Variations on a Theme

Music critic Paul Morley has written a catalogue essay (designed by Dexter Sinister; published by Film and Video Umbrella) to accompany a recent installation by American artist Cory Arcangel, a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould (2007). Or rather, Morley has assembled most of the text in the same way that Arcangel assembled his video montage – from fragments found on the Internet. Arcangel’s installation consists of a version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741) meticulously constructed from YouTube samples of individual notes played by amateurs. By making the connection between YouTube and Gould, the bricolages invite a comparison between user-generated content and the production methods of the modernist-creator figure.

Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations in 1981

Does user-generated content make possible a new form of artistry, prefigured in both Gould’s approach to the recording studio and in Wendy Carlos’s synthesizer renditions of Bach? Or are Gould and Carlos being positioned as anticipating the dissolution of the individual artist in an anonymous digital network?

Morley’s own position on these questions has been studiedly equivocal. Originally a journalist at the NME in the late 1970s, Morley has found himself gradually absorbed into the 1990s’ clip-show culture of chatty ephemera. His embrace of superficiality and gloss in the early ‘80s played more than a small part in ushering that culture in, though what was envisaged as a revolt against postpunk austerity plays very differently in today’s pervading climate of populism. In the introductory section of Morley’s recent catalogue essay – seemingly the only section that he wrote as such – the text is positioned as the sequel to his 2003 book, Words and Music: A History Of Pop In The Shape Of A City. Morley is averse to definitive claims, but Words And Music seemed to want to establish a continuity between high modernism and pop at its most apparently disposable, a continuity exemplified by the book’s opening juxtaposition of Kylie Minogue and experimental composer Alvin Lucier. But Morley’s ultimate motive was artfully veiled by a spaghetti junction of convolutions and deferrals; it was unclear whether he sought to vindicate the avant-garde through its impact on popular culture or to ennoble pop via its incorporation of the avant-garde, or both, or neither.

His Arcangel essay retains a certain amount of this ambivalence, but, in its gnomic brevity, it is far more suggestive than the often tiresome Words And Music, which felt at times like being trapped inside an interminable series of iPod playlists. Via thumbnail portraits of the likes of Gould, Carlos, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s Delia Derbyshire, Genesis P-Orridge and Robert Moog, the montage follows a number of associative lines connecting music, transgendering and electronics. By paralleling Arcangel’s methodology, Morley might have wanted to imply that the electronic music of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s paved the way for the networked world of user-generated content of which YouTube is a part. But the pop examples that figure in the text most insistently – Gary Numan, The Human League – belong not to this decade, but to a postpunk moment 30 years ago. Perhaps in spite of itself, the text ends up reading less like a justification of 21st-century popular culture and its modes of consumption and more like a requiem for a past moment of popular modernism, a lost circuit between pop, new technological developments and the avant-garde.

Morley’s text implicitly poses some of the questions which an essay in Philosophy Now by Alan Kirby addresses explicitly. Kirby talks of a new type of ‘text’ – a text we are all now very familiar with – ‘whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener (although these latter terms, with their passivity and emphasis on reception, are obsolete: whatever a telephoning Big Brother voter or a telephoning 6-0-6 football fan are doing, they are not simply viewing or listening).’ Oddly, Kirby labels these texts ‘pseudo-modernist’, arguing that this ‘pseudo-modernism’ has now superseded postmodernism. Kirby’s understanding of postmodernism suffers from being exclusively derived from literary studies, which has defined postmodernism narrowly, in terms of a set of reflexive strategies based around so-called ‘meta-fictions’ such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962). But far from marking a move beyond postmodernism, the shift from creator to recipient, from producer to consumer, that Kirby describes is exactly what the most acute theorists of postmodernism – Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson – had long ago got to grips with. Reading Baudrillard’s texts from the 1970s, with their extended discussions of reality TV and the ‘referendum mode’, is to confront analyses that now seem preternaturally prescient. What has been made obsolete is not Baudrillard and Jameson’s mordant anticipations of the monotony that would ensue in the name of viewer and consumer ‘involvement’, but those positions which claimed that eroding the privilege of the author and the artist carries a subversive charge.

What Kirby calls the ‘new weightless nowhere of silent autism’ has eroded the popular modernism which Morley once belonged to just as much as it has eliminated the high cultural resources of traditional modernism. As Kirby indicates, far from leading to new forms, user-generated content has tended towards retrenchment and consolidation – for example, YouTube (for the most part) recycles old material, or else provides a space in which millions of aspirant stars ape idols whose status – established by the old systems of distribution and valuation – remains secure. Instead of being cowed by the relentless demands for viewer participation, both cultural producers and the much-derided ‘gatekeepers’ need to find new ways of asserting the primacy of production over consumption. They need to find ways of stepping outside seamless circuits in which ‘everyone’ is implicated but no-one gets what they want. In another catalogue essay for a couple thousand short films…, curator Steven Bode argues that Arcangel’s installation is ‘less an advert for networked participatory culture than an index of people’s increasing atomisation.’ If postmodern culture presents a kind of networked solipsism, perhaps what Gould can now teach us most is the value of disappearance from the screens that eagerly seek our image. Gould, who famously retired early from concert playing, showed that sometimes it is necessary to withdraw in order to find better ways to connect.A lecture given by Arcangel at Columbia University, New York.

Arcangel performs a glockenspiel version of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’ at PERFORMA 07.