No Medium by Craig Dworkin

Author:Craig Dworkin [Dworkin, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, History, Contemporary (1945-), Mixed Media
ISBN: 9780262018708
Google: sYGxz-LB0BkC
Amazon: B00BIOFLXI
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2013-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

7 Signal to Noise

1966: The Beatles’ last concert. Maria Callas’s last concert. The final year of the ONCE Festival. The launch of the Monkees. Four Herb Alpert albums in the top ten. A series of singles from Simon and Garfunkel. The best-selling song in the United States all year: Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets.” There was nothing to listen to.

1966: A blank record might be heard as an elegy for the times, an epitaph, a cenotaph, un tombeau.

1966: Nothing to listen to. Not in the sense that there was nothing worth listening to: the Beach Boys release their unshakably strange (if not quite listenable) Pet Sounds; Frank Zappa debuts with Freak Out!; Cornelius Cardew joins AMM; the AACM issues Sound; Herbert von Karajan records the first installment of his Ring cycle; Miles Davis has his second great quintet in order; the Coltrane quintet is distending “My Favorite Things” to an hour of atonal improvisation; Steve Reich is phasing two tape players slowly out of sync; a mercurial quintet named The Hawks, later known as The Band, is warming up the tubes in their amps…But with Ken Friedman’s Zen for Record there is really finally nothing to listen to. After all the sheep bleating and bleary psychedelia; Sadler’s jingoist snare drums and Zappa’s deskilled jingles; Malachi Favors’s “little instruments” and Simon Dupree’s Big Sound; after Dylan’s electric Judas kiss in Manchester and Rashid Ali’s steel brushes shredding in Tokyo; after all the easy and difficult listening that year, you could have put on Friedman’s disc and listened to nothing.

1966: But we might have guessed it, more or less. The title already dates the work squarely to its cultural moment and the intellectual climate of the postwar counterculture, with its distinctly Americanized understanding of Zen. More specifically, the title points to the pervasive alignment of Zen with Fluxus, that loose group of artists with whom Friedman was then in intimate dialogue. In part, the association between Fluxus and Zen was perhaps both inevitable and coincidental, given the congruous aesthetics of the “event score”—often presented in a haiku-like triplet—and the koan. Ranging from a single word to a few paratactic sentences, the telegraphic noun phrases of the event score masquerade as imperatives, establishing a series of dynamic contrasts: between everyday vocabulary and the imaginative acts it might provoke; between the condensed language of grammatically contracted forms and the broadly abstract categories named; between the restricted verbal means of the score and the open-ended possibilities for its performance. In short, between minimal gesture and maximal potential; specificity and ambiguity; constraint and permission. “Permission granted,” as John Cage was fond of saying, “but not to do whatever you want.”1

Zen for Record might be thought of as a koan in the form of a phonograph disc: is it a version of the event score, or its performance? (The sound of the blackbird singing, or just after?)

1966: By now, however, Zen was also a quite explicit

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