact, because of its over-all capture of the struggle to commence of both Nature and language.
In the second section of a poetry sequence called, 'Birth, Copulation and Death,' Jonathan Brannen carries out several infra-verbal operations:
bentrance The first two poems are fusional. The copulation-related analogies that their spellings bring to the fore should be clear. The third poem seems at first mutational, 'knowledge' being misspelled to suggest fertilization's being a ledge to Now; at the same time, however, it alphaconceptually suggests fertilization's being only a silent letter distant from Knowledge! It is through such subtleties that alphaconceptual poetry most excitingly proves its value.
*intereruption
*nowledge
Needless to say, there are other kinds of pluraesthetic minimalist poetry besides the visual. One is mathematical poetry. Among its leading practitioners is LeRoy Gorman, whose works in the form include one called 'the birth of tragedy':
(!+?)2
Or: tragedy equals a blur of exclamations and questions multiplying against each other
For my last piece of evidence for the high value of minimalistic poetry, I am going to turn to my all-time favorite minimalist poem, which is probably my all-time favorite poem of any kind, as well, Aram Saroyan's:
lighght "This is quite a famous, or notorious, poem. Every few years somebody comes out in print against it. A few years ago, for instance, the nationally syndicated columnist, William Rusher, was bemused that the government once (in the seventies) gave an award to so poor a work of art. I, on the other hand, can still scarcely believe that the government once gave an award to so wonderful an artwork. Most people tend to echo Rusher's view of it, even when they encounter it properly, at the center of an otherwise blank page--to emphasize its deserving a full page's worth of attention (as an expression of light, and only light). Merely glancing at it, they judge its key element, the extra 'gh,' a petty eccentricity designed to shock, or a hoax calculated to win the esteem that obscurity-for-obscurity's-sake too often receives from academics. They are seriously wrong: the extra 'gh' is neither trivial nor obscure. By putting it into his word, Saroyan brings us face-to-face with the ineffability of light, a mysterious substance whose components are somehow there but absent, as 'ghgh' is there (and delicately shimmering) but unpronounced in the word, 'lighght.' And he leaves us with intimations of his single syllable of light's expanding, silently and weightlessly, 'gh' by 'gh,' into... Final Illumination."[20]
Architecture:
There is no more clear representation of the collapse of architecture as an art form in the 20th century than the buildings of Frank Gehry. Designed to confuse and confound, and to provide a form of dis-harmony in tune with a dis-integrated mind.
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| Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain |
Notes:
1. www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/cage-quotes.html (Italics added).
2. https://johncage.org/beta/autobiographical_statement.html.
3. John Cage's 4'33": Is it music? S.Davies. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 75(4), pp.448-462. Found at researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/2292/26909/Davies1997John%20Cages%20433withcoversheet.pdf.
4. www.classical-music.com/composers/john-cage/ (Italics added).
5. rosewhitemusic.com/piano/writings/silence-taught-john-cage/.
6. core.ac.uk/download/pdf/1145989.pdf.
7. johncage.org/beta/autobiographical_statement.html.
8. Conversing with CAGE, 2nd Ed., Richard Kostelanetz. Routledge, New York, 2003. p.78. Found at https://silo.pub/qdownload/conversing-with-cage-n-5904953.html (Italics added).
9. Ibid., p.198.
10. For the Birds. John Cage, Daniel Charles. Weslyan UP, Hanover NH, 1995. Found at electronicbookreview.com/essay/wiring-john-cage-silence-as-a-global-sound-system/.
11. "Minimalism." Christopher Want. Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. 2009 www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T058397. (Italics added).
12. www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3698
13. Ibid.
14. The Sounds of Silence - John Cage and 4'33". Larry J. Solomon. Found at hugoribeiro.com.br/biblioteca-digital/Solomon-John-Cage-the_sounds_of_silence.pdf.
15. What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand. Louis Torres & Michelle Marder Kamhi. Chicago: Open Court, 2000. pp.135-6
16. National Gallery of Art News Release. National Gallery of Art, October 16, 2001. Found at www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/research/gallery-archives/PressReleases/2009-2000/2001/14A11_45244_20011016.pdf
17. ibid.
18. ibid.
19. Edward Cline, "A Monument to the Death of Literature" in The Intellectual Activist, vol.12, no.9, 1998. pp.10-11.
20. www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/grumman/egrumn.htm (Italics added, except to "wonderful")
For a thorough exploration of the philosophy behind the irrationality of modern art, see Stephen Hick's excellent article, Why Art Became Ugly. He also has an interesting article on (perhaps surprisingly) the most important artist of the 20th century.
