Parachute, 1 décembre 1985, Décembre 1985 - Février 1986

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WËÊ& mm.* 18111 WËMi -%.\t4 ÜÜP JiïpgSS ï» fc: 111851 SI-PI: MM£?$ ¦ * TRADUCTION EN FRANÇAIS/ENGLISH TRANSLATION art contemporain/contemporary art décembre, janvier, février/ December, January, February 1985-1986 5,50$ COUVERTURE/COVER Karl Blossfeldt, Centaurea macrocephala, pistil grossi 5 fois.directrice de la publication CHANTAL PONTBRIAND conseil de rédaction SERGE BÉRARD ROBERT GRAHAM BRUCE GRENVILLE JOHANNE LAMOUREUX MARTINE MEILLEUR JEAN PAPINEAU RENÉ PAYANT collaborateurs JEAN ARROUYE SERGE BÉRARD JODY BERLAND JAMES D.CAMPBELL BARBARA FISCHER JACQUELINE FRY PEGGY GALE RAYMOND GERVAIS BRUCE GRENVILLE PATRICK JENKINS JOHANNE LAMOUREUX MARTINE MEILLEUR BRIGITTE OSTIGUY graphisme LUMBAGO secrétariat à la rédaction, administration COLETTE TOUGAS promotion, secrétariat RACHEL MARTINEZ traduction SERGE BÉRARD ROBERT McGEE publicité BRUNO ÉMOND documentation ROBERTO PELLEGRINUZZI agent de bureau JACQUES LALANDE promotion en Europe KATHLEEN VAN DAMME 52, rue Émile-Bouilliot 1060 Bruxelles Belgique PARACHUTE, revue d\u2019art contemporain inc.les éditions PARACHUTE 4e trimestre 1985 conseil d\u2019administration Chantal Pontbriand, prés., Robert Graham, vice-prés., Jocelyne Légaré, sec., Colette Tougas, très.conseillers honoraires Colette Chabot, Yvan Corbeil, Lewis Dobrin, Elise Mercier Abonnements/Subscriptions: PARACHUTE C.P.425, Succursale Place d\u2019Armes Montréal, Qué., CANADA, H2Y 3H3 Tél.: (514) 842-8821 Rédaction et administration/Editorial and administration office: PARACHUTE 4060, boul.Saint-Laurent, bureau 501 Montréal, Qué., CANADA, H2W 1Y9 Tél.: (514) 842-9805 Toronto editor Bruce Grenville, 631 Queen St.W., M5V 2B7 abonnement un an\tindividu\tinstitution Canada\t20$\t28$ Europe, U.S.A.\t28$\t36$ deux ans\t\t Canada\t32$\t42$ Europe, U.S.A.\t42$\t54 vente au numéro\t\t Allemagne: 13 DM;\tBelgique: 325 FB;\t Canada: 5,50$; France: 43 FF; Grande-Bretagne: 3.60 I; Hollande: 15 FL; Italie: 9300 L; Suisse: 11 FS.distribution Québec Diffusion Parallèle, 815, rue Ontario est, Montréal, Québec, H2L 1P1, (514) 525-2513 British Columbia: Vancouver Magazine Service Lts., 2500 Vauxhall Place, Richmond, B.C.V6V 1Y8, (604) 278-4841 Belgique: Librairie Post-Scriptum, rue des Eperonniers 37, 1000 Bruxelles Toronto: C.P.P.A., 54 Wolseley Street, Toronto, Ont., M5T 1A5, (416) 362-2546 U.S.A.: Bernhard De Boer, Inc., 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, N.J.07110 PARACHUTE n\u2019est pas responsable des documents qui lui sont adressés.Les manuscrits ne sont pas retournés.Le Conseil de rédaction se réserve trois mois après la réception de tout manuscrit pour avertir l\u2019auteur(e) de sa décision quant à la publication du texte.Tous droits de reproduction et de traduction réservés © PARACHUTE, revue d\u2019art contemporain inc.Les articles publiés n\u2019engagent que la responsabilité de leurs auteurs.PARACHUTE est indexé dans Art Bibliographies Modem, RADAR et RILA.PARACHUTE est membre de l\u2019Association des éditeurs de périodiques culturels québécois.dépôts légaux Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec Bibliothèque Nationale du Canada ISSN: 0318-7020 courrier 2e classe no 4213 Imprimerie Boulanger inc., Montréal ln-cinq communications, Montréal PARACHUTE est publié avec l\u2019aide du Conseil des Arts du Canada, du ministères des Affaires culturelles du Québec et du Conseil des Arts de la Communauté urbaine de Montréal.Imprimé au Canada/Printed in Canada art contemporain/contemporary art décembre, janvier, février/ December, January, February 1985-1986 SOMMAIRE/CONTENTS ESSAIS/ESSAYS 4\tMonstruosités photographiques\tpar Jean Arrouye 7\tAutour de Promenades\tpar Johanne Lamoureux 12\tSound, Image and the Media\t \tRock Video and Social Reconstruction\tby Jody Berland 20\tNarratives\tby Peggy Gale COMMENTAIRES/REVIEWS\t\t 24\tGiulio Paolini\tpar Serge Bérard 25\tRoberto Pellegrinuzzi\tpar Serge Bérard 26\tAlain Paiement\tpar Martine Meilleur 27\tGuy Bourassa\tpar Brigitte Ostiguy 28\tLynne Cohen/Robert Del Tredici/\t \tKaren Smiley\tpar Jacqueline Fry 31\tEdward Poitras\tby Jacqueline Fry 33\tJohn Heward\tby James D.Campbell 34\tLouise Noguchi\tby Bruce Grenville 35\tBernie Miller\tby Bruce Grenville 36\tArt and Community\tby Barbara Fischer 37\tMark Adair\tby Patrick Jenkins DÉBATS/ISSUES\t\t 38\tLettre à l\u2019éditeur\t INFORMATIONS\t\t 40\tLa Musique et le Temps\t \t(2e partie)\tpar Raymond Gervais TRADUCTIONS/TRANSLATIONS\t\t 42\tAbout Promenades\tby Johanne Lamoureux 44\tSon, Image, Media le vidéo-clip et la reconstruction\t \tsociale\tpar Jody Berland of \u2019AAV *! ¦O' K Wm:on^ I Joan Fontcuberta, Lavandula angustifolia.MONSTRUOSITÉS JEAN ARROUYE Le Petit Littré définit le monstre, d\u2019abord, comme «un corps organisé, animal ou végétal, qui présente une conformation insolite»1; presque aussitôt le dictionnaire ajoute: «Les fleurs doubles sont des monstres».Il poursuit en disant qu\u2019un monstre est aussi «un être physique imaginé par les mythologies et par les légendes»: ainsi la sirène, l\u2019homme à tête de chien, et tous ces êtres que la mythologie antique ou l\u2019émerveillement médiéval ont créés, dont la nature est double.D\u2019un double à l\u2019autre il n\u2019y a pas si loin: Joan Fontcuberta les a conjoints imaginairement dans son Herbarium où la photographie sert à faire passer illusoirement pour vraisemblables d\u2019étranges*hybridations d\u2019éléments botaniques empruntés à des plantes diverses et d\u2019insolites greffes d\u2019organes animaux sur des structures végétales2.La Lavandula angustifolia, le Philosifus hyemale, aussi bien que l\u2019Hi-mena flaccida doivent leur existence à ces accouplements monstrueux.On ne verrait là qu\u2019exercice facétieux de l\u2019image et du langage si Fontcuberta n\u2019avait conçu son jardin des délices comme un hommage à Karl Bloss-feldt, étendant ainsi indéfiniment, par récurrence, la problématique du monstrueux.Car si Fontcuberta fait passer ses montages pour vraies plantes, Blossfeldt photographiait celles-ci de sorte qu\u2019elles paraissent des ornements architecturaux.3.Toute photographie n\u2019est-elle pas ainsi double dans son apparence, et donc dans sa nature, puisqu\u2019elle n\u2019est qu\u2019apparence?C\u2019est en tout cas la leçon que Roland Barthes semble tirer de sa réflexion sur le portrait.«Au fond, constate-t-il dans la Chambre claire, la photo ressemble à n\u2019importe qui, sauf à celui qu\u2019elle représente»4.La photographie allie incessamment l\u2019obvie et l\u2019obtus, ce qui est et ce qui n\u2019existe pas, ce qui est donné à voir et ce qui est accepté comme reconnaissable.C\u2019est là sa monstruosité fonctionnelle, celle qui fait que Barthes qui, en 1964 dans Rhétorique de l\u2019image, définissait la photographie comme image sans code, lieu de «pure conscience spectatorielle»5, peut en 1981, dans la Chambre claire, sans renoncer à rien de cette première théorisation, ne plus y considérer que sa «force d\u2019expansion métonymique».Car si «la photographie emporte toujours son référent avec elle», ce référent est, comme le voulait le titre donné à une photographie par André Breton, une «explosante fixe»6.Une petite fille est à jamais fixée dans sa pose; mais, déclare Barthes, «le corps photographié vient me toucher de ses propres rayons», et la serre du Jardin d\u2019Hiver explose, comme dans Nadja sautait la tour du Manoir d\u2019Ango7.Cependant la monstruosité de la photographie ne consiste pas seulement dans la conjonction d\u2019un être et d\u2019un paraître du référent, que tout entraîne par ailleurs à diverger.Chacune de ces dimensions de l\u2019apparence est aussi entachée de monstruosité en elle-même.Car la précision indifférente des optiques enregistre les objets avec une acuité qui, si l\u2019on n\u2019y remédie pas volontairement, produit le même effet que ce dessin de Paul Klee dont parle Maurice Merleau-Ponty dans l\u2019Oeil et l\u2019Esprit: «Il y a deux feuilles de houx que Klee a peintes de la manière la plus figurative, et qui sont rigoureusement indéchiffrables d\u2019abord, qui restent jusqu\u2019au bout monstrueuses, incroyables, fantomatiques, à force 6\u2019exactitude»8.Les intérieurs d\u2019Atget ou les coquillages de Weston, qui pourtant ne se réclament que de leur être-là, finissent par avoir la même prégnance hallucinatoire que les décalcomanies de Max Ernst, qui ne sont aussi qu\u2019empreintes.Quant aux images qui veulent favoriser l\u2019aventure du paraître, elles montrent des lieux qui, comme la bouche d\u2019ombre de la boutique de bois-charbons photographiée pour Nadja ou les carrefours déserts des banlieues de Stephen Shore, semblent en attente d\u2019apparitions9.Dans la Jeune Fille et la Mort de Michel Tournier, Mélanie, qui est l\u2019allégorie de la photographie, fait l\u2019expérience de ces anamorphoses imaginaires: «.le jardin devenait le fond d\u2019une fosse marine abyssale.Des monstres aquatiques devaient être tapis dans ces profondeurs glauques»10.Ainsi dans la photographie tout est toujours «à la fois reconnaissable et méconnaissable», comme l\u2019écrit Michel Tournier, car l\u2019avoir-été-là s\u2019y confond avec l\u2019imaginé-ici et le passé composé s\u2019y conjugue à l\u2019irréel du présent.Cela n\u2019empêche pas, on le sait bien, que la photographie soit le plus souvent considérée comme le moins insolite des documents et le plus fiable des témoignages.Sans doute est-ce dans /7/e mystérieuse de Jules Verne que l\u2019on trouve la plus admirable parabole de la foi en la valeur probatoire du medium11.Harbert qui, sur l\u2019île Lincoln, fait de la photographie pour se distraire, un jour «séduit par la pureté du ciel, eut la pensée de reproduire toute la baie de l\u2019Union».Or voici qu\u2019il découvre «sur son cliché un petit point presque imperceptible qui tachait l\u2019horizon de la mer».Il lave en vain son cliché, croit à «un défaut qui se trouve dans le verre», et puis enfin comprend: si point il y a sur l\u2019image, ce ne peut être que la trace d\u2019un objet dans le monde.Et ainsi est découvert par les naufragés le navire qui va changer leur existence et relancer le récit.Ce point sur la ligne d\u2019horizon met le point final à la deuxième partie du roman.L\u2019image est ici source d\u2019information, origine du sens, berceau du récit.Dans la Vue, ekphrasis versifiée d\u2019«une très fine photographie» de bord de mer, Raymond Roussel illustre l\u2019exact contraire de la postulation romanesque de Jules Verne.La vue, symboliquement «enchâssée au fond du porte-plume» de l\u2019écrivain, bien qu\u2019infime, recèle une telle abondance de traces, de détails et de scènes qu\u2019elle excède tout dénombrement fini et est irréductible à tout récit définitif12.Karl Blossfeldt, Saxifraga Willkommniana.Aussi différents que soient les résultats de ces deux lectures d\u2019images, dans chaque cas la transparence de la photographie est postulée.L\u2019effet de serre barthésien est ignoré; la mimesis exclut la poïesis, et la lecture, efficace ou éperdue, n\u2019a de limite que celle qu\u2019impose la matériologie du support (qu\u2019Harbert avait d\u2019abord soupçonnée), celle qui suspend les conclusions de l\u2019enquête du photographe du Blow-up d\u2019Antonioni.Suffirait-il donc de veiller au grain pour que la photographie se mette à rendre compte du monde avec innocence?Pourtant cette innocence supposée ne va pas sans perversité.Car c\u2019est dans la proportion où elle est crue dénuée d\u2019information que la découverte d\u2019un point sur l\u2019horizon de la mer vide est de forte signification.Inversement, c\u2019est sa richesse en informations qui rend la vue observée par Roussel insignifiante.Paradoxes, à ia réflexion, retournables: il suffirait que le descripteur de la vue focalise sur un objet (mais lequel?) pour que tout se hiérarchise et que naisse le sens; par contre, sur son cliché, Harbert paysagiste s\u2019apprêtait à apprécier le jeu des reflets et des ondulations de la houle, et tou- tes les vagues possibles de la mer nombreuse, la mer toujours recommencée.Ainsi tout comme l\u2019obvie et l\u2019obtus sont concurremment, monstrueusement, solidaires et rivaux, le visible et le vu s\u2019appellent et s\u2019excluent simultanément.Le partage entre eux est une question de regard, car la photographie n\u2019est, finalement, qu\u2019un spectacle à interpréter, et son sens tient moins à ce qu\u2019elle montre qu\u2019à ce qu\u2019on y démontre.Cependant cela est vrai aussi, initialement, dès la conception de l\u2019image.Soit l\u2019objet à la fois le plus neutre, puisque volume régulier posé sur un plan, et le plus lourd de symboles, puisque dressé à l\u2019origine de notre culture, une pyramide.Maxime Ducamp n\u2019y pouvait reconnaître qu\u2019un fabuleux vestige, du haut duquel, il le savait d\u2019avance, quarante siècles le contempleraient.Un siècle, et sans doute quarante millions de clichés plus tard, Denis Roche, redoublant la grande pyramide de celle du trépied de son appareil, montre que le pharami-neux tombeau est devenu l\u2019un de ces colifichets d\u2019inanité visuelle que les touristes collectionnent.Mais que survienne un photographe poursuivant une réflexion plastique sur les formes de la mort, déjà auteur au Mont Albert, au Québec, d\u2019un «cromlech» dédié aux caribous oubliés, et songeant à un mémorial aux baleines échouées sur les sables de Gaspésie, aussitôt la pyramide recouvre son prestige funèbre tandis que le désert se révèle marqué du sceau de la mort: Reno Sal-vail découvre la carcasse d\u2019un cheval crevé, inexplicable, inévitable, nécessaire concrétisation de sa songerie d\u2019artiste qui prépare pour le musée de Rivière-du-Loup une installation qui associera réflexion écologique sur la disparition des espèces animales et méditation symbolique sur la mort des civilisations.Tant il est vrai, comme l\u2019a fait remarquer Edouard Boubat que «les images sont latentes dans le photographe.Le sujet n\u2019est qu\u2019un révélateur».Plus généralement cette photographie semble illustrer la conception du réel théorisée par Clément Rosset, qui veut que les «manifestations du hasard ne sont susceptibles de se produire que pour autant qu\u2019elles sont aussi des manifestations du déterminé, de la nécessité»14.Le philosophe ajoute: «c\u2019est pourquoi l\u2019incertum dont parle Lucrèce est toujours en même temps un déterminé, un certum.Et vice versa, les marques de la détermination sont toujours en même temps des 5 #' \u2022''t* wm^ Denis Roche, sans titre.'Wêm*~ > %\t ~ «\u201d _L\u2014 De ce déroulement de syntagmes figés, voici quelques exemples: une plate-bande rocailleuse de Sarkis épelle, au bord du lac, en une cérémonieuse conjugaison de nature (les fleurs) et de culture (le langage), un kriegsschatz (trésor de guerre) incongru avec le format adopté, celui d\u2019une parure d\u2019hôtel de ville au discours habituellement désignatif et invitant, («Bienvenue à Outremont», par exemple.).Ajoutons à cela, le plan d\u2019eau de Rebecca Horn: .Un bassin hexagonal aux surfaces internes miroitantes rempli aux 2/3 d\u2019eau distillée, fermé par une plaque de cristal, est enterré dans un pré.Aux oscillations de température, des gouttes d\u2019eau se forment sur la plaque de verre.Chaque goutte montre en miniature le reflet de son environnement.3 Cette fois, la distorsion par le spéculaire provient d\u2019un effet kaléidoscopique plutôt qu\u2019anamorphique (Raetz).L\u2019exposition est riche d\u2019autres motifs du même genre dont quelques-uns nous intéresseront plus loin.On trouve à Promenades quelques cas plus «extrêmes» encore de cette scénographie de jardin.Le petit cours d\u2019eau aménagé par Meret Oppenheim est tout à fait «irrepérable» sans le plan de l\u2019exposition (distribué à l\u2019entrée et dont la fonction a vite fait de se révéler): même une fois localisé, il n\u2019est pas pour autant compris comme total artifice (ce qu\u2019il est pourtant) car seuls trahissent l\u2019intervention un très minuscule radeau de bois et quelques petits monstres de caoutchouc engloutis qu\u2019un enfant pourrait bien avoir oubliés le dimanche précédent.On est bien là de plain-pied avec un illusionnisme pittoresque, mais modalisé différemment de par une miniaturisation de l\u2019échelle (disproportion de l\u2019intervention et du site) et une espèce d\u2019anonymat des traces: à travers ses allures (son déguisement) d\u2019oublis, l\u2019indice ne fonctionne pas vraiment comme signature et il contribue à maintenir sciemment dans l\u2019indécidable la question des limites périphériques de l\u2019oeuvre.Seulement, chez Oppenheim, si le camouflage «marche», nous fait marcher, il n\u2019a pas de dimension critique.L\u2019oeuvre de Vito Acconci y revient et produit ironiquement la version mondaine de procédures militaires bien connues et elles-mêmes maintes fois caricaturées: des silhouettes humaines de mousse (devant) et de feuillages (derrière) synthétiques constituent les modules de base d\u2019un environnement de jardin que leur assemblage articule bien entendu «à l\u2019échelle de l\u2019homme»: une table, des chaises, un banc de mousse, une pergola feuillue.L\u2019agencement de cette architecture anthropomorphique, cyniquement humaniste, s\u2019inscrit évidemment contre un fond de pelouse et d\u2019arbres qui de loin cautionne le camouflage et de près en dénonce le faux ridicule dans l\u2019emploi du matériau.LE MATÉRIAU Les effets illusionnistes dans l\u2019utilisation du matériau ne se fondent pas toujours sur des visées mimétiques.Ainsi deux «jeux» de bronze: chez Maria Nordman, dans un mobilier de jardin (encore un), cette matière a des allures de bois ou, de l\u2019autre côté d\u2019un sentier, des effets d\u2019eau stagnante et sombre dans un petit bassin (un autre) circulaire: ce qui désamorce l\u2019illusionnisme ici, c\u2019est-à-dire ce qui le révèle comme tel, c\u2019est la proximité des deux pièces qui trompent séparément mais qui, une fois rapprochées, se dénoncent l\u2019une traire du réel ou comme tracé discret, d\u2019un gris neutre, sur un fond de verdure homogène.Markus Raetz présente aussi un dispositif de captation: au bout d\u2019un sentier boisé, un miroir rassemble en une figure (un torse de femme) des traits anonymes grattés à même une série de miroirs dissimulés parmi les arbres: nul besoin de spécifier que l\u2019efficacité de l\u2019anamorphose est sérieusement compromise par la propriété réflexive des miroirs qui les confond à l\u2019environnement.Mais déjà, les dispositifs de Fabro et de Spaletti avaient, en leurs contours fins, nets, neutres, une minceur qui, mise en relation avec d\u2019autres récurrences de l\u2019exposition, soulève une problématique du repérage de l\u2019oeuvre.Ce que j\u2019aurai bientôt l\u2019air de décliner, c\u2019est une là à Promenades, mimer le mimétisme, en le thé-matisant par exemple, requiert parfois un jeu d\u2019illusions.Serait-il possible que nous ayions là, à travers divers calembours plastiques, un mimétisme qui soit le contexte critique, drôlement critique, d\u2019un reste d\u2019illusions et des exigences devenues conventionnelles de la sculpture en site?(Admettons qu\u2019il est plus probable que nous en ayions un commentaire critiquement drôle, ce qui n\u2019est d\u2019ailleurs pas négligeable, pour commencer.) PARTIE DES MEUBLES: LE MOTIF Ce mimétisme est d\u2019abord sensible à un niveau iconographique: dans Promenades, beaucoup d\u2019oeuvres accumulent des motifs de jardin et Pat Steir, Sans titre , 1985 série de procédures faisant feu de tout bois (du contexte, du format, de la forme, du matériau, de l\u2019échelle), par lesquelles réapparaît quelque chose d\u2019impensable (c\u2019est-à-dire quelque chose qu\u2019on ne voulait plus penser): quelque chose d\u2019insoutenable (c\u2019est-à-dire, bien simplement, soutenu par personne) et qui, avec la déconstruction du cadre, avait mérité à la peinture son discrédit au milieu des années soixante: un reste d\u2019illusionnisme.Et pourtant non.Car il vaudrait mieux parler ici de mimétisme que d\u2019illusionnisme: le mimétisme ne vise pas à (faire) confondre une chose et son double, sa copie: il brouille la frontière entre une chose et son milieu.Seulement voilà, on le verra ici et jouent ainsi des conventions qui rappellent l\u2019utilisation du site: elles citent les topoïdu parc, recourent à tout un vocabulaire de meubles ou d\u2019accessoires prévisibles, attendus dans une nature domestique et mondaine (mobilier de jardin, plans d\u2019eaux, rocailles, balançoires, etc.).Cette première variante de mimétisme table, presque toujours avec ludisme, souvent même à la limite de l\u2019absurde, sur des références à une pratique sociale (et non solitaire) du parc plutôt que sur un investissement plastique et conceptuel de sa topographie spécifique: il s\u2019agit en quelque sorte d\u2019un camouflage par conformité à un décorum, à une série de «formats» du plein-air.9 Mario Merz, II Numéro Ingrassa (come) I Fruttl d'Estate e le Foglie Abbondanti 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 1974-1985 : ntm ¦ |« *\"§***«»\u2022¦» -\"A V'J H /¦' 7: ; î1\t! * - rC-^v SügJSlg 11111 tâÆtfï&W-t -41*^ - .\u2019 îKsKEsfe ¦.- W c - iPsui S K®g*£aj®B5j8 «s?: m : .; ¦ WmËm fSvJ'A\u2019-îr'/wtf:sjfo i - .:.-¦ -3 : .S^Wwî\u2019 Sm3S*2Î mm - ¦ PS» : y- ™ - - ' - .\u201cV \u2019;'-'\u2022 .immmsm iiv-.'i:- -\t.V àsmsmr&Æ&m H «m (Hffi WÊSmÈSÊÊ& lll§tjll$ii& Missis* l\u2019autre.Penone, quant à lui, a conçu, comme Fabro, son oeuvre en fonction d\u2019une particularité paysagiste du parc: au sein d\u2019un «tunnel» dramatique, formé de la retombée de branches noueuses et nues, il érige à partir du sol de fausses «branches», des «bigarrures» de bronze dirait Lacan4, qui se confondent à l\u2019architecture végétale du site choisi.Ici l\u2019illusionnisme matériel et la conformité morphologique construisent un effet-camouflage prodigieusement efficace, un contrepoint involontaire à l\u2019anthropomorphisme ironique d\u2019Acconci, à sa parodie d\u2019une projection romantique de l\u2019homme dans la Nature.(D\u2019ailleurs, dans une autre perspective, plus large, il faudrait reparler de l\u2019effet-prodige de Promenades: l\u2019accumulation de tant d\u2019oeuvres, où est donnée à entendre leur soudaine métamorphose en fonction du site, évoque une pratique artistique à laquelle les dieux d\u2019Ovide auraient fait un mauvais sort, auraient joué un joyeux tour.Il en résulte, même quand les oeuvres ne font pas directement référence à la fable (ce que maintes oeuvres font toutefois), une espèce de frémissement poétique: on est toujours à deux doigts d\u2019un rapport animiste à la Nature.L\u2019humour nous en préserve le plus souvent en instaurant une saine distance: mais il n\u2019en reste pas moins qu\u2019à nous contraindre à une telle vigilance devant l\u2019effacement des oeuvres, les lieux donnent l\u2019impression que c\u2019est, au bout du compte, eux qui amicalement nous guettent.L\u2019efficacité poétique de Promenades doit beaucoup à ce regard du site qu\u2019orchestre la «disparition» des objets.) Le camouflage des oeuvres ne se limite pas à une mise en jeu illusionniste du matériau: il mobilise sa transparence littérale (et non plus uniquement celle, théorique, qui fait par exemple, que pour fonctionner comme bois, le bronze doit se faire oublier comme bronze).Paolini pose dans un boisé les quatre grandes lettres transparentes de ce qui pourrait bien être la question même de l\u2019exposition: dove?(où?).Le mot n\u2019est pas épelé linéairement: ses lettres sont distribuées autour d\u2019un quadrilatère virtuel qui suppose le lecteur en son centre: or, comment même savoir qu\u2019il y a là un centre à occuper, un terme à déchiffrer?Le modèle de land-artiste suggéré par Promenades n\u2019est pas tant le rêveur de Rousseau que le rusé Petit Poucet de Perrault: Ils allèrent dans une forêt fort épaisse, où à dix pas de distance on ne se voyait pas l\u2019un l\u2019autre.Le Bûcheron se mit à couper du bois et ses enfants à ramasser les broutilles pour faire des fagots.Le père et la mère, les voyant occupés à travailler, s\u2019éloignèrent d\u2019eux insensiblement, et puis s\u2019enfuirent tout à coup par un petit sentier détourné.Lorsque ces enfants se virent seuls, ils se mirent à crier et à pleurer de toute leur force.Le Petit Poucet les laissait crier, sachant bien par où il reviendrait à la maison; car en marchant il avait laissé tomber le long du chemin les petits cailloux blancs qu\u2019il avait dans ses poches.5 On connaît la terrible suite du conte: abandonné une seconde fois avec ses frères, ce pauvre Petit Poucet emploie, mais sans succès, sa maigre ration de pain.À Promenades, la nature des repères hésite entre la marque déjà ténue des cailloux blancs et le risque des miettes de pain qui feront la joie des oiseaux.LE LIEU Toujours «sous le couvert» de la transparence, si l\u2019on peut dire, l\u2019oeuvre de Pat Steir travaille entre le leurre et le trompe-l\u2019oeil: elle suspend haut dans les branches un décor de peinture composé de deux pans de toile diaphane, l\u2019un derrière l\u2019autre, histoire de créer un effet de profondeur.Ce qu\u2019elle y dé-peint, peint en deçà, peint en lavis, d\u2019une couleur à la limite de la couleur et que le soleil de surcroît menace, c\u2019est une fausse prolongation du site réel: à travers le trafic des branches et des grappes feuillues, voici un autre renvoi mythologique, à une mythologie de peinture cette fois.On pense presque inévitablement au récit de Pline sur le concours entre Zeuxis et Parrhasios.C\u2019est à partir de cette légende aussi que Lacan distinguait le leurre du trompe-l\u2019oeil: Si des oiseaux se précipitèrent sur la surface où Zeuxis avait indiqué ses touches, prenant le tableau pour des raisins à becqueter, observons que le succès d\u2019une pareille entreprise n\u2019implique en rien que les raisins fussent admirablement reproduits, tels ceux que nous pouvons voir dans la corbeille que tient le Bacchus du Caravage aux Offices.Si les raisins avaient été ainsi, il est peu probable que les oiseaux s\u2019y soient trompés, car pourquoi les oiseaux verraient-ils le raisin dans ce style de tour de force?Il doit y avoir quelque chose de plus réduit, de plus proche du signe, dans ce qui peut constituer pour des oiseaux la proie raisin.Mais l\u2019exemple opposé de Parrhasios rend clair qu\u2019à vouloir tromper un homme, ce qu\u2019on lui présente c\u2019est la peinture d\u2019un voile, c\u2019est-à-dire de quelque chose au-delà de quoi il demande à voir.6 Chez Steir, si l\u2019oiseau, la grappe, renvoient à la «proie raisin», au tableau-raisin de Zeuxis, il faut y voir une ruse: son oeuvre réitère quelque chose de plus apparenté au geste de Parrhasios, mais à travers ce qui semble une traduction ironiquement littérale du projet de Zeuxis, une version élargie du projet de Zeuxis où il serait question de nous tromper en nous montrant, en plus du raisin, les oiseaux qu\u2019il a piégés.Lacan souligne justement que la hargne de Platon devant la peinture s\u2019explique du fait que «le tableau est cette apparence qui dit qu\u2019elle est ce qui donne l\u2019apparence»7 et non pas la doublure illusoire des choses.C\u2019est dans cet esprit, me semble-t-il, que Steir se référé à l\u2019idée de l\u2019illusionnisme et du trompe-l\u2019oeil: elle matérialise jusqu\u2019à l\u2019absurde les conventions, nécessairement implicites, de cette dernière pratique, et par cette adhérence au pied de la lettre, elle les met en échec.Voyez.La fluidité du pigment jointe à la transparence du support créent au-dessus de nos têtes un châtoiement argentin qui appelle l\u2019oeil, éveille un désir de voir, une curiosité mais, au même moment, les contrent: la représentation se dissout dans un éblouissement ensoleillé, l\u2019éclair d\u2019un flash continu qui ne nous laisse que notre aveuglement, et rien au-delà.Avec Pat Steir, s\u2019esquisse toutefois un refus, par 10 v?«SP llllllllll 11111 - \u2014 wmmm ¦ WMmlmimm fflmm m MÈÊÈÊÊÈÈÈÈm i\u2014 M1 immm \u2018 vH ¦ *^.:.;v;.'-\",\" wÈSBÈËËÊMËÈBÊÈËÈ |HH[ aSjJjjJjjtjl IHISjt ;; Luciano Fabro, Pao/o Uccello, 1985 \u2022\u2022¦ \u2022\u2022 \u2022-.:»\u2022 -r )w- ^; V/-;- r z*> ''¦ ¦ ilSSffSsi la transparence, du plan en élévation, de l\u2019oeuvre qui se dresse: une large part des interventions de Promenades souscrit à cette tendance en désertant le sol, par suspension (l\u2019espèce de kayak échoué que Gilberto Zorio accroche aux branches) ou, croirait-on, par lévitation, dans le cas des chaises de bois attachées par John Armleder aux cimaises d\u2019arbres qui rappellent le bois dont on les fait.Déjà ce type d\u2019accrochage défie la visibilité.Mais comme si ça ne suffisait pas de devoir marcher le nez en l\u2019air pour repérer ce qui est à voir, il faut encore qu\u2019un nombre encore plus considérable d\u2019oeuvres ne soient pas repérables à distance parce qu\u2019elles sont couchées, tracées, au sol.Il faut inclure sous cette rubrique le bassin de cristal de Rebecca Horn, la dalle hiéroglyphique de Matt Mullican ou, sous un arbre, la figure rousse d\u2019un «champ» de cannelle (Catherine Willis) qu\u2019on dépiste à l\u2019odeur les jours où il pleut.On y ajoutera encore une sorte de shape-grave, une rocaille d\u2019Anne Sauser-Hall qui représente un faon sur le flanc, ou l\u2019«ombre» écrasée au sol d\u2019un gigantesque insecte, une mosaïque de gravier de Sylvie et Cherif Defraoui.Bien qu\u2019ils soient visibles à l\u2019oeil nu, les gigantesques carrés de Mario Merz, ne se montrent au rouge (leurs côtés sont verts) et dans leur pleine gymnastique mathématique que d\u2019un point de vue en plongée généreuse: on a là peut- être la plus étrange «monstruosité» de l\u2019exposition, en terme de disparition; une espèce de camouflage conceptuel, de camouflage camouflé.Car comment ne pas penser «gris» devant la complémentarité qu\u2019entretient, avec le vert tondu des pelouses, le rouge strident des figures?Mais j\u2019exagère, c\u2019est sûr.On me le reprochera moins si je m\u2019en tiens aux inscriptions de Kosuth sur du ciment coulé au coeur de souches, la plupart dissimulées sous des bosquets lesquels, ne vous en faites pas, se tiennent droits au grand jour.Ou si je parle des brindilles marquées chimiquement par Roger Ackling et jetées, pour s\u2019y confondre, au pied de quelques arbres anonymes.L\u2019ÉCHELLE ET LE TRAIT Ces chutes de latitude dans la succession pointil-lée des oeuvres produit un accrochage casse-cou: non pas dangereux à organiser mais requérant, à la lettre, une souplesse de la nuque.Ce jeu de cache-cache témoigne très certainement d\u2019un souci de ne pas déranger le site, par des modifications permanentes et surtout par des configurations plastiques «immanquables».Or cette éthique, à saveur écologique, rappelle aussi quelque chose qui nous est récemment devenu assez familier dans les procédures d\u2019exposition en salles clo- ses: une résistance aux accrochages au niveau de l\u2019oeil, une nouvelle dissémination topographique dans l\u2019investissement de l\u2019architecture souvent anonyme des musées et des galeries.Transposées en plein-air, ces procédures opèrent bien entendu de manière différente et spéculent sur une incompatibilité.Car l\u2019ouverture du lieu, de même que sa densité et sa variété, ramène un tel accrochage à un mode de camouflage qu\u2019exacerbe encore un facteur d\u2019échelle.Les oeuvres de Promenades que je retiens ici ne font pas qu\u2019un éloge de l\u2019intime comme couleur, comme ton, ils incarnent un concept de l'infime, du tout-petit, du peu.À côté des exemples que j\u2019ai (trop) brièvement cités, imaginez encore un arbre dont une seule branche, bien garnie, serait peinte en or (Jacob Mattner); ou un arbre encore (décidément un protagoniste important de Promenades) qui serait transpercé d\u2019une flèche (Ian Hamilton Finlay).Bien sûr à l\u2019échelle d\u2019un parc aussi vaste, et malgré la carte des lieux, malgré les discrètes indications en place, de tels «gestes» ont toutes les chances de rester inaperçus.Mais paradoxalement, ils possèdent en même temps une acuité qui combat et renverse leur propension compulsive à disparaître.Une fois repérés, ils s\u2019impriment, s\u2019«en-crent» dans l\u2019esprit pour de bon: leur maigre visibilité ne permet plus de les camoufler.On peut suggérer que se marque ici un rejet de la figure, de toute prégnance gelstaltiste (et pittoresque) qui viendrait déchirer ou segmenter le parcours en «stations» fortes, en moments autonomes.Mais cet en deçà de la figure n\u2019est pas une pratique de l\u2019informe, du chaos, du n\u2019importe quoi: elle assume une prédilection pour le trait, entendu dans toute sa polysémie: comme acte (trait de bravoure) voire comme illumination, comme «mot» (trait d\u2019esprit), comme graphie (cette minceur linéaire que j\u2019évoquais plus haut).Le trait s\u2019inscrirait en l\u2019occurence à mi-chemin entre une rigueur conceptuelle, «minimale», wholistic et les signes figuratifs de l\u2019art récent.À maintes reprises au cours du parcours tortueux que j\u2019ai suivi à Promenades, il m\u2019est apparu que la concision, la fulgurance enjouée des oeuvres visaient le spectateur et se donnaient ainsi à voir en désamorçant par là leurs diverses procédures de camouflage, c\u2019est-à-dire en se rendant paradoxalement visibles dans leur camouflage même.NOTES 1.\tAurora Borealis (les Cent jours d\u2019art contemporain) s\u2019est tenue du 15 juin au 30 septembre 1985 à Montréal, Place du Parc: l\u2019exposition est une réalisation du Centre international d\u2019art contemporain de Montréal.2.\tcf.du même auteur «Lieux et non-lieux du pittoresque», Parachute, n° 39, juin-juillet-août 1985, p.10-19.3.\tCatalogue de l\u2019exposition Promenades, Centre d\u2019art contemporain, Genève, 1985, n.p.4.\tLacan, J., les Quatre Concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Paris, Seuil, 1973, p.92.5.\tPerrault, C., «Le Petit Poucet», Contes de ma mère l\u2019Oye, Paris, Gallimard, 1977 (1ère parution en 1697), p.102-107.6.\tLacan, J., op.cit., p.102.7.\tIbid., p.103.Johanne Lamoureux est critique d\u2019art et vit à Paris et à Montréal.English translation of this article on page 42.11 THE IMAGE, THE THEME, THE STORY Think of it.Elvis before Warhol.Or even Elvis before Ed Sullivan.Chuck Berry before the Beatles.Marlon Brando before Marlon Brando.What is it that gives these historic images such mysterious and magical coherence?They haunt our cultural present and topography: but if you look at them, they\u2019re very distant, very other.For us their Difference and their coherence are deeply connected.They radiate the purity of a style of an era when sound, image, desire, refusal, dance, age, and the pocketbook appear to be perfectly conjoined.They form the first perfect myth in the cacophonous constellation of what we now know officially as \u201cpopular culture.\u201d In their original form they remain mysterious, magical.At the same time they reproduce themselves all around us, empowering a set of moving images on the basis of a history which is noisily forgotten, noisily floating in the Imaginary.The pleasure of appropriation radiates with the same glow as the pleasure of innovation, of discovery: the appropriating context having been moved into bag and baggage, appropriation is (makes itself) an innovation.1927: popular record releases mark the end of silent film.The music consecrating this transformation: naturally, a love ÊSfiM ïèsM \u2022 : ¦ - - \u2022 \u2022 ¦ j yi gin ÆÊÊ ' .m.IpffKfS WWm mm We are concerned here with the history of technology.The song is an early manifestation.The bourgeois epoch gives rise to the song as an ambivalent articulation of individual self-recognition (and self-doubt) perfectly enclosed in its own structure.1 Rob Wilson, Young Gene Vincent.With the invention of the photograph, and of sound recording, the singer is split from the song.Nostalgia is bound to run rampant.Music is, by its nature, phenomenologically social.The history of subsequent communication technology is the history of the increasing separation of singer, sound, and image, their fragmentation into particles, and the simultaneous history of their reconstruction.The photograph catches the image.Later it moves.The recording catches the sound.Later it moves.But not yet fast enough! Film promises to restore their abandoned unity, even to take its place.It\u2019s a great moment for songs! After sound enters film, music publishers can sell 100,000 in st month, where before 10,000 in a year would have been pretty marvelous.The film companies buy out the music publishing houses.The song-writers move west.Movies become a hazardous architecture of insipid story and inspired songs made-to-order.The more films offer themselves as a market-place for songs, the more they set the tune.2 There could be (and have been) countless other ways to employ music in film.The reconstruction of the two, of sound and OUND, IMA* ROCK AND SOCIAL R song.By 1928, the inclusion of \u201cshowstopping popular tunes\u201d ensures the success of sound film and leads the record industry to paradise.1957: rock\u2019n\u2019 roll makes it to the movies.The rock star is no longer any mere musician.One image says it all.Its celebration spreads across the globe.1982: the visual arts embrace the network of emancipated sound.The artist challenging the conventions and apparatuses of organized art holds a cassette tape in her hand.The image is in danger of disappearing entirely.But somewhere else, it has been captured on video.1984: music video is included in Video Culture Canada.Music video sweeps the music world, and stamps musical discourse with an endlessly varied but still repeating choreography of sociable paranoia, resolute self-enactment.The Song is Seen.The image is heard.With a swell of pride, the moment of appropriation passes itself off as the most beneficent offering.The difference is chronological, the difference is what they are doing with time, the difference is the self-love of the appropriating gesture, the self-forgetting of the honoured sign, the difference is the celebrated power of the mediating apparatus, the difference is the machine and its simulated culinary feast, the difference is what they are doing with space.image, has been, from the beginning, economically ruthless, ideologically loaded, sumptuously artificial.The increasingly sophisticated production values make live music, and later mere recorded music, and radio, underdeveloped relations of the Image.The more this reconstruction is so \u201cproduced,\u201d the more mediated is its method.And the more entranced its spectators: oh we are all happy children now.1984 This year Video Culture Canada moved its annual high-tech low-conflict trade fair to Ontario Place, a found paradise of clean living chosen, no doubt, for its perfect adequacy for 1984.The festival is made possible by the corporate backing of the Sony electronics giant: its organizers have claimed that its purpose is not \u201cmerely as an advertisement for Sony products,\u201d but a celebration of video art and technology which attempts \u201cto bridge the gap between the \u2018underground\u2019 art of the community and a mainstream audience.\u201d3 In 1983 they called it \u201cBringing Video Culture to the Masses.\u201d But someone else is doing that now.Thus the 1984 event heralded the first of a burst of similar firsts.There was a panel on music video, with several prominent music video producers flown in for the occasion (City TV was there for that 12 part), and someone collected a substantial if not substantively conceived collection of rock video in its \u201cMedia Library\u201d of tapes for general (i.e.private) viewing.A month later the Juno Awards, sponsored by Canada\u2019s music industry, such as it is, were bestowed for the first time on video singles.The more general effect of the MTV/MuchMusic influence was clearly evident in the visual and musical preferences of the ceremony as a whole.This year\u2019s \u201cbest singer\u201d award winner, Bryan Adams, now does promos for MuchMusic.It\u2019s not just television that rock video promises to redeem.In between these two events, the Toronto Board of Education gathered anxious teachers, councillors, and students together in a special public meeting to address the problems of music video\u2019s influence on today\u2019s youth.Were these images encouraging violence and passivity amongst its millions of watchers, and could anything be done to save them?This question was not, of course, on the agenda at Video Culture Canada.Rather, the precarious artistic authenticity of the rock video, and the producers\u2019 mediation between artistic freedom and the commercial imperatives of the industry, were considered in some frank detail.A different frankness was induced during the Juno Awards, themselves and their viewers with.You probably know them without hearing their respective lists: dry ice and back-lighting, characters mysteriously running up or down stairs or along passages or streets, various alluring angles on female skin, car chases, pilgrimages to exotic places, exploding bombs and battles, anguished heroes, curtained windows.The industry, it seems, likes it that there are such lists.Sanborne and Scarlett-Davis were especially brazen in their attacks on the genre.No doubt their humorous hostility was encouraged by the fact that they work within stronger and more secure industries than that which is currently promoting itself in Canada.It was also an irresistible opportunity to bemoan their awkward position as unacknowledged mediators between musical ambition, in its various contradictory imaginings and aspirations, the seductive possibilities of the video form, and the simple but ruthless requirements of the industry\u2019s captains.According to the video producers, the music industry wasn\u2019t making art possible at all \u2014 it was ensuring the impossibility of that which the form itself promised.On that subject they were silent.It took a member of the panel\u2019s audience to question what might be seen as a crucial cornerstone of contemporary rock video.(Not that blatant sexism, commercial utilitarianism, and a halfway-liberated art-historical ecstasy aren\u2019t really the tion.I want to think about that guitar.This calls for a retrospective summary of the iconographie, economic, and structural issues relevant to what has been a continuous integration of music by the monstrously powerful visual media.It draws to our attention a process of imploding intertextuality, an \u201cintegration\u201d which is not simply a fusing of unlimited possibilities, an explosion of narrative repertoires, nor even an increasingly complex web of self-referential quotation but, in addition to these, a centralizing/marginalizing process of vertical and horizontal integration (remember your economics?) of cultural resources wherein \u201cuneven development\u201d is the order of the day.THE RESURRECTION The presentation of the newly created Vitaphone in New York City has created a sensation in motion picture circles.The presentation was made by the Warner Brothers, in connection with the Western Electric Company and the Bell Telephone Laboratories, with the showing of the new John Barrymore picture, Don Juan.The Vitaphone is the newest application of sound to motion pictures.Since the beginning of films, various unsuccessful attempts have been made with so-called \u2018\u2018talking pictures.\u201d The Vitaphone, however, is an unusual thing, miles ahead of the famous early Edison talking pictures.Such an authority as Michael I.Pupin, Professor of Electro-Mechanics at Columbia and President of the V ; ¦ : ' - ¦ .¦ - \\\t14, BY JODY -\t-\t; Y\tVY.;>.'\u2022 ¦ BERLAND where award-winning musicians and video producers were warmed by the array of TV cameras and industry luminaries to thank \u201cthe people behind Champagne Pictures who made it possible to work with artists like Corey Hart\u201d (Rob Quartley, who was embarrassed into reticence on such issues before the more artistically ambitious crowd at VCC, and, like his fellow panelists, hardly spoke of art at all4); to \u201cthank God for MuchMusic\u201d (the Artist Corey Hart himself, who subsequently explained his source of musical inspiration to be video imagery, and whose own success, in turn, has been explained by the appropriateness of his tough/vulnerable face for the intimacies of the video camera), and \u201cto thank the industry for voting for me\u201d (Bryan Adams, whose multiple wins have inspired the press to congratulate itself for the rising influence of music video).The Juno\u2019s rapturous displays of gratitude towards \u201cthe industry\u201d for making art possible would have seemed in poor taste in the discussion of rock video by the video producers themselves.The VCC panelists (Rob Quartley, John Scarlett-Davis, Jon Sanborne, and Rob Frescoe) showed selections of their work and shared fraternal confessions concerning the visual clichés which they, and alas all other \u201cpop promo\u201d producers currently indulge crucial components of rock video, but to align these with the structural and historical issues to be pursued here.) Why, she or he asked, did music videos always have to show the guitar somewhere, perpetuating that silly phallic image of the rock musician and forcing us to admire the neck of every thrusting guitar make in the western world?Coming out of the panel, a couple of youthful (male) fans took issue with this critique.Why shouldn\u2019t they show guitars, they argued, following the rationale having been preferred within; after all, these clips are advertisements for records, and advertisers have to show their products don\u2019t they?And what has anyone got against looking at guitars if they like the music?A clear and straightforward defense.Even Scarlett-Davis wouldn\u2019t have belied that one, having elegantly argued that pop promos aren\u2019t art anyway, they\u2019re just a job, hired out to a racist sexist industry, and music videos should all disappear soon anyway and what\u2019s the big fuss about them?(This is the artist speaking, not in defense of art, but in contempt of its subject.5) Because the presence of the guitar is so clear and straightforward, so apparently obvious and pragmatic, let us problematize it immediately, and place it as a question at the centre of this investiga- American Institute of Electrical Engineers, says: \u201cNo closer approach to resurrection has ever been made by science.\u201d Bringing Sound to the Screen, October 19266 While the early days of recording and broadcast industries provided the initial spark for producing loudspeakers, it was in the late \u201920s that the movie industry\u2019s quest for \u201ctalkies\u201d provided the drive for high-fidelity/high-powered loudspeaker systems.The development of high powered loudspeakers at Western Electric made possible the \u201ctalking motion picture\u201d industry, whose beginning was marked by the historic debut of Warner Brothers\u2019 Vitaphone motion picture production, Don Juan, in 1926.The work at Western Electric, continuing on into the mid-30s, created a timeless legacy.The loudspeaker industry had its roots in supplying sound for the motion picture industry.The pioneers then, and the engineers now, based their work on the requirements of cinema and what we can refer to as conventional entertainment.A Brief History of Loudspeakers, 19847 We are not prepared for television.Cameras and tape recorders don\u2019t make television programmes.You have to have trained people to do that.What are we getting now?The pop music of Germany, ABBA, Star Parade and so on.People see these things over and over again.But we don\u2019t have the 13 money, experience, or capacity to put on shows like that.Even if we do put on something national, it can\u2019t compete with all The glittering lights and costumes of the foreign products.People begin to believe that you have to have that sort of thing.This development could destroy everything that has come down through the ages, everything that we can proudly call national culture.W.B.Makulloluwa musician, Sri Lanka, 19828 You can\u2019t make a hit record, become known, make money, cross national borders, without making a video.This endows video, and so television, with a new and unprecedented power; power over music, and so power over us through music.This dependency also endows television with a new language.This language allows us to embrace every available visual memory: the dreams of 20th century art return to haunt us.For this we are grateful.It begins to come together before us.The nuances of the face, the texture of the rhythm, the narrative, the fast-moving polyphony of style, reference, movement, imagination, the self-reflective humour, the montage of hospitable quotation and re-enactment, the generosity with which its images join us with our Imagined collective history, collective paranoia, collective angst, expectations, laughter, language, hope.Watching this beneficent hospitality, everything is brought home.Into our home.We are on an adventure; we have been there all along.I am still talking about the guitar.ANOTHER HISTORICAL TROPE: ELVIS, WITH HEGEL We see images or hear sounds as part of remembered series of images or sounds, a series which gives each individual form its understood significance.At the same time such a \u201cseries\u201d takes its own general meaning \u2014 which is never quite closed \u2014 from the patterns, contradictions, repetitions of the individual parts.Over time these patterns change, patterns of musical practice, for instance, to which echoing images refer, and so the meanings of specific forms change, as they respond to changing structures of reproduction or perception, to an appropriation by an audience who know and do different things now.Some are used, and re-used, and reimbued with meaning, until a single image flickering before us resonates with a whole cookbook of crystallized uses.Thus the gesture of the rocker with the guitar.It draws with it a cinemascope mystique of youthful rebellion announcing itself as the sudden explosion of a biology that must have been there all along.With this image, youth is born.The memory starts to work in mythological form at the very moment the biological mystique overruns itself, makes rock stars millionaires, erupts in territorial wars, fills commercials and corporate accounts, or when the mods beat the shit out of the rockers, or vice versa, or someone else.But the struggle for that image had already begun, perhaps with Elvis, the truck driver with the pelvic flip, dreaming about making it into the movies.He did dream about it.And he did make it, as I hardly need to tell you, via the (what else) Ed Sullivan Show, American variety entertainment par excellence (cf.the Beatles, who, in 1963, according to a 1983 Rolling Stone commemoration, revealed in their appearance there their truly American identity), the Ed Sullivan Show, where the cameraman filmed him, primordial pelvic performer, from the waist up.Actually that camera angle is also something of a myth, a recurring story encountered in various accounts of the rockin\u2019 rebel\u2019s rise to the top.Elvis did three performances for the Ed Sullivan Show, in the winter of 1956-57, one of which was filmed from the waist up.He appeared there only months after Sullivan, the \u201cKing of American TV,\u201d swore that Elvis, so-called \u201cKing of Western Bop,\u201d would never appear on his show.Elvis pocketed $50,000 for the appearances his host had sworn would never happen.That victory is part of the aura of the image, the rock rebel, Elvis or whoever, just as the fight for that particular victory is.But whose victory was it?According to one source, those shows were watched by an unprecedented 82.6% of the American population.Yep \u2014 another coronation.According to another, that figure is totally absurd and unbelievable: 82.6% of the American population didn\u2019t even all know that Eisenhower was their president.But (as the sceptic allows himself to wonder) who cares?9 You didn\u2019t need to know about Eisenhower to buy Presley records, and wasn\u2019t that the point?No one explains why it was the last of the three performances that filmed Elvis from the waist up.jjïTÎTi f The resulting record was called \u201cFrom the Waist Up.\u201d By this time, the image \u2014 the lonely rock rebel hero \u2014 had already found its place in the movies, without the aid of rock stars, and Elvis would find his own place there with no difficulty, a place hospitable enough to display him from head to toe, complete with pelvic thrusts, and the omniscient guitar.The space for Elvis had been created by the first rock movies, without rock stars: movies like Brando\u2019s The Wild One (1953) or James Dean\u2019s Rebel without a Cause and East of Eden (1955).Blackboard Jungle (also 1955) made Bill Haley\u2019s \u201cRock around the Clock\u201d the international anthem of teenage rebellion.We see emerging what is by now a familiar phenomenon, the interdependence of rebellion and spectacle, towards which our resentment is considerably softened by the unique, unreplaceable, authentic beauty of the images that made this interdependence possible in the first place.That was easy with rock stars.They just played themselves.It wouldn\u2019t be long before Warhol would challenge viewers with rows of microscopically different faces with just such authentic/two-dimensional appeal.The paradox here is a continuation of the basic contradictions upon which rock culture itself has been formed ; the introduction of rock heroes to the movies would mark that contradiction with the beginning of a sort of end, the end of a sort of beginning, marking and diluting, underneath the uproarious surface, an historical rupture of lasting significance.The music was inevitable as a supporting act for the rebel movies of the fifties.It\u2019s not clear whether the resulting film format, with its consolidation of a particular repertoire of rock rebellion, was inevitable for popular music.But perhaps it was \u2014 the music helped to sell the movies, and the movies, once again, sold records, sold images, sold a style.Rock culture was thereby disseminated across even wider geo-political expanses: having edged its way out of the local radio/DJ community discourse of the early fifties to the large corporate home of the music industry, the globe was next.Only the most pristine of rebellions would do.British teenagers got their first taste of the exuberance of this new chaos from The Blackboard Jungle, thus forging ties of mutual influence that have made all subsequent pop music history what it is \u2014 among other things, an enormous network of unequally productive branch plants.That\u2019s when seat-slashing began, too, with Blackboard Jungle.The underlying and largely implicit connections between rock music, small-town culture, teenage rebellion, fun, anger, and fashion, were made explicit.But thereupon the connections changed.Movie producers knew a good thing when they saw it and made a score of Rock-around-the-Clock clone movies that quickly condensed the rebellion into a structure of predictable motifs.The kids are putting on the Seniors' Hop and somehow they get all these great rock\u2019n\u2019 roll stars to appear from out of nowhere and play for them for nothing (oh sure, yeah) but the parents and the school committee won\u2019t let them put it on because it\u2019s bad or something and somehow the big crisis is resolved and near the end Bill Haley or somebody is playing and the kids are all bopping away and the parents are standing around watching, supervising, and the camera shifts to the parents\u2019 feet and their toes are tapping, you know, and they\u2019re snapping their fingers and their heads are bopping back and forth, looking at each other and saying, \u201cGee this music ain\u2019t so bad after all is it?Kinda catchy.\u201d10 Finally, Elvis didn\u2019t need to do what those who had made that place for him had done, including himself \u2014 he didn\u2019t need to fight much, except maybe with the father of the girl he wanted, to recognize what a good guy Elvis really was behind that guitar.Meanwhile the articulate guitar \u2014 that inescapable symbol of rebellion and honest speaking \u2014 allows the powerful film apparatus to invite the rebels in and reward them with fame, on the house.Here the rock mythology does for the music what, in a different way, rebel movies were doing for film: offering weekend routes to post-cowboy rebellion.They are about rebellion: their representation swallows it and softens the bite, containing it all, making it pleasurable and safe.No longer the horse but the gear shift and the guitar: icons of angry vulnerability, enactments of restless solitude for everyone to love, balanced precariously between social critique and sentimentality on that same tense edge that James Dean suffers on, even without a guitar, as he rescues post-war liberalism from melodrama (and from McCarthy).These images spice up fifties moralism with a strong dose of youthful distress while, incidentally, helping to rescue the film industry from postwar post-TV disaster.And so the film, hallmark of American success, swallows rock\u2019n\u2019 roll, and so rock\u2019n\u2019 roll swallows up rebellion and embraces it to death, if only temporarily, in the doo-wah-diddies of desire.BgSWwr - ¦HP 15 - Il II ' 1 \u2014B IN AND OUT OF SPACE TOGETHER Last summer the American trade paper Daily Variety cited a survey affirming that \u201cMTV viewers are more influenced (in their purchase of records) by the cable music video channel than by radio, concerts, or commercial TV.\u201d Who would have imagined, five years ago, that television could equal or surpass radio as the principal music medium?David Hayes, \u201cThe Sight of Music,\u201d in Saturday Night, July 1984 Modern Science suggests that rather than think of space as a container or bodies as \u201cthings\u201d in space, we grasp the organism as a center for the production of space around itself \u2014 space is not external to the body but generated by it.such analysis needs to be completed by a rhythm analysis in which time is then grasped in its spatial form.The data of the unconscious are also to be considered in terms of the spatial articulation between objects and desire.Finally, spatial practice is on this level most concretely articulated in the various historical and cultural systems of gestuality.Henri Lefebvre, \u201cThe Production of Space\u201d (English precis), Urbana, Illinois, 198311 Most advertising suggests that the product on display will facilitate or ensure the satisfaction of our greatest psychological and emotional need: the need to belong, to be accepted, desired.This strategy informs the rhetoric of rock videos, too; they create an imaginary community \u2014 in the psychoanalytic sense of imaginary \u2014 with an inviting sense of imaginary relationships.The viewer\u2019s access to this imaginary community is mediated by music, by rock stars, by the rock video shows.Of course, economic function is performed here in that the viewer\u2019s access to the community must be constantly re-negotiated; only the viewer\u2019s continued consumption of videos and video programs will ensure the extension of that feeling of belonging and community.Joanne Marion and Lianne McLarty, \u201cRock Video\u2019s Message,\u201d in Canadian Forum, July 1984 IN AND OUT OF SPACE Pretend for a moment that music is at the centre of everything, even of the visual image, or specifically of the current predominant relationships between sound, image, and performance as these are structured by the mass media and extended in social and symbolic space.This may not be the perspectival bias you are accustomed to.It has a material as well as an autobiographical rationale here, because the music industry is the largest and most powerful cultural/economic apparatus in the world.However to maintain this economic and geographic hegemony, the music industry turns, or rather finds itself extended to and through the differently structured apparatus of the visual media.In this way the power of the industry is expanded, if not the power of the music, or of the musicians either; as I have said, music no longer succeeds on the market without film or video promotion/extension (not counting the extensive radio/record/cassette independent community which exists in addition to, and in opposition to, but not in spite of, this corporate hegemony).This compulsion has been there from the invention of sound film.To perceive the mode of this mutual dependency is to trace the outline of a process of strategic appropriation of music and musical culture by the defined imperatives of visual communication, which, in its dominant forms, have defined the methods by which sound and image, once separated by the technologies of reproduction, are re-integrated by these same technologies.This momentary dispensation to the musical cause is important because it concretizes an argument here; that space is not only global, not only visual or conceptual, but is also physical, experiential, physiological, material, and controllable.The past sixty or eighty years have been propelled by one productive process, which increasingly fractures and subdivides the practices of mak-ing/recording/hearing/watching/visualizing music, on the one hand, and by a second, related process of reconstructing their relationship by artificial means.This dual momentum is not a bad thing in itself (I\u2019m not a cultural Luddite); but such audio/visual reconstruction asserts, in its particular and contingent forms, a continuous social and semantic power over our experiences of sound and image, our ways of being gathered and separated, our ways of seeing music, of being communicated to in time and space.To reconstruct this reconstruction we must imagine, as I have suggested, that at the centre of what \u201cworks\u201d in a culture is an originating group of people (and even, imagine, bodies) whose relations with one another are physical, geographical, sensual, epistemological, emotional, antagonistic, linguistic, symbolic, etc.\u2014 i.e., musical \u2014 and that these have a politics which can be understood in the ways in which these relationships are lived out.When music is split from the originating context, new forms of social practice are precipitated, based on a new division of labour between playing, listening, watching, moving.The split of sound from social presence problematizes the organization of the community (and of its bodies) in space and time, raising new questions about how these are ordered by the changed forms of cultural dissemination and experience.12 This is the basic anthropological premise with which we approach, but have not yet analyzed, the history of this relationship between the social, and visual, and the musical.Because this relationship has changed utterly.Even without the sponsoring images, music no longer depends on a shared social space.Now it can be heard anywhere, in any context, drawn into any kind of discourse.It provides the cement (Adorno called popular music \u201csocial cement,\u201d which was not meant to be kindly13) of the massive network of quotation/replication by which the industry centralizes the effectivity of its symbols.Of course it provides a cement (of a more slippery kind) for other passions or networks but here, too, the music tends to either disappear into the rich margins or to be absorbed into this centralizing system of reference and repetition.You can hear the music, but see anything, the walls of an empty room, a passing street, a shop, a bar, a remembered image of someone walking, as easily as moving bodies and the moving resonance of making sound.While music is omnipresent, it is no longer necessary that you should really listen to what you hear, unless it triggers some memory, some association, some fragment of desire.There is at least a kind of mobility granted by this omnipresence/autonomy which is negated by TV.But the dissolving of the sensual aural imagination associated with listening to that elusive shadow-dance with meaning called music doesn\u2019t begin with MTV, though that is the main qualification uttered by guilt-inflicted video producers.The path for that visual colonization has been laid all along.What is the basis for the music\u2019s continued appeal, its necessity, when it loses its location, its located significance?Perhaps that was Elvis\u2019 greatest moment, and the resonance behind the aura of that particular image: that last growl just before becoming King of Western Bop, when the sound had a history, a surprise, a place to struggle from.Later his voice would be known (and imitated) everywhere.There are various possible directions one can follow when this detachment/enlargement of the sound occurs.Not all of them contribute to the mutually dependent symbolic integration of the industry.For the most part, music video does.Without being too ironic, video is not (or not simply) the perpetrator of that dissolution; it is also its redeemer.Songs \u201cmean\u201d again.They enclose people in a shared symbolic (though not shared social) space.Then they go out and buy the records.16 'Wümw \\k .ÜP» a*P w.\u2022 -1 * ¦ 0.«¦4MMK ¦ : These icons have in common with music video one feature: the image of musical presence is split from the sound itself, and makes itself more powerful than the sound precisely on the basis of the sound\u2019s contribution.It\u2019s another form of cultural cannibalization, if you like, but of a precise kind.Music, of course, has its own power, which everybody knows.But images subsume: they carry a power that enables them to do with music what they will.This power is in part drawn from the music, but at the same time it works against the music.There are ways of drawing sound and image together which recognize the powerful hunger of the image; they are not unification at all, Wagner notwithstanding.They make music independent, give it its own voice in relation to (as generally \u201chits\u201d are not, in film) the image.This dialectic is rare, as Eisler and Adorno pointed out in their still cogent critique of film music.14 There are still exhilarating affirmations of this possibility: Laurie Anderson offered this originally (more in her performance than her video); David Byrne and Jonathon Demme have just done it with peculiarly hypnotic zeal in Stop Making Sense; sure, there have been some great music videos.But for the most part (and there must be a most part, given the mass production required by the music/TV apparatus), Wagner is still there, hiding his theology behind the \u201cauthentic\u201d image of the performer (who is playing herself, himself) and further disguised by the dizzy, eclectic montage, the restoration of surrealism, the dream of Eisenstein, or various other avant-garde restorations; Wagner is still there, hiding, but powerful as always15.Despite the disruptive rapidity of the image\u2019s movement, there is rarely a space made for the crack through which the performer\u2019s authenticity (or the video producer\u2019s presence) can be seen or challenged, and so in a larger sense be productive.The rarity of the success of this dialectic is in part because the encounter between sound and image takes place in a context which requires a new (but repetitively self-affirming) language independent of \u2014 and maybe even directed towards erasing \u2014 the locatedness, the internal dialogic receptivity of the music\u2019s and musicians\u2019 originating context.Music video is Very Big Business; its mediating process produces on a grand scale, seeking the context of more widely available gestures and proximities.In this sense music video does, as McLuhan claimed television does, extend people\u2019s reach in space.But this extension is effected by monopolizing the codes which transport them.People still need to feel that they \u201cpossess\u201d the meaning of what is directed to them; part of the pleasure of reception is the feeling of competence, a recognition of the code that is, must be, made for them.Thereupon the media lies, by feeding upon itself (though it can also tell the truth by feeding upon itself); it gathers to its powerful and prolific centres a selection of recurring images whose serialized passage from source to resource endears itself to its audience, while simultaneously making welcome its own transnational semiotic centralization.It\u2019s a form of semantic flattery.The reproduction of symbols = the reproduction of competence = dependent pleasure.And some images are particularly potent.The image of the young-male-musician-with-guitar can mean, in a single flash, everything: bobby sox, punching out the boss, hitting the road, opposing the war, an old chevy, 1958 in Kansas, dancing till dawn, coming on, this condensation of symbols (multi-leveled and elusive, like the music; but clear, adamant) performing the performance of a performer which can speak each or any of these without speaking at all.From the early days of film it was often other, invisible and unnamed, singers who actually provided the sound.The particular means of drawing music into film was also influenced by the imperatives of the record industry, which had begun to capture a growing market at the moment that songs became part of the repertoire of film.The need to have self-enclosed songs whose sound quality guaranteed secondary sales to record buyers contributed to the early tendency to \u201cdub\u201d sound \u2014 to show a popular actress singing while recording the song with someone else\u2019s voice.The real singer, like today\u2019s video producer, was rarely acknowledged in the credits.The reification of the visual image of the actress (like that of today\u2019s rock star) was thereby strengthened.The songs themselves fit the shape of the record industry\u2019s manoeuvres while gaining their desirability from the aura of the screen.With the emergence of rock music, the \u201cauthenticity\u201d of the performer was assured, if not that of the filmed performance, which, again, is dubbed.But now the rock performer plays himself, and promises a continuity of self with the space beyond the stage.Among the successful, it takes a rare musician not to look like a video quotation of the image of a musician, though; the image shimmers at the border of leaving the music behind, while celebrating itself as musically inspired.In Toronto bars the video screen is left silent, and ghostly musicians perform to the sound of a separate (recorded) performance.It\u2019s ironic that this severed presence is the dominant form of music video\u2019s presence in public space; but space is not, McLuhan notwithstanding, an abstraction of codes, but a material form, a social form, a physical organization of bodies and their actions and senses.In relation to such organization of space, the process of severance continues, each portion technologically re-imbued or deleted, unless you go to a concert, which now ordinarily (but not always) means submitting to a highly mythologized collective hypnosis, its power intensified by its previous mass reproduction; or unless you watch the music performed live on TV or film, where what you are watching is not (ordinarily) musicians making music in the context of where and why they began, but an image of them having made it, placed alongside other constructed or found images \u2014 the musicians having adventures, or dancing, the continent of Africa exploding, or singing, the monsters approaching, the car cruising, the body bruising, the rhythm of these images carefully reunited with the sound of their having made it, with or without any relation to the lyrics of the song itself.And the images\u2019 rhythm adheres to physical rhythm only in the most empirical sense: faster and faster, nowthe image moves fast enough.It is not only the social/spatial dimension of music so transformed; so too is time, real time, the time it 17 takes to sing a song, the once again unilateral 3 1/2 minutes of time, whose Imagination spirals in an escalating rapidity of moving images.Because the image subsumes the music, in most instances, the rhythm of visual editing subsumes the larger rhythm (not to mention the words) of the song as well.On the one hand, this enables the visual language of the rock video to surpass, in complexity, subtlety, and technical sophistication, the language of any other programming available on contemporary commercial television (aside from advertising, in some instances).On the other hand, this tends to prevent the visual-semantic complexity which has so conquered sound from drawing the ostensible import of the song and its story, its desire, into a genuinely challenging or committed communication with the viewer.Music videos are, at one and the same time, the most innovative mode of visual language available on television, and the most popularly accessible inheritance of 20th century visual art; and mere TV commercials for purchasable products: records.It is the image of the guitar which anchors this contradiction.The singer mediates then between an attentive camera perched in \u201creal time\u201d (performance) and a kaleidoscope of visual editing and time disruption (\u201cconcept\u201d).The stage becomes a narrative centre of gravity around which pulsate the street, the story, the quotes from old films, newsreels, science fiction, surrealism and other genres, the chaos of war or the exotica of far places, the sexual manoeuvres or imaginings.The singer, a lyrical poet despite the thunderous style, responds to these with (constructed) exemplary sensitivity.The video, like the song, has its basis in rhythm.Musically the song, as a singular structure \u2014 a structure which is almost never contested in the video \u2014 embodies the attitude of the individualized commodity producer speaking on behalf of a constructed (real or abstract) collectivity.In the video the rhythm is not an abstract matter.While the sequence of imagery appears to pulsate with the driving beat of the percussion (i.e., to respond to the rhythm as a body would), in fact it follows, with some ingenuity of rapturous rigour, the Song as it has become: a convention inspired by the The guitar proposes all of the meanings I have suggested, and more.It articulates: this performance is real, this is an authentic cultural action, rock is real speech, today\u2019s folk culture, today\u2019s resistance, today\u2019s performance art, today\u2019s truth, today\u2019s avant-garde, today\u2019s lyrical poem \u2014 and also: don\u2019t take this seriously as art, you understand, this is just a commercial.WATCHING TV Technically, \u201crealism\u201d attaches itself most intimately to the fingers on the frets of the guitar.The farther from the neck of the guitar the camera moves, the more touched by the flashes and fades of fantasy.The singer stands between these two poles \u2014 the real and the imagined \u2014 and heroically mediates their tensions.If he is a man, the camera makes love to his fingers, his face, and his body\u2019s bounce.If she is a woman, it is (within the dominant code) her mouth and the gestures of her neck.Most often the camera watches from the side, or from below, making the singer\u2019s stance large, potent, symbolic, and drawing us into the crowd below the stage.The rest is simulated disequilibrium.Romantics, entrenched later by recording techniques in the 1920s (3 1/2 minutes please), reinvented in 1955, or was it 1963.each time it breaks from the frame (as it did with the nurturing sponsorship of FM radio in the late sixties) brought back once again by the expansive discipline of new technical advances.The alternation of verse/ chorus/instrumental achieves finally a naturalnesse in our collective bodily memory whose basic pattern now structures not only most music video but most TV advertisements as well.In the verse the singer describes; in the chorus he expresses; in the instrumental break something happens, illustrates or illuminates his cause, elaborates his fantasy, opens up, hesitatingly and circularly, to the largeness of the threatening world.The guitar helps him to speak.In this sense the exploding horizons of visual narrativity in rock video settles into the landscape of the oldest tune in the book: big world, little me.The rhythm of the song, which is both first and primary, anticipates for a moment (the stillness of the initial image) and then conquers.The images caress the beat; but in fact they determine the rhythm of the experience just as the power of the musical rhythm determinestheir effectiveness.The rhythm conquers all, first the real subject (me watching) and then, after some struggle, of course, the fictional object \u2014 the girl, the escape, the act, the search, the movement or meditation across space which we watch, unmoving.The filmed audience is ecstatic.Let free by the instrumental, the story takes a vacation from the speaking voice (though not necessarily from the fingers moving across the fret of the guitar, which are still in action).The story is played out, if there is one, the art is displayed, the visible collectivity of the band coheres, and fades, when we are returned to our hero he is no longer alone, even if there is no one else left on camera, since he has spoken, acted, protested, played, yearned, joined, for us.With few exceptions, the video cameras are not visible.THE UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT OF THE SIGN Through the intervention of the technological processes and dominant codes of the media, music\u2019s collectivity becomes the subject of its visual representation precisely as it is thus diminished.The image of the defiant rocker becomes the icon of the \u201creal\u201d \u2014 with all the power and two-dimensionality of any icon.First nature (the biology of youth) and later genrefied quotation provide the source for the magic sign; in its aura the tape-looped echoes of social desire can be heard.Like Elvis postcards (or earlier, like Warhol\u2019s silkscreens), current TV commercials reproduce the aura of the 1950s as the quintessence of popular culture in its moment of purity.They quote old songs as \u201coriginals\u201d endowed with the same purity and sociability as a good bottle of beer.Obviously the hierarchy of musical discourse is similar in its structure to what Benjamin and Berger said about the privileging of the original painting.Yet the experience of music is more physical, intimate, part of the body, part of movement, part of the social.With music, the intervention of technological reproduction plays, in itself, a less restrictive role.The movements of interchange between live and recorded music, and between popular music, avant-garde music, performance art, Pop art, and all the attendant electronic and technical mediations, are still freer, more interrogative, more live than those tensions between original painting and technologically reproduced images described by Benjamin and Berger.16 But this free interrogation is, at the same time, mediated and constricted by the apparatus that controls their outcome, and most powerfully by the discourses of film and television which this exploration threatens, in a constant and tantalizing gesture, to disrupt.And so the guitar, sliced between the unequalled complexity of texture/narrative/sound generated by music video, both brings the discourse to life, and returns it to normal; swallows the hysteria, completes the sentence, confesses its abridgement, reminds us that all this abundance and complexity might have no function (once the sentence is \u201cexpressed\u201d) than to sell the song, whose category as Song (and as product) is sealed by the richly speaking and welcome icon of singer-with-guitar, the icon which promises everything, and surreptitiously performs the mission of ensuring that nothing escapes the boundaries to which it has so devotedly been assigned.18 This is not always a successful mission; there are escapes all the time.The more the centre centralizes, the more the material discourses of independence mobilize themselves.The media, as McLuhan promised, or was it threatened, centralizes and decentralizes at the same time.If people can buy or circulate videotapes in five years the way they now buy records or sound tapes, then the possibilities seem to become endless.These processes are always promising us endless possibilities! The whole television/music/gallery/ performance communication structure could change.Musicians, artists, producers could make music videos as easily as they now make good cassette tapes (in terms of their technological accessibility, that is).The entire mode of making and moving musical images could be transformed with such accessibility, and so, even, their language.The logic of this optimism seems vulnerable indeed when framed by the larger logic of our present material and psychic economy.McLuhan wrote also that artists use new cultural technologies like an advance radar system, to prepare us to cope with what is to come.17 The rock videos currently seducing our imagination propose a number of trajectories.The majority of them balance their promise against a complex inventory of paranoia, which is the other source of their real effectiveness.Their compelling images of pursuit and repression play in a vocabulary within which the bomb, like its counter-image the guitar, articulates a whole structure of feeling whose social form is mediated, and reproduced, by the structures I have described.What is coming, and are we coping?NOTES 1.\t\u201cThe freeing of individuality brings about a tremendous expansion in the conception of the world, accompanied by an unprecedented development of the arts and sciences.On the other hand: The satisfaction resulting from drinking pure water has to be deserved by a burning fire of thirst.\u2019 [The song\u2019s] role has become a central and decisive element in bourgeois music culture.The social need that gave rise to the song is linked, as to content, with the personal lyrical requirements of the isolated individual and, as to form, with the demand for a genre that could be produced by him alone without the necessity of collective participation or even a collective circumstance.The forms of \u2018music-making\u2019 must change into \u2018musical forms\u2019 which will comprise an entity independent of performance ways.\u201d Janos Marothy: Music and the Bourgeois, Music and the Proletariat, Budapest, 1974.2.\tFacts and statistics are gathered from articles reprinted in Miles Kreuger (ed.): The Movie Musical from Vitaphone to 42nd Street, as Reported in a Great Fan Magazine (New York: Dover Publications).3.\tIn an interview in Now, Oct.1983.4.\t\u201cYou\u2019re constantly taking conventions and twisting them.I think of music video as moving stills.I like the glossy look: each frame should be a grabber.If I was to do a real raunchy punk tune, I\u2019d even be slick in the raunchiness.People are used to watching multimillion dollar productions, that\u2019s the standard.It\u2019s an international business, and the only way to play international ball is with this type of entertainment/promotion.They go hand in hand.\u201d Rob Quartley, interview with Rob Salem, Toronto Star, n.d.(Reprinted in Quartley\u2019s V.C.C.promotional brochure.) 5.\t\u201cI think most pop promos are blatantly sexist, which I find incredibly offensive.They\u2019re just masturbation fantasies for middle America.They just sit there with their cans of beer tossing off while all these scantily clad girls do this and that with men with their big electric guitars like prick extensions.Most pop promos are just fifth rate imagery that\u2019s copied from someone who\u2019s copied from someone who\u2019s copied from someone who\u2019s read a coffee table book on Magritte and has probably seen a few films noirs.\u201d John Scarlett-Davis in interview, \u201cVideo\u2019s Culture,\u201d Now, Oct.1984.6.\t\u201cBringing Sound to the Screen,\u201d Oct.1926; reprinted in The Movie Musical from Vitaphone to 42nd Street, op.cit, 7.\t\u201cA Brief History of Loudspeakers,\u201d db Sound Technology Magazine, Oct.1984.8.\tQuoted in Roger Wallis and Krister Malm, Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries (London: Constable, 1984).9.\tFrom the Waist Up (Golden Archives 150), again a bootleg, collects Elvis\u2019 performances on \u2018The Ed Sullivan Show\u2019.These were the shows that put Elvis over as a national figure: according to Neal and Janet Gregory\u2019s meticulous When Elvis Died, 82.6% of the American population watched the first program.(This figure is completely unbelievable \u2014 it is not altogether certain that on September 8, 1956, 82,6% of the American population even knew Eisenhower was president \u2014 but what the hell.)\u201d Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock'n\u2019Roll Music (New York: E.P.Dutton, rev.1982).10.\tGreil Marcus, \u201cThe Movies,\u201d Rolling Stone Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, 1982 (rev.edition).11.\tThis text is forthcoming in full English translation in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).12.\tSee R.Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 1977).13.\tSee Adorno\u2019s \u201cOn Popular Music,\" Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, IX (1941) or, in more reticent form, in his Introduction to the Sociology of Music.14.\tHanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (Adorno withdrew his name) (London: Dennis Dobson Ltd, 1951).15.\t\u201cIn the past whenever the arts were drawn together, a fatal mistake was made.It was thought that the total production could be strengthened by having all the arts proceed in parallel motion: that is to say, whatever happened in one art had to be duplicated at the same instant in all the others.But this technique of synchronization results in an art form that crushes more than it exalts, as André Gide has aptly noted of Wagner.\u201d R.Murray Schafer, \u201cThe Theatre of Con- fluence (Note in advance of action),\u201d 1966, published in The Canada Music Book, Winter 1974.c.f.Sergei Einsenstein: \u201cOnly a contrapuntal use of sound in relation to the visual montage piece will afford a new potentiality of montage development and perfection.The first experimental work with sound must be directed along the line of its distinct non-synchronization with the visual images.\" Film Form (1928).16.\t\u201cLaurie Anderson\u2019s achievement can be partly explained by the fact that a relatively closer relationship exists between avant-garde music, sound art, performance and pop music than exists between the visual arts and the mass media.many pop groups were founded by ex-art students, and in terms of dress, stage performance and publicity graphics these groups were strongly influenced by developments in the fine arts.In the realm of music, a fetish is not made of the original work of art as it is in the visual arts.This is because a live performance is a transient phenomenon which does not easily lend itself to becoming a commodity.\u201d John Walker, Art in the Age of Mass Media (London: Pluto Press, 1983).17.\t\u201cArt as radar acts as \u2018an early alarm system,\u2019 as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them.\u201d Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (other citations here are from the same source) (1964).Jody Berland is a writer, musician and teacher living in Toronto.Traduction française de cet article à la page 44.*%&} \t » \u2022! 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