Art for art’s sake
Sometimes a theme comes at you from all angles and this past week it was art for art’s sake.
Last night I took in the animated film, Persepolis. It is an adaptation of the memoir by Marjane Satrapi and tells the story of a girl growing up in Tehran before, during and after the Iranian Revolution. It is a great story, told well and revealed through beautiful (mostly) black and white animation, full of shadows, contrast and shades of grey. Should anyone care how much of it is based in truth? I certainly don’t.
Earlier, while studying at the local library, I looked up from my work and staring at me was a little paperback copy of Oscar Wilde’s, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The preface by Wilde includes the thesis,
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim, that all art is at once surface and symbol and those that go beneath the surface and those who read the symbol do so at their peril, for it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Then there was the passing of Teo Macero, who produced Miles Davis in the 60’s and 70’s. Several works from that era, most notably the groundbreaking Bitches Brew, were a pastiche of improvisations and song sketch recordings, edited together. This was a controversial break from traditional jazz ‘realism’ recording philosophy.
Mr. Macero strongly believed that the finished versions of Davis’s LPs, with all their intricate splices and sequencing — done on tape with a razor blade, in the days before digital editing — were the work of art, the entire point of the exercise. He opposed the current practice of releasing boxed sets that include all the material recorded in the studio, including alternate and unreleased takes.
Lumper/Splitter, a 2004 collaboration with Joe Rut lives up to this ideal. We recorded some 40 hours of our guitar duo improvisations, narrowed it down to several hours of material and then edited out all semblance of overt melody and rhythm. We merged, added and manipulated, eventually creating a soundscape with a whole new vibe, rhythm and melody - quite different from anything we perform live. That was the point of the exercise and a work we are very proud of.
