Art for Arts Sake

Pipo Tafel & David W. Pyke

Since 06/2022 8 episodes

AFAS E04 Space in Art & Life

when is space, time, sound, movement considered art?

2022-07-22 27 min

Description & Show Notes

What is the relationships of the artist to space and the necessity to reflect upon it? We discuss the labels, that are used to define the languages of art, examples include John Cage 4' 33", Hermann Hesse, ancient paintings in Australia thousands of years old, Miles Davis and others.
Music as always from David - cheers!

Transcript

DAVID Recording have started. PIPO Recording has started. DAVID The tape is spinning. PIPO The tape is spinning. DAVID Fullscreen mode and in Dolby surround sound. PIPO Okay. DAVID Yeah. Quatrophonics. PIPO AND....the recording is running DAVID There you go. PIPO Clap. DAVID Clap. Well, here we go. Here we are. You've been to Croatia, you've been to Zagreb. You've been other places beyond your borders. PIPO Yes. And you have been to an island in Australia with incredible paintings on the wall? DAVID Yes, fifth largest island. But nobody goes there except if you do mining or you live there. But I went there. PIPO And you recorded those ancient drawings? DAVID Yes. How old they are? Who knows? But it has anthropologists very intrigued. Maybe a couple of thousand, maybe 40,000. What I find amazing is the paint is just from the earth. It's just ocher and pigment from the soil. And they put it on the rock and it's so sheltered. When they have big storms there. You think in 2000 years, how many major hurricanes or storms come through that was. PIPO Indeed... DAVID Planets, the spider sitting there, it's amazing. And it's like graffiti going on here. They were spilling all over the wall, wasn't just in one corner, it was all over the place. Wherever there was a space. But what really struck me was interesting was green. I know in nature green is everywhere. Green is all our trees are green, but you know they're not. DAVID Unless they got it from the leaves. I don't know the pigment. Where did it come from? Did it come from the ground? That that makes it. I suppose if you mix yellow and blue, but blue is not a pigment. Brown is a pigment. Red is a pigment, you see. How do they do that? Or do they go to the supermarket? DAVID Was that was that a recent one? PIPO Since when can you buy paint in the supermarket? DAVID Oh, well, I mean, in Germany you can't. PIPO But in Germany you can't DAVID Industrialized societies, we have that facility. PIPO You have that in Wal-Mart and those places. I've seen it in the U.S.. Well, you. DAVID Can buy things. You can buy rifles in Wal-Mart. You can also buy ammunition for those rifles. Anyway, we digress. Space. But that's what I said about the the rock space that was was filled with lots of drawings, paintings. We were talking about space in art and in space in life. Yeah, the pillow philosophy of it, of course, many classical composers will say many, a few, including jazz composers like Miles Davis, they talk about the importance of the space. DAVID It's like some people go so far as to say that's where the music is. I think that was Miles Davis. He says that's where the music is, is in the space. But he wasn't the only one. There were composers who said that as well. PIPO I went to Zagreb and we recorded with Ken Ludden Masterclasses and he mentioned that the dancing is in between the positions. DAVID So similar, a similar thread of thinking is going on. So what does it mean for a visual artist on a painting? Is it the basis of what? Or they don't fill in colors? PIPO I find it interesting that you call it space because we talked about idleness and seemingly rest and nothingness and you came up with space, which is completely different. It's not nothingness. It means there's space for something. And what if for the visual artist, it is in the process. But if it's between the nodes for the musician and between the positions for the dancer, it might be in the execution of the stroke. PIPO You know, on the on the way. I've always wondered if I could be able to be present and be in the moment when I'm painting something instead of thinking of a line, thinking of infinite, of number of the points and dots that are following each other. So positions like that. So if I can be aware of those instead of the line as the result, that would be something. DAVID Well, if you go to a big microscope, I'm sure you will find space on what you think is a line or color. PIPO Yes. DAVID But interesting also is idleness. You know, traditionally one of the seven deadly sins of the Catholic Church. Idleness. PIPO Now we're talking. So are you a Catholic? DAVID I was baptized Catholic. And I work at a Catholic institution. And essentially I am Catholic. That's an identity, not practicing as much as I should. That's a practice and a process and whatever. But yes, that's I was baptized the whole lot. But I'm aware of some of the some of the regulations or some of the recommendations from Canon Law and other places. DAVID Space. You have to. You have to covet space because even idleness is necessary. But I guess it's like everything excessive, anything. Maybe it's too much. Too much idleness is no good. Too little idleness is no good. So perhaps it's the happy medium. PIPO Now that I'm looking at you, I'm wondering what kind of headphones are you using? Because I haven't seen them before. And in the same time, the thoughts in my head are about the question of when we mentioned idleness and you mentioned the Catholic Church. There's this statement over at LABORA, Pray and Work, and that also made me think of the chants of the monks that have to have you listen to the I think it's Benedictine monks or these. DAVID What they call plainchant. PIPO You know, you have those I mean, you have the churches and you have space. And also, I think about the question of the the space in your head or your believe, because if God doesn't have a manifestation as one person or something, isn't that something similar to the artist? We're having a construction site here downstairs. But anyway, if you thinking of the the abstract concept of God for some people is really concrete. PIPO They find it anywhere, but it's for others it isn't. So maybe that's that's similar to the arts, you know, that it's not about the nodes but the space in between. But actually we were thinking about silence when we it's I'm getting closer to the microphone. That's a better sound, isn't it? I sort of thought about that before. DAVID I think you eat a lot of cheese and beans, but. PIPO [laughing] DAVID They. No, no. You know, scientists say space is not nothing anyway. So space can be the stuff in space. Spaces space is more a relationship, I think. And maybe the music's not in the space. Maybe the music's in the in the notes that are being played. I mean, it's, you know, just a fun way to look at it. DAVID But we need I love I love the sound effects lecture growing today. We love we love the idea of that. We control things, too. But I think the art of art reflects life. That's a that's a cliché statement. And I think if you don't have space, you mean like a juvenile might not do graffiti on a wall because there's no space. DAVID It's busy, it's got advertisements, it's got artwork already there. But for their expression, they require the blank wall. You say they need the space for that composes creative. People need to go into a cocoon in their bedroom, the chamber, whatever, or in forest or something. And they have to they have to have a space time. You can't constantly produce, produce, produce. DAVID It's it's what you give out. You have to absorb, absorb, and you need the time. And of course, the Asian talking about religion, the Eastern religions, they, um, there, they don't have this doctrine of idleness. They talk about making spending a lot of space. In fact, the Buddha probably sits 18 hours a day, probably 24 hours a day. DAVID Who knows? In the in the folklore of it, meditating, trying to shut out thoughts of all thoughts, how much space is that? That's a lot of space towards enlightenment. PIPO I always thought that graffiti is possible even without space when you just mention it. Not always, but concretely. Because if you look at a wall, it already has a structure. So it might be a question of I can, I need to keep on reminding myself to go to the microphone. That's something, you know, like when being in the process of making something and creating something, forgetting about the technical aspects is a really good sign. PIPO But then later in the mix, you will realize that the person has changed the distance to the microphone. So I just realized that I'm less a technician today, but more a person, which is a good sign, but it'll be apparent in the mixing anyway. If a a a wall has a structure, you know, a surface. And as you said, with the microphone, there's already something. PIPO So it's not a blank canvas even a blank canvas already has a structure, has a color. So it seems pretty much about the concept of how we look at things and we define them for ourselves. I unless I read about to this morning with in a book of Hermann Hesse the art of Idleness. And that brought up the topic. PIPO And I just read the first page. It seems that I think our brain works 24 hours a day. It never stops and so does our heart. So I believe that the concept of production is also a question of definition of what we call producing, you know, is a heartbeat, is a the the electrons in our brain communicating with the other cells. PIPO Isn't that already production? And why do we and we also why do we always need to judge what is good or bad? I mean, John Cage mentioned that when you go to one of his performances, he is it's not about saying black or white. I like it. I don't like it. It's good or bad. It's about making the experience okay. DAVID It's very profound. I don't know. I'm not I'm not defending space as something or nothing, but it's our limited language. We don't comprehend these concepts holistically and 100%. So we have to come up with labels for things so we can. Our brains like to like looking at the Grand Canyon, which is a lot of space. Your brain can't actually fathom the distance between the two peaks, so it makes a contraction of that image in your head in a way that your brain can understand it. DAVID And I think that's what we all must do all the time, is that we I mean, everything we're saying, you know, by the saying upside down anyway, the way our convex lens works on our eyes and our brain keeps playing tricks on us and turning the so-called right way up. But we just put labels on. We can't comprehend. DAVID Like someone says, the universe is infinite. You can't even comprehend that live in a finite world, really. I mean, even if you look out the ocean, you're only looking at about 14 kilometers. You don't know how high you are from the beach. So we have to put labels on things to try to communicate to other people maybe, or to store a memory somewhere in a language format rather than a visual. DAVID But yeah, space, space and music is it can be between the notes, that's for sure. Or it could be in bars. Sometimes orchestras don't play for a bar. Two bars, three bars. Maybe everyone went to the bar. I don't know. But it's space. John Cage, you mentioned. Okay, was it one minute and 43 or something? One minute, 42. PIPO 4' 33". DAVID Yeah, there you go. So when I first saw that, I was at university and my lecturer put that on and I looked at it and I thought, well, that's a good joke. PIPO When I saw it, I was in university too, and when the professor put it on, I thought, That's amazing. DAVID Okay. PIPO But I listen, I looked at it in a in a film and not I didn't listen to it. So you listen to it in a recording? DAVID No, no. They had a film. It was Carnegie Hall and. Yeah, so it was a context of a very prestigious, uh, theater. And then he's, he's not, he's not playing anything for minute 33. So, um, yeah, but I guess, I guess that's a wake up call and it takes 20 years later to actually understand it. I didn't understand it at the time. DAVID I thought it was a joke. I thought it was taking the the mickey or some other words I could use out of art because I thought, well, I could do that. I could I could put a tuxedo on and go to the concert hall. This the piano sat at the still for 6 minutes. You know, but but takes 20 years later than when you when you bring up this particular topic, then you think, okay, now look at the statement. DAVID And if some of the Miles Davis people are saying that the music is in the imagine imagine what people are imagining if you watch somebody lift the lid of a grand piano and sit at it, imagine what what what collectively people are imagining. Because then you get into another thinking, what is music? Is a music, a soundscape or as music, you know, diatonic notes along the scales. DAVID Well, I think I think traditionally it's been thought of that way. But I think in the 21st century, which is a reflection of earlier centuries in other cultures and other hemispheres, that music is sound if you want to define it like that. So the absence of sound might be they heard a buzz in the room. Maybe there was a, you know, sometimes lights make a noise or something. DAVID Maybe there was some sort of ambient noise or white noise or people shuffling beside them or coughing in that one minute and 33 or perhaps breathing, maybe they heard their own heartbeat even. Who knows? I don't know if John Cage was trying to take people that would be like a Zen master or a yoga master, perhaps. But he was he was talking about, I guess, coming in as a composer, presenting a piece of music. DAVID And it was strategic, but it was very detailed and specific. One minute 33 said, so it couldn't be one minute, 30 for one minute, 35. They had it had this parameters about it. PIPO And it has three sections in the notation. DAVID Yeah. PIPO So when I put on the record about a year ago, so we had a conversation and you said well that's not music, you think it's you listening, but it's, there's no orchestra, there's no musician, nobody's playing. So it was the vinyl on the record player and then, you know, the, the, the thing, the sound thing. And it takes on so many styles. PIPO You mentioned the needle. Yeah, the needle. You mentioned that, you know, there's actually no orchestra. There's nobody playing. Another interesting concept. There's a lot of to think about. And also there's the relation of when something is happening, what it means, what it means to whom and why you're doing it. So when does it become art or when is it music or sound and why does that matter who that. DAVID Person makes that decision, whether the person engaging. PIPO With it? I haven't figured it out. Still, I had a professor and him. He said, Who are you to call yourself an artist? Is society defining? If you're an artist? Also an interesting statement. DAVID No, I disagree. You could be like Van Gogh. You could be quite, quite proficient, quite skilled, and almost nobody knows you exist until a long time later. And even if you weren't discovered later, you could still be an artist. PIPO Maybe it's about the word, you know, the question of are you going to go and do what you think is necessary to be done in your lifetime? Or are you taking words and descriptions and titles and definitions of society and put yourself into a definition trying to become what the definition is and what you think the definition is. PIPO You know, if Van Gogh was a person who took paint and took paper and did that, you know, why isn't that enough? Why do you need to call it, you know, I don't know, an artist or just wondering? DAVID Well, he's no, he's an artist. But my point your professor says that society label that maybe from that point of view. Yes professor could say that it's us calling Van Gogh the artist, but either he would have called himself that. I'm sure of it. He would have felt that he was the artist. That's why I kept doing. He had to. DAVID He had no choice. PIPO I believe what happened at that moment was that there's two persons talking and one person says something and the other one says something else. But also the other person says a little bit of You're wrong. And I have a better idea of that. So it's kind of an entitlement in there, too, and that's a fragile situation of being a teacher and understanding what it means to be a teacher. PIPO Is it actually necessary to tell someone like, hold on what you're saying, that's not true, I know the truth. And how are we going to not even teach but, you know, pass on the knowledge or how do we communicate with each other? And I think the a lot of it was also about that, that there was someone called professor around a student and then there's a conversation and then this thing happens, you know, like, like being lectured. PIPO Part of it was being lectured in what somebody thought was true for him but doesn't need to be true for someone else. DAVID Well, perhaps it was a focused art lecture who saw himself in that context, but it wasn't to a philosophers. PIPO It wasn't a par having beers. It could be. DAVID It could be anything. PIPO It wasn't a bar having beers after a workshop. DAVID Okay. PIPO So, yeah, it never stops. So if you think it happens in the art lecture, I guess it's like with the notes and the space, it's important. What happens is that we define positions and notes and, you know, styles, but then the thinking is in between our opinions and in the transitions and in the changes, not necessarily in the statement like that is the truth. PIPO And I guess we're going like a Tarzan in the jungle from one thing to the next, flying from one country to the next. DAVID Well, our brain obviously absorbs in chunks. So if I spoke continuous sounds, it would be what they call gibberish. But if I put a spice in that, you can say, Oh, that's a word, that's another word. Oh, that's a sentence. Oh, that's a phrase. You can make sense of it. And music is a language as well as being an art. DAVID Music is about communication, so it's visual painting, so it's any pottery or anything, but the spice. You have to you have to plug your notes in phrases. And if you do that, then you then you have communication is not a continuous beam of noise. It's it's staccato and stops and starts just as this is the way we speak. DAVID So why do we have to have space in our language, spoken language? Well, we have to breathe. We can't. We're not robot making continuous noise. I'm sure a computer could talk to another, perhaps in a continuous beep or some rhythm of beep or something. You make sense of it. We couldn't do that. We couldn't. We couldn't generate it. DAVID So the space is just part of it. It's just the nature of language, the you don't talk in hundred percent term, you have a gap of breath. You have pauses to signal pieces of information coming through. PIPO So a lot of times when I edited the episodes of the podcast, I would take out breaths. Most of them, and then it would create a different rhythm. So yes, no, you make me think of if we can do something and leave things in here, the breaks and all those things. I did that because it helped to keep attention with what was being said, you know, because when we're talking like we're talking now, which isn't actors talking, but it's persons having a conversation and it's not scripted, then we're making up our minds and we're thinking about it. PIPO And sometimes we need breaks. And as you mention, breathe and we need to swallow and all of those things. Yeah, it would be interesting if we wouldn't if what happens if I don't edit, you know, that would be less time spent. Also for the art, for art's. DAVID Sake, it's more well, it's also more authentic. And also you've got jackhammer power tools going on, which is life really, isn't it? Unless you especially make a studio somewhere. That's where they do the nuclear war cabinet and everything shut off 40 kilometers under the ground. PIPO All right. I will think about that and go into the editing. DAVID: Okay. Rightio! PIPO: Art for art's sake. DAVID Art for art's sake. PIPO: Adios!