Something that I think would have been interesting to explore in class -- but is far too complex to actually include, lest you want to expand the course into an intense full-year one-- is the connection between the various media of 20th and 21st century art. I think to get a full understanding of, say, minimal art you need to also become familiar with minimalist music, literature, architecture, home design, film, et cetera.
Beats on Canvas are a Canadian trio of musicians who seek to create musical compositions that express audibly matching compositions of paint on canvas. They have been nominated for a few Juno awards this year, but I'm interested in checking them out to see just how successful they are. Is there an inherent connection between the music tracks and the paintings, or is their goal to show that attempting to link two separate compositions of different media a naïve hope of intertextuality? It's not like we're watching a sound film, where the images presented and the soundtrack are inherently linked (unless, of course, you choose to turn off the screen, or mute the sound -- but that's not the intention of the work); Beats on Canvas' presentation of their compositions, i.e. a music track that you can play separately on a music player and the matching painting in a booklet in your hands, doesn't have the inherent link that, say, a film does. But I think it's an alluring experiment: is it possible for us to listen to the music and match the paintings to it without being told?
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