I’ve been enjoying and learning more about paintings and art in museums this summer, visiting MoMA and The Met and others. Aesthetically, I find a sort of similarity between the kind of music I like and the kind of art I’m discovering I like – though I may also be imagining links where there are none.
Discovering I like “modern” art, and exploring Autechre’s 2010 albums, Oversteps and Move of Ten, I came across this review of Oversteps that is really more like an art critic’s review of Autechre’s 20-odd year career, followed by a short review of the album. It’s one of the best writeups I’ve seen of their music, and also helped me flesh out my thinking on art in general. I even decided to wander the halls of MoMA a couple times while listening chronologically to all of Autechre’s back catalog.
“Like all good art, Autechre allows itself to be symptomatic, instead of futilely trying to be socially relevant,” writes the reviewer.
On a recent visit to the Met, the Modern area was mostly closed for installation, prompting me to explore earlier art more. Exploring Braque, Van Gogh, Rembrandt and others, it struck me how much art has changed. Particularly post-photography. There are many other things about “modernity” that influence artistic expression, but I am stuck on the idea that mechanized means of production — and reproduction — greatly affected the art world. One begins to understand the point of, say, Warhol.
Autechre are creating music decades after the invention of tools to make music electronically. Tape loops, record players, turntables, synthesizers, hip-hop, disco, remixing… Music has been made for half a century out of the tools dreamt up in the 40s and 50s. So many factors have influenced changes in art and aesthetics. The blooming of the middle class as both audience and producers of art, rather than just elites and patrons; post-war industrialization and invention leading to easy reproduction and re-use of art…
no electronic musician today can create without doing so on the administered grounds of an abstracted avant-garde moment which pioneered both electronic products and likewise the principals that they are somehow liberating which comes along with them. In short, the avant-garde slipped into the culture industry and the administration of younger generations through products. No artist today can use a synth or music software without being tacitly forced to subscribe to the obscured cultural zeitgeist of generations earlier
This is true of all instruments; they are products of a previous cultural zeitgeist. After all, Mozart did not compose for the piano, because it didn’t exist yet; his era’s pianofortes were rather different in sound. But no previous artistic age emerged from such industrial mass production and engineering, so perhaps there is a fundamental difference.
Artists of the past sought to master and perfect their vision. In “the modern era,” this sometimes seems to have shifted towards a constant exploration of boundaries, a desire to stretch and redefine our limitations. Perhaps this is endemic to “the modern era.” And, yes, I think the best art is more symptomatic than overtly engineered. Evolutionary rather than intelligently designed, you might say. The latter most often seems to me to produce mere curiosities.
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