Water [Glass] [Empty]

[1] I know we last touched on this a week ago, but nonetheless, getting back to Cage, Pollock, recording (sand and wire): Cage is saying that the permanency of Pollock's work is its major failure- its failure to be performance. That is also his problem with recorded, synthetic, music - that it can be played back at will. It can be permanent. What saved sand art and wire recording for him, and what Pollock lacked, was a way to erase the art object. This is why he was preoccupied with being reborn without cultural knowledge (as a European-influenced American), as technology (i.e. wire recording) erases cultural memory and to erase a thing is to remove its intrinsic "thingness"- the things that Pollock's paintings became when completed. [2] I think what we are doing might be dangerous. I don't know if you share these uneasy feelings - the idea that by making art - producing "new" art, just gives whatever comes next some template to subvert until there's nothing left. Maybe the trend is cyclical and in thirty years people will be undermining performance thru Renaissance-re-revival painting, or maybe there's no end, or maybe there is. To say it another way, perhaps we should think about subverting progress. (This does not mean to hold on to what there "is" now, or what we "have".)