Whatever Happened to the Avant-Garde?

You either get it, or you don't. From an early age, I got it. I remember, as a child, being told I could stay awake to listen to John Cage's HPSCHD being performed at the BBC Proms so long as I was in bed with the light turned out. A treat, for my 14th birthday, was a ticket to a Stockhausen concert in London. I revelled in it all. Sometimes I was mystified, but I just knew that something was going on worth listening to and that if I kept listening, all would be revealed.

I was right. Many 20th century composers produced work which is up there with the best: Stockhausen's Gruppen, Gesang der Jünglinge, Nono's Il Canto Sospeso, Berg's Lulu, Boulez' Le Marteau sans Maître, Cage's Sonatas and Interludes to name but a few. If you're a 'classical' music lover (classical? serious? art? the lack of a definitive word for the genre we're talking about may be part of the problem) and these pieces are unfamiliar to you (or you dismiss them as unapproachable noise), then you're missing something. Of course, you're totally at liberty to miss it if you want. We live in a free society, don't we?

In a consumer society, there's very little incentive for anyone to promote anything that requires effort on the part of the consumer to consume it. The product, too, must at least appeal to at least a critical mass of people, to be worth producing. During the Cold War, the avant-garde – though hard to turn into a commodity – served a purpose. The Soviet Union rigorously controlled the output of composers – all new music had to appeal to a wide audience on first hearing. Governments in the West were keen to demonstrate – as much to their own people as anyone else – how different they were. You may not like the music your country's composers are producing, but at least they're allowed to produce it – encouraged, even. And hey, it's a free country, so you don't even have to listen to it! Preposterous though it sounds, the CIA even found ways of funding and encouraging the work of avant garde composers.*

The twentieth century avant-garde were, on one level, prophets who chose music as their means of communication. Their music often seems to speak to us from a different world whose musical expression might seem complex to us now, but which will become clearer to us with time. I don't think this is fanciful: indeed, the music was often explicit about it. One of Schoenberg's earliest more challenging pieces, the last movement of his Second String Quartet, is a setting of a poem by Stefan George which began with the famous line, 'I feel air from another planet'. As writers of film music discovered, the work of these composers was not so far removed from the world of science fiction.

Once the Cold War was over, though, the idea of the artist as prophet, who produced visionary work that one needed to make an effort to get to grips with, was never going to meet with government approval. The era of late capitalism, left to its own devices, has no need for it. Arts funding changed: at one time, it was a way to fund important work that would never be marketable. These days, if you want arts funding you're under pressure to demonstrate that your work will become commercially viable.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall there was no way back. Free market economics had already been raised to the level of a dogma – anything that didn't sell didn't matter – and there was no need for governments to try to demonstrate their social and cultural superiority to a rival system. Talk of individual freedom faded from the narrative. As a child growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, you were told how lucky you were to live in a country where you didn't need an identity card and wasn't not watched by TV cameras wherever you went. Now, CCTV is everywhere and governments since the 1990s have often talked of introducing ID cards. There has even been serious discussion in both main Westminster parties, at various times, as to whether we should move to a 'post-democratic' age and replace politicians with managers. The things people were prepared to fight a nuclear war over in 1965, miraculously, don't seem to matter anymore.

The composers of the twentieth century avant-garde, who'd found themselves promoted by governments who found them useful but who had no time for their visions, found themselves dropped the moment those governments had no further use for them. Not only that, but a new generation of composers was on the rise, learning their trade in a very different world to their forebears. Prophets only survive in places where people are open to change. They find themselves marginalised – and, at worst, persecuted – everywhere else.

The irony of all this is that if you turn on BBC Radio 3 today, there's a good chance you'll find yourself listening to Shostakovich. If you go to a classical concert, there's a good chance they'll be playing, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and... Shostakovich. In the pre-concert talks and the programme notes, you'll be treated to a restatement of the trials and tribulations of his relationship with the soviet state. If you take any interest in classical music (or whatever you want to call it), you'll have heard it a hundred times before. The chances of any serious, 'difficult' late twentieth century classical music being on the bill, though not impossible, are slim indeed.

Thankfully, mainly due to the internet, the avant-garde still survives – though on the margins. In fact, the fact that the Establishment's gaze is turned elsewhere might even be doing it good, in a way. Many of the great musical works dating from the days of relatively lavish state funding now languish in obscurity because they require huge or difficult to assemble forces to put on and a lot of rehearsal time to get right. These days, when anything marginal is destined to stay marginal and fund itself, there are – thanks to the internet – too many small outfits to count turning out electronic music, short films, experimental writing, multimedia projects, etc. Also, the availability of often free software to take the place of expensive machinery and equipment has made it easier for people to make what they want. Moreover, having your work showcased on your own website rather than under the avuncular gaze of a state broadcaster, for example, can mean the audience gets to appreciate the work in a more meaningful context.

*Coincidentally, a new book - Finks by Joel Whitney - has just come out about CIA interference not, this time, in music, but in literary culture during the same era.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Computer

I've just been reading an article in the Guardian about art created by Artificial Intelligence, in which art experts are challenged to spot the differences between works created by real artists and works created by computers. Okay, it was probably written as a bit of fun but, nevertheless, I think it really missed the point.

The big question the article asks is, 'could a computer ever hope to reproduce the emotional depth that gives great art its charm and meaning?' It might be a big question, but it's nothing like big enough. It betrays a shallow perception of what art is and what it does. The fact that a computer can create a convincing, fake impressionist painting does not mean a computer can create a work of art. It may be impossible to tell it from a real impressionist painting, but that's not the point. In any case, if I were to set out to create a fake impressionist painting, it wouldn't be a work of art either. Doing anything of the kind would be beyond me but, even if it wasn't, the result would be merely a curiosity. I might be able to make a few bob selling it, but the fact that it may be indistinguishable from the work of a real impressionist painter would not make it a great work of art.

Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, dealt with the problems associated with the production of mass-produced copies of art-works, films and so on. One can quite easily extend the things he says to the creation of machines which reproduce the skills and some of the creative choices made by artists themselves. Benjamin says:

That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.

Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The connection with some sort of 'domain of tradition' is crucial to the work of art. This not just about the creative traditions of artists, through which 'classical' might evolve into the 'romantic', say, but the whole cultural tradition of the society in which the work of art exis

ts. As Benjamin says:

An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura.

Ibid.

Obviously then, although they're important, there's a great deal more to a work of art than 'the emotional depth' that gives [it] its charm and meaning.' Art has a cultural context that helps us make sense of it and the world we live in. The real question, the one the Guardian doesn't ask, is, how can art made by a machine ever be part of a cultural tradition? The answer is, it can't. It can only imitate work done in the past. It could, conceivably, generate new ways of making material, but since cultural traditions are, by definition, made by people, such material could not serve the same function as art. There are exceptions to all this. Firstly, some artists – John Cage and Brian Eno, for example, have sometimes consciously decided to delegate creative choices to machines. The crucial difference is, they have delegated rather than abrogated their responsibilities as creators. Secondly, if machines could be created that are truly conscious, and not merely creating the impression of consciousness, one would have to look at all this again. It may be that conscious machines might create cultural traditions of their own. That would be intriguing.

People often ask if the rise of AI will lead to machines 'taking over'. Thinking about the role of machines in the creation of art makes one wonder, will we notice if they do? Cultural traditions change, but the changes have to be made by people. If we're surrounded by machine-generated art, cultural tradition has passed out of our hands. We may be charmed by and find intriguing meanings in the images we see, but that can never be enough for the 'art' to be meaningful to us. It may even – to use Benjamin's word – have an 'aura', But that aura is not that of a work of art: it's generated by the sense of wonder we feel on realising that a machine can create something so like a work of art.

Of course, it's not just about visual art: what I've been saying applies to the other arts, too. In 1984, Orwell imagined a world in which novels were written by machine. The generation of art, literature, etc., in this way reduces it to the level of entertainment and diversion. Before we realise it, we might find ourselves drifting from day-to-day though a sanitised, cultureless world, distracted by charming (there's that Guardian word again) sounds, words and images that signify nothing. Sound familiar? Are the machines taking over? Perhaps they have already.

The end product of such machine-creativity is merely a commodity 'that [has] to be produced, like jam or bootlaces', as Orwell put it. It strips it of any deeper, cultural meaning. Since art and literature produced in this way is unlikely to tell anyone anything meaningful they didn't already know, it's unlikely to encourage members of its audience to think for themselves. In the eyes of some, this might be thought of as a good thing. Art – especially original art – can be dangerous. As Aldous Huxley said:

By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms -- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest -- will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial [...]. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World.

Perhaps we have to see past the computer. Much of the creative work we're surrounded by today endlessly harks back to the past. One only has to wander round a modern housing estate with its hotch-potch of nineteenth and early twentieth century styles of architecture to see this. If our culture has become merely imitative, it's only a small step to transfer all responsibility for creative work to the computer. We worry about computers taking over the world, but perhaps they've already taken over our minds. Perhaps, armed with computers and aware of the ways in which they can be useful to us, we've begun to think like computers ourselves. If an otherwise good idea doesn't lend itself to development by new technology, does it get rejected in favour of one that does? One thing is certain: computers that are capable of creating imitations of art, literature and music – along with a whole lot else – are already making the job of Huxley's 'thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators' a whole lot easier.