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Looper's Delight
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| i've been thinking about these topics that have been bouncing around for the last week or so, my 2 cents: someone stated that art is not entertainment- that is false. in the 1800s at the height of the salon era in Paris (the center for the art world at the time), the state funded salon which could make or break careers-, the art that was being shown was one of the forms of entertainment of the time (remember, no tivo, movies or ipods at time). people would go see the paintings, etc. and marvel at the good stuff, and LAUGH at the bad stuff. as for the experimental debate-i can only speak from the pt of visual arts, since that was my training, and in all my yrs of art school, i never heard the term "Experimental" w/ the word "Art". i think when you are talking about visual art, the word "experimental" is implied, you are experimenting as you learn/make stuff. now, i have heard/seen the term-"experimental film"-it usually means film that breaks from narrative context, as in the classic sense of film (stories told w/ visuals and sound) and certainly there is lots of examples of this: dadaist/surrealists made experimental films back in the 1920's etc.... but on the whole, as applied to the visual arts-i've never seen "experimental" coupled w/ it. now the terms that are coupled w/ it: avant-garde-french term for advanced guard-usually mean folks going beyond the limitations of the day, exploring new ideas of FORM. in the classic sense of modernism (movement in art celebrating modern life, from Manet in mid 1800's on), avant garde usually meant artists who did things that took the rest of the art world 10 yrs or so to catch up to what they did first, so 10 yrs later, it becomes a style, example is all the artists who fall under the different -ISM's (manet, monet, van gogh, picasso, etc). generally their style was a move away from idea of Renaissance space to a flatter use of space, and moving away from ideas of finish, eventually removing idea of subject matter. Avant-garde also was about artists who went outside of the normal means of getting their work shown (ie: Courbet setting up his own pavilion, Impressionists having their own group shows outside of Salon/academy). of course all this sort of ended w/ the advent of post-modernism, which is a loose term that noone seems to know what is or when it started... now, how this relates to music-i have no idea. but in the interviews i've read about people who i classify as "experimental", the musician never usually says their work is "experimental". it just seems to be a loose term that people (critics/writers) throw out, sort of like "alternative"-which i laugh when i see that term used, b/c i think isn't that a music movement from the early 90's? can it still be applied to today? generally-i think of experimental music as the people from the turn of the 20th century who began to explore ideas outside of tonality, and their movements were concurrent w/ the ideas of what picasso/cubists were doing (breaking w/ form of how subject matter is explored//also happens when einstein comes up w/ relativity-world see universe in different perspective). you know, the question is: when you sit down to play/compose, etc: do you say, i'm going to make a piece of "experimental music"? most likely not, you usually just start to play/compose music based on what's going on in your head/your life and the outside influences that move you...and you work on it and refine it, etc.... my long 2 cents....i'm sure i forgot a 100 things..... s---- ps-a friend of mine, who is a professional singer/songwriter, and who's background is in music, one time we were talking about "experimental music", and she said she always thought it was people just DROPPING SHIT. that always made me laugh. |