A blank blog would certainly be appropriate and brilliant.
Was Henry Flynt trying to merely promote creativity by including the following on his Fluxus score: “The instructions for this piece are on the other side of this sheet” with the other side being blank (Dworkin 1)? Was it purposely a very open prompt just to get people thinking deeply (even though I’m not sure how inspired I’d be after an obvious lack of direction)? This is my only possible explanation at this point; what else could it be? It couldn't possibly be that he thought he was being creative, could it? The instructions seem similar to some of the answers I sometimes have given my students when they ask me how long a document should be (“however long you think it should be” often being my answer). I wonder if they’re as frustrated with me as I would be with Flynt had he left me the blank instructions.
I don’t understand how Cage’s publisher could have possibly sued Mike Batt for copyright infringement (Dworkin 3) “One Minute Of Silence” because, after watching both of them, I could not see any resemblance (other than a general lack of noise even though the pictures were different). Even if there were, if Mike Batt was just poking fun of Cage’s 4’33”, then that’s permitted because Batt was sort of parodying (allowed under Intellectual Property Law) Cage’s (which is allowed: think of Weird Al Yankovich’s work—he’s allowed to do what he does/did). How could Cage’s publisher sue Batt for using a bit of Cage’s SILENT piece in his own parody; how could the publisher even tell that it was in fact Cage’s?
The Language Removal Excerpts sound creepy and often sexual. The “60 Second Anthology of American Poetry” nearly made me gag from all of the repulsive licking of lips. Gross!
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Yes, you should have written a blank post. Why did you put words in?
ReplyDeleteI really like your reflection on Flynt and how it's similar to your students' experience. It's true that we deal with open and precedural things like this in everyday life. Think of any act of following directions. One thing that makes the Flynt piece especially interesting is that it makes us notice a structure (front and back of a page) that we don't usually notice, and shows that this structure is pretty complex (how could you explain a "page" and it's front/back to someone who had never seen one?).
Re the lawsuits: yes, it's hard to grasp. Are these jokes? Is there a quality to silence? Some silence better than others?
Interesting point about Language Removal. Yet these are the sounds we're all making all the time. They are bodily in the sense put forward by the sound poets. Funny, however, to hear how characteristic some are (e.g. listen to the Arnold Schwarzenegger one).