Days Seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen:

OK – spring break done – now to nudge the class a bit farther along on the gen art timeline. The Fluxus project has been developed over a number of years and a number of iterations and refinements. The first time I used it in a P2P class was in the Aesthetics of Dissonance back in 2012. My mistake was to time it right before spring break. It was the high point of the term, but we were never able to get the momentum back. In subsequent teachings it was moved to right after the break. Fun, chaotic, noisy, it is a good way to return to the class. I felt like there was quite a bit ridding on this piece and had really talked it up to Bob. My fear, of course, was that it was just going to crash and burn. It didn’t.

What was odd about this time is that students in both sections immediately started performing them simultaneously. Some, I suspect, as a way to mask their response, but other saw opportunities to overlap pieces and basically dove in when they felt the impulse. This lead to some amazing collisions of pieces. Hard to see everything, but the chaos really had a live and in the moment quality. As typically happens – some pieces bore, and others confound, and yet others demand attention and silence. While I prefer the one at a time model since the quieter more still pieces can emerge, there was something quite beautiful about the presentations. One thing we did notice – the 8:30 class spent a bit more time winding up to chaos, whereas the 10:00 started there. It’s hard to sustain over time – so the 8:30 class did a much better job of drawing the pieces out in time.

The following class I was out for administrative stuff – so Bob discussed some non-dualism material and worked with the students to pull out some basic ideas from the fluxus pieces and then they created new ones. His take was that they were not as successful as the first round, mainly because there was almost no one left to watch, but also the refinement didn’t help the overall process. A very valuable lesson.

The next class I presented information on chaos theory – with the idea that we have already seen examples of sensitive dependence, iteration, and strange attractors. Perhaps not as successful an integration as I would have liked, but a few of the students dug into this material, so it may have an impact later on. We started the class with the “one second late” piece in which they fill in five events that happen because someone started their day one second late. Its always interesting how they degenerate toward violence or destruction, some every day, and some fantastic. I have heard very few positive takes on this.

Today was day one for the fragmentation projects – and I’ll hold off on a complete discussion of them until we have finished the second group. But what we saw today was great. The students that are willing to challenge themselves to think through the process of taking something apart and reassembling it get to reflect on their process and what it produces. There are still some students that we feel are kind of phoning it in – doing the least invested pieces they can. It’s a shame because they are all bright enough to turn in some wonderful work. We do occasionally see students we thought were tuned out wake up and do some great stuff. How to keep them awake is more complex.

One more thing I will mention. Bob and I went back to the Solo olos rehearsal to watch four more iterations of the dance. The first one was amazing. Some lovely images and movements ridding right on the edge of collapse. The other three were good, but did not have the spark the first one did. Abby is working with the students to not get too comfortable with the piece. She also encourages them not to try and control it too much. When the caller tries to shape the piece by looking three or four moves ahead it loses something. Fascinating that they have to work so hard to be indeterminate.

Days Fourteen, Fifteen, and Sixteen:

 Wow did we get lucky. Bob and I met with Abby Yager who was working with students on staging a performance of Trisha Brown’s 1976 piece Solo olos. Abby graciously invited her dancers to meet with our 8:30 class to show the work and discuss the process. Abby first gave the students a nice historical overview of the Judson Church folks. Then she explained the indeterminate structure of the piece. The timing for our class could not have been better. Three basic dance phrases (main, branch, and spill – the first two set, the third developed by individual dancers from an ambiguous set of instructions) are set n motion. Five dancers start with main – which – like all phrases – can be performed backwards or forwards – one splits off to become the caller. The caller, at specific points in the dance can call out a single or multiple dancers to execute the branch or spill phrase or to reverse any of the three phrases. The result is that each time the dance is performed it creates different arrangements. Very much like Cage’s indeterminate sound pieces. After performing it once (about 10 minutes) the dancers talked about their experience with the work. Here are some basic things that emerged from the conversation:

Exploring the friction between freedom and form.

There are no mistakes – everything creates something beautiful.

You learn to deal with what comes your way.

“Just try.” That was the point. She put us on a collision course with the impossible (to see what would happen).

She works with seemingly impossible instructions.

Five instructions:

Line up (the warp – the baseline to create from – the underlying structure)

Play with visibility and invisibility, the emergent and the disappeared.

Work the edges of the space – transgress the space and play with the extremes.

Act on instinct

Keep it simple.

These ideas help you get past your creative genius.

She worked to destabilize the notion of right and wrong.

Then they danced the piece again with a different set of dancers and a different caller. Completely different – and yet  - bot. Bob and I videotaped the presentation and discussion and then went over this material with the second class.

The following class Bob took the lead to present a slide show on where we have come from and how we got to the postmodern era. The presentation was complete with a few movement exercises based on the Solo olos material – but significantly simplified. Part of what we were exploring was indeterminacy, but also system – specifically group events.

Today was about fluxus – getting students ready to develop their own fluxus inspired pieces. So, brief history of the movement, some examples, and some discussion about La Monte Young. It was at this point in the first class that a student, who has remained largely silent this term, asked about intent – mainly – how is it possible to look at such things as art? It’s a question I love because then we have to talk about what we have been trained to see VS what we see in front of us. It also frames the question of categories and understanding in really interesting ways. Much of this is inherited in the sense that we are taught how to listen and watch and understand artistic expression. What I like about what the fluxus folk do is push on those understandings. By creating simple pieces they open up a space for a dialogue about “what is art?”

I felt compelled to follow up with the student via email to mention two things – how glad I was he posed the question (which I posed in the second section) and that he should continue this line of thought. Here was my response:

I appreciate you questioning the material today. I expect you are not the only student to wonder about the material we have been discussing (something true in both sections). The fact that you have thought about it and talked about it - even if you don't agree with it - means that the course material is doing what it is supposed to do. What I mean by this is that these paths to the present courses are designed to introduce students to material that they may not be familiar with. Much of this material raises the question you raised today in class - how can this be considered art? When posing the question it become clear fairly quickly that everyone draws that line differently. Part of what Bob and I are proposing is whether it is possible to define artistic expression not by skill or technique, but by concept and execution of thought. By the end of the term I suspect some students will reject much of what we have discussed. Which is fine. I don't believe that Bob's job or mine is to convince anyone where that line of art/non-art is - but merely to raise questions that you can wrestle with on your own. 

Thanks for speaking up today - I encourage you to continue this line of questioning in the future. 

So – now we are at spring break – it was actually great that the art question came up at this point – it gives the students something to think about. When we return students will be bringing in their three fluxus inspired pieces. Each piece is to be written out on a 3x5 index card. Then we perform them. In the past it has been a fun and interesting day. I have sold it as such to Bob. My hope is that it doesn’t disappoint – but who knows.

As a side note here – we have seen a number of students wake up and get engaged in the conversation in really interesting ways. But there are those that still feel asleep. My hope is that the somnambulistic tendencies don’t drag the whole thing down.

Days Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen:

We used an open class day to pull together a number of threads that had been developing. Bob put together a fantastic presentation with Cage, Reich, and Eno functioning as examples of artists that were an affront to an established system, experimented with the system, and finally found a way to integrate back into the system. The point with this is for students to begin to see generative work not in isolation, but as helping to develop viable tools for artist to employ. The timing of the presentation was great – with just having finished the sequence on indeterminate and generative music and right before the third project.

Part of the drill with the project courses is allowing students the space to understand the material on their own terms. This happens as they execute the open-ended project questions and wrestle with a specific framework or direction, but need to animate how that is navigated by them. Students naturally begin to gravitate toward mediums, elements, symbols, etc that are meaningful to them. The result of this process is that they have ownership over both their work and their understanding of the material – not merely regurgitating what the teacher has said. So – the open day is a point to remind them that they already understand a great deal about generative art whether they recognize it or not. This is a much slower process than more traditional approaches like lecture or seminar, but the pay off is that their understanding is considerably deeper and richer.

By this point in the term – right toward the end of the first third – students have been exposed to the following ideas:

Juxtaposition

Tension

Process

System

Re-purposing

Disruption

Chance

Indeterminacy

Context

Intention/Interpretation

Layers of meaning

Perspective

Framing

“Devaluation” of skill

Artistic eye

Concept/idea

Unintended results

Audience interaction/implicate viewer in process

Typically to generate this list we ask the students what techniques or ideas have they seen develop in the projects and conversations. We then supplement that this with ideas that we may have noticed but have gone unsaid.

This brought us to the third project – making a simple machine. The assignment was to create a machine designed to make a sound. The parameters involve taking no less than one minute and have at least five steps, with the encouragement that students think about things like -  motive forces, variables, time, space, speed, weight, friction, distance.

The results are always quite telling. At least half of the projects don’t work the way they did at home, and some fail to function at all. Sidestepping the issue of “success” or “failure” we try to discuss what was produced independent of intention. Often the end result is as if not more interesting than what was intended. So – it is kind of a loaded question in which we know that a certain percentage of the projects will not progress the way there were intended. For some students, who have internalized years and years of standardized testing as the only measure of success – this is a hard class. But the follow up questions are about what they learned from what their project to do. This is the first step in pushing them away from their work so that they can reflect upon what is created. The next project completely takes control out of their hands. It is always fun to see what that produces.

Days Eight, Nine, Ten:

Moving from the second projects into John Cage material worked quite well. By focusing on process the idea is that students would have a greater understanding of Cage’s methods than merely just reading about them. I must admit that the students who abstracted a process and used it to shape the result of the piece offered some really good insight into usefulness of this idea. Direct application, while interesting, tended to reveal itself fairly quickly. Building off of these projects we had students create a Cage inspired soundscape. Essentially a process piece with the timeline and intensities laid out, but with sounds to be filled in by the students.

The results were fascinating – similar arc – but lots of variety within that arc. The megamix of all seven projects (three from the first section and four from the second) show where the pieces began to pull away from each other in time.

Cage-like Megamix

The Cage day was mainly devoted to the exercise and to exploring some of his scores, 4’33” and a video on a prepared piano. Cage then becomes a lead in to Reich and Eno.

As I have done in the past – we had students listen to Reich’s Pendulum Piece – microphone suspended over amplifier – as a means to discuss process. Then it is on to a listen of “Come Out.” This pieces, though 13 minutes long, is a great example of process and product collapsing into one idea. Reich merely sets the loops in motion (with some after the fact tinkering). The point that came up in both classes is that what we listened to was unlikely to be the first time he tried this. The question then is – how long did he experiment before he found something he thought worthy of listening to? This is the big change in the Gen Art class from last time – a greater attention to the role of the artist in all of this. While skill and technique get put into question – concept or idea is moved to the forefront.

Reich gave way to Eno and we looked at his 77 Million Paintings and ipad app – Scape. What was unique about this time is that Bob created the suspended, melting sculpture that periodically released pebbles onto xylophone bars creating a ringing sound. Impossible to predict the next sound, the dropping pebbles animated the entire class time and provided a good basis for discussion. We did notice that the dropped pebbles, due to the shape of the bars, tended to cluster into specific areas. A nice strange attractor for us to address with the chaos material.

We ended the class urging the students to begin thinking through the material we have covered so far. The goal with this is to circle back around and discuss ideas, techniques, and how they relate to the SSC material. This is an optimum time to do this – to take stock of where we are – and help shape the rest of the term. One thing that I always forget about these project courses is that they tend to feel a bit wander-y – as if we are just floating from topic to topic. It seems to take longer in these courses for a clear picture to emerge of the subject. We are right at the point where it will start to emerge. That leads us into the last project of this section before we dig a it more deeply into indeterminacy.

Days Five, Six, and Seven

As so often happens – I get way behind on blogging on the class. A good sweep of days here – moving from the first project through in-class work to the second project. Bob and I focused on the Zen and Thich Nhat Hahn material as a way of reviewing the first projects. The impulse was initially to call the first project “non-intention,” but it worked better to focus on juxtaposition with non-intention being a by-product of executing the projects. Through this conversation we developed a list of terms, ideas, techniques that we intend to circle back around to after the Reich and Eno material. A discussion of eastern and western approaches to art making was a good place to focus our energies. Control VS natural process. The discussion was OK – we are finding that the first class takes a bit more time to warm up to the conversation, whereas the second section dives in deeper sooner. So – there is a bit of a disconnect between the sections, but not by too much. We also find, which is no surprise, that we understand the material better in the second section and have streamlined the ideas. I do wonder how much this impacts the level of conversation.

The next class was focused on four in-class exercises that developed out of what I used to call “dadaday.” Tzara’s dadapoem, Burroughs’ cut-up, collage, and the surrealistic game exquisite corpse. Four stations – 10 minutes each – then share samples from each group. It is always interesting how this arcs – first quiet and focused – like good students – toward more cacophony – toward chaos – and then back to quiet. It was easier to share the textual material than the images – so we had the students post them on the wall and gathered at the end to discuss. As opposed to the last time Bob and I taught this class, we continually ask students about the use of these technique and process in their arts area. Looking at things like juxtaposition, chance, fragmentation, etc it is often a mindset or abstraction rather than a direct application. As was discussed – it would be easy to use the corpses and collages as inspiration for text, sound, character development etc. The suggestion that a collage could be used as a text for a piece of theatre, music, or screenplay was met with interest. Bob’s acknowledgment that the by-product of the process was to create some “interesting” images.

This has been an idea we have returned to a few times – largely through Nile’s questions about what “interesting” means. Bob and I keep wrestling with this notion as I don’t really feel comfortable with the “good” and “bad” designations for projects. I would prefer to discuss projects that are more interesting than others. By design, this has a vague definition since what is interesting to one person may be boring as hell to another. This fits right in to our discussion of how the viewer can contextualize a project in a number of different ways.

Next class was dedicated to presenting project #2 – one designed around detailing a process for an everyday activity and then creating a painting or sculpture using this process. Not a simple question, but one that yielded some great results. There were a number of students that interpreted this in a linear and literal way – marching though the steps one at a time or incorporating the steps into the piece itself. We started by just looking at the pieces without the process. Paused to ask questions about commonalities and difference between projects. The process pages were then set out, a second review of the projects, and then on to discussion about what we see. Here we noted direct applications as opposed to abstraction produced quite different responses. Abstraction took a bit more time to digest and often yielded more complex results. Although I should qualify that “complexity” was often contained in some of the simpler projects where simplicity created a greater need to dwell. We have the next round of project #2 tomorrow.

Part of what we are working to have the students focus on is process – the steps by which something is executed. Underneath this are two elements – we will eventually separate the students from the work, and there is probably some commentary built in to this about the process they are acquiring here at the school. The next project will move from identifying to creating one and then setting it in motion. Should be interesting.

Day Four: First Projects part deux:

Two weeks into the class. Hard to believe. I don’t feel like we have covered much yet, and yet, we have tons of material we can draw on. As we explained to the students the first day, their answers to the project prompts provide content for the course. I’m not sure they recognize what that means at this point. Connecting the projects and discussion to the set of reading for next week students already understand a number of key ideas without realizing it. Some of the ideas about juxtaposition were generally clear going into the projects, but now we have a host of ideas to discuss. Allowing the students to generate the list of concerns or ideas in the project discussions will begin to provide the framework on techniques so useful as they continue to generate work. The goal with this is that by the end of the class they have a kind of generative art tool kit – with ideas and techniques useful in a variety of ways. We do need to pair this with the historical material and so moving from these first projects through dada and John Cage will help ground the ideas in time. Bob and I have discussed the second project question – which continues to morph as we see opportunities to nudge the conversation one way or another.

The differences in section is always quite interesting. Section one seems much more contemplative, quieter, more focused on the discussion. Their projects had less of a performative feel as opposed to the other section. Section two seems much louder, more easily distracted, more active. This may have something to do with the earlier VS later class times. Both lend themselves to the material quite well, but means the sections will be drifting away from each other a bit over the next few weeks. As with Tuesday – lots of great projects to discuss. We have a ton of material to weave into the conversation on Tuesday.