Art

Szlia_sl said:

There are three parts in your post, let me address all three.

1) The gamut in abstract art is about as large as the gamut in music (and I'll pretend you were not dissing Steve Reich). For every hyper 'noisy' Jackson Pollock painting, there is an intense monochrome by Yves Klein or the serenity of a composition by Mark Rothko, etc, etc. The linearity of music, the fact it is an art of time, allows us to maybe project with more ease a kind of narrative continuity to it, but it is in no way less abstract than abstract painting. A C flat on the harpsichord in a Bach piece represents nothing other than itself; the sound you get when you press that key of the harpsichord. Yet, there are moods, there are movements, there are conversations in musical pieces. That's the power of abstraction (and an enigma to neurologists and sociologists): music cannot show sadness or tell sadness (or joy, or loneliness or rage) but it still can communicates it.

2) The idea that the camera replaced the painters' 'historical role' is assuming that their role was to make a realist representation of reality. You will find that outside some artistic movements delimited to specific times and specific places it was never the case.

3) As a general rule I hate pranks, because it's social manipulation + editing. In that specific case, an exhibition is curated so the visitors come with the expectation that someone, most of the time more knowledgeable than them on the topic of the exhibition, selected a number of artworks. With that frame of mind, most visitors will give the benefit of the doubt to what they see. Maybe they'll like it, maybe they won't, maybe they will find it worthy to be selected, maybe they won't, but they'll assume due diligence from the curator and, as such, will try to find in each piece what is supposed to be interesting (I confess that I often fail). A prank piece will be approached with an open mind, which is more a testament to the curiosity of the visitors than a proof that they are dumb or that modern art is stupid. In the particular example shown in the video, some might even like the piece, because there is something light, fun and incongruous about it (which, depending of the exhibit can be a nice change of pace), they might also like the prank itself as a performance commenting on art.


As a conclusion, an abstract visualization of a piece of 'noise' music, both requiring a high level of craftsmanship. WARNING DO NOT PLAY LOUDLY:Lucio Arese | Yu Miyashita - Mimic - YouTube

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Araysar_sl said:

you're the one who said that modern art and high end fashion is the same

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Szlia_sl said:

You put me on the spot here, but I guess I got what I deserved!

As a foreword, I'll say that I chose this video because I found Arese's really stunning especially when you consider the complexity of the music he turns into visuals, but I am not a huge fan such extremely aggressive 'noise' music, so I'll confess it was mild trolling on my part (Arese has other video of the same type I could have linked with music I enjoy more, there is even one on Gould's rendition of the Aria of Bach's Goldberg variations - Bach did not come out of nowhere in my previous post).

So... what's the value in a noise piece like Mimic. The genre as a whole is part of a galaxy of movements that aims at deconstructing our expectations of what music is. It explores different sounds with different textures, different scales or even abandon tonality, structure, rhythm. A noise piece like Mimic reduces music to some sort of raw energy, it's all speed, all movement, every time the chaos seem to coalesce into some sort of structure, that structure explodes. There is also a whimsical dimension to it as, suddenly, something like a sped up silent movie soundtrack appears (something we associate with slapstick comedy), playfully mocking our expectations. It's not a music to dance to (that would fill hospitals quickly), not music you could use a background, not music that is made to be pleasant really, but an intellectual construction designed to be listened to carefully and with focus, making it difficult to enjoy for too long a stretch (there are some noise musicians that do very intense and very long performances though turning it into a mental and physiological ordeal - in the ritual initiation sense of the word for some and the torture sense for others!). Note these comments are for this particular type of noise music as there also are very soothing pieces of noise music and also a lot of electronic music that uses noise elements to add a particular texture of frailty or chaos.

As for the difficulty in creating it... how many bars are there in these 106 seconds? Even if some raw material is performed and improvised on analog machinery (which might require a low level of skill) organizing that material and cramming it into these 106 seconds, maintaining the intensity, leaving room for the silent suspensions, managing the spatiality of the sound through panning and reverbs, having all these construction-deconstruction loops, finding or creating the mock music and inserting it in the composition... all of that is pretty far from "hey I can do that" territory. I am not a noise music creator though so there is the possibility I am looking at the complexity from the wrong end of the binoculars. What I mean is that a simple process might have resulted inapiece that happened to bethispiece, even if it would have taken very complicated process to get this specific piece and not another piece)...

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