I do these things
Oh how I persist I am at least persistent
And I ask
Does anybody want them?
The answer comes back
Nobody at all
So I go on.
Howard Barker The Forty
I never felt, for example, that I was remaking society, but
I felt that my work demonstrated a kind of intellectual atmosphere of the
most formulative, creative part of my life, my early twenties. I was in a
society of painters and writers, that were absolutely free, but for
another reason, [had] nothing to do with politics. They were free, I was
free, because nobody cared. And maybe that not caring is the best type of
freedom possible, either for society or composer. Nobody cared. My father
cared, because he didn't want me to be a composer, but no one else cared.
I gave performances, people really didn't care. They didn't have the
energy even to hiss or boo, that's how disinterested they were. And I
always felt that that was the best type of environment to be an artist
— indifference — I don't mind indifference.
Morton Feldman
In conversation, 1972
Tonight, Wednesday, 3 March, at 8.00pm, Marilyn Nonken
performs the 95-minute Morton Feldman piano solo Triadic
Memories at the Players Theatre, 115 Macdougal Street. Tickets are
$20.00 and available online here.
Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes
souls into things. On its own account, even in advance of total planning,
the economic apparatus endows commodities with the values which decide the
behavior of people. Since, with the ending of free exchange, commodities
have forfeited all economic qualities except their fetish character, this
character has spread like a cataract across the life of society in all its
aspects. The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress
standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent and
rational one. Their criterion is self-preservation, successful or
unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity of their function and the
schemata assigned to it. Everything which is different, from the idea to
criminality, is exposed to the force of the collective, which keeps watch
from the classroom to the trade union. Yet even the threatening collective
is merely a part of the deceptive surface, beneath which are concealed the
powers which manipulate the collective as an agent of violence. Its
brutality, which keeps the individual up to the mark, no more represents
the true quality of people than value represents that of commodities. The
demonically distorted form which things and human beings have taken on in
the clear light of unprejudiced knowledge points back to domination, to
the principle which already impaired the qualities of mana to
spirits and deities and trapped the human gaze in the fakery of sorcerers
and medicine men. The fatalism by which incomprehensible death was
sanctioned in primeval times has now passed over into utterly
comprehensible life. The noonday panic fear in which nature suddenly
appeared to humans as an all-encompassing power has found its
counterpart in the panic which is ready to break out at any moment today:
human beings expect the world, which is without issue, to be set ablaze by
a universal power which they themselves are and over which they are
powerless.
Below, a video of Adorno from a German documentary. Narrated in German,
Adorno's remarks themselves, which begin about 55 seconds into the clip,
are subtitled in English:
Arthur Schopenhauer located the transcendent experience in the work of
the artist and the saint; in those two figures, he said, there is
demonstrated the ability to catch a mere glimpse of the Will that lies
behind all phenomenal experience of the world: through suffering and
discipline to ecstatic knowledge. In the below quote from the rare essay,
"Saintliness, Death and the Perfect Family," published only as a preface
to the 1994 publication of Hated Nightfall, Howard Barker extends
the concept to the consideration of the possibility of hope and love in
the world of representation, which requires necessary deception. At
the same time (especially in the concept of the repudiation of the
world), he provides a potential bridge between Schopenhauer and
Adorno's conceptions of the art work in contemporary culture:
If the sign of the saint is sacrifice, it is a sign
illuminated by the vehemence with which he repudiates the world. For the
saint finds the world lacking, and his desire is focused on what can never
be satisfied. His passion can discover no worthwhile object, and the more
searching his gaze, the more contamination is revealed. For Dancer [the
protagonist of Hated Nightfall], all is transparent, and this
transparency is appalling pain, for we require to be deceived, it is the
condition of social acceptance. Without deception there is perhaps no hope
... the saint is lured by human love only to discover its inadequacy ...
the saint is first and foremost his own work of art, exhibited primarily
to himself. But neither saints nor works of art are socially desired, for
they are disruptive to the bourgeois and the collectivist alike.
