Page 54 - Studio International - November 1974

means for new ends, and its terms of reference used to date. Above all, though, this is a book Scotched
are quite at variance with the Victorian for those involved in the avant garde in 'Charles Rennie Mackintosh as a Designer of
academicism (in a factual rather than whatever field. Readers as diverse as conceptual, Chairs, by Filippo Alison. 106 pp., illustrated.
tendentious sense) of orthodox musical training. minimal, systems, event, and inter- and multi- Documenti di Casabella, Segrate/Warehouse
'Experiment' means activity whose outcome is media artists, community workers and workshop Publications, London 1973. £3.95.
unforeseen. In normal usage this carries the clear leaders, and students of ethics, aesthetics and After 70 years the work of C.R. Mackintosh
implication of a provisional activity, whose sole even sociology and politics may be startled to remains an intriguing phenomenon that is only
aim is to enable activity with a foreseeable meet their own private preoccupations staring partly elucidated by the studies which various
outcome — 'real' activity — to take place out as they turn the page, cropping up and authors such as Pevsner, Howarth and Macleod
subsequently. As redefined virtually brought together quite naturally as an integral have devoted to it. Their description of
singlehanded by John Cage twenty-five years part of the theory and practice of experimental Mackintosh's idiom as Scottish art nouveau,
ago, however, experiment is no longer music. They run the risk of discovering that as.the start of the modern movement, or as a
provisional but definitive. Its aim is to escape they are not as unique or isolated as they synthesis of conflicting polarities (such as
the foreseeable, and it is the unforeseen which thought, and that the sources and very identity tradition and modernity, arts and crafts and
becomes real and significant. The traditional of their work are quite different from what esthetic movement) doesn't explain its very
artist 'expresses himself', creating 'art' which they had imagined, but one hopes that a few of fascination lasting until today to such an
reflects his own ideas, taste and personality. them have the courage to find out. extent that visitors to Glasgow still speak of it
Unfortunately this adds but little to the sum of As for the books excluded from the brief to 'with a light in their eyes'. Hence further and
human understanding: styles may come and go, which Nyman has written, luckily one of them more detailed study to grasp the magic quality
but form and content inevitably conform to already exists in Cage's 'Silence', the definitive of his idiom is not superfluous, and in this
human type, ultimately telling us no more than guide to the experimental philosophy which respect one tends to welcome the present survey
we know already. The experimental artist, on should be read alongside 'Experimental Music'. of his major chair designs. It's a nice little book
the other hand, renounces the indulgence of That leaves three others, which Nyman himself that covers 27 chairs, designed between 1897
solipsism (the fatal assumption that the sole would seem exceptionally well equipped to and 1910, carefully illustrated with inedited
significance lies in ourselves) so that the material tackle one day. One would cover the same photographs, original drawings and neat line
may transcend human forms, and tell us about ground but comprehensively rather than drawings by Luigi Falanga.
the world outside ourselves. selectively, with far more composers and pieces, As an Italian-British co-production, the book
In a brilliant opening chapter Nyman begins and answers for the musical questions begged starts with a smooth historical introduction by
by exploring this revolutionary conception of here. This time Nyman has quite reasonably Professor McLaren Young, 'Mackintosh and Italy',
the nature of art, and distinguishing it from chosen to exclude conventional avant-garde mainly dealing with Mackintosh's 1891 journey
that of the conventional avant garde, which is composers such as Stockhausen, since they and quoting some unpublished fragments of his
merely trying to do something different within reject the experimental approach. Nevertheless discerning diary. Reading these fragments one
the limitations of solipsistic art. He goes on to many of the modern music establishment do regrets that there is still no edition of
outline the new skills and attitudes entailed take advantage of experimental innovations — Mackintosh's writings (his Italian diary and
from both artist and public, and then to the not to mention their propensity to pass these Glasgow lectures).
many indeterminate, chance and electronic off as their own — and therefore they surely In his introduction 'Biographical and Critical
techniques which have been evolved to bring need evaluation by this yardstick, if only just Notes' Alison tries to summarize the existing
about the unforeseeable. The remaining chapters for the record. After all their work seems interpretations of Mackintosh's work, and
focus on the successive phases of experimental hardly more arty, lifeless and egotistical than rightly points out that limiting his 'architecture
music in greater detail, establishing each on its that of some he does include, since experimental to simple considerations of an aesthetic nature
own terms while at the same time relating it to pieties and procedures are no guarantee of a is to deform the meaning of that new form of
a broader context. Despite its apparent brevity, truly experimental spirit. In fact this reluctance composition which Mackintosh, not without
the book is something of a monumental to adopt the standpoint of the critic rather than awareness, proposed in the examples of his
achievement. Nyman is as much at home with the artist and make value judgements on interiors' (p.14). He makes it his task to recover
the extreme diversity of Cage or the Scratch individual cases is the greatest weakness of the Mackintosh's 'most individual synthesis and his
Orchestra as the extreme austerity of LaMonte present book, along with its failure to get really most sensitive connotations', by revealing the
Young or Steve Reich, and is particularly good to grips with the thorny borderline cases — one 'scientific-cultural component' of his idiom.
at primary criticism, on such areas as the could also mention improvisation, and even Oddly enough his critical notes hold no more
concept and event pieces of George Brecht and Nyman's own critical pet 'the new tonality'. than well-known facts and interpretations, and
the Fluxus group, or the experimental neo- The second book would explicitly make the his 'Critical Analysis of the Chairs' (pp. 87-104)
classicism of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, which connections with work in other fields from are confined to merely formal aspects. He
have largely evaded intelligent comment in the Duchamp to Ehrenzweig and Buddha to Mao, describes the chairs in terms of a 'theoretical
past. With exhilerating command of every evaluating a wide range of art and achievement scheme', i.e. an abstract configuration of planes
aspect of the subject and its wider implications, from the standpoint of experimentalism, and and lines. Although he pretends an iconological
and with every paragraph overflowing with placing the latter in the history of ideas as a research, his description remains almost
information and ideas, its authority as art whole. And lastly — despite the relatively iconographical.
histbry is unmistakable, much though those modest place he is given here — there really Indeed he considers the chairs as paradigmatic
whose vested interests lie elsewhere may ought to be a proper critical study of the space concepts which constitute at the same
disapprove — and much though I resent finding protean figure of Cage himself, who in the final time major components of the spatial articulation
the quotation from my own writing in a totally reckoning can still be seen as the only begetter of their context, and one can accept this as a
misleading context. of experimental music in all its aspects, and has valuable starting-point, as a preliminary
At another level it can be seen as a practical impinged so valuably on so much else besides. condition for semantical analysis, revealing
handbook for the artist choosing an All these works are badly needed, and with his cultural meanings and Mackintosh's concept of
experimental approach in any medium, since first book Nyman has certainly proved himself human relationships. But the author actually
experimental music is not necessarily concerned one of the handful of writers on any medium doesn't reach this level of interpretation. He
with sounds, and Nyman has given much space who genuinely deserves the name of critic. does mention but he doesn't dwell on
to describing the various experimental processes Victor Schonfield Mackintosh's 'cultural connotations' that clearly
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