What do I mean by allegorical sound? It is a sound that should, at least, reinforce the explicit meaning of the work. It may enrich the explicit meaning with nuance and texture.
But there is - potentially - an even greater role. Much of learning, appropriately and necessarily, is logical, practical, and as a result reductionist. Learning seeks to define even what is infinite.
Allegory of various types - mythology, poetry, and music - can remind us to treat our definitions as we might a good tool: with respect but without deference.
Allegorical sound can take us beyond intellectual definitions into experience of the mystery. Please see an enclosure in my original Email for a - very poor - example of what I mean. If there is a way to insert wav. files to this blog, I have not discovered it.
5 comments:
Here is a link to the .wav file:
arche logos version 1.0.wav
As we move to a discussion of artwork , it may be useful to consider an excerpt from Art & Discontent by Thomas McEvilley. The chapter is entitled "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". McEvilley proposes that "everything we might say about an artwork that is not neutral description of aesthetic properties is an attribution of content". He goes on to list thirteen ways in which artwork can take on external meaning, with examples. It provides for a useful framework for analyzing a work, and for adding layers of meaning onto a novel creation.
Here is a link:
http://www.smcm.edu/users/lnscheer/mce.html
I'm unsure of the intended allegory of the "arche logos" recording. If we take McEvilley's suggestion to treat "everything we might say about artwork that is not neutral description" as an "attribution of content", aside from the literal meaning of the words spoken, there are four areas in which allegorical meaning seems likely to be hidden:
Pitch: The first two recitations are spoken on the same low pitch (G, two octaves below middle C). The third recitation accentuates each word by a jump of a minor third (Bb) after the initial attack on G, along with a slight accent. The fourth recitation is sung one octave higher, on the G below middle C.
Rhythm/Tempo: With the exception of the final one, each recitation is spoken/sung approximately twice as fast as the previous one. The fourth recitation is actually a bit longer than the third. The first recitation is somewhat without an obvious meter, as there is an extended pause between "arche" and "logos", and "gos" is not clearly enunciated. The later three follow a regular beat.
Timbre: The timbre of the first three recitation is dark and muted, whereas the final one is sung in a clear tone.
Count: There are four recitations. I don't know if the number is significant or not...
Perhaps I've just overdone the analysis, and am missing something obvious, but I'm still unsure as to what the allegorical meaning is. I would welcome any suggestions.
I am fairly sure that the Arche Logos .wav file is not worth much analysis. At best it may be what McEvilley calls an attidudinal gesture.
"In the beginning was the word" is not an especially accessible or immediately understandable statement. To have any hope of understanding what this might mean there is a need to read this in its Greek context. But the Greek context is exceptionally layered and complicated.
Logos is the principal tool for ordering chaos (another Greek word). For the Greeks chaos was a place of great potential. Logos - naming, designating, categorizing, and arranging - transforms the potential to actuality.
The immediately prior paragraph is a very poor summary. Many paragraphs could be written before a sufficient summary might be generated. Along the way 9 of ten will be lost.
With the .wav I was trying - not yet successfully - to capture and crystalize this concept, but in a way that fewer might be lost and few more intrigued. The pitch, tempo and especially the timbre was meant to suggest the barely perceptible potential of chaos. The final recitation brings forward something much more clear... yet, because it is in Greek, far from explicit.
When combined with appropriate visuals an allegory - of a very rough sort - begins to emerge. Or at least that was the intent.
All,
I wasn't able to find much information about Jasper Johns online, and the little bit that I read about the exhibition at the National Gallery of Art piqued my interest, so I've been reading the book that accompanies the Jasper Johns exhibition (also titled "An Allegory of Painting"). Prior to Phil's email, I wasn't previously particularly familiar with Johns, but the book is fairly interesting, so I thought I would share a bit of what I've learned, in hopes that it will help along the allegory discussion.
The "Allegory of Painting" title stems especially from Johns' early work that relies heavily on common signs such as the American flag (http://tinyurl.com/2f29ua), targets (http://tinyurl.com/2eddpy), numbers (http://tinyurl.com/22948b), and maps (http://tinyurl.com/2fycrb). Similar to the Marcel Duchamp's readymades (i.e. a urinal named "Fountain", and called art), Johns presents artwork that begs questions such as "is it a flag, or is it a work of art?". In his own words, "it is the gray zone between these two extremes that I'm interested in -- the area [where it] is neither a flag nor a painting. It can be both and still be neither".
As for Johns' inspiration, while I don't think he has confirmed this, one of the authors in the book posits that Johns' early use of these signs were in part a reaction to his time conscripted by the American military draft: "targets, flags, numbers, and maps form a ubiquitous set of iconic signs within the closed military environment...the soldier is first and last a number. And military life is completely regulated by numbers. On the rifle range the target is raised, the soldier fires, and his score is denoted by a number that is hoisted in the place of the target".
One thing that I found particularly interesting is that, despite the notion "allegory of painting", one of his most iconic pieces, Target with Plaster Casts, wasn't painted in a traditional manner: "each concentric circle of the target...was constructed separately. Circles were drawn on the canvas. Johns then held bits of [news] paper against the circles and cut or tore small segments of arcs to conform to the circular outline. The fragments...were dipped in the colored encaustic medium and placed within the predetermined lines of the target. The concentric bands abut but do not overlap". Also each band of the target is made from a different type of newspaper, "the largest blue band consists of...newsprint without images. The paper of the adjoining yellow band consists of newspaper headlines and advertisements...". Interestingly, though it was my first reaction to wonder if the news stories contained any insight as to the "meaning" of the painting, Johns claims to be disinterested with the content of the printing on the newspaper, even though it does show through the paint. Rather, he says that he chose each piece of newsprint based purely on aesthetics: "I looked at the paper for different kinds of color, different sizes of type, of course, and perhaps some of the words went into my mind; I was not conscious of it".
There are two things that I noticed while reading that seem particularly pertinent to our discussion of allegorical sound, and "In the beginning...". One is the use of signs/icons/symbols (semiology) to assign meaning to a work, "when a sign determines an interpretant of itself in another sign, it produces an effect external to itself". This seems to be exactly what we're talking about...what sort of auditory "sign" creates an allegory for "in the beginning"? The second thing that I noticed is Johns' use of visual gestalts. Gestalt psychology basically states that we perceive our environment by grouping (in order to make sense of a constant onslaught of information), and filling in the spaces when we're presented with missing pieces. Visual gestalts are separated into groupings of proximity, similarity, continuation, closure, and figure/ground (http://tinyurl.com/2lhtgf). The reliance on visual gestalts in John's work is made especially apparent it his American map, where there are no clear borders, but the states are still perceivable, and his single-color flags and targets, where, for instance, concentric bands are not 100% defined by actual lines, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks. In doing so, Johns blurs the line between was is a painting and what is not a painting, and what is a target (for instance), and what is not a target. Gestalt psychology is also easily applied to music / sound theory, and each of the gestalt principles hold true for music just as much as they do for visual artwork. One well-known example is Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, where the individual melody lines played by the first and second violins, when played separately, are angular and made up of large intervalic jumps. But when the parts are played together, the combined, perceived result is a smooth melody. The reason that this occurs, according to Gestalt theory, is because our brains perceive the combined melody as the actual melody because of pitch proximity...we hear the pitches that are in close proximity as ones that follow each other, creating the melody line, even though the melody lines in the actual score are made up of pitches that are not in close proximity with each other.
Anyway...semiology and gestalts...things to think about.
Thanks,
Tom
Philip J. Palin wrote:
> Kari, Tom, and Jason:
>
> I liked Kari's points about twist, tension, and balance in allegory... and other aspects of our work.
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> Following is a Washington Post storied entitled "Rules for Youtube: Make Art, Not Bore" that I think echoes some of our discussion.
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> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/02/AR2007020200358.html
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> Not quite as directly relevant, but something that I think might underline the powerful potential of twist and tension is the current Jasper Johns exhibition at the National Gallery of Art entitled Allegory of Painting.
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> http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/johnsinfo.shtm
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> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/arts/design/02john.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin
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> Just to keep the conversation going...
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> Phil
>
>
>
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