Luanna wonders: what is music for?

In a world of binaries and black and white, such a question leads only to others: what is music? Who is music for? Is the impossibility of an answer to the question simultaneously the answer? Is it this otherworldly difficult-to-pin-down different-for-everyone sense that is the point of music?   

Here’s the closest I've come to an ‘answer': that music is defined by those who are experiencing it. I was going to say those who listen, but already words are inclined to limit the way we can describe and, consequently, define music. By limiting our description of music to an aural one, we discount the possibilities of music being a live all-senses-wide experience.  A music beyond listening; an idea of music as a temporary state of being in one's mind. 

Music can be a deeply personal, solitary experience but it can also, even at the same time, be a force of connection. The appreciation of music appears to be able to bypass the social and cultural barriers that have historically challenged human interaction, such as language, and encourage connection through the sharing, or communal making, of music.   

Illustration by Luanna McCallum

So the term ‘Music’ is shrouded in ambiguity. With so many forms and ways of being, one of its only constant features seems to be the way music taps into our emotional or spiritual psyche. In other words; that it makes us feel, and how it makes us feel. Even then, our opinions differ so greatly on genre, sound, and style that it feels a little uncomfortable to categorise such experiences into one singular term.   

If music brings people together, how remarkably it seems also to be one of the most controversial topics in the western world. Discussions linked to music can dominate popular culture; as we express opinions not only opinions about various songs new releases, but musicians too. Considering musicians extends our initial question still further: can we separate the artist and the art? Furthermore, if music can be so deeply personal, how can it simultaneously create a sense of community?  

Nick Cave (of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), believes that the answer lies within a sense of shared vulnerability. Of his songs, he writes:  

'I send them out into the world, bright emissaries of the spirit, to travel where they are needed, collecting souls as they go – to the joyful and the disheartened, the sick and the well, the grievers and those yet to grieve, the lost and the found, the good and the bad and the somewhere in-between. They become a great whirling conga-line of souls.'  

 This image, these bright emissaries and conga-lines for me, comes close to clasping the meaning of music, the point of it all.   

One thing is for certain: music is for anyone, in any way, for any reason, for anyone bold enough to grapple with such an elusive thing as the meaning of music. 

Aliens, Spaceships and other things make more sense than traffic, my phone, the supermarket and God.

“The Hithchikers Guide to the Galaxy” (1979) by Douglas Adam’s is a science-fiction/comedy franchise foloowing the misadventures of Arthur Dent, the last human in the universe, as he hitchhikes across the galaxy. Along the way, Arthur befriends Ford Prefect the alien, Marvin the paranoid android, creatures  familiar as mice and odd as the “Vogons.” Arthur’s story begins on Earth. 

When Arthur Dent’s house is about to be destroyed to replace it with a bypass, he doesn’t shout or beg the construction workers to stop. Rather, he lays flat on the mud before the bulldozer, politely refusing to stand.  

“This Bypass has got to be built and it's going to be built!” the city council worker tells Arthur, to which Arthur obviously answers: “Why’s it gotta be built?”. Well, that’s another obvious answer there: “It's a bypass. You’ve got to build bypasses.” 

 Arthur eventually stands and heads to the pub with his friend Ford Prefect who lets him know that the world will be ending in just a few minutes, and that he shouldn't worry about that house of his: it will all be gone soon enough.  

Something is wrong…Arthur heads to the pub with his friend Ford illustration by Matilda Wright

Ford is, to Arthur’s surprise, not of a human background. He’s from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and works as researcher for the wholly remarkable book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Ford has been stranded on Earth for a few years now, but he's about to find a way out. 

 In the end, Arthur’s house isn’t bulldozed after all; the whole affair is interrupted by a race of aliens called Vogons bulldozing planet Earth to replace it with a hyperspatial bypass. Sadly, Earth was in the way, so obviously they’re building bypasses anyways. 

 Ford and Arthur hitchhike, leaving whatever rubble remains of Earth behind.  

 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wonderfully absurd novel about a human, a book, lots of aliens, a paranoid robot, mice, and the answer to life, the universe and everything.  

 It’s a novel I think about while I sit in traffic.  

 They’ve been building this bypass near my house for years now - still, it’s nowhere near completion. Mexico City is like that a lot. Loads of huge, metropolis, traffic filled, hurried, miserable people cities are. They tear down houses, dig up huge holes seemingly just to create construction sites we can all complain about while we sit in traffic. Give us something to do, something to think about. I sit and wonder when the aliens will come and tear it all down, when they’ll finally inform us that this whole thing was just a joke or sadistic experiment, or both most likely.   

 Arthur Dent the human should be no less than horrified when he finds out that Planet Earth is, naturally, a supercomputer created by another supercomputer. The original supercomputer, named Deep Thought, was designed to come up with the answer for “The Ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything.” After a couple thousand years, the answer is ready and the universe takes a deep breath while Deep Thought prepares to deliver its answer so that everyone can get back to their business, finally knowing why we get up early, build bypasses and generally do anything, at all, ever. After calculating for thousands of years Deep Thought gives an answer to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything. That answer, of course, is 42, to which everyone unanimously replies: “huh? What?” 

The issue with Deep Thought's answer is that the hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings that built the computer did not think of the right question to ask. 42 is the answer, but what was the question in the first place?  

Enter Earth, built originally as a supercomputer that would, eventually, figure out that very question. Except now it's become a load of rubble and rocks floating around.  

Surely Arthur Dent the human would be horrified to discover his entire existence on Earth and the existence of everything he's ever known, loved, hated or cared about was just an experiment. But he’s not surprised: ‘well, you know” says Arthur thoughtfully, “all of this explains a lot of things. All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and that no one would tell me what it was.” 

Meanwhile - Marvin the paranoid robot has a brain the size of a planet. He’s a robot that suffers from depression and extreme boredom, despite living in a pretty exciting environment. He’s scared, sad, bored and lives on a spaceship. The rest of us are the same I think (except for the spaceship, I assume) I may be paranoid. I may be living and breathing but watch with covered eyes from between my fingers. I’m no android, I’m no super intelligent being, but even if I was, I may be paranoid. Like Marvin. I may be scared, sad and bored too. Obsessively anxious, even as a robot.  

To Arthur, the world simply makes more sense if it's all some huge joke. An experiment. I remember the unfinished bypass from back home and the paranoia that follows everywhere I go, and I see where he's coming from. Maybe aliens and spaceships make more sense than traffic, construction, my phone, the supermarket, God etc. I may be paranoid.  

Now Arthur finds himself in the center of an intergalactic conflict. As the last human, Arthur should therefore understand Earth better than anyone; he's been living there his whole life, his brain was “an organic part of the penultimate configuration of the computer program (known as Earth).”  

The aliens, mice and miscellaneous creatures in power believe this means he must know the answer Earth was trying to calculate. They all question Arthur. 

Arthur doesn't know what to say. Even as an organic part of Earth, it all makes little sense to him: “He wasn’t aware of ever having felt an organic part of anything.” 

Just because he lives on earth, why would that mean he understands it? Arthur would quite like to go back home to his little, insignificant planet. He remembers where his day started: 

Arthur glanced around him once more, and then down at himself, at the sweaty disheveled clothes he had been lying in the mud in on Thursday morning. 

“I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle”, he muttered to himself.  

“I beg your pardon?” said the old man mildy. 

“Oh nothing.” said Arthur, “only joking.” 
 Like Arthur, I seem to be having some difficulty with my lifestyle, and I also find myself not understanding anything, at all, ever. Even the small things (coffee, mud, bathrobes) feel bizarre sometimes. I'm as paranoid as a robot, as anxious as a human.  

I like to think that all that stuff about aliens could be real, that there's a huge incomprehensible universe out there. That things are the way things are because the universe makes no sense, so why should anything, you know? 

Breath and existential crisis: Minimalism is phenomenological

(Tom writes in response to Experiencing the Aesthetic, a unit taken by second year Liberal Arts students at University of Bristol) 

‘20 firebricks in Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII - a reckoning with existence itself’ Artwork by Rose Jeffs

The term ‘Minimalism’ fills cultural critics and avid gallery-goers with dread. When Carl Andre’s contentious Equivalent VIII was purchased by Tate Gallery in 1962, the gallery was scorned for this acquisition of a ‘pile of bricks’ (as quoted from the Evening Standard) eliciting uproar from press and public alike. The work, made from twenty firebricks, aroused such dissent that it was defaced with blue food colouring in 1976: a protest referencing Ruskin’s infamous attack on Whistler for ‘throwing a pot of paint’ in the public’s face. Viewed as an insult to artistic legitimacy, the sculpture quickly became one of the most controversial artworks to be acquired by a leading UK institution.  

Yet, somewhat paradoxically, this scandal made concrete the work’s position within history books and the Tate collection, where it remains today. Was this tabloid farce a total misunderstanding? Can Minimalist works be classified as ‘true art’ or are they disrespectful towards it? 

Introducing Phenomenology 

A possible answer to this artistic quandary lies with phenomenology. Pioneered by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this critical approach judges an artwork’s aesthetic value upon the viewer’s immediate response to the work. As Amanda Boetzkes explains, phenomenology considers an artwork ‘against the spatial, temporal and material conditions it shares with the viewer’, pedestaling viewer’s subjective reaction. In other words, phenomenology celebrates the ‘here-and-now’ of the viewing experience. This approach enmeshes the beholder and the artwork in a contingent encounter. It is this encounter and the viewer’s response to this encounter that is seen as aesthetically significant and integral to an artwork’s meaning. In this way, phenomenology favours an embodied and visceral aesthetic experience, as opposed to the historical approaches of traditional academic disciplines. 

Through this lens, the disapproval garnered by Equivalent VIII becomes a vehicle of aesthetic meaning, sculpture emotionally affects beholders upon their immediate encounter with it. Upon encountering the firebricks, the viewer responds with visceral shock or offence, thereby validating the bricks’ ascension to artistic status. Thus Equivalent VIII is wholly reliant on audience response to become an ‘artwork’: without the viewer, this translation cannot occur and the bricks remain no more than the sum of their parts. This ‘reliance’ lies at the heart of phenomenology; it declares that art needs a receptive audience to exist as art. 

Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, 1966. Firebricks, 127 × 686 × 2292 mm. © 2020 Carl Andre. Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY and DACS, London. Photo © Tate.

 Bewildering Bricks: Minimalism and ‘Objecthood’: 

Curiously, what is most striking about Equivalent VIII is what it lacks. As a stack of industrially produced bricks with unadorned, planar surfaces, Andre’s sculpture seemingly has little aesthetic interest. The artwork is often understood as expressionless and cold, as it cannot be read metaphorically. Rosalind Krauss explains how this inscrutable appearance prevents the viewer from becoming ‘absorbed’ by the work. Indeed, by eliminating the mark of the artist and presenting bricks merely as bricks, the work becomes impenetrable to semiotic (symbolic) interpretation*.

Art Historian Michael Fried probed this notion in his essay ‘Art and Objecthood’. Fried suggests the ‘literalist sensibility’ of Minimalism’s austere appearance is comparable to an ‘encounter’ with ‘an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder’.vii His claim acknowledges the experience of Minimalism is wholly phenomenological. The experience of the work is thus wholly ‘external’, in the same way in which one experiences a piece of furniture, for example. This is anchored by the sculpture’s lack of visible interior: a site associated with ‘uncovering’ meaning in 20th-century sculpture. It is therefore impossible to project an anthropomorphic reading onto Andre’s work: this unfeasibility reduces the experience of the work to an object within space. 

Minimalism, Self-Consciousness and ‘Heightened Perception’ 

Unable to imbue the bricks with a symbolic reading, the viewer experiences something like an existential crisis. For, as the viewer fails to interpret Equivalent VIII, the artwork inadvertently throws the attention back onto the viewer themselves. Thus the viewer becomes aware of their own body in relation to the sculpture, as the work is understood as a form within a material landscape.  

The beholder becomes aware of the size, mass, and weight of their own body in relation to the work, alongside the rise and fall of their breath, their proximity to the work, and their position within the gallery space itself. This gives the sculpture a palpable presence, as the beholder becomes aware of their intrusion into the artwork’s spatial field. Thus the artwork becomes an anchor against which the viewer interrogates their subjectivity. Claire Bishop has described this self-conscious experience as one of ‘heightened perception’, wherein the sculpture emboldens our awareness of both the exhibition space and our process of perceiving it. In this way, the aloofness of Equivalent VIII forces us to reckon with the phenomenology of existence itself, as human beings perceiving an object within a wider physical world. 

Minimalism and the Experience of Architecture 

The literalist aesthetics of Minimalism also draw the viewer’s attention to the architectural space within which the art is housed. Frances Colpitt has argued that Minimalist sculpture ‘activates’ the space surrounding it—i.e. the space ‘inhabited by the viewer’. Again, this is a by-product of the work’s ‘objecthood’, encouraging the viewer to perceive their body as a form within space. As such, the viewer is not ‘distracted’ by the art and thus can come to terms with the gallery space itself. As the viewer conceives themselves in relation to the work, Equivalent VIII becomes a central anchor against which a viewer understands not only their own form and subjectivity, but also the gallery space. 

Equivalent VIII sits in the middle of the room  like  an obstacle, around which the viewer must negotiate to traverse the exhibition space. In this way, the sculpture interferes with the space and the viewer’s movements through it, a phenomenon termed the ‘Minimalist environment’ by Bishop. Consequently, the sculpture influences the viewer’s understanding of the space, as they circumnavigate the firebrick stack.  

Moreover, comprised from industrially produced bricks, the work’s materiality itself harks from the world of architecture. The planar sides and sharp corners of Equivalent VIII’s arrangement proves to emphasise the cuboidal space of the gallery itself, while its unadorned surfaces mirror the sparseness of the ‘white cube’ gallery. As such, the walls, ceiling, and flooring are understood as a macrocosm of the sculpture itself. Lying horizontally across the gallery floor, the sculpture emphasises the expansive horizontality of the ground, counterbalancing the verticality of the human body atop it. As such, the viewer becomes aware of their intrusion into the gallery space and their erect posture which stands perpendicular to the gallery floor. These experiences force the viewer to reckon with their existence as an entity within architectural space, diverting the viewer’s attention to the sublime power of human engineering.  

A Phenomenal Movement 

In summary, the application of phenomenology to Minimalist sculpture is crucial to understanding the movement. Minimalism lends itself to a phenomenological approach, as both concepts concern themselves with the viewer’s temporality and experiences of embodied perception. Yes, Andre’s work is a mere stack of firebricks, but it is that very fact that makes Equivalent VIII so phenomenologically significant. By ameliorating all traces of the artist’s hand, Andre encourages us to consider the capabilities of our own bodies, which have the power to perceive and construct remarkable architectural spaces. As such, Andre majestically transforms a pile of bricks into an interrogation of existence itself, as a living and computing human being. By encouraging us to see and appreciate the world differently, Minimalism has just as much artistic legitimacy as Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, or Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.  

*OED definition of ‘semiotic’: ‘relating to signs and symbols.’ 

Written by Tom Dance (Aurora editor 2022-23) 

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