Visual Music at the Hirshhorn Museum
July 2, 2005
There are several paths to visual abstraction, but I guess the path that seems easiest is to distort visual elements, stepping slowly away from pure representation, until one arrives at a picture that has no recognizable basis in our actual world. The exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum here in Washington sets out an alternative path: the mimesis of musical forms. Several early abstract paintings on display made the attempt to get across in visual form the experience of music. The visual is thus bypassed as flowing music is rendered onto canvas.
The exhibit manages to tell the interesting story of a succession of artists who tried, at first on canvas, but soon in film and through computer generated images, to capture musical form. The unspoken goal of many of these efforts is to become liberated not only from image, but from narrative. They were visual artists not simply trying to illustrate a piece of music, but to find a visual language that could sustain interest over a period of minutes with only abstract visual motifs. None of these efforts are likely to be on the verge of a popular rediscovery.. they appear to a modern audience as slightly clunky screen-savers.. pleasant perhaps as a background, but hardly anything to be watched with the intense abstracted interest that music can stir.
The inheritors of all this effort sit easily now on the hard drives of our personal computers. When I listen to music on my computer, it blinks into a program where abstract waves and pulses give me a chance to rest my eyes on something that at least is not distracting, and may even be complementary. But that is a much humbler goal than is documented by this exhibit.. the effectiveness of colored lights and psychedelic patterned slides as a background to music we have recognized since the Sixties. The question for these artists, however, was whether the visual arts could capture the attention without recourse to people and things that we recognize from this world.. and most of all, without narrative to drive the minutes along and grip our attention. The answer to that broader question appears to be a resounding No.
To my mind discussions often get off track by ignoring the way human beings process art. The delight of art is short lived. A beautiful painting or a beautiful melody strikes us quickly.. not immediately, since sometimes it takes a while to warm up to a work.. But finally it is sweet, and the pleasure as distinct as honey. At the base of each art, I believe, is this delight.. from bodily movement to trippingly evocative words. The next issue is how to maintain and extend an immediate pleasure into a work that elapses over a period of time.. perhaps an extended period of time. Here I think we need to call on narrative.. which by most recent accounts is hardwired into human minds: we make sense of our world through narratives, and discover causes by constructing narratives to explain them: we are perfectly able to maintain interest in a story.. to turn the pages to find out what happens next. In fact our natural interest in narrative can often overcome a distinct lack of artistry in presentation. Only through the aid of narrative can the immediate delight of something beautiful be prolonged, and long forms, whether they be ballets or poems, inevitably employ narrative. Music, of course, is at first glance the exception to this.. and thus its attraction for visual artists.. however, I think the narrative development of long classical forms is underappreciated.. But this is taking me a long way from the Hirshhorn!
I was impressed by the different gadgets preserved at the Hirshhorn exhibit. There were color organs.. antiquated and clumsy looking things.. that projected lights and patterns onto a surface. By the end of the exhibit we saw computer generated images that must have seemed fantastic on the earliest computers, but which now could be generated by a bright college student. Yet the exhibit fulfills one of the primary goals of this web site.. to preserve the stages of creative experiments.. to consider carefully the odd roads of the past. If we could, we would proudly display these experimental abstract films on our web site.. There’s no success like failure, someone once said.
