John Cage – Indeterminacy

Composer John Cage's Indeterminacy (1959), involved the reading aloud of a series of stories or anecdotes – some about the history of music, some with Zen ideas expressed, some about mycology (the study of mushrooms, in which Cage was an expert), some about ordinary life – all a minute long. Each is chosen at random and takes a minute to read. At the same time random musical segments were played – though in the original recording of the work, the two performers could not hear each other. If the music and text worked together (or clashed), this would be entirely serendipitous.

Here's an attempt at performing a section of the work, by Jack Goldstein, and Gloria Lin, in conjunction with the Faculty of Music at Oxford University and The Ashmolean Museum:

Here's a selection of the texts, in visual form:
http://johncage.org/indeterminacy.html

Here's comedian Stewart Lee on Cage's Indeterminacy:
http://thequietus.com/articles/09907-stewart-lee-john-cage-indeterminacy

Steve Reich – Come Out (1966) + Glenn Ligon

Steve Reich's early tape-loop work, Come Out, 1966 was a seminal piece of American avant-garde music. The work responded to the Harlem Riots of 1964, by sampling the voice of a youth involved in the riots, 19-year-old Daniel Hamm, who talked about being beaten by the police and piercing his bruise a proof of his beating, which the police denied. Reich looped a phrase from Hamm's interview – "I had to open the bruise up to let the bruised blood come out to show them" – turning it into a hypnotically rhythmical sound piece, which fluctuates between order and chaos, sense and sound, form and content, art and the political.

Black American artist Glenn Ligon recently riffed visually on the piece producing a set of large-scale paintings, with misregistered screenprints of Hamm's phrase offering a visual analogue of the sound.  (The works were shown at an exhibition at the Camden Arts Gallery at the end of last year.) 

Is Ligon's text-art a way to carry on a tradition of "history painting" after abstraction? Is the point formal play, or reference to a black history which seemed to be being repeated in the Ferguson Riots around the time this work was being shown? (Another form of repetition?) Or is the point the "poetic" gulf between the work's formal play and its historical referent?

Glenn Ligon, from the Come Out series, 2014.

Further links:

Camden Arts Centre:

http://www.camdenartscentre.org/whats-on/view/ligon

Thomas Dane Gallery – Ligon's London representative:

http://www.thomasdanegallery.com/artists/44-glenn-ligon/works/

Luhring Augustine – Ligon's New York gallery.

http://www.luhringaugustine.com/artists/glenn-ligon

Freee

The artists' collective, Freee, have an interesting practice developing playful forms of political text.

Here's a recent piece – a section from the "Manifesto for Counter-Hegemonic Art", which appropriates and "hacks" Marx's famous Communist Manifesto.

http://www.hewittandjordan.com/freee/manifesto/freee_manifesto_p1.pdf

More on the manifesto here:
http://freee.org.uk/2007/01/12/the-freee-art-collective-manifesto-for-a-counter-hegemonic-art/

Here are a couple of further images of their practice:-

Free Collective, Advertising Wants To Convert Our Desire For A Better Life Into A Desire To Buy Something, billboard, 2008.

Freee Collective, The Economic Function of Public Art is to Increase the Value of Private Property, 2004.

Manifestos

For anyone thinking of writing an avant-garde manifesto, this humorous take on the rules and conventions of manifesto production, by American artist and cultural historian, Lee Scrivner are illuminating:

http://www.londonconsortium.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/scrivneripmessay.pdf

Thomas Hirschhorn

Stamps designed by Thomas Hirschhorn and issued by the Swiss Government, celebrating his entry in the Venice Biennale in 2011.  

Thomas Hirschhorn is a German artist whose works engage with both politics and philosophy. Made out of the most informal, cheap "trashy" materials, such as cardboard, photocopies, marker pens and the like, it is often ambitious in scale and intent. It is both formally inventive, and also often directly socio-politically engaged. Text is often a prominent element in his work (often used to draw in theoretical content and to foreground or anchor its political investments).

Hirschhorn has included a number of works that set out to create monuments to particular thinkers, and his work has often situated itself outside orthodox gallery spaces, setting out engage both "artworld"and "non-artworld" audiences.

The Bataille Monument, 2002, was presented as part of the Documenta exhibition in Kassel. A "monument" to dissident surrealist philosopher Geroge Bataille was erected in the Friedrich-Wöhler Siedlung housing estate, a low-income housing estate some way from the main "art world" exhibition venues. It included a library of Bataille's books and a snack bar.

Hirschhorn also frequently "maps" both issues and questions that he's interested in and also the key ideas of thinkers he is influenced by:

Foucault Map, 2004.

Where Do I Stand, What Do I Want?, 2007

His work also often develops into complex immersive environments on the grand scale:

Installation view from The Crystal of Resistance, 2011, Swiss Pavilion, Venice Biennale.