Entoptic landscape and ijereja are both works that can be considered as expanding collections of materials. They explore the spaces between composition, notation, performance and improvisation by considering all of these activities as equally 'performative'. Each work comprises a set of materials that includes scores, fixed media audio and video, recorded live performances, studio-edited performances, and performance strategies. In the case of each piece, materials created in and by previous performances go on to inform future performances of the music. As such, there can be no 'definitive' performance or statement of the works, and nor can they ever be considered finished or bounded. This is how these pieces conceive of music as an iterative process: they are intended as statements of that process. Nicholas Bourriaud (2010) identifies the creative artist as a 'semionaut': one who must navigate between signs and signifiers in order to negotiate, interpret, and create meaning. In the 'work' of music, the composer, performer and listener can all be thought of as semionauts; they take part in the same processes to create and recreate the 'work'. In my own practices I embody and enact all three of these positions, and I seek to blur the boundaries between listening, performing and composing. Contemporary artistic forms in Bourriaud's terms, then, are 'journey forms': they internalise and externalise an experience of movement through the work as a temporal and spatial territory. The music presented here offers an opportunity for the exploration of the journey form as a compositional strategy, a tool for performance and interpretation, and a framework for criticism.
Peter Bürger's critique of the historical avant garde (in Theory of the Avant Garde) accounts for its ineffectual nature as a political movement because of its relationship with institutions. He argues for hermeneutics to be employed as a critique of ideology, and as a facet of the understanding of the ‘historicity of aesthetic categories’. The influence of institutions on music since 1968 has served as a central part of its critique: the work concept itself seems to enshrine political ineffectiveness and the bourgeois nature of art practice that ought to be critiqued by an avant garde. In contrast, Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of the ‘exform’ re-conceives the avant garde as outside of institutions and an idea of ‘progress’ that is aligned with a dominant capitalist ideology. He frames the task of the avant-garde artist as giving energy to ‘waste’, outside of political and ideological institutions. This type of avant-garde practice functions to ‘bring precarity to mind: to keep the notion alive that intervention in the world is possible’. This article explores the exform with respect to the work of the British composer Chris Newman and the Swiss composer Annette Schmucki, and considers how Bourriaud's approach to re-thinking the avant garde might apply specifically to contemporary and experimental music in the present.
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