Response #1 Week #1

Bryson Hansen

Artd 410 Contemporary Design

Friday Oct. 3 2008

Response #1 Week #1

 

I found something particularly interesting about a note made in Seeing Is Forgetting. On page 127, the author relates Irwin’s notes about some of his conceptions regarding perception and art. Irwin explains that if one is to appraoch “art” with the attitude that it “is” art regardless of his or her experience with it, then that mental framing is what determines art. In addition, Irwin supports that many artists approach their work wearing the idea that they are “interpreters” for their own novel insights to be extended toward the layman, and that Irwin sought to design a situation in which the experience that a participant has with a work of art is the meaningful part (not something buried beneath). Although I believe that art as a form of expression bears its own weight and significance, I can see Irwin’s point. How is an artist suppose to communicate a “feeling” without attempting to invite the audience to take part in it? I feel that it is not a stretch to say that this was Marcel Duchamp’s great point! Duchamp set out to use found objects to explain that everyday objects and experience are each of their own unique design and should therefor not be considered any more or less an artistic “thing”. Art can be very much about an experiential moment or memory for the audience, not just a moment of realization. One example of a contemporary sound artist who, I feel, has achieved creating works that bear this frame of mind is Maryanne Amacher’s “Sound Characters (making the third ear)”. Maryanne Amacher uses psychoacoustic sound design techniques to achieve a perceptual “change” in her audience. In “Sound Characters”, Amacher uses a variance on frequencies, in a setting that involves carefully placed speakers and environment, to offer her audience a moment in which they can percieve a tone coming literally from between their own ears. The frequencies pulse back and forth between the ears to create an individualized tone, seemingly created by the audience member alone. The meaning behind all of this is that the ultimate moment in which the piece becomes realized can only occur with the participation and perception of the audience.

 

I feel that the 9 Evenings project is one that demonstrates an attitude not just in an experimentation of instruments and their related functions, but also in an experimentation of the the artist as an “author”. What determines whether the artist is in control of his or her final product? Many of the individual pieces made throughout the 9 Evenings project raise this question by allowing participants’ performances to articulate the original authors’ ideas. One example of this is with John Cage’s Variations VII. In this piece, Cage arranges a room in which a large number of different noise makers are controlled by a number of people. This goes on in an improvisation for at least eightyfive minutes. It is interesting not only to consider the bridge that was made from artists’ designs for these textural sounds and their correlating engineers’ imaginative construction, but also Cage’s choice to render all of the sounds without preconception. Cage used no prerecorded sounds or music, instead he suggested that the performance of his contemporaries would dictate the actual personality and character of the aural material.

Here is a link to some info about Maryanne Amacher: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryanne_Amacher