Minimalism/post-minimalism/Minimal Art/process art -- whatever you want to call it -- tickles my fancy. In particular, I'm intrigued by "process art" and its emergence in a variety of art forms. In this class, we briefly touched on the works of Robert Morris, and when we did, I immediately connected the dots with some of my favourite 20th century composers: John Adams, Steve Reich, Michael Nyman.
Their concepts are quite similar: set up a process, create the parameters of it, and let it go. Sit back and enjoy the tumbling dominoes.
This seems to be to be an evolution of John Cage's experiments in chance, but with a different flavour. While Cage would create pieces that were utterly random at points, seemingly chaotic, these composers strike me as more... how to put this? Mathematical? Tight? Patient? I'm not quite sure of the word to use here. What I'm trying to get at is that Cage took a more Dadaist delight in confusion and entropy: what sounds from the audience will emerge during a performance of 4'33"? These process artists, on the other hand, seem to be interested in complex patterns and the recombination of them. I'm imagining a puzzle. Someone like Reich would take a puzzle and try to make it into as many different combinations as possible, seeing what new forms will come out of it. Cage, on the other hand, would take the pieces and let a kitten with a blowtorch and a plastic bag of new pieces loose on them. Some pieces would be lost, some cut up, some burnt, and new ones added. It's a new combination of what we saw before, but changed by chance and nature. Reich would create parameters for the piece to play within. Cage would prefer to have no parameters at all, and see what happens.
So to get back to Robert Morris, I think he's much more of a Reich man than a Cage one. Take a piece of felt, slash it a few times, hang it up on a gallery wall, and see what shape comes out of it. How is this not Cageian? We're anticipating gravity, a sterile environment, and that it will return to a state of equilibrium if someone happens to touch it. I think the point would be lost, or at least the meaning of the piece vastly changed, if we were to let loose the blowtorch-kitten on it. Why? Because the parameters have been altered.
If anything, Morris' anti-form seems to me to be a celebration of the mathematical precision and predictability of the universe. "Isn't it amazing all the natural processes out there and how they effect us?" he seems to be asking.
Cage seems to be a celebration of the chaos and unpredictability of the universe. "Isn't it neat how things can blow up sometimes when you least expect it?"
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