Screened on a freestanding monitor in the centre of the main gallery floor, the footage in Nephin is silent and colourless, following the tendency of O’Malley’s films in recent years. Watching it, the spectator is presented with a continuous viewpoint from behind the window of a vehicle as it travels along a country road, close to the artist’s childhood home. By this route the camera indirectly approaches the eponymous mountain before being led on a partial circumnavigation of it. The mountain controls the camera’s attention and, apart from occasions when the proximity of a roadside ditch washes the whole image in rapidly passing greys, Nephin dominates the upper half of the screen. Other objects in the landscape slide from right to left in our visual field at speeds determined by their distance from the camera. After the small dark blind spot in the upper right of the screen, O’Malley’s mountain is the most stable element in the film. Its gradual rotation is not obvious in short viewing, so awareness of it is contingent upon the temporal as well as spatial composition of the viewer’s experience.

Staging the tension between uncertain types of movement and apparent stillness has been a regular device of O’Malley’s video works, often functioning to provoke the viewer’s awareness of a specific perceptual mechanism. Another strategy regularly deployed to this end is the use of various glass screens, panels or fragments, which can play a role in the production of the artist’s films or be recruited as materials in various installations in the gallery itself. Again these reflective, transparent, or opaque facets often function to hold up some detail of the viewer’s embodied experience and position it alongside the work’s more obvious content or subject, and O’Malley’s show in the Douglas Hyde is no exception.

Coloured and clear glass appear repeatedly: in a way that only slightly alters its traditional function of framing drawings or prints in works such as Standing Stone (2014), in which a drawing is tinted by straw coloured glass, to the camera’s panning of the geometry of a neglected greenhouse structure in the show’s other video work, Glasshouse (2014). In this dual-channel video the side of a glasshouse acts as a filter to the camera, filling the screens and sweeping across them at a steady rate. The pictorial movement, again from right to left, is much more precisely controlled than that in Nephin, and occasional vertical sections of the structure’s framework scan across the video screen almost mechanically. The glass sections that they support, however, are stained or marked to varying degrees of opacity. Many are broken or missing completely. The result is a kind of visual conveyor belt that alternatively frames, obscures, darkens, or otherwise alters our view of the densely overgrown plants inside the glasshouse.
Several constructed works in the show further exploit the material and optical qualities of glass. Stand (Pale Straw) (2014) and Stand (Rose) (2014), consist of a pair of coloured panes that stand vertically on the gallery floor, scaled to the human figure. Though transparent, their respective straw and rose colouring, while obviously mediating a view of the gallery, draws attention to the surface quality of the glass itself; it makes the textures of the large screens much more readily visible. Elsewhere, a sequence of works on paper, all simply labelled Untitled (2014), offer textural studies in combinations of pencil, watercolour, and monoprint, which seem to take formal cues from the numerous screens and fragments present in the show. For instance, one small pencil drawing on board evokes the slightly rippled glass surfaces of the Stand works.

While the black smudge in Nephin, and to some degree the passage of darkened structural sections in Glasshouse, indicate O’Malley’s interest in ideas of the scotoma, the attention to texture and colour, as defined by the material properties of glass, offers a subtle, less immediate counterpoint to the blind spots of the videos. After all, it is by generating a perception of colour and texture, in relation with our environment, that we remain unaware of the minor blind regions of our own vision. This fact serves as a simple analogy for a more complex experiential relationship between body and world that is at the root of O’Malley’s work.

Ostensibly, the show’s subject matter derives from the rural Irish landscape and from O’Malley’s childhood home, evident in the picturing of mountains, standing stones, and earthen hollows, and in the use of terms like ‘straw’ and ‘rose’ in naming colours. However, the prevailing concern is the artist’s larger, ongoing phenomenological project. Though there is some degree of repetition in O’Malley’s methods, they are methods which continue to offer subtle inflections of the viewer’s observation of otherwise highly familiar environments.

The Nuisance of Landscape was spread over four venues in various parts of northwest England’s Lake District and celebrated the last 15 years of creative ventures at Grizedale Arts. This organisation has been an important presence since 1999, supporting work which has been heavily informed by the place in which it was made, but seeking a different kind of fidelity to the area by encouraging the emergence of dissensus within a landscape of great natural beauty and fuelled by revenue generated through tourism.

The largest display in The Nuisance of Landscape was at the stately Abbott Hall in Kendal town, where the exhibition was divided into chapters. Chapters One and Two, named respectively ‘place’ and ‘complexity’, encompass the years 1999 – 2006. A longer legacy of Grizedale Arts was presented in ‘Chapter One’, represented by Andy Goldsworthy’s Land Art, alongside the influence of the Artist Placement Group from the late 1960s. ‘Chapter Two: Complexity’ dominated much of the Abbott Hall presentation: it was organised in a purposefully chaotic manner, with art-works bleeding into each other and lacking typical ‘sign-posts’ for the viewer, such as titles and artists’ names. My overall impression of ‘Chapter Two’ was that of having missed-out. There were empty sheds, props, costumes, posters for events long passed and a large post-meal table.

Presenting nuanced objects, which have been vacated of meaning, feels like a provocative curatorial decision. These objects appeared to have been de-activated – yet were still physically present and available for future (or current) moments of resurrection. In ‘Chapter Two’ curatorial challenges abounded as to how best to make site-specific or performative work legible to an audience who were not present at the works’ primary moment of activation. The art historian Claire Bishop identifies this challenge in her book Artificial Hells (2012), in which she recognises the fine line of a ‘dual horizon’ which these types of work must tread, ‘facing towards the social field, but also towards art itself’.

A wall in the exhibition section titled, ‘Chapter Three, Use: 2006 – 2014’, was dominated by a large reproduction of a certificate issued by the Mechanics’ Institute from the 1870s. This certificate represents a progressive organisation which emerged in England in the 1820s and effectively revolutionised working people’s access to education. By the middle of the 19th Century there were over 700 institutes throughout England, which functioned as libraries, lecture rooms and technical workshops.

There was a pronounced change of approach between ‘Chapter Two’ and ‘Three’, reflecting Grizedale Arts’ interest in revisiting the structure of these institutes and reimagining how artists might position themselves within a space with idealistic yet practical aims. Throughout this section of the exhibition we saw examples of artists inserting themselves into the locale of the town of Coniston in useful ways. Artist Liam Gillick was asked to address the dilapidated Coniston Institute’s lending library. Part of Chapter Three was given over to his design solution for this task. A temporary version of Honest Shop inhabits a section of ‘Chapter Three’. This shop was originally conceived by the Graphic Design studio ‘An Endless Supply’ and is a permanent fixture in the rejuvenated Coniston Institute: it contains a range of foraged and locally farmed foodstuffs, along with locally handcrafted objects. Each item in the shop is for sale. However, it isn’t staffed and its functioning is reliant upon people’s honesty. The initial motivation in setting up a shop that is predominantly stocked by local residents is that the contents would form an alternative portrait of the area. Indeed the mixture of goods available are beautifully idiosyncratic: dried local mushrooms, hand-knitted carrots, a ceramic bust of 19th Century artist and writer John Ruskin, along with a pottery Lovecup by art heavy-weight, Ryan Gander.

Through ‘Chapter Three’ art-works were invited to actually function in an economic and social sense within the greater Coniston area – they are expected to respond to and share non-art structures within that community. This irreverent approach to the authored art-object closely relates to the principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which found heightened expression in the Lake District through the 1870s. The Nuisance of Landscape display at ‘Blackwell: The Arts and Crafts House’ on the banks of Lake Windermere opened out these relations in a generative manner. Idealistic moments are referenced in this display called After Ford 151: Blackwell’s Darkest Place, where a replica of a Gatling gun (1862) was positioned on top of a pottery wheel (1940s). The diverse mix on display ranged from practical objects dating back 150 years to Infocalypse Stack Data Ritual Necklaces, made by arts group Juneau Projects in 2013. Images from a project which inspired many of the leaders within the Arts and Crafts Movement called ‘Ruskin’s Road’ were printed onto window seat cushions – these tasteful prints also convey a sense of disappointment as to how the ideals of a movement ultimately found expression in high-end furnishings. ‘Ruskin’s Road’ was an educational module initiated by John Ruskin for undergraduates at Oxford University in 1873. The students’ task involved building a road to connect two villages across a marsh, with Ruskin instructing his students that the road should be useful, beautiful and educational. The students, including Oscar Wilde, managed to construct half of the road before going home for the holidays.

The Arts and Crafts Movement’s failure to achieve its aims, despite the best of intentions, was a reoccurring melancholy theme worked through the diverse range of objects on display at Blackwell. This exhibit resembles an eccentric essay, which emphasises the social exchanges and political implications which flow around and between the objects on display.

A healthy degree of skepticism emanated from the Blackwell display. Yet underpinning the entire The Nuisance of Landscape exhibition was an inventive, restless and ultimately optimistic curatorial approach, which questions how art objects circulate and function. Faintly perceptible was a quietly spoken belief that if pushed hard enough, art might deliver unexpected answers to such rigorous questioning, answers which might be uniquely positioned to impact on both the social and the aesthetic.

The Nuisance of Landscape was on view at various venues in the Lake District, 10 October – 20 December 2014.

In Maker (2014) a pale green cement-like structure is very carefully rendered but left unfinished, like so many other of these depicted objects that seem to dissolve into the shadowy atmosphere. It seems natural to imagine these forms as either gargantuan concrete masses looming several feet tall over the viewer, or as delicate cardboard maquettes sitting modestly in a glass vitrine. Their surroundings vary: some live in rooms with carefully mapped-out angles and lines (with Scullion’s pencil sketches still visible), others live in shadowy landscapes void of any architectural framework. In Front (2014) the smooth cream floor and the brown textured walls almost suggest some coherent purpose for the angular pink object and its legs; yet once again the scale and exact function of the object are indeterminable. Other landscapes are fading, dark into light, with colours indistinguishable from each other. In Comes Down (2014) a fanlike pastel structure is in motion, on the verge of fusing into the evanescent abyss behind. Horizon lines are blurred or extinguished, forming a hazy terrain in which these configurations are suspended, waiting lingeringly to be fully formed or put to use.

The titles of the paintings do little to clarify their content. Consisting of single words, fragments of sentences, and subtle word plays, they tend to refer to temporal and spatial relations rather than to stable objects. Titles such as In Point (2014) and Here About (2014) are broadly associative and wide open to the personal connotations of the viewer. One comes away with a sense of having slipped into the parallel universe of the artist where unresolved objects, musings and inventions have been thrashed out in the landscape of Scullion’s mind, and to powerful effect.

On first impression the work of Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren in Gallery 1 resembled an overbearing older brother to Scullion’s serene, modest, inward looking paintings. Dahlgren’s show, Abstract Space in Concrete Terms, consisted of three artworks. The Wonderful World of Abstraction (2013) took over a large portion of the gallery floor. It consisted of a huge dense cube of multi-coloured ribbons tied vertically from a metal grid suspended from the ceiling. The effect was visually striking, but it was not at first clear that the viewer was being invited to physically enter this kaleidoscopic forest of colour. In the press release Dahlgren states, ‘It’s very important to be part of the work. . . At first you don’t know if this is ok, if you are allowed to or not. Then once you see that you can, have permission to, it’s a magical moment.’ Entering the sculptural structure the density of the ribbons shrouded the space in darkness; considering the work is made up of pure colour this was a surprising effect. The experience of wading through the soft labyrinth was multisensory, and as one navigated through the ribbons to create a path they fell perfectly back into place, leaving no trace on the work and bringing it back to its original form, in wait for its next visitor.

The next piece encountered was Units of Measurements (2014), a work modified specifically for Rua Red. Thirty metres of Stanley measuring tape horizontally spanned nearly two walls of the large gallery. The striped grid pattern created a trompe l’oeil effect, and it was not clear what one was looking at until closer inspection. Every second length of tape began at alternate sides to the wall. The work brought installation and building materials to the viewer’s attention and turned the mind to issues of production and presentation. This labour-intensive piece is highly typical of Dahlgren’s interest in geometric, linear shapes and his characteristic transformation of everyday objects into sculpture. For instance, in Reykjavik (2009), Dahlgren transforms a number of coat hangers into geometric abstract paintings, the everyday objects changed beyond recognition in the process.

Upon entering the exhibition, the sound of the video work Non Object (2013) followed the viewer around the space. This piece issues out of Dahlgren’s obsession with striped t-shirts (he has claimed he will wear one until the day he dies), an enthusiasm evident in nearly all of his work since his earliest years. In Signes d’abstraction (2005), which was performed in a mall in Stockholm, the artist invited 300 people wearing stripy tops to occupy the shopping centre for the day. Separated into groups, each were given specific tasks, with the aim of conjuring solidarity between the participants. Non Object itself consists of an hour and 25 minutes of looped footage of Dahlgren following people sporting horizontally striped tops around in the street. It takes the viewer a few minutes to discover the connecting thread of this seemingly random pursuit. The time spent trailing stripe-clad members of the public varies from person to person and one only gets to see the camera’s subject from behind. Once you realise the logic of the piece the quest becomes more engaging: the sounds, actions and pursuits of the ‘characters’ become the story, you feel more actively involved. The viewer becomes the spectator of an imagined video game of which the artist is in control.

Both shows in Rua Red therefore approached abstraction from different positions: Scullion’s work presented an array of newly imaged spaces and required time and considered looking; Dahlgren’s work was full of light, colour and tactility, and depended upon physical interaction to be fully appreciated. Both shows therefore seemed to me to aim at quite different responses, while at the same time sharing a stimulating engagement with abstraction as a theme and with the different ways it can be explored today.

An introductory text on the gallery wall, tells us that the exhibition is divided according to key themes such as ‘material’, ‘speculation’, ‘site’ and ‘narration’, and that these themes have been further designated with ‘keywords’ that allow for different trajectories to be mapped across the space of the galleries. This interesting curatorial proposition implies that the keywords would operate like meta-tags, creating a rhizomatic network of associations between the physical art objects which would reflect the interconnectivity of the digital archive. However, this hypertext of keywords seemed to be absent. Perhaps the idea is that the viewer forges their own connections between the artworks and the thematic words provided; however, this asks a lot of the viewer in terms of cognisance of the curatorial project, while it is also to some extent a method of mental reflex and association that happens naturally in the context of any exhibition. This aside, Selective Memory was an informed exhibition which explored the changing nature of the relationship of archival technology to memory.

As would be expected, much of the work in this exhibition is lens-based. However, there is no clear-cut distinction between analogue and digital images. In fact, in many works the differences between these two media are blurred, as one engulfs or appropriates the other, and this is perhaps the point. Jasper Rigole’s Paradise Recollected (2008) is a collection of found 8mm films, sourced from flea markets and garage sales, which have been transferred onto video. Much of the material consists of amateur footage and home movies which have been saved by Rigole’s ‘International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other People’s Memories’ (IICADOM). The resulting video is a kind of essay film complete with a voiceover which reflects upon the nature of collective memory. Rigole connects temporally and geographically distant footage through an effective editing process which groups together familiar and universal memories through a system of montage that produces a sense of objective classes of memory. This comes across most powerfully in a series of shots of different infants, captured in flickering film, at different times and in different places, all taking their first steps towards the camera.

The video is accompanied by a diagrammatic textual poster which breaks the film down into discrete terms; the moving images of saved memories are here transcribed into different units of data, just as the actual images were when the films were transferred into a digital format. The self-awareness of this transference from film to digital video in the context of the gallery is refreshing. To further emphasise this transition from real indexical imagery to sets of discrete data, Rigole provides us with a Mac monitor and keyboard displaying the web page of IICADOM, which the viewer is invited to interact with. Here we can browse all of the films that are being projected, as well as being able to change the search terms on the footage. For example, a black and white film of an old lady eating can now be tagged with the terms ‘boy’ ‘playing’; thus Rigole’s archive itself is susceptible to inevitable corruption and disorder. By juxtaposing analogue and digital archival technologies Paradise Recollected draws attention to the differences between these processes. The traditional archive is a static and orderly collection of physical documents which should not be altered or interfered with, while the digital archive promotes an interconnectivity operating according to a more dynamic mnemonic logic which continually updates, rewrites and erases itself in virtual space.

The tension between preserving and destroying is a key paradox of the archive. It also alludes to the problematic nature of new technological shifts for artists, as the digital is perceived to threaten analogue mediums. This incompatibility is played out in a series of works by Sean Snyder that has evolved from his project Index. Here, Snyder has been editing and digitising the archives he has amassed while researching previous projects. During this process many of the physical elements of the artist’s archive have been destroyed. We see the discarded remnants of this process in Untitled, (printed materials, broken DVDs) (2009), a collection of photographs of close up details of cracked and smashed DVDs and shredded pieces of printed text. This process of digitisation, through which the material remnants become unreadable and are then discarded, acts to draw attention to the surface materiality of the technical support itself. In Snyder’s photograph of a smashed DVD we actually register the material properties of the object’s mirrored surface, the way it cracks and breaks like glass, but also bends because it is plastic. This emphasis on the material properties of different surfaces relates to questions concerning the relevance of the concept of medium specificity in a digital age, as digitisation erases the differences between media. Text, sound and visual images all become data files that are read indifferently by the computer.

The transition from analogue to digital archival processes is also the subject of Zbyněk Baladrán’s Working Process (2007), another video essay which utilises found film footage and old film stock transferred again to video. The film is overlaid with horizontal blocks which give way to text evoking the now obsolete aesthetics of early computing. In this work text and image are vying for attention as the eye has to switch rapidly between reading the text, which sits over the image, and perceiving the image behind the text. At one point a series of blocks gives way to the sentence ‘THE PAST AND FUTURE CAN EXIST NEXT TO EACH OTHER’. In many ways this sums up Selective Memory, which is reflective of our current, transitional phase in the history of the archive, a phase in which its past and future states co-exist.

Maquettes have traditionally allowed sculptors to test out ideas and forms, and Baumgartner’s works are one-to-ten scale models for larger pieces. The models are primarily constructions of wood and mirrors; they present smooth, finished surfaces and were fabricated by a carpenter with whom the artist has had a long-term working relationship. They reference different kinds of architectural features and spaces. Some pieces are opaque and closed when seen from certain angles and, though small, have a monumental aspect. Others are seemingly more playful and open: we can look through windows into some of the pieces, while others employ periscopes, making clear the preoccupation with point-of-view and the framing of vision.

As we look our gaze is refracted and reflected through a hall of mirrors. In the accompanying text Baumgartner makes reference to Jacques Lacan and his celebrated theorization of ‘The Mirror Stage’ – the idea that the young infant, before having acquired a stable sense of self or the capacity to speak, jubilantly recognizes his or her own mirror image. This image is more unified, upright and coherent than the infant in fact experiences itself to be. For Lacan, this is an important step in the formation of the ego. But the mirrors in Baumgartner’s works do not reflect back a coherent whole; they more often than not break up the image of the viewer.

The pieces also seem to have an optimum viewing position and, if such a position is adopted, the mirror effects break up the viewer’s reflection into parts. At the exhibition’s opening the artist showed my friend and I the preferred position from which to look at 5 Figures, a wood and mirror construction, suggestive of a guillotine. If scaled-up and built, the structure would become the platform for a dancer, and through the placement of mirrors each viewer would see another viewer’s head in place of the performer’s. The pieces, then, are maquettes for environments for performances; this raises the question of how exactly we are meant to confront the work. Are we meant to view them as objects in themselves, or to imagine their manifestations with performers; are they models for stage-sets, or are they sculptures?

The contextualizing material for the show speaks to the viewer in a casual, conversational tone, opening with the words, ‘You asked me about Martin Buber’. This textual supplement signals a relationship between the artworks and philosophical influences. Indeed, there is a demand in the field of contemporary art to legitimate artwork with reference to theory and philosophy, and Baumgartner’s statement acknowledges this but at the same time does not entirely play the game, His tone is too relaxed, it does not strive for seriousness, he name-checks Lacan but confesses to often not understanding the writing, enjoying it instead as poetry. The same strategy of equivocating between sincerity and irony is at play in his use of kitsch. For example, Stable, a tasteful wood and mirror construction in a minimalist style, is inhabited by two small plastic horses; plastic wrap is employed to signify liquid in Fountain, (the title signalling to Duchamp’s infamous 1917 urinal); Twins, a minimal construction of mirrors slotted into a wooden base, is occupied by two tacky miniature baby dolls; Hell’s mirrors are backed in hot pink.

Komm, an audio work made in collaboration with Black Mariah director Ian McInerney, plays from behind a partition made by the artist Mollie Anna King. This structure, corporate minimalist in style, marks out an administrative space within the gallery. It is made up of different lengths of horizontal and vertical grey painted metal slats and one horizontal, coloured plexiglass panel. It is technically a separate space, although its openness allows viewers to look at other viewers or at the gallery administrators. Komm is a low-fi, looped vocal piece of approximately three and a half minutes in length. The phrases ‘I and Thou’ and ‘Ich und Du’ are repeated at various volumes and pitches, and this has both a disturbed and ridiculous aspect, the vocal sometimes breaking into coughing and laughter. It illustrates the way minimal repetition produces rhythm and exemplifies the tendency of Baumgartner’s work to oscillate between different tones.

Inside Manhole was hung above the ubiquitous Apple lap-top which sat on the office desk. It consists of a photograph of the artist in a mirrored environment, a full-size realization of one of his maquettes. It has a theatrical quality, the artist seeming to stare directly out at the viewer, his skin reflecting the blue fluorescent lighting and his limbs holding stylized postures. The space is confusing and ambiguous, the photographer’s reflection appearing small and upside down in the top right hand corner of the image.

There is a tension in Baumgartner’s exhibition between features that seem very finished, and looser, more casual and throwaway elements that worry the pristine surfaces. The show’s meaning alters on different visits. It had a performative aspect at the opening, encouraged by the interactions between multiple viewers. On another visit, King’s partition/ artwork, in conjunction with two young art administrators, served to accentuate the bureaucratic function of the space, and the hallowed art atmosphere receded. There is a tentative aspect to Baumgartner’s artworks, which trouble gallery protocols; they don’t seem entirely confident in relation to their position as exceptional objects, and highlight just how contingent the status of the artwork is. We look, this show suggests, but a network of discursive frameworks and structures always underpins what we see.

Laura Poitras, filmmaker and journalist, is on her way to the Mira Hotel, reading an encrypted email from Edward Snowden which he sent in January 2013. This darkness is symbolic, but that atmosphere of danger is real enough, and equally dramatic for being so very recent. But by the time Citizenfour was screened last October, the season of hot debate was over. No fictional reconstruction, Citizenfour chooses not to spell out endless complexities which are left to the viewer to figure out, presenting instead the turning point in a lifetime. White out of black screen emails remind us that we live in two worlds, especially since Web 2. But pace Jean Baudrilliard, Snowden’s disclosures demonstrate how real the virtual world is. Citizenfour is one big understatement, its screen-world devoid of action or plot. Instead, the everyday is exceptional: we are made party to terse conversations interspersed with anxiety and waiting, while Snowden’s pauses get longer and longer. He is between actions; looking out of the window, waiting to be kidnapped, fearful of arrest.

We also meet the spies, the journalists, the whistle-blowers: William Binney, former analyst working for the US National Security Agency who made publicly known the illegal activities of the Bush War on Terror and, after trying to protest through official channels, was hounded like a medieval Cathar. Greenwald, the lawyer, investigative journalist and blogger. The spies: we watch top brass brazenly deceptive under oath, during a congressional hearing in May 2013 (Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Keith Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency). Was government collecting data on millions of Americans? In the filmed conversations over the eight days, Snowden sums up the hard evidence trickling out to The Guardian and The Washington Post since 5 June: that the US processes twenty billion communications worldwide every day; that since 2006, nine major internet companies have been providing the NSA with access to every US citizen’s calls, texts, emails, and documents stored in the Cloud; that GCHQ taps the UK’s forty transatlantic fibre optic cables and has access to Ireland’s too.

Citizenfour is a cinematic version of a Cartier Bresson ‘decisive moment’, filmed in real time. The rules of American storytelling, with its satisfying climax, are flouted. Instead, you get pieces of a puzzle which document some of the background, but no conclusion. Paradoxically, the culmination occurs in the middle, when, on 9 June 2013, Snowden reveals his identity in a twelve-minute filmed interview that was immediately uploaded onto The Guardian online. That’s the only event, the only ‘action’ to speak of, in the hotel where Poitras and Glenn Greenwald finally match the codename with a person who defies the disparaging media representations: a gauche young guy, taking a momentous step from an easy life in Hawaii to the challenging world of decision-making. We watch him reveal his identity to the world and hear him explaining that the reason why he has released secrets of state is to allow the journalists to select and provide context and commentary on the million and a half documents. He speaks to Poitras’s camera, saying quite simply: ‘All this is not about me, it’s about what’s been happening’.

In the final scene, in some dacha outside Moscow, we are in the company of Snowden (and Poitras) and of Greenwald who scribbles the name of the latest person to make secrets public. Viewers can only wonder what they might mean and accept or reject the unspoken invitation to begin the slow activity of interpretation.

I’m reminded of the critical documentary tradition of the 1960s and even earlier – before Jean-Luc Godard’s showy Brechtian interruptions – a tradition with roots in what film theorist and writer Cesare Zavattini termed ‘shadowing’ the real (pedinamento). Poitras’s camera too is ‘with people, in real time, confronting life decisions’, as she has put it. The filming conveys the same kind of excitement of being in the present as Albert Maysles’ shots of JFK walking through the crowds in Primary (1960). But though the Maysles brothers may well be among her models, Poitras’ relation to her subject is different: more like Chris Marker’s Cinéma Direct in Le Joli Mai (1963) than American Direct Cinema. For Poitras is directly implicated in the events and definitely on Snowden’s side.

The film’s title was Snowden’s code name before going public: a private person becomes a citizen, acting as a subject, by going beyond the personal sphere. “Things are not OK,” Poitras told a journalist. Rather than hector the viewer through interventionist approaches, such as Michael Moore’s or Errol Morris’s confrontational interviewing, Citizenfour raises the question of statesmanship obliquely: what happens when civil society questions the workings of parliamentary democracy? In theory, for Jürgen Habermas, the informal contexts of debate he calls lifeworld, should neatly and as a matter of course fix the contradictions of democracy by communicative action. In practice though, the underlying suggestion that haunts this film is that it takes great courage to elicit real dialogue.

Patriot or traitor? That’s the lingering question in the film. The dichotomy is between national security and human rights. Decades ago, photographs were smuggled out of Vietnam and given to Seymour Hersch. He got the My Lai story out, and acquainted the world with a run-of-the-mill genocide by the US military. Then David Ellsberg made public the Pentagon Papers, demonstrating how the Johnson Administration had lied to both the public and Congress (he only narrowly escaped prosecution on a technicality). In recent years, Hersch, once again, published damning photographic evidence of the Abu Ghraib prison torture of Iraqis. But if you are not a journalist, the US Whistleblower Protection Act (1998) offers you no protection for revealing information; nor is there any provision in the UK or Europe for a critique of government that works by making evidence available. Essentially, for the State and the States, Snowden is a criminal. Sadly history repeats itself: when Thomas Drake leaked to the Baltimore Sun in 2005, he was rewarded with years of legal proceedings against him. Chelsea Manning has been condemned to thirty-five years’ imprisonment. But how else would the public find out about wiretapping, torture and renditions?

Since the Snowden revelations, a review board appointed by Obama has found that collecting data from millions of Americans’ emails and texting was wrong and US Congress has introduced thirty bills to restrict NSA surveillance. Furthermore, Nils Muižnieks, Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe, has just condemned ‘secret, massive and indiscriminate’ surveillance. Even so, Snowden was charged with espionage and his passport revoked. ‘Citizen Four’ became a non-citizen. But too late. WikiLeaks got him out of Hong Kong on 21 June and eventually Russia granted him asylum, temporary at first, then extended for three years.

Awareness of this political and legal context makes Citizenfour resonate and shifts its workings into the territory of ‘new documentary’, that is, of art. Let’s hijack Michael Fried’s ‘absorption’ category, to refer instead to the enthralling atmosphere of danger and impending arrest that permeates a transitory, empty space, transforming a hotel room into an agora, part of the public sphere. This is a dimension mostly shut out by the unsubtleties of mass media and direct address documentaries. In this contemporary allegory, cinema no longer coincides with shots and cuts, or where to begin and end a shot. Instead, beyond the micro-history of current affairs, the particulars of contingency point to the universals of history.

Curated by Sohail Daulatzai, professor of Film and Media and African-American Studies at the University of California in Irvine, Histories Absolved showcased a modest subset of the many political graphic art posters produced and distributed globally in Tricontinental Magazine by Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL). From the 1960s through the mid-1980s, OSPAAAL commissioned a number of artists to design posters promoting Cuba’s solidarity with, and support of, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles around the world. This culminated in a captivating array of designs encompassing a wide variety of visual styles. Often, these works make reference to traditional Asian, African, and Latin American art and visual culture, while simultaneously drawing on aesthetic elements from popular international art movements, including Psychadelic Art. The result was a potent and effective visual language of revolutionary action that appealed to a vast transnational audience, and continues to resonate with uprisings and political movements today.

Histories Absolved focuses specifically on posters depicting the struggles for liberation across North Africa and the greater Middle East, a region Daulatzai has termed the ‘Muslim Third World’. Upon walking into the gallery, one was immediately struck by three enlarged prints each adhering to separate walls in the room. One of these, an off-set print designed by Victor Manuel Navarrate in 1978, affirms Cuba’s solidarity with the people of Palestine. A high-contrast, black-and-white sketch of a resistance fighter figures prominently in the poster and visually occupies almost its entire length, with the poster’s text marginalized. The figure contrasts strongly with the print’s arrestingly bright red-orange background, giving the impression that the fighter is emerging from a sea of blood. His left hand reaches outwards with his index and middle fingers in “V” shape, dualistically signifying victory and peace, while his right hand raises a gun toward the sky. Treelike roots emerge from the fighter’s boots and extend downwards, implying a powerful connection between the land and the Palestinian people, and suggesting the Palestinian revolution is ‘growing’ despite, and perhaps because of, the ongoing bloodshed caused by the Israel-Palestine conflict. The roots at the fighter’s feet further insinuate that the revolution cannot be defeated: even if the soldier is killed, the roots of the struggle will remain and bear life to the resistance movement again.

Navarrate’s symbolic juxtaposition of victory/peace and violence implies that achieving liberation necessitates struggle and sacrifice, while the ambiguity of the fighter’s appearance allows the fighter to be interpreted as belonging to various different ethnicities and struggles. This ambiguity enables universal identification with the image, thus furthering OSPAAAL’s aim to create international solidarity against imperialism. The simple yet striking character of the poster’s design, while serving the practical purpose of allowing for quick and easy reproduction, also ensures its legibility among a vast audience. Indeed, one does not need to be literate in order to be emotionally moved by the imagery and interpret the poster’s support of active resistance against colonial occupation.

The three enlarged prints in the gallery were surrounded horizontally by original OSPAAAL posters held in simple black frames to guide the viewer’s eye in a sweeping motion across the space. Representing countries from Afghanistan to Syria to Morocco, many of these posters are reminiscent of western Psychadelic Art in their use of flat shapes, bold, warm saturated colours, and stylization of details. Faustino Perez’s 1968 ‘Palestine’ design, for example, depicts an abstract, two-dimensional profile of a man on a solid orange background. The man’s ‘eye’ – importantly the only part of the image drawn in three dimensions – also forms part of a rifle, suggesting that the act of bearing witness to injustice can also be a form of resistance against oppression. This striking conflation of weapon with body immediately grabs the viewer’s attention, while the aesthetic style of the poster allows it to blend in seamlessly with popular concert and film posters produced in the West during the same era. Consequently, Perez’s poster would have been more palatable internationally than the often didactic posters produced by the Soviet Union, helping OSPAAAL to successfully, and perhaps more covertly, spread Cuba’s anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist ideology.

While the vivid reds and oranges found in a number of the designs on display served in part to evoke the feeling of an arid Middle Eastern / North African landscape, they also suggested a sense of vitality and urgency in these anti-imperialist movements of the Cold War Era. This urgency was further reflected in the posters’ slogans. Another 1978 design by Rafael Enriquez, for example, proclaims ‘Independence or Genocide’ in support of Western Sahara’s movement against Moroccan rule, while Rolando Cordoba’s composition from the same year declares ‘Unity is Victory’ for Lebanon. The multilingual character of OSPAAAL’s products accentuate the organization’s commitment to international solidarity: all of the posters’ slogans are rendered in Spanish, Arabic, French and English. Importantly, these texts were almost always printed in equally sized font, suggesting that the struggle for liberation should ultimately be a shared one, and no single language, or group of people, should be privileged over another.

In surveying the posters exhibited at Histories Absolved, it became evident that one theme remained constant throughout OSPAAAL’s work regardless of the posters’ various aesthetic influences: OSPAAAL does not shy away from embracing armed struggle as a means of resistance to oppressive power. As such, OSPAAAL’s artwork can certainly be interpreted as propagandistic. It frequently portrays men and women holding firearms, and the organization’s logo itself is comprised of a globe balanced on a human hand clenching a gun. The posters seem to assert that liberation cannot be achieved without some form of armed struggle, an idea that was shared among many prominent intellectuals and artists involved in national liberation movements in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. The juxtaposition of images of weapons (guns, grenades, chains) with bright, eye-catching colours served to rouse the viewer’s emotions and inspire immediate action, potentially at the expense of deeper contemplation. These posters cannot, after all, offer any guidance for what should take place after a revolution occurs. Still, OSPAAAL’s posters are unique in the way that they speak to the energy and excitement spreading throughout the Third World during a period of large-scale decolonization, as revolutionaries risked their lives in an effort to change their societies. Through aestheticizing violence, these designs act as a kind of visual resistance to cultural occupation, while also working to incite subjugated peoples and their international allies to rise up in defense of humanity and fight for freedom.

Throughout the five-week run of Histories Absolved, guest speakers and community workshops were also organized to supplement the experience of the exhibit. On the opening day of the show, Self Help Graphics & Art – a beloved Los Angeles-based non-profit arts organization – offered a free printmaking workshop for attendees to create their own posters inspired by those on display. The following week, scholar, activist, and author Chris Dixon presented a lecture on the important historical and ideological connections between grassroots organizing in the United States and abroad. These events helped turn Histories Absolved from a place of quiet reflection to a place of dynamic and active engagement, one which inspired viewers to consider a subjectivity outside of their own and to place current products of visual dissent, whether they be posters, graffiti, or hashtags on social media, within a larger historical discourse.

While the subject of these posters has a particular currency in the context of the United States’ ongoing ‘War on Terror’, Daulatzai’s curatorial statement reminds attendees that independence movements in the Muslim Third World and Latino-Muslim solidarity both have over a century-long history. Daulatzai references the writing of José Martí to reveal this continuing legacy, noting that in 1893, Martí declared “We are all Moors!” in support of the Berber community’s resistance against Spanish rulership in Northern Morocco. Martí’s writing would go on to become a major influence on Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, inspiring the transcontinental support Cuba provided – and continues to provide – to other nations struggling against imperialism. By elegantly linking the struggles of the past to those of the present and connecting domestic oppressions to international ones, Histories Absolved considered the interconnected forces that shape the world and suggests we still have much to learn if we seek to create an egalitarian society.

In the wake of the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, as mass protests against police brutality have swept across the United States, Histories Absolved was particularly timely. It asked us to consider the role of art in the larger context of political struggle, and to draw connections between racial, economic, and gendered oppressions in the United States with the ongoing violence exerted by war, occupation, and American expansionism abroad. As debates over the efficacy of declaring ‘solidarity’ or ‘ally-ship’ with different struggles continue to take shape, Histories Absolved returns us to a radical past and asks us what we might gain from looking to the international solidarity movements of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s for inspiration. More than that, it encourages us to carry the revolutionary spirit embodied by these Cuban artists towards a just future.

All of these works dealt with the juncture of image-production and warfare, with the media used and the style of warfare changing according to the era under scrutiny – from Vietnam, to the Gulf War, to the ‘Wars on Terror’. The newer works, Serious Games I–IV, were shown in a separate darkened room. The installation consisted of four looped projections onto suspended screens, with their accompanying audio playing from speakers above small, timber benches in front of each screen. All were discrete, stand-alone pieces and they focussed on US Army Marine training methods, particularly for the more recent asymmetric wars the United States has spearheaded in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is difficult to grasp at what level of reality we were supposed to approach these films, as they oscillated continuously between ‘the real’ and ‘the virtual’.

Computer generated imagery is central. These works are at first an investigation into how marines are trained for deployment using computer generated landscapes and situations, but also how computer generated situations are being employed by the US Army to bring the soldier back out of deployment, i.e. to help traumatised soldiers remember the site of their real-life war-trauma.

Serious Games I: Watson is down (2010) shows a row of young marines, dressed in fatigues, sitting behind computers in an office in California. On the left of the two-channel projection we are shown a series of humvees being directed through a generic, computer-generated desert landscape. These marines are in training for traversing expansive, unprotected combat zones, like ones they might encounter in Iraq or Afghanistan. They are fired upon and eventually, one is killed – Watson. His real life counterpart puffs out his cheeks, and slumps back from his computer and into his chair. There is something flatly habitual not only about the exercise but also about the response of the other marines, sitting behind their screens calmly registering Watson’s demise.

Serious Games II: Three Dead (2010) is a single-projection film. It opens with a computer-game-like sequence showing us a small town in the Middle East that is supposed to stand in for any Afghan or Iraqi town. Army helicopters swoop overhead and stiff marching columns of American soldiers make their way through the streets. There is an explosion and a group of local men are seen chasing from it. One is hurt, lying on his back, groaning in pain. We cut to what appears to be a real-life Afghan/Iraqi village, but it eventually becomes clear that this village is constructed with painted corrugated shipping containers, and we realise that this reality is another deferred version of reality: it is a training base that appears to have been modelled from a computer game. Here we see Afghan and Iraqi extras socialising with the training soldiers; there is a movie-set catering service, and people sit to eat on benches. Then there is an attack: the marines respond, secure the area and discern that the attack has resulted in three casualties. The film cuts back to the computer-generated world again, and the types of suspense generated by these different depictions of reality become conspicuous.

In Serious Games III: Immersion we are shown an instructor / programmer / world re-maker introducing a new imaging software package to an out-of-shot audience. He shows some of the new features of this package, like how the nocturnal darkness can be lightened up a little. On the right a series of returned soldiers wearing eye goggles sit and describe the circumstances of a traumatic attack that occurred while on duty. An image of the world they are describing is produced by their goggles, which we get to see as well on the left-hand channel of the split screen. One soldier describes how they were ambushed while travelling down a road, saying that there was an explosion and lots of smoke. Smoke plumes duly appear on the left hand screen, blacking out the sun. ‘It was surreal,’ he says. We cut then to another trauma patient, who, with some difficulty, recounts his memories, to the point of feeling ill. The therapist / instructor / programmer / world re-maker continues to ask him to return to the psychic ‘then’ of the situation, the one being presented before his eyes, not the physical present of the therapy session, which is where the ‘patient’ would prefer to be, it seems. The session ends, and we realise that what we have seen is a sales pitch for the imaging product. The trauma patient takes off his goggles and jokes with the ‘therapist’ about some of the glitches in the pitch.

Projected very close by is Serious Games IV: A Sun with No Shadow. This piece makes clear Farocki’s ability to speak about and analyse the meanings of moving images – his observations and reflections connect with the other works and draw them into a larger essayistic whole. Here, the same set of marines appear again sitting at their computers. We are shown computer-generated landscapes that are similar to the footage used to prepare soldiers for war, but the footage in Serious Games IV has been generated with cheaper software: the objects in this supposedly therapeutic world cast no shadows. ‘The light of traumatic experience is different,’ we are told. Farocki seems to be picking up on threads created in Interface, where he prises apart the relationship between memory and image, after-effect and registration, what is offered and what is understood, what is mechanised for human benefit, and what is merely mechanised. This leads us to one of the major queries raised by Farocki’s image-decoding: how and to what degree is an image sensitising, or desensitising? And within this, where does culpability reside?

Inextinguisable Fire is a committed attempt to disentangle what it means to be a responsible decoder of images and what it means to be an observer – triggered from an analysis of the mass media coverage of the Vietnam War. Farocki tries to relay what napalm burning on flesh is like. He stubs a cigarette out on his forearm, and says this burns at 400 degrees celsius. Then he tells us that napalm burns at 3000. Farocki’s critical gaze is turned just as much towards the production, dissemination and use of mass media images as towards those responsible for the production, dissemination and use of napalm. He shines a light on the moral blind spots occluded by the divisions of industry-driven labour: be it industrial image-making or industrial chemical production and machine manufacture.

Inextinguisable Fire started an interrogation that Serious Games continues, but in Serious Games the distance from the world from which the image was generated has increased considerably, to the point of making the real place associated with the image almost impossible to pin down, or even imagine.

Adrian Duncan is an artist and writer based in Berlin. He is co-editor of Paper Visual Art Journal. Harun Farocki: Ernste Spiele/Serious Games, curated by Henriette Huldisch, was on view February 6 2014 – 31 January 2015.

An event is something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable. An event is not by itself the creation of a reality, it is the creation of a possibility; it opens up a possibility. It indicates to us that a possibility exists within, that has been ignored. The event is in a certain way, merely a proposition. It proposes something to us. Everything will depend on the way in which the proposition proposed by the event is grasped, elaborated, incorporated and set out in the world. (Alain Badiou, Philosophy and the Event, 2013)

The recent exhibition of Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) at the Irish Museum of Modern Art emphasised the Brazilian artist’s crucial influence upon the recent development of participatory art. With many contemporary artists finding new resonances in Oiticica’s expanded practice it is an important time to reassess his legacy. Indeed, such priorities have been a key feature of Oiticica’s reception ever since Catherine David’s seminal inclusion of his work in Documenta X (1997), which led to more large-scale surveys, such as Tate Modern’s 2007 retrospective, Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour. If Tate’s show prioritized the aesthetic intensity of Oiticica’s work, and David’s presentation foregrounded the political charge of his project, the title of the IMMA show, Propositions, asserted a third way of interpreting Oititica’s achievement: one which stressed the relational event and the idea of artist as ‘proposer’, rather than as ‘maker’ of objects or direct political statements.

For Oiticica’s mentor, Lygia Clark, the ‘proposer-artist’ mediates the art object and the spectator’s engagement with it:

We are the proposers: We are the mould; it is up to you to breathe the meaning of our existence into it. We are the proposers: Our proposition is that of a dialogue. Alone we do not exist. We are at your mercy. We are the proposers: We have buried the work of art as such and we call upon you so that thought may survive through your action. We are the proposers: We do not propose you with either the past, or the future, but the now (Lygia Clark, ‘We Are The Proposers’, 1968).

In this sense, the idea of ‘proposition’ as ‘form’ could be perceived as a conceptual progenitor of contemporary theories of participation, such as relational aesthetics and socially engaged art. However, by focusing on the more open-ended nature of Oiticica’s practice, Propositions also drew us back to a consideration of the historic avant-garde, which sought to negate the traditional borders and limitations of artistic practice by extending ‘art’ into ‘life’. Through differing techniques and devices, such as the appropriation of everyday objects, urban intervention, political engagements and acts of conviviality, the historic avant-garde privileged the rupture of the everyday and the norms which frame it. Brian Holmes has usefully described such impulses:

Shedding its external forms, its inherited techniques, its specialized materials, art becomes a living gesture, rippling out across the sensible surface of humanity. It creates an ethos, a mythos, an intensely vibrant presence; it migrates from the pencil, the chisel or the brush into ways of doing and modes of being. From the German Romantics to the Beatnik poets, from the Dadaists to the Living Theatre, this story has been told again and again, each time with a startling twist on the same underlying phrase. At stake is more than the search for stylistic renewal; it’s about transforming your everyday existence. (Brian Holmes, Eventwork, 2011)

There are two theoretical events which are of crucial importance to understanding the history of the Brazilian avant-garde. The first and most recent is the arrival of poet and critic Ferreira Gullar’s re-interpretation of Brazilian Concretism in ‘Theory of the non-object’ (1959); the second, more distant but no less significant, is the publication of Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Anthropophagite Manifesto’ (1928). Gullar’s influential text re-thought the logic of early abstract art as a ‘proposition’ that challenges the ‘object’ through the removal of the pictorial frame. By breaking with the separation between pictorial space and real space, artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian and Vladimir Tatlin pushed the art object towards an engagement with its social and institutional contexts. For Gullar, these interventions functioned to open up new sites of experimentation that challenged dominant emphases on representation and contemplation, in favour of the co-production of abstract and participatory forms. He writes,

It’s a rediscovery of the world: colours, space, do not belong to this or that artistic language, but to the living and indeterminate experience of man. To deal directly with these elements, outside the institutional frame of art, is to reformulate them as if for the first time. The spectator is solicited to use the ‘non-object.’ Mere contemplation is not enough to reveal the sense of the work—the spectator goes from contemplation to action. But what his action produces is the work itself, because that use, foreseen in the structure of the work, is absorbed by it, revealed and incorporated into its signification. (Ferreira Gullar, ‘Theory of the non-object’, 1959)

‘Theory of the non-object’ concludes that these new sites of experimentation had fostered a particularly Brazilian avant-garde, one which imagines a different future for abstract art than that being developed within American and European narratives.

This point draws us to the second theoretical event, Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Anthropophagite Manifesto’ (1928). Written as an act of war against the colonial influences on Brazil’s history, Andrade’s manifesto set out to re-signify the Tupi Indian act of cannibalism, which involved the eating of the other to appropriate its power. In Andrade’s hands this became a powerful metaphor for cultural appropriation: ‘Tupi or not Tupi,’ he writes, ‘that is the question’. By inverting the master/slave relation, the ‘Anthropofagic Manifesto’ popularised subversive strategies and inspired artists to reconsider their relation to the dominant narratives of art history. Between these theoretical events, a new generation of Brazilian artists were liberated from the provincial reproduction of second-hand modernist codes, and encouraged to explore an aesthetic language which merged the formal and the social. This complex theoretical dynamic formed the intellectual context from which Hélio Oiticica emerged in the late 1950s.

Born into a prominent anarchist family in Rio, Oiticica channelled the inheritance of his anarchist ideals into an artistic career that expanded the boundaries of abstract painting, interrogated national cultural perspectives, and pointed the way towards a ‘participatory environmentalism’ that has become a powerful presence in global art in recent years. The intensity and rigour of his intellect was also demonstrated in his many published statements, which challenged any easy separation between the visual and the textual. Similar to that great Brazilian thinker of critical literacy, Paulo Freire, Oiticica was uncompromising in his belief that the discipline(s) he was involved in were a part of a broader emancipatory project. In line with this tradition, Oiticica championed the emancipation of the art object from its institutional limitations; the freeing of the artist from the modes of production supporting these institutions; and the liberation of the viewer from the modes of exchange prescribed by such institutions. Indeed, the dynamics and constraints of the retrospective exhibition form were tested in IMMA’s show.

On entering the exhibition, the visitor was enveloped by orange coloured walls, which functioned as backdrops to wall texts providing biographical information and timelines, as well as to some early works entitled Metaesquema (1957-1958). The Metaesquema are a long series of abstract paintings which shimmer restlessly, as if the frame itself was plugged into a wall socket. They represent Oiticica’s early concerns with line and form over colour, and together with a similar series of abstract paintings titled Grupo Frente (1955-56), they dominated the entrance and first moments in the show. Consistent with this focus on the early abstractions, the first three rooms off the main corridor functioned to highlight Oiticica’s slow explosion of the pictorial frame, and his obsession with colour as sculptural form. This obsession pulls geometric shapes off the picture plane into real space in the Bilaterals (1959-60); suspended from the ceiling, these folded wooden constructions release the intensity of monochromatic yellows and oranges from the limitations of two-dimensional pictorial space. Alongside these works were the Relevo Espacial (1959-1960), which glow in the space as if lit from inside. In response to these dynamics of light, hue and weight, the next room features the Bólides (1963-1969), a series of glass bottles filled with coloured pigment. Reducing chromatic experimentation to the materiality of pure ground pigment, these works offer up containerised invitations to engage the tactile dimensions of colour.

Through the second half of the exhibition these explorations were framed with consistency and clarity, each work illustrating a logical progression towards the next, and all pushing at the possibility of a greater sensorial immersion. The work becomes progressively more sculptural and more fragmented, increasingly assimilating the viewer’s physical body into the artworks. Through this process the language of abstract forms begins to shed its art historical reference points, merging instead with the everyday dialect of informal architecture, such as that of the favelas and the costumes of the samba. From this phase emerge two of Oiticica’s most significant works, the Parangolés (1964-1979) and Tropicália/Suprasensorial (1966-1967).

Located in the middle room, off the main corridor, the Parangolés are a series of coloured cloths, blankets and bits of plastic sewn together in such a way that they may be used as makeshift costumes. Putting on one of these capes produces an uncomfortable and awkward experience of both containment and exposure: although you are sure you are supposed to be wearing the capes, you are never sure what to do once they are on, especially in the self-conscious environment of the art museum. It makes sense, then, that the English translation of the Portuguese word parangolé means a state of confusion or agitation. For Oiticica these confusions were born out of Brazilian traditions of flexible architecture, he wrote,

The ‘discovery’ of Parangolé elements in the landscape of the urban or rural world is also part of ‘establishing perceptive structural relations’ between what grows in the structural grid of the Parangolé (representing here the general character of colour structure in environmental space), and what is ‘found’ in the spatial environmental world. In the architecture of the ‘favela’, for example, there is implicitly a Parangolé character. (Hélio Oiticica, ‘Fundamental Bases for the Definition of the Parangolé’, 1964)

Similarly, in Tropicália the dynamics of body/architecture/disorientation play out in a favela-esque installation. As with the Parangolé the spectator is expected to be mobilised, moved through a series of small labyrinthine spaces, over sand and water, against felt and wood, towards an end point at which a television plays static in a dark room. In both works the body is absorbed into the architecture, consumed by it, and subsequently offered an escape through its open-ended nature. Finally, towards the end of the show, we were confronted with Cosmococa CC2 ONO-object, 1973. Subtitled ‘program in progress,’ the Cosmococa series represented Oiticica’s final engagements with ‘suprasensorial environments’ that focused on cinematic spaces as sites of immersion. Given the title of the exhibition it is unfortunate that more of the Cosmococa proposals were not presented (this felt like a missed opportunity, especially given the suggestions made online that Cosmococa CC9 would be realised in the show).
It was in these final moments of the exhibition that the struggle between the multi-disciplinary nature of the work and IMMA’s institutional framework begin to emerge most powerfully. Although organised as a retrospective, it becomes clear that there was a tension between the open-ended nature of the exhibition title ‘Propositions’, and the austere atmosphere of retrospective commodification. Such tensions were further exacerbated by institutional spectacles, such as an Oiticica fashion shoot for the Irish Times; framing Oiticica’s work as a backdrop to the clean Sex and the City lines of ‘designer capitalism’ is one way to contain and domesticate the very messy reality of the themes which drove his work. These themes negotiate questions of colonial violence, symbolic cannibalism, sexual anarchism and narcotic excess.

Such problematic emphases could have been avoided by the provision of a deeper historical, cultural and theoretical context for understanding the work. This could have been established by a greater understanding of the specific developments which contributed to the emergence of the Brazilian avant-garde, including but not limited to Andrade’s and Gullar’s crucial texts, and how these developments influenced the alternative trajectory of Brazilian art. Gaining these theoretical tools would have enabled both a broader and a more specific understanding of the nexus of cultural forces manifested in Oiticica’s work. This in turn might have provided a more subtle link to our own colonial history, and a more interesting narrative. As it stood, the opening rooms of the show distracted the viewer from such specific concerns by highlighting more generic art historical references, such as the retinal abstract works of Josef Albers and Jesus Rafael Soto.

Admirably, the show did give proper weight to Oiticica’s writings, which were presented in the form of large printed quotations beside key works. These helped to contextualise certain concepts and highlight the relation between text/object, voice and work. Towards the end of the exhibition an entire room was given over to the presentation of photocopies made from Oiticica’s notebooks. The quality of the photocopies and their representation as serialised pictorial images seemed to undermine the intimacy and immediacy of the texts, however. This is not entirely the fault of the exhibition or its organization but rather a realisation of the limitations of re-presentation, which Oiticica struggled with his entire life, and which he ultimately realized was beyond his control. Indeed, of all the quotations supporting the work, there is one omission which could have better reflected this particular problem. On return from his first and only European show, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, he penned the following reflection to his friend and champion Guy Brett,

I am not a career artist – I am going to make an experience with this London show…not an ‘art exhibition’ as all artists do…but something that will have a new form of seeing, of behaviour, not an artificial prestige as an ‘artist of the world’, although this cannot be easily controlled…’ (Oiticica in Guy Brett, Oiticica in London, 2007).

Such statements remind us of the historical context from which Oiticica emerged. This was a sensibility which was fully grounded in the radical praxis of the avant-garde, a praxis which artist and critic Marc Léger defines as, ‘the willingness to sacrifice art, in the artistic gesture itself, rather than give up on the real’ (Léger, Brave New Avant-Garde, 2012). Today, the potency of such a position is frequently contested within the dominant critical frameworks associated with relational aesthetics and socially engaged practice. In this context, these discourses suggest that building relations with our neighbours is ‘a matter of much greater urgency than “making tomorrows sing”’ (Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 1998). However, for Léger, such humble aims may need to be re-assessed at a time when socially engaged practices are becoming increasingly institutionalised. Proposing a return the priorities of the historic avant-garde he asks, ‘Must the avant-garde hypothesis be abandoned? What does the idea of the avant-garde have to offer us in the present moment?’

It is within the context of this question that the IMMA exhibition could have been used to negotiate a different understanding of the link between contemporary participatory practices and their historical predecessors. Oiticica’s work could have been brought to bear more explicitly on understandings of the avant-garde, one that might have helped articulate and negotiate the present tension between autonomy and heteronomy, where ‘extra-institutional socially engaged art has become, for good and bad, the order of the day’ (Leger, Brave New Avant-Garde). Instead of looking for a way out of these dialectical tensions, the ‘formal-social’ dimension of Oiticica’s work points towards a ‘disjunctive synthesis’ which challenges any easy understanding of these terms today.

It is fair to say that this overdue retrospective of one of the major figures in the post-war avant-garde succeeded in ‘grasping’ the ‘evental’ significance of Oiticica’s work within the framework of participatory art. However, the real question is whether it incorporated the potential of that ‘event’, to use Badiou’s term, and set it out into the world to challenge the present.

When we refer to ‘classical’ music without geographical qualification, we mean a music that is European and mediaeval in origin. Classical music in America, as in other European colonies, was necessarily a late starter.
 
The basis for professional classical composition in the USA was provided by New Englanders who studied in Europe and returned to impart what they had learned: Edward MacDowell (1860-1908), Amy Beach (1867-1944), Horatio Parker (1863-1919). Of the same generation as these ‘highbrow’ composers was Scott Joplin (1867/8-1917), a working-class African-American from Texas. He composed two classical operas that were unperformed in his lifetime, but gained fame as the master of Ragtime, a syncopated dance genre of African origin. A predecessor was Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) from New Orleans, of English Jewish and Haitian background. He made a career as a concert pianist in European salons playing such compositions as Le banjo and Bamboula. uniquely synthesising Creole elements with Lisztian bravura.
 

Musical modernism in early 20th century Europe was partly a reaction against a venerable tradition to which it nonetheless belonged; this clearly did not apply in the USA. Charles Ives (1874-1954), the son of a New England bandleader of liberal-to-anarchic views, secured the liberty to compose as he saw fit by becoming a successful insurance executive rather than a professional musician. At ease within a variety of musical traditions, Ives developed a musical space and time that would enable their free combination and juxtaposition. This freedom and absence of hierarchy would justify the application of the term ‘experimental’ to most of Ives’s work, and to that of an entire (counter-)tradition of subsequent US composers. Ives saw himself as a Transcendentalist, in the tradition of the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). This doctrine of self-reliance beyond the corrupting norms of society, while seeming quintessentially American, had its origins in German idealism seen through the prism of British romanticism.
 
In 1908, the year that the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1952) broke with tonality (the key system on which Western music had been based since the 18th century) in his String Quartet No. 2, Ives composed The Unanswered Question, a short work anticipating much of the future history of advanced western music. Its three layers – a short questioning phrase repeated by solo trumpet, agitated atonal responses in woodwind, and slow tonal / modal successions of chords in the off-stage strings – are neither reconciled nor dramatically counterpointed. In its companion-piece Central Park in The Dark, static, atonal ruminations are unceremoniously interrupted by an explosive collage of ‘popular’ musical elements.
 
The experimental strand in American music was continued by, among others, Carl Ruggles (1876-1971), John J. Becker (1886-1961), Henry Cowell (1897-1965), George Antheil (1900-1959), and Harry Partch (1901-1974).
 
The title Soundpieces, adopted by Becker for a number of his works, says something about the approach to music shared by these very different composers – a concern with sound prior to expressivity or formal elaboration. Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique (1924), scored for pianos, pianolas, airplane propellers, sirens, and a wide range of percussion instruments, was a succès de scandale in Paris in 1926. Its failure the following year in New York seems to have influenced the composer’s turn to a more traditional style in later works. Cowell was one of the first composers to work with percussion ensembles; he expanded piano technique by using clusters (anticipated by Ives and Leo Ornstein) and direct intervention on the strings (The Tides of Manaunaun, Tiger, Aeolian Harp).1 The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók politely asked Cowell’s permission to use clusters in a number of his most radical works composed in the late 1920s.2
 
Partch was in many ways the most uncompromising experimentalist, and the only one to proclaim his total rejection of European models (although Greek scales and ancient Greek drama remained important to him). He devised his own systems of notation and tuning, and invented musical instruments such as the Chromelodeon and Quadrangularus Reversum, thus ensuring with characteristically American stubbornness that performances of his work would be few and far between.3

Also belonging to this experimental tradition was Edgard Varèse (1883-1965), who emigrated from France to the USA in 1915. Varèse defined music as ‘organised noise’, juxtaposing blocks of sound with a forceful rhythmic thrust but without traditional development; his 1930 Ionisation was the first work for percussion ensemble, while later pieces employed both electronic instruments and tape. Through the advocacy of Frank Zappa, Varèse acquired a somewhat improbable link to popular music.4

No account of 20th century American music is complete without reference to the teaching of Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979). While her own preferences were neo-classical, the dozens of American composers who studied with her in Paris, from Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) via Aaron Copland (1900-1990) to Philip Glass (b.1937) and Elliot Carter (1908-2011) chose an eclectic range of creative paths. Just how eclectic is demonstrated by the latter two: Glass became the master of white-note music based on turning typical accompaniment figurations into the entire musical discourse, while Carter veered from neo-classicism to a complex, wholly independent atonal style often involving the superimposition of different speeds.

George Gershwin (1898-1937) was rejected as a pupil by Boulanger, Ravel, and Schoenberg, on the grounds that he had nothing to learn from them. The composer of Rhapsody in Blue (1924), Piano Concerto (1925) and An American in Paris (1928) achieved an effortless synthesis of jazz and classical elements that no European composer could match. Stravinsky feared that his own efforts in that direction would be viewed by Americans as ‘very alien corn’.5

In 1933 Henry Cowell nominated Arnold Schoenberg as ‘most likely candidate for the post of the world’s most significant composer’, and advised John Cage (1912-1992) to study with him.6 Schoenberg’s somewhat baffled assessment of Cage was that ‘he’s not a composer, but he’s an inventor – of genius!’, precisely the kind of pedantic dichotomy that was irrelevant to American composers.7

Although Cage never lost a certain reverence for the austere Austrian, a decade later he discovered a more congenial European predecessor in Eric Satie (1866-1925) who was, according to Daniel Albright, an ‘expert in rejection. . . [whose] whole career is a gran rifiuto of all that is grand. Satie cast a cold eye on impressionism, on expressionism, on most of the vibrant movements of the age.’8

In 1883 Satie composed his Gymnopédies. This might be described as music ‘in which nothing happens three times’, to paraphrase Vivian Mercier on Beckett’s Godot. Each of the three pieces, written almost entirely on the white notes, consists of a slow melody over a simple chordal accompaniment; each follows the same pattern, without climax or subsidence. In his 1917 ballet Parade, a collaboration with Cocteau and Picasso, a great deal happens – but to no purpose of a traditional nature; the various episodes are simply set down one after the other, employing such ‘extra-musical’ sounds as gun-shots, factory whistles and typewriters, and the piece ends abruptly. In 1917-18 came Socrate, a 30’ ‘symphonic drama in three parts’ for soprano(s) and small orchestra in which extracts from Plato’s dialogues about the last days of Socrates, culminating in his suicide, are recounted in a manner neither symphonic nor dramatic.

In 1944 Cage arranged the first section of this work for two pianos; in 1969 he composed Cheap Imitation, a dance piece based on the rhythms of Socrate and deriving its pitches from the ancient Chinese I Ching (Book of Changes). In 1963 Cage also arranged an 18-hour performance of the 1893 keyboard piece Vexations of which Satie wrote: ‘In order to play this motif 840 times, it would be good to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the greatest silence, by means of serious immobilities.’ Cage clearly identified with the French composer’s indifference to development, form, dramatic contrast and expression, and his lack of reverence for Western traditions. Satie, who described himself as a ‘phonometrician’, was a European ‘experimental’ composer before the term had come into musical use on either side of the Atlantic.

In 1949 Cage met the French composer Pierre Boulez and the two formed an unlikely friendship. In due course both Boulez (Piano Sonata III) and Stockhausen (Klavierstück XI) were inspired by Cage to incorporate aleatoric (involving chance and choice) elements into their music. However, each saw fit to ‘Europeanise’ these innovations by devising elaborate rules to integrate them into their music’s mathematical rigour. Cage participated in the Darmstadt Courses (a seminal institution of the European avant-garde) in 1958, at which he lectured on Composition as Process and Indeterminacy; in turn, Stockhausen lectured on Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra there in 1959. By the 1960s, the flow of influence was crossing the Atlantic in both directions: American experimentalists like Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown were having a major impact on European composers, and Minimalism announced itself via Terry Riley and Steve Reich.

Here, according to a celebrated 1998 article by the American composer and author Kyle Gann, is a different perspective on this ‘flow of influence’:

It is difficult to remember at this point that, prior to World War II, America had a thriving compositional community with its own distinctly non-European aesthetic, spearheaded by Henry Cowell, John Becker, Carl Ruggles, George Antheil. As soon as the Nazis came to power in 1933, composers like Schoenberg, Bartok, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Krenek, and Weill made a bee-line to America, along with hundreds of lesser-known musical emigrés. The burgeoning American scene was forced underground by the avalanche of famous Europeans, and the post-war era from 1946 to 1960 was a period of intense absorption of continental aesthetics. Composers like Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions became more European than the Europeans, and insisted that great American music could only be a continuation of the European tradition – primarily, the 12-tone tradition.9

These composers gained ‘a vice-like grip on the sources and venues of new-music funding and performance’. In particular, they cornered the market in big lucrative prizes: ‘The Pulitzer and Grauwemeyer (sic) define an extremely narrow slice of the current new-music spectrum. Excluded from that slice are minimalism, postminimalism, totalism, conceptualism, free jazz, improvisation, computer music, performance art, DJ collage, and most other trends in current music.’

Undoubtedly Gann pinpointed an injustice in the distribution of awards and funding, which at that time tended to be reserved for a specific aesthetic which he describes as follows:

Uptown composers. . . believed in notated music of considerable complexity. . . If they weren’t writing intricate serialist-style structures, they were writing splashy orchestral scores full of big brass climaxes and tensely competing sonorities. The argument they cultivated was that between Stravinsky and Schoenberg, or between neoclassicism and 12-tone music, or between a highly impersonal contrapuntal tonality and an increasingly fragmented form of atonality.

Of course the phenomenon of a stereotyped ‘prizewinning music’ (or literature or visual art) is a perennial one, not confined to the USA. The Nobel Prize for literature, like that for peace, only exceptionally goes to genuinely anti-establishment figures. However, Gann overstated his case dramatically, positing a nativism that is almost racial. His ‘Downtown’ composers, themselves of white European background, ‘distance [themselves] from traditional forms. . . in order to escape the influence of past and inevitably foreign personalities.’

In order to construct this narrative, Gann has to resort to considerable exaggeration bordering on falsification. He refers to ‘American composers who had insisted on independence from Europe in the ‘20s and ‘30s – Henry Cowell, George Antheil, Leo Ornstein, Carl Ruggles’ who ‘fell into serious decline as the neo-Europeans took over.’ Of these composers, Ornstein (1893-2002[!]) was born in Ukraine and appears to have chosen his idiosyncratic path independently of any ‘takeover’ by fellow Europeans. Antheil composed his most radical works in Europe under the influence of Dada, a European movement, becoming relatively conservative after his return to the USA. Ruggles changed his first name from Charles to Carl because of his admiration for German composers. His most characteristic works could easily fit ‘between a highly impersonal contrapuntal tonality and an increasingly fragmented form of atonality’, in Gann’s phrase. As for the Irish-American Henry Cowell, the ‘serious decline’ of his career would appear to have been due less to a putative neo-European takeover than to his 1936 arrest and imprisonment for four years on a largely trumped up ‘morals’ charge.10

In 1998 Gann concluded that ‘the experimental tradition. . . cannot be repressed forever. Like a field of intransigent daisies, it is breaking up through the concrete of the Euro-classical establishment.’ The really good news was that ‘the Uptown good old boys are ageing, power is slipping from their hands.’ This is the same vengeful message that the composer Tom Johnson conveyed in a speech delivered at the November 2012 Béal Festival in Dublin: the Uptown composers used to get all the funds, but we fought back, power changed hands, and we ended up with all the loot! Neither Gann nor Johnson seems to recognise that the ‘power’ in question is ultimately not in the hands of composers but in those of the state and/or its constituent corporations. Of course composers may become its instruments, beneficiaries, and victims, a state of affairs likely to continue as long as we live in a society ruled by the profit principle.

In a Personal Commentary On American and European Cultural Funding in 2004, the American composer William Osborne maintained that ‘the rise of neo-liberalism as a cultural paradigm’ in the USA ‘would suggest that cultural expression that doesn’t fit in the marketplace doesn’t belong at all. For the arts, the alternative has been to maintain a relatively marginalized existence supported by gifts from corporations, foundations and the wealthy.’ He opposes this ‘to the tradition of large public cultural funding found in most of Europe’s social democracies.’11
Narrating the development of crossover in the USA via the influential ensemble Bang on a Can All Stars (Bang on a Can is an organisation described by the San Francisco Chronicle as America’s ‘most important vehicle for contemporary music’), Osborne claimed that ‘Europeans rejected most attempts in their own societies to merge commercial and classical music. Their cultures are not dominated by the mass media as in America, and they do not have the same innate relationship to pop… And above all, they continued to view forms of culture associated with the American mass media and corporatism as hegemonistic. . .’

This was written at a time when Osborne thought he could diagnose ‘the increasing political division of Europe and America’. This was premature, as with the bust of the boom that was then in progress the two limping superpowers began to huddle together for warmth, a process that has subsequently led to the EU becoming little more than an appendage of the USA. Recently the Irish Minister for Culture has been ominously promoting an enhanced role for ‘philanthropy’ as a panacea for relieving his government of the burden of arts funding, in accordance with his former colleague Mary Harney’s dictum that ‘spiritually we are… closer to Boston than Berlin. . .’12

The rejection of attempts ‘to merge commercial and classical music’ is also a thing of the past. Perhaps, however, Osborne oversimplifies matters by seeing crossover itself, rather than some of its manifestations, as regressive. The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno suggested that the culture industry, ultimately the target of Osborne’s polemic, ‘forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years, to the detriment of both. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in speculation about its efficacy; that of the lower perishes with the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total.’13 The terms ‘high/low’ are no longer acceptable, but the critique of what we now call crossover remains suggestive.

The notion of ‘stasis’ entered Western music a decade before Satie’s Gymnopédies when, in Parsifal, Richard Wagner had Gurnemanz intone the famous words ‘here time becomes space’. Close to death, when he had belatedly resolved to devote himself henceforth to symphonic music, Wagner told Liszt that ‘[w]hen we write symphonies. . . the one thing we must avoid is thematic contrast. . . but must spin a melodic thread until it has spun itself out. But above all no drama.’14

The prohibition of drama and the transformation of time into space, of dynamism into stasis, would become dogmas, spoken or unspoken, of experimental music and Minimalism, including European ‘holy’ Minimalism. It has now, I believe, become the dominant trend of contemporary classical music. Probably anyone who has recently been involved in adjudication (of competitions or open submission concerts) will be able to confirm the preponderance of works imprisoned in the premises I am outlining here: ranging from chirpy US-style minimalism, either on the white notes or bearing key signatures, to po-faced European irony with a measure of crossover and meaningless but knowing monosyllabic titles.

Of course stasis is a condition that can only be metaphorically attributed to music. A train stopped in a station is static, but as soon as it moves this ceases to be the case. The notion of musical stasis arose as a reaction against ‘development’, a concept essential to the evolution of Sonata form in the second half of the 18th century whereby two contrasting ‘subjects’ are exposed, developed by means of dramatic interplay, and recapitulated. This became linked to the dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis attributed to Hegel, and thence to a concept of history as teleology: the overcoming of contradictions to arrive at a new condition of society.

Many early modernist works evoked stasis by avoiding contrast and development and by shunning such climaxes as arise from the friction of contrasts. A few examples: Debussy’s prelude Voiles (but not its pentatonic central section), many of Scriabin’s late piano pieces, the third of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces. Stasis, however, was but one dimension of these composers’ styles. It was only when modernism gave way to postmodernism that musical language purported to become wholly static. Here Satie was the precursor, as Cage clearly recognised. However, given the preponderance in his era of a discourse of historical evolution and progress, Satie’s formal insouciance had a radical dimension. Like no subsequent composer, he was revolutionary and postmodernist all at once (and described himself as a Bolshevik!).

Postmodernism was defined in 1979 by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard as ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’.15 Such metanarratives include universals of any kind, the monotheistic religions, the Enlightenment, Marxism, or indeed any linkage of events within the horizon of a telos, an aim or meaning. In the case of music, this might mean a rejection of any over-arching system such as tonality or atonality. It might view musical history as a pile of aural debris from which we can extract and re-combine anything we wish in any way we desire. The American musicologist Susan McClary, writing of the multi-genre composer John Zorn, has referred to ‘hellzapoppin’ nihilism, revelling in the rubble of Western civilization.’16 The same phrase could just as well be applied to certain works by Satie, composed at a time when such rubble was still invested with a powerful aura that rendered the revels genuinely subversive.

In the case of postmodernist contemporary music, the transformation of time into space often entails an analogy with the static art of painting. The American critic Art Lange writes of Morton Feldman that ‘[t]he painted canvas. . . is its own metaphor; so is the poem on the printed page. To find metaphors for music. . . we use other arts. Feldman himself chose painting. . .’ Feldman’s ‘method of scoring, listening, and adjusting is similar to that of Piet Mondrian. . .’ Feldman may have composed nothing ‘flatter’ than Violin & String Quartet ‘in the sense of the abstract flatness, the lack of perspective and depth, the rigorous attitude, that Clement Greenberg found so desirous (sic) in Abstract Expressionist paintings. . .’ Significantly, Lange concedes that ‘[t]his may be . . . an illusion, but one rooted in the same rejection of multi-dimensionality that Mondrian spoke of. . .’17 (Perhaps Feldman needs to be rescued from Lange: particularly in his final phase, he was a far more complex and interesting composer than this painterly reductionism – and indeed Feldman’s own writings – would suggest.)

Such notions quickly crossed the Atlantic. Referring in Lange-like terms to the music of Gerald Barry, Vincent Deane claimed he was ‘always intensely antipathetic to the illusion of depth and perspective that typified much of the New Music of the last few decades. . .’18 Again referring to Barry, the critic Ivan Hewett suggested that ‘[f]rom Stockhausen he took the idea that music instead of being divided neatly into foreground and background, theme and accompaniment, could all be foreground’, which involves ‘ignoring most of the craft of music, which is precisely to do with things like. . . the setting up of a neat hierarchy of foreground and background.’19 Kevin Volans added that ‘[t]he music is non-developmental, there is no climax, no pivotal point, no resolution, no dialectic.’20

But are ‘depth and perspective’ in music necessarily an illusion? While in painting perspective is indeed a kind of trick, in music this is not the case: separate planes may be embodied, not simulated, by separate voices and dynamic levels. Hewett’s ‘neat hierarchy’ is no characterisation of musical polyphony, which entails genuine multi-dimensionality: there is no foreground or background in a fugue, or if there is, it is a purely temporary relationship that may be dissolved and reconstituted in the course of the musical (dialectical) argument. One might even suggest that the deployment of timbrally diverse instruments and/or voices in a homogeneous manner is itself illusionistic – and why not? Art and illusion are bedfellows.

The exclusion of depth, perspective, dialectic and multi-dimensionality is entirely a product of will and style rather than principle, although it is not free from ideology. There can be no objection to composers engaging in such speculations and making such choices, but problems arise when inclination becomes hegemony and ‘abstract flatness. . . lack of perspective and depth’ become mandatory, with accompanying prohibitions. If the revelling in rubble precludes these dimensions, then the resultant equilibrium neutralises multiplicity into homogeneity.
Postmodernist music, whether American or European, excludes confrontation, disruption, interruption, catastrophe – in short, as Wagner instructed, drama. This music is predictable because although we don’t always know what to expect, we certainly know what not to expect – an event. Regardless of the velocity of this music – and much of the Bang on a Can repertoire is notoriously brisk – its uneventful character renders it static.

An event is defined by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek variously as ‘the effect that seems to exceed its causes’, ‘an occurrence not grounded in sufficient reasons’, ‘the surprising emergence of something new which undermines every stable scheme’, and, most radically, ‘a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it.’21

A work like Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (1976) is extended, colourful, variegated, and strongly cumulative – but once it has set out its premises there are no fundamental changes throughout its considerable duration that ‘undermine [its] stable scheme’ or ‘change. . . the very frame’ through which we engage with it. This is busy but uneventful music, and as such is ideally suited to a postmodern age that has supposedly put history behind it. But if history is over, as Francis Fukuyama famously maintained (in the process denying the eventual reality of any number of social and political upheavals), what we have is the status quo – neo-liberal capitalism; which is where we rejoin William Osborne’s analysis.22

In 2012 Kyle Gann looked back on his earlier article and rejoiced in the rout of the Uptown ‘old boys’. He defined this triumph as a liberation from rules and prohibitions:

The more trained a composer is, the more prohibitions he (sic) tends to carry around in his (sic) head. . . It is sad when an artist becomes an artist by internalizing a long list of prohibitions. . . Every composition becomes a chain of evasions, an ungenerous process of withholding from the listener anything he (sic) might naturally expect, an embarrassment about anything too easily understood.23

But surely this works both ways. What happens when the composer is trained to carry around a long list of prohibitions against depth, perspective, dialectic, drama, multi-dimensionality, and indeed the use of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, apparently deemed too suggestive of potential tensions for the not-so-brave new world of white-note music? Is Downtown music not itself ‘a chain of evasions’, ungenerously embarrassed about anything not too easily understood? And does this generous catering to the supposed expectations of the listener really do justice to the tradition of radicalism invoked by Gann, and sketched in the first part of this essay? How often in concert programmes on either side of the Atlantic will we find music by the likes of Ives, Ruggles and Cowell, not to mention Becker and Ornstein?

Perhaps the disappearance one by one of the giants of the European avant-garde – Stockhausen, Ligeti, Berio, Xenakis, Kagel, Grisey, Lutoslawski – has left the old continent feeling disinherited and uncritically receptive to an aesthetic that defines itself precisely in opposition to those composers, and in the name of egalitarianism excludes what was radical and exciting in their work alongside what may have been academic and exclusive. It is a sign of the times that March 2015’s ‘New Music Dublin’ festival has been renamed ‘David Lang’s Festival of Music’, its curator being the composer of that name who co-founded Bang On A Can. While there is some ambiguity as to whether Bang On A Can is ‘really’ Downtown, Lang contextualises it thus in the video explaining ‘his thoughts behind the programming of the festival’.23 When in 2002 John Schaefer of WYNC Radio in New York, a tireless advocate of Downtown music, visited Dublin he complained that too much music was of a kind ‘prevalent in European universities in the 1960s’, but concluded that there were ‘some lone voices in the wilderness’ and that ‘the Irish musical scene as a whole is still fermenting’.24 That process would seem to have matured, turning Dublin into a corner of downtown New York.

Meanwhile, in a country in which most of the radical European 20th century operas have yet to be staged (Wozzeck, Lulu, Moses und Aron, Die Soldaten, etc.), and in which numerous contemporary Irish operas still await staging, we have recently been treated to André Previn’s Streetcar Named Desire, Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, and Kevin Puts’s Silent Night. These neo-romantic American operas are highly ‘European’ in the most traditional sense. They are full-blown pastiche, adopting the harmonic structure and temporality of European late-romantic music. There are ‘events’ in this music, but they are always already familiar ones, hence accessible to us according to the conventional model of accessibility.

Heggie and Puts, incidentally, are Pulitzer prizewinners and John Luther Adams’s Pulitzer-prizewinning status is advertised in the programme for David Lang’s Festival of Music. John Adams (the one without the ‘Luther’) and Steve Reich have both won the Pulitzer, so while that prize continues to ‘define an extremely narrow slice of the current new-music spectrum’ (Gann), it would appear that downtown and neo-European composers are now comfortably sharing that slice.

At a time when our politicians are telling us that ‘there is no alternative’ to the monetisation of every aspect of existence, it is significant that this Americanisation of our musical life is taking on such proportions. However, it is important not merely to invert Gann’s terms and rail against ‘the influence of. . . inevitably foreign personalities’, in this case meaning US-Americans. Downtown music needs to be heard and absorbed just as do all the many other strands that make up the fabric of contemporary music. I have personally chosen for performance, and indeed sometimes myself perform, music that I would categorise as ‘uneventful’, and indeed I am fond of much of it. My critique is directed against a deepening cultural and ideological hegemony, not against individual composers.
Nor am I proposing an oversimplified answer to Fredric Jameson’s question ‘whether, if you prefer modernism, it is conceivable, let alone possible, to go back to the modern as such, after its dissolution into full postmodernity.’25 What I am suggesting is that Lyotard’s ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ should also be extended towards those of postmodernism. Are there possible points of escape from the postmodern prison-house? Certainly not if we are unaware that we are imprisoned in the first place; still less so if we believe our imprisonment is already a liberation.

If we look at the world in the second decade of this millennium, at the massacres perpetrated by the USA and Israel, by high-school kids in the USA and by Anders Breivik in Norway, by Boko Haram and the Islamic State, at the occupations, strikes and demonstrations staged worldwide by the deprived 99%, at the natural disasters and epidemics that seem linked to dominant economic policies, and see in all this no events with the potential to change the world for good or ill, then we are truly blinded by ideology. If the music that we compose within such a world insists on maintaining a flat surface, a neutral equilibrium that leaves no room for disruption, catastrophe, even annihilation or perhaps (whisper it) emancipation, then we may well be accused of banging on a can while the world burns.