Last night, in considering possible post topics for today, I emailed myself the following:
Creating space to experience art, Bresson walking slowly backwards out of the room so as you want to follow him, Eno wanting to leave things out, while players want to hear themselves play. Making a cool medium from a hot one. Film with the lights off. White websites. A new function of modernism, subjective, interactive. John cage, lettng the audience hear itself, it's contribution to the music. Trying to squint your ears to eaves drop after thinking you heard your name. Drawing in the audiences attention. Having them come to you, never demanding it.
Private, personal, contemplative aesthetics, subjective, conversational.
This morning I forwarded that to Alex, asking him to run a litmus test on the idea:
Just pick something that isn't an argument built on top of your deep
vocabulary. If it can't be said with simple words, fuck it.
What I mean is this: we eat carefully presented meals slower than we inhale reheated chili. When my mashed potatoes have a leafy garnish stuck in them I feel the need to meet the chef halfway. It makes me eat with as much care as went into the preparation of the food.
When a doctor whispers instructions in that hush way that gives us goose bumps we listen intently to every word. When our parents used to scold us we shut off and let the scolding wash over, perhaps some of it was absorbed as vibration through our skin.
In art this idea is leveraged through the use of negative space. We fill in the parts that are empty. In music we use the negative space to anticipate the next note. It creates drama. When something appears deliberately sparse or still we engage it to find out why it is so.
To expand on the examples I listed last night: I love
Robert Bresson's films because he makes us do work. He used non-professional actors, calling them models. They deliver their lines flatly, they move stiffly, the camera moves very little. He creates a very deliberate mystery with all of this negative space and we get sucked in to equalize the pressure.
In an
interview for Tokion magazine a few years ago,
Brian Eno mentioned an essay by Warren McCulloch called
What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain. The premise is: our eyes constantly fight off habituation. If we stop scanning a room the rods and cones stop transmitting new information. A frog's eyes habituate on purpose. It's what makes the fly buzzing about the main object of the frog's interest. This idea has been put to use in Eno's minimalist music
for quite a while. He creates a ground for our ears to absorb, then plays with themes and accents that float above that ground.
That bit of positive space surrounded by negative is our fly. When it's left room to breathe, we gobble it up.
