This video contains an interesting rant about Basinski's Disintegration Loops and how he appropriated 9/11 as a mythology for the piece.
Do you think the story or mythology that builds up around an artwork, either via the artist or critical reception, can ever be a legitimate part of the art? Or is it bullshit?
It's a tempting postmodern notion, but as a modernist I'm not so sure.
Interesting. I appreciate the criticism - anything receiving this amount of praise deserves examination.
Full disclosure: I'm a fan, but it has nothing to do with 9/11 for me. It's not why I listened in the first place, and it's not why I keep listening. I never completely believed either part of the mythology (the 9/11 connection or the 'tapes were dying' story), but I found the music enjoyable (and still do). I've always found the 9/11 tie a little tiresome, to be honest.
I'm going to keep thinking about your original question.
Meanwhile, two things to consider:
"The events of 9/11 were the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.” - Karlheinz Stockhausen
I've never heard this record. I've heard *of* it, I watched this video, and I talked to Brian about it. That's it. But I definitely have an opinion about the situation as I understand it and your general question. Mostly I keep thinking of parallels to abstract art. A good example would be contrasting Mark Rothko to Cy Twombly. Twombly has a lot of paintings with titles drawn from Greek mythology. I read this article when I was a teenager about how some critics thought these references were a bunch of b.s. intended to make his paintings seem deep. He denied this, of course. On the other hand, Rothko stopped titling his paintings at one point because he wanted them to speak for themselves without framing people's interpretations. So...
Music is generally more abstract by nature that visual art, but ambient music is particularly so. It generally doesn't have words & tends not to have recognizable instruments. So it's more subject to people's associations. Putting a label on it or even choosing cover art creates a frame for people's thinking that is more powerful than it would be with another form of music. I was saying to Brian, I think that for dilettantes ambient music also tends to sound somber. This meshes really well with the supposed subject matter of Disintegration Loops.
Bruce, you're right that in some ways this is a postmodernism vs. modernism question...
Basically, can we unmoor meaning from supposed referents and just take a text at its word, disregarding ideas of authenticity that are based on external standards? Does the truth of these claims matter? How about artistic merit? If rockism is dead, does it matter that this is cheesy ambient music that aficionados of the genre would scoff at? Shouldn't that cease to matter? I would argue that you can play fast and loose with a lot of things, and that has value, but when you get to a certain point, people do care about authenticity (one major point of my thesis, ahem). An event like 9-11 brings this into sharp relief. Pomo posturing is one thing but when a piece is supposedly about 9-11, most people want that to really mean something.
First off, I'll say I'm not automatically against artists framing their work. I would, however, prefer that it's done thoughtfully. That's left for critics and the audience to decide, I suppose. What bugs me about Basinski is how he retroactive framed the piece, and in a very romantic way that grates on me.
Yeah, it's awfully sentimental. And it capitalizes on that sentimentality. Which runs directly counter to the kind of postmodern arguments you'd have to resort to to justify it. Basically, in order to make a good case for this album it sounds like you'd need to strip away the very things that make people like it.
I would guess that for people who don't know much about ambient music, the sort of Pitchfork types who are likely to, say, own a copy of this record and either no other ambient records or very few, the problems this fellow in the video points out won't be apparent. So they just see this somber, deep, inaccessible piece with this sentimental connection to 9-11. It's sort of perfect from that perspective. The problem is that...
...this breaks down if you get the perspective of someone who actually knows about this stuff. Among other things, being knowledgeable about the genre means that something doesn't automatically sound all deep and fancy just because it's ambient.
There are obvious sentimental media texts about 9-11. The movies and so forth. If you think you're too cool for that stuff but you have enough emotion around 9-11 to crave some kind of romanticized text relating to it, something like this record might be especially appealing.
I listen to and work on a fair amount of ambient music. I find merit in the work completely outside of any sentimentality / romanticism attached to it. While not completely original, it is unique and enjoyable to listen to. Obviously, my subjective opinion. I'm not arguing that the merit of the work excuses the mythology (which I agree is bullshit), but I believe the popularity of it is about more than just the story.
On the other hand, Reich's 'WTC 9/11' piece (music clearly written about 9-11) felt crassly sentimental to me. While it wasn't retroactively framed like this piece (perhaps more 'honest' in that way), the use of actual emergency calls as part of the music felt like a much cheaper route to a quick emotional response.
Two other popular ambient works with equally dubious mythologies:
I've listened to these pieces a great deal without any idea about how they were made or how Basinski was framing the pieces. On their own, no matter how they were created, I think they are stunning to experience. Hypnotic, mantra-like, engrossing, and beautiful.
And if he wants to say it has some spiritual connection to 9/11 whether it happened before or after, why should we stop him? It frames the work poorly, I think, as I don't think the music feels connected in any substantive way. Like Beau said, at least he didn't try to loop in emergency phone calls or soundbites from news programs. It stands on its own with or without the framing devices.
Yes, I agree the Basinski piece stands on its own, without the framing.
As for the Müller, right of the bat I thought the mythology was a playful joke and added to the overall sense of an art piece. I'm not sure how it might have worked for people not plugged into the whole "unearthed private press rarity!" thing.
For the record, my favorite bit of framing is always going to be all the literary, historical, and other bits Paul Morley scattered all over the early ZTT albums by Art of Noise, Propaganda, and FGTH. There was always a sense the package and pretense was all part of the deal.
I'm having a hard time with the foundation that Ott uses to build his argument on. Is he setting himself up as an authority on both the subject of electronic music and music criticism because he has had "careers" in both fields? I'm going to have to watch this again, but I don't get why he felt the need to lay all this exposition out about how great P4K is and how much he admires the writers, as well as his history in the music world... What purpose did that serve his argument burying it under the weight of all his chatter about how the Internet buried the print world?
I have a trouble sorting out a lot of the rant, but I do think the part of it that Bruce brought up is a valid criticism of Basinski's appropriation.
It is possible to separate mythology from art & artists? Even the excellent example of Rothko provided above has a backstory (Rothko's attempt to defuse any such framing) attached to the art that hints at what kind of artist Rothko must be (pure, dedicated, honest) and his motivations.
The enormous gravity and shared experience attached to this instance seems to be the sticking point; were it about something else (the death of Basinski's dog, for example), I'm guessing nobody would care (or even bother to think about it).
Sorry, meant: "Is it possible..."
That is a very good point, Beau. If it were any other big event on September 11th, 2001, no one would bat an eye. I think that is Ott's primary beef - here's this music that he feels is absolutely lightweight that is being praised because of the 9/11 connotations. Everything else he talks about in the video is just window dressing.
Thanks for your feedback! Team Branch
