Immersion Into Noise

The Imprudent Immersive Noise of the Fin-de-Siècle

As we saw with the Neo-Rococo, the main point of psychic noise through decadent design is the concept of space as a unified fuzzy entity. This concept of molding space into a unified whole through all-over noise marks the beginning of the trend away from eclecticism and towards Art Nouveau Gesamtkunstwerk ideals.

Art Nouveau is the French name of an art movement that took its impulse from the nymphianesque blend of natural forms and women. This interest in sensual bio-structure was expressed in sinuous Gesamtkunstwerk fashion, touching everything from cutlery to lamps to furniture to walls to entire building façades to metro-stations. Architects and designers who contributed to the development of this style included Victor Horta, Henry Van de Velde, Antoni Gaudí, and Hector Guimard (discussed below).

Basically, Art Nouveau is a Northern European and North American style of art/architecture which spanned from the 1890s to about the Neo-Neo-Classicism of the First World War era. It was called Stile Liberty, Jugendstil, Modernism, Nieuwe Kunst or Sezessionstil respectively in Italy, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Austria, but in all cases, artists and architects wanted to expunge the differentiation between the major and minor arts in the creation of a total art in Gesamtkunstwerk fashion by centring them around life. Therefore architecture, which has an immediate immersive sway on human existence, was the prominent art to which every artistic propensity is thoroughly integrated.

For our concerns, it is especially interesting to note the importance of Art Nouveau's approach to conceptualizing Gesamtkunstwerk interior space. As mentioned, the basis of the Art Nouveau interior is a concern with nymphian effluvium-feminine forms, and with swirling, tendril-derived patterns that are applied throughout the space in a frivolous spirit. The forms from nature most popular with Art Nouveau designers were characterized by flowing curves of the sacred grove: grasses, lilies, vines, and the sensual curves of women. However, on occasion, other, more unusual natural forms, were also used, such as peacock feathers, butterflies, and insects, but at all times High Art Nouveau's foremost feature is an emphasis upon ornamental value distributed throughout the entire space.

An Art Nouveau interior is asymmetrical at root, as evident in the tiniest single line or in its approach to the total space, but its typical asymmetricality is always in service of a total design. So what is important to our concerns, is that Art Nouveau is a noise art concerned with every detail, as every object of or in an Art Nouveau space is ideally related to a homogeneously noisy whole.

The obscurantist mystification often sensed in circuitous Art Nouveau was part of a widespread cultural reaction against the new social divisions brought about by the power of the Industrial Revolution and towards the intractable powers of the nymph/fairies at flippant play in nature. Its sinuous space provides the immersant with the possibility for an ebbing of consciousness toward the incomprehensible, a vantage point from which to breakout of the Renaissance perspective position towards a more supple non-Euclidean noisy awareness. This heightening of perceptual sensitivity allows for and encourages a heightened consciousness of one's surroundings in general, as the churned-line is found on the floor and then picked up in the shapes of the furniture and on into the doors and door frames until it reaches the structural arches which support the ceiling and into the lighting fixtures. As a result, the entire space is swaying, bending, floating, arching, smoking, curling, throbbing, dripping, melting, aching, writhing.

Baron Victor Horta (1861–1947), a Belgian artist/architect and teacher at the Brussels Vrije Universiteit and at the academies of Antwerp and Brussels, is one of the key founders of the Art Nouveau movement, who, at age 25, fabricated his first domicile in Ghent just after finishing his studies at the Brussels Academy of Fine Art.

Belgium's extensive industrial development during that period, which was based on mining, iron and steel industries, led to the emergence of a new and well-off bourgeoisie that was readily disposed to exhibiting its recently acquired wealth and social status by commissioning original architectural creations. Industrial space had called for the development of large scale iron and glass constructions for factory use and this new technology became available for possible applications in creating human habitations. Grasping upon this new technology, Monsieur Horta broke the mould of traditional architecture (in search of the all-inclusive Gesamtkunstwerk) by giving his spaces a centralized light well.

The first Art Nouveau building was built in Brussels in 1893 by Horta, the Hôtel Tassel. The Hôtel Tassel, at 6, Rue Janson, was built for Horta's friend Emile Tassel as manifesto, and in so doing established Brussels as the capital of Art Nouveau.

Figure 12

Interior stairway of Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel (Brussels)

Baron Horta's idea to construct lyrically enchanting spaces with whimsical arabesques (noodles, whiplashes and eels) is particularly evident in his 1900 Maison Personnelle (personal home) which is located at 23–25, rue Américaine, in Brussels. It is one of the most exquisite Art Nouveau buildings in the world and open to the public. Its fully immersive fin-de-siècle noise milieu is achieved through an unfamiliar warped suppleness of space created through thin, windblown, and whiplashed lines which lent me to the feelings of sprite underwater hair and, of course, writhing seaweed.

Baron Horta's creative fervor was enthusiastically received for almost 20 years (from 1893 to 1910) by an ample component of the Brussels' fin-de-siècle bourgeoisie. However, the Catholic high society rejected Art Nouveau, considering it dangerously decadent because of its emphatic use of curved lines. Consequently, in Brussels no church was ever built in the Art Nouveau style, which made it ipso facto a part of the secular movement of the period. Between 1915 and 1919 Horta stayed in England and the United States respectively, and there his whiplash noise ideal towards space became tempered and he turned to straight lines.

Gesamtkunstwerk-inspired designer/architect/theorist Henry Van de Velde (1863–1957) also was a key figure in the movement as he called for the unification of art into the space of the whole room (wallpapers, furniture and paintings). Van de Velde and his Brussels company, the Société Van de Velde, created all the interior furnishings of his buildings, including rugs and metalwork and in one case even a matching dress for its owner in keeping with his theories of totality which he articulated in Déblaiement d'art (1894) and Aperçus en vue d'une synthèse d'art (1895). Van de Velde advocated in his tracts the unification of all of the arts as an instrument of social reform and a rejection of historical forms. Living in Germany, he became associated with the rise of the Jugendstil and became an early member of the Deutsche Werkbund (who invited him to build a theater for its planned exhibition in Köln in 1914). He is considerably known for his Havana Cigar Shop, a shop he created in Berlin in 1899 in collaboration with the Belgian painter/designer/theoretician Georges Lemmen (1865–1916). Lemmen was especially recognized for his carpets, wallpaper, and tiles. Indeed Henry Van de Velde's reappraisal of the status of the applied arts became a fundamental issue in the Sezessionist movement.

We turn now to the imposing suavity of Antoni Gaudí in Catalonia. At the age of 16, Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) left his hometown Reus to join the school of architecture in Barcelona where he quickly adapted Islamic, Oriental and Gothic influences. Although he did not travel about Europe, Gaudí was aquainted with fin-de-siècle Belgium/French avant-garde movements because of the intimate relationship between Barcelona and France and with the pre-modernistic movements of Arts and Crafts, Gothic Revival, and Impressionism which were discussed in the intellectual proto-modernist circle which he frequented, but it was Horta's Art Nouveau movement that influenced Gaudí the most, stimulating him to experiment with new materials and new fluid shapes. Gaudí was particularly close with Count Guëll, who travelled often in Europe and it was Guëll who introduced Gaudí to the theories of the architect/theorist who exerted the most persuasive influence over the Art Nouveau architects in regards to the Gesamtkunstwerkkonzept ideal, Viollet-le-Duc and his book Entretients sur l'Architecture (which influenced both Horta and Gaudí). Noteworthy is the fact that King Ludwig paid a visit in 1867 to Pierrefonds, a restored medieval citadel that underwent restoration by Viollet-le-Duc.

Like Horta's, Gaudí's version of Art Nouveau noise, is characterized by an overwhelming proclivity for the organic nature of women, beasts, and plants which he translated into immersive utility. The materials utilized by Gaudí towards these ends ranged from stone, ceramic, tile, wrought-iron, glass and brick. He also used broken tiles for financial and technical reasons, as square tiles could not match the wavy shapes he preferred, plus it was cheaper to use free broken refuse from ceramic factories.

Antoni Gaudí is a chief exponent of Art Nouveau noise precisely with his 1906 building Casa Batlló located at 43, Passeig de Gràcia, Barcelona, noticeable for its organic tactility of bones and shells within, and its external cocked surf façade and chimerical roof. With Casa Batlló, Gaudí accomplished an astute transformation of an existing building, transforming it into an enchanting immersive Gesamtkunstwerk as Gaudí thoroughly undertook the design of every single element of the building, from the extravagantly protuberant façade to all aspects of the interior, including the gracefully gnarled furniture. On the exterior, Gaudí was able to combine a flamboyantly surging façade (in an ingeniously cool-color orchestration) while maintaining a dialogue with the neighbouring Casa Ametller (1900), built by Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1869–1956) four years earlier. Powerful pillars that resemble the substantiality of mammoth elephant legs accost the visitor at street level, protruding into the sidewalk, nigh tripping up an unaware pedestrian. These legs are bordered by a craggy vertebrae-like tier and the wavy façade extends upward between these two biologically evoking forms, culminating at the roof in a gargoylesque humping crescendo. The façade itself, coated in a layer of Montjuïc stone, shimmers seductively under the sun in multifarious chameleon-like colors, fraught with a scattering of small roundish plates resembling fish or reptilian scales. Affixed to this seething mass of swelling construction are a number of small, elegantly curved balconies with oval shaped portholes.

Figure 13

Exterior view of Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló (Barcelona)

The entire structure feels unsharpened, flowing and smooth in opposition to the street itself on which the arrangement sits, with the exception of a few square windows up top. Even the walls are gently rounded in strained undulation and contraction, as if they too have entered into the oceanic female throws of a fluttering uteral orgasm. The walls appear to be made of a soft, smooth, supple, leathery material and this illusion of softness is carried through by the roundness of the inside forms of the building where one has the feeling of being pleasantly encased in an expanse of hardened dripped honey. Turning, lunging stair railings are met, engulfed and supplemented by softly, heaving honey-colored walls and wooden biomorphicly shaped carved doors and irregularly shaped windows. There are no right angled corners or straight lines, which offers the immersant an impression of being wrapped up in one continuous fluid wave motion, complementary with the exterior. The number of ceramic tile elements used, that complement the feeling of inhabiting a construction produced by organic cells, increases towards the roof, where the crest of the roofing runs in a protuberant line that traces a zigzag spinal swell. The roof is covered in pallid bluish-pink ceramic tiles on the side facing the street, almost as if it were blushing due to the pithy sensuality of its avant-garde stance.

The French focus for Art Nouveau was Paris and the city of Nancy. In Nancy, one can still encounter a wonderfully complete Art Nouveau environment intact at the Musée de l'Ecole de Nancy's Salle à Manger (1904) by Eugène Vallin (1856–1936). Art Nouveau came to Paris principally by the celebrated architect Hector Guimard (1867–1942) who, as most people know, designed the Paris metro entrances, among other structures. In 1894 Guimard was building the Castel Beranger in a neo-gothic style when he visited Horta in Brussels. Inspired by what he had seen of the Hôtel Tassel, Guimard modified his plans for Castel Beranger, designing every detail, the wall paper, door handles, floor tiles, and front door, in Gesamtkunstwerk manner. Another architect who theorized, designed and built Gesamtkunstwerk-based Art Nouveau in Paris was Frantz Jourdain (1847–1935), an influential teacher, theorist and builder of the 1910 La Samaritaine building.

Painting Modernist Noise

As initiated (by the students) in the studio of Gabriel-Charles Gleyre (1808–1874), Impressionist painting restored noise concentration onto the two-dimensional surface of the canvas while simultaneously suggesting an interregnum of luminous space. As such, it also played a consequential role in modelling fin-de-siècle French aesthetics. One thinks here of the ephemeral paintings of Claude Monet (1840–1926), particularly his extensive series of paintings, Haystacks (painted between 1890 and 1892) and Rouen Cathedral (painted between 1892 and 1894) and then Nymphéas, the series of 23 large paintings (19 of which were 2 by 4.30 meters (6.56 by 14 feet)) which he created late in life based on his Giverny garden's Bassin des Nymphéas. From 1915 to 1926 Monet exhibited all of these paintings in wall-to-wall installation mode, filling the three rooms of the l'Orangerie des Tuileries in Paris. But also indicative of this noise aesthetic are the paintings of Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Alfred Sisley (1839–1899) and Jean-Frédéric Bazille (1841–1871).

Post-Impressionism extended this noise momentum, for example, with Georges Seurat's (1859–1891) mammoth 1886 Pointillist canvas Un Dimanche après-midi à la Grand Jatte. Here, everything on the canvas is inexorably locked together in one flowing noise as the composition (taken as a whole) postulates an uninterrupted enveloping energy devised from the color theory of the chemist Eugène Chenoiseeul (1786–1889). We can see this continue in the Divisionist paintings of Seurat's friend Paul Signac (1863–1935), for example in his painting la Voile Jaune of 1904 which shows a ship disintegrating into its environment. Paul Cézanne likewise extends this noise tradition in such a way, that his influence on the 20^th century is hard to overstate.

As Rudolf de Lippe pointed out in his book La Géometrisation de l'Homme en Europe à L'Epoque Moderne, increasingly in the Modern era the geometricization of human vision became the general methodical condition in the West, characterized by an analytical sight which decomposes the immersive noise vision sphere into geometricized fragmented parts. This is a modern technological vision whose effectiveness lies in its tendency to isolate and decontextualise noise scope. Indeed, modern technology had an enormous social impact in the 20^th century in this, and other, respects. The automobile and electric power, for instance, radically changed both the scale and the quality of 20^th century life, promoting a process of rapid urbanization and a substantial change in lifestyle through mass production of household goods and appliances. The rapid development of the aeroplane, the cinema, and the radio made the world seem suddenly smaller and more accessible. Since 1900, the speed of travel has increased by a factor of 10 to the 2^nd power, known energy resources by 10 to the 3^rd, explosive power of weaponry by 10 to the 6^th, and speed of communication by 10 to the 7^th power. Such new ways of understanding involve a change in perspective, and that change is marked in the 20^th century by an extended propensity for immersion into noise.

“An ‘automatic’ scribble of twisting and interlacing lines permits the germ of an idea in the unconscious to express, or at least suggest itself to consciousness. From this mass of procreative shapes, full of fallacy, a feeble embryo of an idea may be selected and trained by the artist to full growth and power. By these means, may the profoundest depths of memory be drawn upon and the springs of spiritual instinct tapped”. So wrote Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) in a short essay called “Notes on Automatic Drawing” in 1916 for the British art magazine FORM. This statement recalls the noise art in the Abside in Lascaux, but who the heck is Austin Osman Spare?

Spare was a chaos noise artist replete with potentials, but who has no place in the canon of Modern Art. He is a spiritual noise artist who concentrated on transforming his libidinal energy into noise art through the use of automatism almost ten years prior to the Surrealists. In a way, he is an artist with whom I cannot be satisfied, but with whom I can be impressed in terms of the art of noise. Why impressed? Because among the many complexities that have transpired in today's society due to the delirious effects of information-communication technology—and the proliferation of visual information that has resulted from this technology—is the changing nature of artistic definition. And Spare’s use of automatic instinct in creating his noise art addresses this condition fully. As you may know, automatism, in the arts, is an act of creation which either allows chance to play a major role or which draws on the unconscious mind through free association, states of trance, or dreams. Spare was a pioneer in this noise practice specifically with his experiments in trance, which is basically self-initiated work with reflexive feedback loops—the basis of cybernetics.

He is impressive, too, in philosophical terms, as contemporary postmodern thought has been concerned with the poststructuralist deliberation on the notion of the subject in order to question (and unlasso) its traditionally privileged epistemological status. Particularly in respect to the automatic-assisted techno-artist (an artist whose discourse revolves around networks and rhizomes), there has been a sustained effort to question the role of the artist/subject as the intending and knowing autonomous creator of art—as its coherent originator. Again Spare’s automatism informs us here. In fact, for me, the semi-automatic drawings of A. O. Spare have become emblematic of this question of the rigorous scrutiny of the subject which Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) has described of as logocentrism: the once-held distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity; between public and private; between fantasy and reality, and between the unconscious and the conscious realms.

Today, we understand that these distinctions are breaking down under the pressure of our speeding and omnipresent computer communications network technologies. We are now part of an automated technologically hallucinogenic culture that functions along the lines of a dream, free from some of the strictures of time and space; free from some of our traditional earthly limits that have been broken down by the instantaneous nature of electronic communications.

The modernist existential concept of the singular individual has been supplanted by the electronic-aided individual, in a way liberating her from linear time, and vaporously placing her in a technologically stored eternity (simulacrum-hyperreality). This quality of phantasmagorical and perverse displacement has for some signified a tightening spiral which formulates a new vision of existence, a vision which Jean Baudrillard has called pornographic and which Deleuze and Guattari have called schizoid. Both these descriptions apply aptly to the drawings of A.O. Spare in a variety of ways that I will make apparent shortly. For those, and they are numerous, who are not familiar with the work of Spare, let me first provide some rudimentary background on him.

Austin Osman Spare was born the son of a London policeman. Doom loomed abundantly in Fin de Siècle England as Spare came of age, thus his development into what can now be recognized as a late-decadent, perversely ornamental, graphic dandy in the manner of Felicien Rops (1833–1898) and/or Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) can be readily contextualized.

As a young man, Spare was for a brief period of time a member of the Silver Star, Alister Crowley's (1875–1947) magical order. Spare's lifelong interest in the theory and practice of sorcery was initiated, he recounted, by his sexual relationship at a very young age with an elderly woman named Paterson. To perform sorcery, for Spare, was a practice meant to captivate, encircle and ensnare spirits. It is not quite the same thing as practicing magic, which is the art of casting spells or glamours. For Spare, as well as for Crowley, Tantricesque sex—the withholding of the orgasmic—held the means of access to their magical systems. However, it is in Spare's conception of radical and total pan-sexual freedom, consisting in the unrestricted expression of what he held to be the “inherent dream”, where we first detect the seditious and chaotic philosophy which drove a prong between himself and Crowley—and every other esoteric system but his own brand of chaos magic/art. [240]

In 1905, at the tender age of 17, Spare self-published his first collection of drawings in a book of aphorisms entitled EARTH INFERNO. In it, he lamented the death of what he called the “ubiquitous women of unconsciousness” (he believed that out of the flesh of our mothers come dreams and memories of the gods), and castigated what he called the “inferno of the normal”. For Spare, and I agree with him here, there are no levels or layers to consciousness, and no dichotomy between the conscious and the unconscious. There isn't even a clearly definable boundary between consciousness and the object of consciousness, between subject and object, between action and situation. There is only a depth or thickness of consciousness which varies in proportion to our state of self-awareness—from the thinnest film of near being, where we engage in pure desire/instinct driven towards action, to so paralyzingly thick opacity that it induces catatonia. The point of automatism is that the more spontaneously we act, the less self-conscious we are.

EARTH INFERNO disparages the world of humdrum banality in favor of an exotic pan-sexual orb which Spare began to reveal in a spate of non-automatic drawings somewhat reminiscent of the decadent artists previously mentioned. His intention was pan-sexual, transcendental, and androgynous—in that Spare claimed that he was all sex—and that what he was not, was moral thought: simulating and separating. Moreover, he wrote that when belief detaches itself from the accessories of convention, desire stands revealed as the ecstasy of the self, ungoverned by its simulated forms.

In 1907, Spare self-published a second collection of drawings in a publication named THE BOOK OF SATYRS which contained acute insights into the social order of his day. Then in 1909, Spare began work on a third book, this time of semi-automatic drawings entitled THE BOOK OF PLEASURES on which he worked for four years. This book emerged in 1913, as did another called THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY. In 1914, he held his first one-person exhibition at the Baillie Gallery in London. It included many of the semi-automatic sketches he drew while half asleep or in a self-induced masturbatory trance. Indeed, most of Spare's semi-automatic works (from 1910 onward) were produced in onanistic self-induced trances that he claimed were sometimes controlled by intrusive occult intelligences working through him. Here, through masturbatory trance, he said the “I” becomes atmospheric. This certainly reminds us of the disembodied state so often encountered in electronic environments (such as virtual reality) where the so-called self is uncoupled from the body and pseudo projected into computerized space. [241] Indeed, Spare considered his best accomplishments those which he said were produced through him by disembodied spirits rather than by him, often by the hand of the phantom spirits of William Blake (1757–1827), Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543) and Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). Not bad virtual company. Spare quite wildly would declare that his was the automatic hand utilized by these deceased masters. Through his automatic and delirious technique, Spare claimed to be able to draw upon the profoundest depths of memory and to tap into the springs of instinct. These drawings can be found in a book Spare prepared but never self-published in 1925 that he called A BOOK OF AUTOMATIC DRAWINGS, a book that was posthumously published in 1972. More automatic drawings were lost when on May 10^th, 1941, during the height of the London bombings, Spare's London flat was obliterated by a bomb. [242]

It is in his highly extravagant practice of automatic openness and swank self-denial/self-pleasure that Spare's relevance to the poststructuralist/post-Internet conceptions of the noisily decentered and distributed subject is found. Specifically, Spare's heterogeneity relevance here lies in his interests in the loss of subjectivity as experienced in sexual transport and sexual fantasies, interests which now dovetail into our interests in the philosophical loss of sovereignty typical of the art of noise. Here, for example, with the loss of body consciousness specific to total-immersion within a virtual reality environment, one frequently senses a transporting dissolution moving consciousness away from self-consciousness. [243] Also there is an obvious bearing on aspects of on-line faux self-permutations—what are called avatars. By participating whole-heartedly in his insertion (and semi-fake disappearance) into the transpersonal symbolic economy of the sign through the assumed equivalence of life and death (in what perhaps can be imagined for us as digitized-stored post-existence), Spare remains truly an individual, if not altogether alone in his time. His was a radical transcendentally false egoless gesture (what a bogus collaboration!) which he fabricated in order to make semi-automatic art try to do magical things. In the process, he created an exciting conception of noise art which focuses on collective and collected selves. Undoubtedly, his is a view which counters the long-standing western-metaphysical-phallocratic-heroic portrayal of male-selfhood—a view which we all know too well. And yet, doesn't his view of a compiled self, akin to the essence of the death of the subject, offer just the sort of resistance to the structures of logocentric civilization that simulationist theory claimed was impossible?

Listen to what Spare wrote on this in a 1916 essay: “Let it not be thought that a person not an artist may by these means become one: but those artists who are hampered in expression, who feel limited by the hard conventions of the day and wish for freedom, these may find in automatic drawing a power and a liberty elsewhere undiscoverable”. [244]

Spare's quite early conception of the illusory coherence of the “I”, renders everyone and every-sex equally phantasmagorical (as disembodied fabula) akin to the way the speeding electronic-computer network can. His conception of automatic every-sex was clarified when he wrote, “In the ecstatic condition the mind elevates all sexual powers towards infinity”. And, “Speed is the criterion of the genuine automatic. Art becomes, by this velocity an ecstatic power expressing in a metaphorical language the desire for joy”. But, in effect, his pan-sexual joyful “I” existed primarily as the construct of a system of male forces which he claimed acted through him on the creation of a synergistic complex image. This synergistic compounding of the mnemonic threshold encapsulates our current post-postmodern-networked predicament in that the fabulated digital-self today may feel sublimated by the automatic system in which it operates. It may feel eclipsed—but also freed-up by—the mammoth computer-media-web as phantom information bits flow continuously around and through us in a vague endless whirl of unverifiablity. This digital-self unquestionably partakes in a data proliferation which forms, bit by bit, into an extensive aggregate somewhere deep in the abstruse recesses of our hard drives, a data proliferation that is awaiting discharge and reformation through noise art.

Perhaps by automatically stirring the viractual-self, Spare can be understood as a precursor of digital fluidity/copy-ability, working as he did, vis-à-vis onanistic actions while forestalling the actualization of his orgasm—thus maintaining an extended virtual state of self-pleasure. Certainly his remarkable sex/magical method for making noise art suggests a methodology based on obsession and longed for ecstasy which I have taken as my digital working method too—a method that plays in the area of control/non-control with an aim towards constructing a capricious alliance that associates discourses of machinic noise with organic sexuality, an association which opens up both notions to mental connections that enlarge them. The digital-noise-self here is impregnated by a sustained desire that becomes energized by the supposition that deep memory responds to chaotic longings and can relive original obsessions. In relationship to this method, Spare said, “The artist must be trained to work freely and without control within a continuous line and without afterthought—that is, the artist’s intentions should just escape consciousness. In time, shapes will be found to evolve, suggesting conceptions, forms—and ultimately style”.

To be sure, each era has its own redundancies and its own compliances. Yet Spare felt it his privilege, even his obligation, to sally forth and be inordinate in his openness to past representational techniques and structures, but not in any placating or merely plausible way, as the meager contemporary appropriatonists and samplers often do. For Spare, only chaotic excess may be magnificent. Only chaotic noise opulence that borders on the decadent can offer a full examination of the illusory digital-self—a self which today arises out of the present day climate of technological flow and informational abundance. Such a digital-self is the technologically expanded psyche which exhibits an anti-essentiality of the body. It is the noise body-in-bits that allows no privileged logos, but insists, rather, on a displacement or deferral of gender-based meanings. Here the sexual body is undone by chaotic disturbances it cannot contain. Here, only ideas of multiple selves can adequately represent the artist as social communicator. Here, only transformative and diaphanous notions of the self can accurately reflect the massive transformational effect of automated webbed high-technology.

So it is extremely relevant, then, to consider Spare's means of becoming courageously individual through his frenzied tranced-groupings. In effect, he achieved this through the transgression of (and by!) his artistic “masters”. In terms of the original’s unimportance to our electronic era's conception of art as simulation, Spare's claim to meta-individuality in his production (really what he claimed was a co-production achieved through automatic means) seems prophetic. If a substance-less collective history of digitized art images and the unseen labor of computer programmers lurks and reverberates internally in each technologically-aided art work today, and if in each of our computers a data-bank of visual information lingers beyond our personal propensity and (perhaps) dominates us, then an inner freedom from external authority indeed seems futile. We can only act with what authority has passed down to us. But what if the search for a digitally-assisted noise art in our contemporary context of the information society is more simply directed towards not repeating what has been learned and collected? Perhaps this possibility—as achieved through the automatic unconscious act—is what I have chiefly learned from Spare’s work and writings, as well as his exclusion from the canon of art history. By way of semi-automatic processes, art can be further problematized, cracked-open, drained and transfigured through the strange mixture Spare showed us of disinterested rapture—a generous elation where off-beat panoramas and chaotic multiple personalities have room to emerge.

To achieve this, Spare would first exhaust himself before beginning to draw in a somber candle-lit room and in a slight trance with no particular idea in mind, thereby, he believed, reaching deeper and more remote layers of chaotic memory. He did this while continuously abhorring the accepted values and maudlin conceits of his day. It has been my experience that computer programming that utilizes automatic functions can achieve similar ends. I learned this through developing in 1991–2 a real-time, operative artificial-life application based on the viral model. [245] This disruptive model, though based upon nature, makes use of automatic functions of computation to circumvent conscious control. Such a non-rational, unpredictable automation, of course, stands in stark contrast to the automation of Fordist/Taylorist production, with its legacy of instrumental rationality.

The fact that Spare was a sensual occultist should not misdirect our appreciation of his artistic and theoretical endeavor. The logic of noise facilitated by the Internet is satiated with a parallel concealment. For most, there is much mystery attached to the digital hidden codes and routing formats that expedite our tele-communications. Moreover, his drowsy semiautomatic drawings, with their multifarious and allusive search for something antithetical to the established norm—and their morbid subversion of the concept of individuality and authorship—play well on today's desire for excessive noise art that the computer tends to encourage. Spare's drawings enmesh, hinder, alter and disrupt the mundanity of elementary communications with their inexorably chimerical noise.

Today it is in the hyper-logic of the endlessly duplicable digital noise and/or sound where we can probe, much as Spare did, for a particular and personal occult expression. Also, we should remember that, within the current electronic environment of hypermedia, artistic annihilations of linear time are now possible. Thus barriers between the deceased and living become somewhat abolished. This, too, recalls Spare’s chaotic methodology. In his own fashion, he created a non-linear noise where deep-memory threatens the common order of events, thus questioning both clichéd ideas of originality and supplied social codes. Clearly, with its emphasis on origin, author and finality, his non-linear artfulness subverts the modernistic conception of production, but without merely accepting the artificial, the copy, the simulation, as the end point.

This is how the art of noise functions in our technomediacratic society—a hyper-society that deploys the effects of rhizomatic connections and trance-like repetitions. It is the artist’s task today, I feel, to disadvantage the digital reproductive technology so as to defeat its attempt at negating our art’s mystical significance. But to do this, we must abandon the Enlightenment baggage of authorizing categories and live non-linearly, while accepting nothing as flatly given. Here again, Spare inspires as he explicitly eschewed categorization and instead sought to problematize the authority of the category through hyper-logic. So Spare compels us again to take notice of the various ways artistic conventions have molded our responses and regulated our artistic denotations.

The possibilities of non-linear, complex-entangled-erotic noise configurations springing forth from the digital Id made up of mercurial symbols and pan-sexual concepts in opposition to recycled representations provides an interesting insight into the way Spare's art (with its convoluted compositions made up of vague confiscations) directs us towards the conception of the transformative possibilities of technologically-aided noise art.

Perhaps the hope that Spare's non-linear and semi-automatic noise art can show us a way to resist art history’s drive towards reification is a fragile hope indeed in our electronically-homogenized cyberage. Honestly, such a hope may be less than we deserve, but it also may be more than we usually allow ourselves to envision.

What I am certain of is the need for spontaneous, pre-rational actions in the realm of art and technology so as to pursue spiritual and erotic desires, and here Spare inspires as he indicates ways in which we may escape the prison of technological logic to encounter intimate realities bound only by the next thought and driven only by the last. This is the answer to the question “how shall I be free today?” and to best express free thought through noise art without too many tainted preconceptions.

Not to dismiss Austin Osman Spare (and his concept of the collective self—which for us can be reconceived of as technological hyper-thought) as dilettante folly is to become aware of the fact that underlying everything virtual is a web of hyper-connections upon which we can exert more manipulative desire than we are normally led to believe by the society of the spectacle. But to do so, we must actively use noise art and not be content with merely consuming it. For as Félix Guattari said in his noteworthy book, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, the work of art, for those who use it, is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense, of baroque proliferation or extreme impoverishment that leads to a recreation and a reinvention of the subject itself.

This reinvention of the self occurs through a curious alliance between the cold impersonality of technology and the flames of personal ecstasy in the new noise art of our time.

However, modernism in architecture (and then art) rejected such late Art Nouveau noise ideals by placing emphasis on the unity and similarity of reductivist forms. This reductive urge is called orthodox Modernism, an ideal concerned with essences and abstractions. Charles Jencks takes the view that the modern movement in architecture is based on a world-view informed by the Industrial Age with great emphasis on the mass production of virtually identical goods, and with reducing the design of something to its simplest functional elements. Simultaneously, profoundly new noise concepts in art began to appear in 1905 with Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and the Fauves at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. In particular, the Cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and George Braque (1882–1963) emerged as a radical departure from the perspectivist representational tradition of the past, as Cubism aimed to restructure representation through a redefinition of realism. Analytic Cubism (1908–1912) dropped the conventions of Renaissance framing in favor of a multi-outlook exploration of many different angles and viewpoints, articulated through overlapping and interlocking planes, as we see with Picasso's 1910 canvas Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.

In opposition to point-perspective, Analytic Cubism shows that the viewer synthesizes fragmentary accumulated evidence into an assembled totality when the viewer's volume of perceptions are detected through ambient vision in motion. Analytic Cubism re-analyzes and synthesizes vision's multiple viewpoints concurrently by tenaciously folding them (simultaneously) into one sweeping but minced formation. As such, Analytic Cubist consciousness suggests an embedded hermeneutic immersion into noise. Synthetic Cubism emphasises this non-illusionistic program in a broader way through the incorporation of elements in the environment, such as fragments of wall-paper, journals and/or photographs. A good example is the 1912 legendary, Nature Morte avec Chaise Canée (Still-life with Chair Caning) by Pablo Picasso.

The early photomontages by the Dada artist Hannah Höch are particularly relevant to noise vision, for example with her amazing Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany from 1919–20.

In this work, Höch presents us with a rush of all-over and intermingled visual fragments (like in the abside of Lascaux) that exceeds any attempt at a clean, clear signal reception. As I showed in Lascaux, this form of visual noise presentational excess offers up the possibility of multiple interpreations that may be in conflict with each other. Thus the interpreative act seems to have no end here. [246]

So now we can turn fully to the immersive work of the Dadaist artist/designer/typographer/poet Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) and his Hannover Merzbau (1923–1937), as stated a large influence on the Japanese noise master Merzbow. In the early-1920s, Schwitters began working on a collage/column which he called a Schwitters-Säule which soon grew out and up over the ceiling of his apartment in Hannover. [247] Soon it grew down across the walls, and niches were made in it to contain mementos from his friends which were later covered over until the work finally grew up through the ceiling, down through the floor and onto a small projected roof. In its entirety it was called Merzbau (Merz-house). [248] This Merzbau was abandoned to the Nazis when Schwitters moved to Norway to escape them. There he began another Merzbau (the Hus am Bakken at Lysaker) which was burnt down by children in 1951. The Hanover Merzbau, too, had been destroyed in the aerial Allied bombings of 1943, but in 1947 Schwitters began work on his final piece of what he called total art [249] —his Merzbarn. This work was to be made almost entirely of plaster with found objects embedded in it. Another relevant Schwitters project from the immersive perspective was his theorization of the Merzbühne, a “total-Merz-theater”. [250] Though this project was never realized, it paralleled a number of other total theater projects that were developing in Europe during the 1930s.

In light of Schwitters' achievements, we might now consider Clarence Schmidt's 1930s noise decor/assemblage creation of a continuous chain of grottoes and corridors and caves created on O'Hayo Mountain near Woodstock, New York, that Allan Kaprow wrote about in his 1966 book Assemblages, Environments, Happenings. [251] Schmidt's collage grotto/labyrinth has been hailed by Adrian Henri as “possibly the 20^th century's finest piece of total art” [252] —a concept of environmental art Henri developed in his book Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance which, as we have seen, stems from the Wagnerian terminology Gesamtkunstwerk: a coextensive configuration which sets out to inexorably dominate, overwhelm, and flood us with sensory impressions.

The key European avant-garde movement with initial immersive art noise suggestion was Futurism. [253] I have already pointed out the crucial importance of Luigi Russolo’s work in this respect and his 1913 manifesto L'Arte dei Rumori (translated as The Art of Noises) is seminal. The noise work of Fortunato Depero is also outstanding, such as his 1915 Edificio di stile rumorista transformabile (Building of transformable noise style)—in collaboration with Giacomo Balla [254] —and his Anihccam del 3000: Canzone rumorista (Machine of 3000: Noise song) (1916–24).

The Cubist ontological embeddedness of the view into a spread of moving optical fields was amplified in Italian Futurism, as it attempted to coalesce and condense scattered/totalized ocular impressions. Umberto Boccioni's (1882–1916) 1911 painting States of Mind II: Those Who Go is an admirable example. Responding to the machine age, the Futurists, under the philosophical leadership of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), glorified speed and the machine while expressing a rejection of the past, best exemplified by a famous fist-fight in 1910 between the Futurist painters and poets and the Venetian townspeople who reacted in anger when 800,000 manifestos, entitled Against Past-Loving Venice, were scattered upon them. [255]

Cubo/Futurism achieved a syntheses of the flickering noise optics of Post-Impressionism with the spread of urban media visual production, announcing the postulate that reality is discovered through the slant of drifting involvement as opposed to static detached understanding. This dematerialized optical noise awareness suggested further supra-visual reconfigurations that are picked up by the radical avant-garde of mid-20^th century, as we will see.

But rather than coming from Cubo/Futurism, art conceived of as total experience [256] stems, according to Henri in his book Tota Art, from Dada, a reaction against the First World War of 1914–1918. [257] It is true that the Dadaists did not restrict themselves to being painters, writers, dancers, or musicians, as most of them were involved in several art forms and in breaking down the boundaries that kept the arts distinct from one another. In particular, Henri suggests that total experience stems from Max Ernst's first Köln exhibition in 1920, in which Ernst was joined by other artists who, like him, were later to become Surrealists. The exhibition was entered through a men's urinal that was opened by an adolescent girl in a First Communion dress reciting obscene verses. [258]

Freud's intrigue with the unconscious was enthusiastically taken up by the Surrealists who saw his studies of dreams as central to their own desire to disrupt the norms of conscious perception. As Henri Ellenberger's book, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, forcefully demonstrates, Freud did not “discover” the unconscious—if we can say that anyone did, it would be Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) and Pierre Janet (1859–1947), the author of De l'Angoisse à l'Extase (Of Anguish and Ecstasy)—but Freud, working with his associate Josef Breuer (1842–1925), might be said to have posited the general principles and contents of the unconscious mind that gained predominance in the 20^th century.

Henri states that the grand Surrealist exhibitions of 1936 in London and 1938 in Paris are the most direct precursors of total art. In the Paris show, under the direction of Marcel Duchamp, [259] the ceiling of the main room was hung with 1,200 coal sacks filled with paper while a gramophone played German military marches, complimented by an ornamental pool and the smell of roasting coffee-beans. For a later exhibition in 1942 at the New York Reid Mansion, entitled First Papers of Surrealism, Duchamp created an environment out of kilometers of entangled string. [260]

We must, too, acknowledge and indeed honor an immersive noise masterpiece and source of immense inspiration to the Surrealist movement itself, the Palais Idéal of Ferdinand Cheval (1836–1924) which, to my eye, appeared to be one gigantic sprawling noise grotto when I visited it, as if the stupendous mannerist grotto-façade at villa Borromeo had been left to grow untrimmed and run amok. It was constructed by Cheval alone in the Hauterives (Drôme) between the years 1879 and 1912, the result of 93,000 man hours of hard labor.

Figure 14

Exterior view of the Palais Idéal by Facteur Cheval (Hauterives, Drôme, France)

So a question: why does quietly framed pictorial art become progressively challenged by visual noise—and to a certain extent, eclipsed by it—following the Second World War? [261] Evidently there was something endemic in the barbarous conditions of 20^th century modern warfare that facilitated this noise development at its onset, rather than any more laudable human aspirations towards the expanding of aesthetic perceptual consciousness. We can find examples of cultural visual noise previous to the war on occasion, as we have seen, but after it there is an explosion.

I have deduced that something in the consciousness of society was altered following the war and have further deduced that the bombing of civilian centers in the course of the war (that is, Köln, London, Tokyo) culminating with the American atomic bombings of the civilian Japanese cities, Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945 (circa 140,000 victims) and Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945 (circa 70,000 victims), changed the world's sense of space radically.

The Allies' strategic air offensive against Germany began to attain its maximum effectiveness in the opening months of 1944. Both the U.S. air forces concerned, namely the 8th in England and the 15th in Italy, were increased in numbers and improved in technical proficiency. By the end of 1943, the 8th Bomber Command alone could mount attacks of 700 planes and, early in 1944, regular 1,000 bomber plane missions became possible. Even more important was the arrival in Europe of effective long-range fighters, chief of which was the P-51 Mustang.

However, Paul Virilio, in his esteemed Bunker Archaeology, indirectly suggested the initial date of this spatial consciousness transition as 1943, with the Nazi preparation for the first operational launching of the V-2 ballistic missile. Ballistic missiles are rocket-propelled weapons that travel by momentum in a high, arcing trajectory after they have been launched into flight by a brief burst of power. Although experiments had been undertaken before World War II on crude prototypes of the cruise and ballistic missiles, modern weapons are generally considered to have their true origins in the V-1 and V-2 missiles launched by Germany in 1944 and 1945. Both of those Vergeltungswaffen (Vengeance Weapons) defined the problems of propulsion and guidance that have continued ever since to shape cruise and ballistic missile development. Indeed strategic missiles represent a logical step in the attempt to attack enemy forces at a distance. As such, they can be seen as extensions of either artillery (in the case of ballistic missiles) or manned aircraft (in the case of cruise missiles).

In 1944, at the Peenemünde base on the island of Usedom in the Baltic, Wernher von Braun and his team created the V-2. The V-2 was 14.1 meters long (47 feet) and its payload was about 900 kg of high explosives. The horizontal range was about 350 kilometers (220 miles), and the peak altitude usually reached was about 100 kilometers (62 miles). It was first fired against Paris on September 6^th, 1944. Two days later, the first of more than 1,300 V-2s was fired against Great Britain (the last on March 27^th, 1945). Belgium was bombarded almost as heavily with them. Reaching a height of more than 160 kilometers (100 miles), the V-2 marked the beginning of the space age. After the war, both the United States and the Soviet Union captured large numbers of V-2s and used them in research that led to the development of their missile programs.

Nevertheless, Pablo Picasso's 1937 monumental 3.51 by 7.52 meter (11.5 by 24.6 feet) painting Guernica presented into art consciousness an earlier (the first) civilian air-bombardment of innocent people at home in their city of Guernica Y Luno during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Here 1,654 Basque people were killed, at the bequest of Francisco Franco Bahamonde (1892–1975), and 889 were wounded, including the elderly, women, and children by Adolf Hitler's (1889–1945) Junker 52 and Heinkel 51 warplanes in the service of Spanish fascism.

Previously, there existed a separation between military and habitational space but, with the bombing of Guernica Y Luno, the swathed immersive space of the tellurian domain was suddenly deemed defunct as previous earth/covering frontiers became increasingly porous to airborne invasions. This sense of airborne vulnerability soon extended itself further and further outwards with the launching of spy and then military-communications satellites (Sputnik in 1957), the first manned space flight of the Soviet military-pilot Yuri Gagarine (1934–1968) on April 12th, 1961 (the first man in space), and then the first manned trip to the moon of the American Apollo Mission in 1969 which featured Neil Armstrong's televised trek on the moon. Rocket technology enabled military forces to put nuclear weapons on intercontinental missiles, due largely to the former work of Russian rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) (whose visionary ideals came from Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1828–1903)), the American Robert H. Goddard (1882–1945) and the German Hermann Oberth (1894–1989). With rocket technology, the space of military interaction clearly expanded and, mirror-like, entered the inner dimensions of the human psyche. Virilio verifies this shift in consciousness in his book, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, where he traces the colonization of the unhurried gaze by military technologies and the introduction of military intelligence into the indoctrination of the non-combatant's perceptions. This "rational" scopic extension of vision is accomplished precisely at the loss of another sort of vision, the ambient/holonogic, as it involves a heightened ordering and sighting of linear perspectives and a consequent geometrization of both external space and the inner human. This new sense of threatening external space perhaps is most strongly, and most fearfully, exemplified by what has become known as C3I (pronounced as see cubed eye), the electronic military intelligence spatial fusion of control, command, communication and intelligence that developed as the electronic/digital system of strategic command over the U.S. military's nuclear arsenal. Herbert York, in his essay “Nuclear Deterrence and the Military Uses of Space”, provides a fine short overview of this trend towards militarizing and sighting outer (and hence inner) space where he outlines the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program of the 1980s and its ensuing militarization of outer space. Indeed, York makes the point that, “from the beginning”, the use of the space program has been “primarily of a military, not civilian or scientific nature”. [262] In 1983, as part of the SDI program, President Ronald Reagan put forth his “vision” of what became pejoratively called Star Wars, perhaps the archetype of this oppressive spatial consciousness.

Certainly, it is true that, hidden in the computer, there is something so strong, so repetitious, so ominous, and so pregnant with the darkness of infinite noise that it excites and frightens us. This is why the innumerable ramifications of mechanical desire help us to utilize our unconscious mind. And this is the real answer to why computers are interesting in art. We admire their inhuman beauty. They return us to the experimental, to a state of sexual desire and noisy restlessness. The neural processes they mimic are our own deepest desires and meticulous obsessions. Their repetitions are the fusion repetitions of our sexual acts with their duplication of eggs, sperm and blood. [263]

Of course, nuclear weapons derive their enormous explosive force from either the fission or fusion of atomic nuclei. Their significance may best be appreciated by the coining of the words kiloton (1,000 tons) and megaton (one million tons) to describe their blast effect in equivalent weights of TNT. For example, the first nuclear fission bomb, the one dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, released energy equalling 15,000 tons (15 kilotons) of chemical explosive from less than 130 pounds (60 kilograms) of uranium. Fusion bombs, on the other hand, have given yields of up to almost 60 megatons.

Figure 15

Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb, 1945

The first nuclear weapons were bombs delivered by aircraft. Warheads for strategic ballistic missiles, however, have become by far the most important nuclear weapons. The U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons, which included the hydrogen bomb that was first test exploded in 1952, reached its peak in 1967 with more than 32,000 warheads of 30 different types. The Soviet stockpile reached its peak of about 33,000 warheads in 1988. Throughout the ballistic missile arms race, the United States tended to streamline its weapons, seeking greater accuracy and lower explosive power, or yield. Most U.S. systems carried warheads of less than one megaton, with the largest being the nine-megaton Titan II, in service from 1963 through 1987. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, perhaps to make up for its difficulties in solving guidance problems, concentrated on larger missiles and higher yields. The Soviet warheads often exceeded five megatons, with the largest being a 20 to 25-megaton warhead deployed on the SS-7 Saddler from 1961 to 1980 and a 25-megaton warhead on the SS-9 Scarp, deployed from 1967 to 1982. Hence at mid-20^th century, space became the range of both humanity's greatest fears (nuclear extinction of life on the planet) and its boldest aspirations (co-operative peaceful space exploration).

What I am proposing here, in agreement with Virilio, is that the sense of human-enfolded space was radically transformed in 1943 when the German rocket-launched bombs began to fall on London without warning, shattering the common sense of civilized, non-combatant, protected space, and that this remade human feelings towards external space thoroughly. As a consequence, I maintain, a consciousness of civilian aerial bombing, of atomic weapons, of military rocketry and of the eventual militarization of outer-space has greatly engendered the abandonment of the horizontal line in art, which for thousands of years had been the basis of aesthetics and proportion. Of course accompanying this new sense of noise space was a general post-war urge to position one's artistic activities and ideas outside of previous contexts; in western art and philosophy's case, outside of Surrealism and Existentialism.

In terms of a transformation of our sense of internal space, I find it amazing that Dr. Albert Hofmann (a biochemist at the Sandoz pharmaceutical firm in Basel, Switzerland) accidentally discovered LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate) the same year that rocket-launched bombs began to drop from the sky: 1943. LSD was first synthesized in 1938 by Hofmann but he did not know what he had synthesized until 1943 when he accidentally absorbed a small amount of LSD (which is colorless, odorless, and tasteless) and thus discovered its visionary properties. With this ingestion, Hoffman, after surveying the room he was in, realized that he now formed a nice noise continuum with everything in sight. The room seemed to shimmer in the sunlight, and he became aware of the atomic substructure that underlay the visible world of the senses.

The problems of LSD's experiential description are notorious, and the typology of its effects vary, but the central experience is one where a new level of consciousness emerges. As this cultural phenomenon did much to change the art of the 1960s to the 1980s, I shall attempt to describe LSD's salient properties as they apply to the art noise experience. Foremost in this regard is that, when experiencing the chemical, the awareness of individual identity somewhat evaporates and subject/object relationships tend to dissolve. The world seems as if it is simply a fluid, shifting extension of mind and it shimmers as if it were charged with a high-voltage electricity. Additionally, the subject often feels melted into the environment and somehow contiguous with it and there is an acute awareness of the atomic substructure of reality which makes it seem that one could pass through a wall or another person. Most importantly, the subject is somehow united with a sense of unified ground of being, and that urge, as we have seen, has driven the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal since the beginning of time.

As Bohm and others have shown us, everything in the universe is made up of, and seen as, part of the seamless unified ground of the holographic total-fabric, and LSD seems to make this visible. Furthermore, this unified ground paradigm began forcefully entering Western consciousness just following World War II's brutal demonstration of nuclear destructive power on Japan and, as we will soon see here, began to be reflected forcefully in vanguard art of the post-war period.

The Noisiness of Jackson Pollock

As reported in the artist Raphael Soyer's (1899–1987) New York Times' obituary on November 25, 1987, Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) said to Soyer one day: “Why do you paint like you do? There are planes flying, and you paint realistically. You don't belong to our time”. From this statement, we know that even though Pollock took his first trip on an airplane (to Chicago) in 1951, he was obviously acutely aware of the expanding nature of technological space that was defining the 20^th century and its art. Pollock maintained that paramount concern in a radio interview with William Wright in 1950 when he said, “My opinion is that new needs need new techniques. The modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio in the old forms of the Renaissance”. According to Pollock, if art is to be contemporary, by definition, it must address the issues of its time.

The impact of Picasso's Guernica (which arrived in New York City in 1939 at the Museum of Modern Art) with its mural size tied to its noisy theme of aerial bombardment on a defenseless population had a stirring effect on Pollock. Guernica's inventive formal automatism (which had been introduced to Picasso via the French Surrealists) and its social conscience, in conjunction with its exploration of collective unconscious fear and guilt, served as a dramatic catalyst for Pollock's expanding idea of art that culminated in the great all-over syncretistic paintings beginning in 1947.

In the late-1940s and early-1950s in New York, certain artists began to displace the emphasis in painting onto the act of painting itself. Painting became the document of an anxious activity rather than a visual composition. Among them was Jackson Pollock. Influenced by André Breton's Surrealist theories and experiments in unconscious creation, Pollock produced his consequential drip paintings where, instead of touching the brush to the canvas, he placed the canvas on the floor, stood over and on it, and flung/dripped paint onto it, often by making large sweeping patterns. Pollock, via Cubist and Surrealist theories, integrated the tautness of the ground (the flat picture-plane) with illusionistic figural-depth, thereby constructing a tightness of picture-plane (through the extent to which the immediacy of the field is forgrounded) that is at one and the same time non-illusionistic, while simultaneously tending to disintegrate into randon noise. The painterly consequences, with their incredibly rich eidetic depth, are suggestive of further abstract noisy spaces and states of mind. This proposal of an oppositional counter-tradition to geometrical perspective places Pollock in a key position to bolster noisy consciousness. The resulting radicalization, as regards their distribution of visual incident into the optical field, manifests an omni-perspectivalism which is exemplary of the ambient omni-directional aspects of noise.

As evidence of this trend's beginnings, in 1943 Pollock painted the engulfing Mural, 1943 for Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) in the dimensions of 2.47 by 6.05 meters (about 8 by 19.8 feet). Pollock had been inspired to paint grand-scale works by the murals of the Mexican muralist José Orozco (1883–1949), for example his 1939 copula mural Mankind at the Hospital Cabana at Guadalajara, and by the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera (1886–1957) and Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974). With the Peggy Guggenheim commission, he transformed the canvas into a whole wall instead of a small object of contemplation which is visually and physically dominated by the viewer. Mural, 1943 set the precedent for the scale of Pollock's celebrated all-over drip-paintings (with their even distribution of compositional interest across an entire large surface) and it also forced the artist onto the floor for the first time, like the American Indian Navajo sand painters of Arizona and New Mexico whom he admired. Pollock had seen demonstrations of American Indian sand-painting (the making of designs and pictures in sand, made with ceremonial connotations) in 1941 at the Natural History Museum in New York and clearly the ideas behind Navajo sand-painting (its magical and healing aims) influenced Pollock's working method and objectives. By putting the canvas on the floor, Pollock said he could see the painting from all angles, even from inside it.

By late-Spring 1947, with the war over and the rebuilding of Europe in process, Pollock began a new series of paintings for his new gallerist Betty Parsons (1900–1982) (as Peggy Guggenheim was moving back to Europe) which was to open January 5th, 1948, in his new (much expanded) atelier, a renovated barn in The Springs, Long Island. As Landau reports in Jackson Pollock, we will never know precisely what initiated the radical breakthrough in procedure that occurred between Pollock's last exhibition at Guggenheim's gallery Art of This Century and the show he was preparing for Betty Parson's gallery. There are only two documents to help us towards an understanding of why, just then, Pollock strides into what I can justifiably call his immersive noise period. One is an application that Pollock prepared in October 1947 as part of a bid for a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation grant (which he was not awarded). As Landau suggests, Pollock's application formulation seems to be inspired by Clement Greenberg's (1909–1994) review in the Nation's art column of February 1, 1947 of Pollock's previous show at Art of This Century, in which Greenberg wrote: “Pollock points a way beyond the easel, beyond the mobile, framed picture, to the mural”. In accord with this idea, Pollock wrote in his Guggenheim Fellowship statement; “I intend to paint large movable pictures which function between the easel and the mural..”. and “I believe the easel picture to be a dying form, and the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural”. Pollock went on to further articulate this artistic intention in Possibilities (Winter 1947–8), a magazine edited by the artist Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) and the critic Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978). In Pollock's artist's statement entitled My Painting, he wrote how he preferred to work on the floor for “on the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method of Indian sand painters of the West”.

Following the Peggy Guggenheim commission, Pollock desired to paint larger and larger surfaces (almost total environments), especially during the years 1947 and 1948 when he began preparing himself to break with the tradition of European easel painting. Pollock's ensuing appeal for mural commissions increased and in a 1949 letter to his dealer, Betty Parsons, he wrote, “I want to mention that I am going to try to get some mural commissions through an agent. I feel it is important for me to broaden my possibilities in this line of development”. The same year Pollock told an interviewer, “The direction that painting seems to be taking is away from the easel, into some sort of wall painting. Some of my canvases are an impractical size ... 9 by 18 feet! But I enjoy working big and whenever I have a chance I do it whether it's practical or not”. With the increased size of his canvases, Pollock started to work on them unstretched and to paint them horizontally, laying them flat on the floor at his feet. Then he felt in the painting. By working directly on the floor, Pollock was able not only to use gravity to facilitate his radical method of paint application, he was also able to walk around and on the composition, reaching into every part by literally stepping into them.

The viewer of one of Pollock's vast paintings is enticed to recreate mentally (and viscerally) the introscopic noise space Pollock seemed to call upon in the creation of his paintings. Lee Krasner (1908–1984), Pollock's companion and peer, spoke of this space as Pollock's intuitive “pursuit of unframed space” which Pollock sought in order to create a spatial continuousness that no longer distinguished between the pictorial space and the area in which the viewer stood. As such, Pollock's imposing paintings demand that the observer relinquish intellectual control (as the beholder is now torn free of unyielding Renaissance perspective) and dive into the energetic noise (through the eye being drawn into the excessive aspect of the painting) and therein dissolve into the dazzling chaos of the individual lines which are also, at the same time, creating a uniformly structured whole-field.

I am reminded here of Wassily Kandinsky (who was a major influence on Pollock) and his book Text Arista (that Pollock owned). In it, Kandinsky writes about learning to look at a picture not only from the outside, but to enter it and to move around in it. With Pollock's all-over, syncretistic noise composition, this hypothetical entrance is facilitated as there is no point of reference, no orientation, no parts to its whole [264] (as in Lascaux's Apse). In contrast with the devices of European Renaissance perspective, Pollock sought to draw the viewer into the canvas, not by establishing a distant vanishing-point, but by conceptually eliminating the frame so as to permit the eye to follow the curvilinear patterns beyond the canvas and into the implied surrounding noise space without being stopped by the edges. Here the intention was to create paintings without beginning or end, as the vastly increased size of the canvas and its elimination of the traditional frame produced an effect suggesting the ideal immersive 360° noise bubble. [265] This is the unrestrained space of ideal noise, a space where a harmony with the irrationality of noise is encountered. For this, Pollock's work from the late-1940s is an art historical noise watershed.

Relevant also to these concerns are the semi-pejorative statements made by Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) (author of the famous account of a psychedelic encounter with a Belle Portugal rose under the guidance of the Canadian psychiatrist and LSD researcher Humphry Osmond (1917–2004)) concerning Pollock's painting, Cathedral, from a 1948 Parsons exhibition. Huxley made these remarks as a participant in the Roundtable on Modern Art, a panel discussion held at the Museum of Modern Art from which excerpts were reproduced in Life magazine's issue of October 11, 1948. In it, Huxley points out Cathedral's lack of focus due to its all-over compositional approach, saying “It raises the question of why it stops when it does. The artist could go on forever. (Laughter) I don't know. It seems like a panel for a wallpaper which is repeated indefinitely around the wall”.

Taking this “wallpaper (...) repeated indefinitely around the wall” aspect seriously, the architect Peter Blake (1920–2006), in planning the architectural strategy for what was proposed as the Jackson Pollock Museum, had the idea (with Pollock) to extend the paintings indefinitely around the space. In an article concerned with the project named “Unframed Space: A Museum for Jackson Pollock's Paintings” in Interiors magazine, Arthur Drexler (1925–1987) wrote that Pollock's paintings “seem as though they might very well be extended indefinitely, and it is precisely this quality that has been emphasized in the central unit of the plan”. About the continuous rhythms of Pollock's paintings, Drexler goes on to describe how, in the model of the museum, “a painting 17 feet long constitutes an entire wall. It is terminated on both ends not by a frame or a solid partition, but by mirrors. The painting is thus extended into miles of reflected space, and leaves no doubt in the observer's mind as to this particular aspect of Pollock's work”. In another immersive noise application of Pollock's implied infinity, the artist/architect Tony Smith (1912–1980) designed a hexagonal Catholic church which was to be decorated by stained glass windows executed by Pollock, though the project never went beyond the formulation stage.

It is pleasing to recall that Pollock had written in his Guggenheim Fellowship statement that “I believe the time is not yet ripe for a full transition from easel to mural. The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state, and an attempt to point out the direction of the future, without arriving there completely”. This “direction of the future” was indeed picked up by the generation of artists that ensued Pollock.

The written testimony concerning Pollock's influence derives mainly from the two-part series run in Art News in 1967 entitled “Jackson Pollock: An Artists' Symposium” (which included statements by Allan Kaprow (1927–2006), Alfred Otto Wofgang Schulze Wols (1913–1951) and Claes Oldenburg) and Allan Kaprow's “Legacy of Jackson Pollock”, also published by Art News in 1958, the year that saw Kaprow's first informal Happening.

For the artists of the next generation, the generation of the 1960s, Pollock generally represented a liberation of the artwork from traditional means and the inclusion of the artist's life and actions into the work, which lead to other implicit noise conclusions, that is, a freedom from confining structures and the inclusion of movement, gesture, and bodily motion into the realm of visual art. As Kaprow saw it, Pollock “destroyed painting” and freed the painter from working solely in two dimensions. Instead of a 'painter,' one became an 'artist'—capable of working in all and any media.

Noise Event Happening

In his seminal A Primer of Happenings and Space/Time Art, Al Hansen states that the idea of the Happening is that of “the artwork enclosing the observer, of art that overlaps and interpenetrates different art forms [...] these performances engulf the spectator: the environment is a work of art that the observer goes into and walks around in and in some cases actually participates in”. [266] Generally speaking then, Happenings bombard the participant with an excess of sensations which the viewer has to order in his or her mind to give the overall quality of the continuous commotion (noisily structured like a Cubist assemblage) cohesion. But also Happenings emphasized extemporaneous and migratory elements while manipulating performers, props and audience in ways designed to break down barriers between performance and audience. A Happening was neither an art exhibit nor a theatrical event but an immersive noise site for experimentation in perception.

The prime source of the Happening's central noise concept is that of collage, the juxtaposition of unrelated real-life elements in relationships contrived by the artist—that innovation by which Synthetic Cubism had ravaged the Renaissance window-in-the-wall conception of pictorial space. Most often, Happenings placed art inside an ideal banal sphere which was imagined less separated from everyday experience, thus challenging the previously established elite hierarchy of values. Towards this end, Happenings were sited in parking-lots, factories or on the street, and involved materials with no fine-art associations. By its emphasis on transient effects and materials, Happenings challenged notions of the permanence of art and the permanence of aesthetic values, hence the Happening became one of the most visible forms of artistic expression of the revolutionary aspect of the 1960s. [267]

Allan Kaprow, in the aforementioned Art News article “Jackson Pollock: An Artists' Symposium”, explained Pollock's role as progenitor of the Happening thus: “When his all-over canvases were shown at Betty Parsons's gallery around 1950, with four windowless walls nearly covered, the effect was that of an overwhelming environment, the paintings' skin rising towards the middle of the room, drenching and assaulting the visitor in waves of attacking and retreating pulsations. [...]. The expanding scale of Pollock's work, their reiterative configurations prompting the marvellous thought that they could go on forever in any direction including out, soon made the gallery as useless as the canvas, and choices of wider and wider fields of environmental reference followed. In process, the Happening was developed”. However, in Pollock Painting: The Photographs of Hans Namuth, Barbara Rose proposes that it was the publication of Hans Namuth's photographs and his film of Pollock painting that are responsible for the development of Happenings (as well as anti-form, distributional, conceptual, performance, and body art). But whatever the specific rationale, the implications of Pollock's work were vast, exerting even a persuasive impact on avant-garde dance, as it has been often noted that the dance choreography of Merce Cunningham is closely related to Pollock's painting. Cunningham essentially fused noise ideas extrapolated from Pollock with those of Marcel Duchamp, as understood and practised by his collaborating composer, John Cage. This tendency in dance was explored in the early-1960s by Jill Johnston, Yvonne Rainer and Ann Halprin.

The feeling/concept of “space in which anything can happen” seems to summarize Pollock's general significance to the artists he inspired. As an example, Claes Oldenburg, self-described as a “Post-Pollock painter” in the 1967 Art News article, conceived of himself as standing on the canvas that became his surroundings, and which stretched as far as he could see or hear. This suggests the idea of a new theme of distribution where the city's many signs are no longer depicted but included in the work, hence immersing the artist (and viewer's attention) in a new (Pop) art based on reproduction.

Certainly by the mid-1950s, media (print, radio, and television) influenced almost everything everywhere in post-industrialized countries, including members of the Gutai Group of Osaka Japan, an art-theater group made up of painters (including Akira Kanayama, Sadamasa Motonaga, Shuso Mukai, Saburo Mirakami, Atsuko Tanaka, Shozo Shinamoto and Kazua Shiraga). They had seen photographs of the theatrical French theoretician and action painter Georges Mathieu in Life Magazine decked out in an elaborate costume painting before television cameras at the Sarah Bernhardt Théâtre in Paris in 1956. These photos inspired their own live painting performances in which they threw balls of paint at the canvas or, in another instance, where an artist ran and leaped through a series of sequential canvases.

Moreover, Kazua Shiraga, a member of the Gutai Group, adapted and exaggerated Pollock's painting techniques and Mathieu's theatrical presentation of the painting-action with his Making a Work with His Own Body (1955), where the artist wallowed in the paint medium with his entire body, and again at the Festival di Osaka's Painting Performance (1959). Hanging from a rope, Shiraga threw himself, in a kind of overwrought psychic automatism, on the canvas and spread lumps of color with his feet around while swinging on the rope. Here the artist is literally inside the painting in a way which we will see again with the Vienna Actionists. Shiraga's work predates and reminds us of Yves Klein's well known 1960 Symphonie Monotone (Monotone Symphony) painting/music performance at the Galerie International d'Art Contemporain in Paris, especially when we consider it from the immersive position of the three female models themselves (one of whom I met and discussed this with). [268]

Another earlier moment leading to the program of the Happening can be traced to an evening in 1952 organized by John Cage at Black Mountain College. For the performance, an audience was seated in four inward-facing blocks as Cage delivered a lecture, punctuated by silences, from the top of a ladder. Poet Charles Olsen (1910–1970) and others read poems from another ladder while David Tudor played a piano and Robert Rauschenberg played a wind-up gramophone. Through this rich conflicting event, Merce Cunningham and other dancers moved about through the space where some of Rauschenberg's early white-on-white White Paintings were suspended as a sort of false ceiling overhead. [269]

In the mid-1980s, I obtained one of Rauschenberg’s black and white silkscreens from his Current and Surface Series (1970). Living with this work, I discovered the best of Rauschenberg’s noise work I think—work that contains rhizomatic layered image sequences where the viewer interprets the progression of images as though reading a ruined communication system arranged in multiple, simultaneous combinations. Rauschenberg here dissolves away the paradigmatic model of media as communications and replaces it with one of failed pageant that leads to both a collapse of meaning and the destruction of distinctions between media and myth. In Rauschenberg’s media noise society, I saw through the numerous saturating media messages, so that information and meaning imploded into pure effect, without content or meaning. In fact, here content becomes decorative and ornate.

This noisy rhizomatic Rauschenberg demands a different kind of looking—akin to the aggregated viewpoints of Cubism compared by John Cage to watching “many television sets working simultaneously all tuned in differently”. [270] In my piece from his Current and Surface Series, there is no obvious hierarchy of images to scan. The trajectory of visual exploration for it is of our own choosing—a dysfunctional situation that no longer communicates purposeful messages but rather proposes noise pattern. Here we have a rhizomatic visual pleasure, where everything equally connects to everything else and so replaces visual purpose. This is a noise art that demands of society an active visualizing participation in private interpretations—and thus is a legitimate metaphor for contemporary art as a form of simulation-shattering engagement. It functions by overloading representation to a point where it becomes non-representational noise. [271]

John Cage's strict musical development does not concern us here, except for his idea—derived from the work of Edgard Varése and the Zen philosophy of Daisety Taitaro Suzuki (1870–1966)—of treating all forms of noise as sound to be used by the composer, together with the corollary that silence is just as important. This led him ultimately to the nec plus ultra of noise music, 4' 33", perhaps the musical equivalent of the white-on-white canvases of Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935). 4' 33" consists of “silence” performed for this duration of time. In 4' 3", the fortuitous immersive noises in the room, usually unnoticed, and the hearers' own thoughts, become the content of the piece.

In terms of one's own thoughts becoming the content of a piece, we must note that in 1954, Dr. John C. Lilly, a pioneer in brain and behavioral research studies, began experimenting with the concept of restricting the amount of external sensory stimuli to the brain in a kind of anti-noise research project. When Lilly built his first isolation environment (what came to be known as isolation float tanks) he was determined to prove that the brain, without environmental input, would simply go to sleep. Using his own being for experiments, he learned the opposite is true. By removing all visual, acoustical, tactile and temperature stimuli, Lilly found that the brain continues to function independently and at an even higher level than normal. I have had this experience myself, so I know it to be true.

But the artist most identified with the external noise Happening and perhaps its chief exponent is John Cage's composition class student, Allan Kaprow. Kaprow began as a painter and his paintings moved from Abstract Expressionism into increasingly complex action-collage assemblages, like Pentiy Arcade (1956), Wall (1959) and Kiosk (1959), which were developed following his interest in the work of Jackson Pollock. The action-collages became bigger and projected further and further from the walls and into the room and included more and more audible elements. A person entering an action-collaged-noise space would become lost in an excessive labyrinthine atmosphere. Kaprow eventually thought how much better it would be if a visitor could just go out of doors. Thus in Kaprow's form of the Happening, ordinary people, ordinary time, and the everyday spaces of street and supermarket noise, were frequently merged.

Kaprow became a professor of art history, and this academic side of his activities made him a fluent and perceptive theorist, enabling him to elucidate how Happenings evolved from the action-collage environment idea of opening up the mind and the eye to the world of the street. In his book, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, Kaprow explains the fusion of the concepts behind Pollock's gestural paintings and the junk-assemblage sculpture movement as culminated in this aspect of the Happening. Kaprow also wrote in his famous 1958 essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” that “Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of everyday life”.

By 1957, Kaprow's work became exclusively environmental involving lights, odors, electronic sounds and unusual materials. His environment at the Hansa Gallery in 1958 contained no art objects as such, but initiated a conception that art was experienced as a surrounding rather than a picture or sculpture to be looked at, a surrounding that engaged the visitor with things to do. However, Kaprow's first mature noise Happening, which involved Dada provocation, assemblage, and action painting, was 18 Happenings in 6 Parts that took place at the Reuban Gallery in October 1959 in New York City. It was tightly scripted and drilled. [272] After 18 Happenings, Kaprow did a number of similar pieces, including Coca-Cola, Shirley Cannonball? and A Spring Happening, the latter taking place in the new downstairs premises of the Reuben Gallery in March 1961. After waiting in a curtained-off lobby, the audience was shown into a dark tunnel, made of wood and hardboard painted black, and with a slit running along both sides at eye-level where they remained for the duration of the piece.

For the next seven years, Kaprow expanded the potential of the environment in a gallery setting, but gradually the showroom space was abandoned for more informal and natural settings such as vacant breweries, open fields, and woods. By 1969, Kaprow's work had evolved so distinctly into new phases that he gave up the designation Happening and adopted Michael Kirby's (1931–1997) term Activity.

By the early-1960s, artists’ noise actions performed in front of audiences and or cameras became more and more familiar as the Happening movement gained momentum. Two types of Happenings emerged: one involving a more or less static audience, and the other a walk-around environment (like Kaprow's Words, which was installed at the Smolin Gallery in 1962). Words was an arrangement of audience-participation devices, rolls of words to move, words on cards hung on strings, words to pin up and rubber-stamps to make phrases with. Garage, An Apple Shrine and Yard (which filled the Martha Jackson Gallery with car tires) also utilized such an approach.

In Paris during the late-1950s, a Marcel Duchamp-inspired renewed interest in Dada noise gave rise to various actions, dé-collages, and performances by artists such as Robert Filliou (1926–1987) and Jean-Jacques Lebel, the most active member of the group of younger artists to emerge from the Nouveaux Réalistes precepts. As an example of the first approach to the Happening, in an early 1960 Happening Funeral Ceremony of the Anti-Process conducted in Venice, Italy, Lebel invited the audience to attend a ceremony in formal dress. In a decorated room within a grand residence, a draped 'cadaver' rested on a plinth which was then ritually stabbed by an 'executioner' while a 'service' was read consisting of extracts from the previously mentioned French decadent writer Joris-Karl Huysmans and the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). Then, pall-bearers carried the coffin out into a gondola and the 'body,' which was in fact a mechanical noise music sculpture by Jean Tinguely (1925–1991), was ceremonially slid into the canal.

Conspicuous, too, in this regard was the fascinating technologically-aided presentation of Mark Boyle, the performance Son et Lumière for Body Fluids (1966), where he presented a heterosexual couple making love with their encephalograms projected and enlarged on a screen above them. [273] Boyle went on to create light-shows for the psychedelic rock group, Soft Machine, and was involved in an early British experimental night-club called UFO.

Another important early noise Happening artist is Carolee Schneemann, particularly with her highly immersive (for the participants) and spectacular Happening bacchanal called Meat Joy, performed at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City in 1964 and in various locations in Europe (including the Festival de la libre expression at the American Center in Paris in 1964).

The Dionysian mystical impact of Schneemann's Meat Joy was heightened by the sexual implications of voluptuous, scantily clad people wallowing provocatively in paint and meat, somewhat beyond the truism that all sexual activity is about the mixing of gametes. Schneemann's environmental noise performance (performed in what she characterized as a “sensory arena”), Illinois Central, utilized a 360° visual environment contrived with film and slides that shifted over time. [274] Schneemann's grotto-like niche entitled Up To and Including Her Limits (Trackings), which she built for herself at the Basel Art Fair in 1976 also impresses, as the work addresses noise as liberation from confine. So, too, does David Tudor's Rainforest IV of 1973 (realized by Composers Inside Electronics), as the viewer is an integral part of the work. Rainforest extended the implications of Erik Satie's ambient Furniture Music of 1920. Like Satie (whom Tudor admired) Rainforest IV overturned the traditional view that music is performed at a specific time in a proscenium space in which the performers and audience are separate.

This relates to Yoko Ono's Cut Piece, first performed in Tokyo in 1964, in which she invited the audience to cut her clothes off, and deserves reference in terms of an artist putting herself in a visceral environment with a high-resonance of associative connotations. The same holds true for Yayoi Kusama, whose theoretical polemic concerning the distributed, scattered, multiplied, and obliterated self is best established, as she herself states, as an “obliteration of everything (including myself and others)” into a beguiling and excessive artifice which gives birth to an opalescent non-existence. [275] In explanation of her installation work, Yayoi Kusama said, “One day, I was looking at a table cloth covered in red flowers, which was spread out on the table. Then I looked up toward the ceiling. There, on the windows and even on the pillars, I could see the same red flowers. They were all over the place in the room, my body, and entire universe. I finally came to a self-obliteration and returned to be restored to the infinity of eternal time and the absoluteness of space”. [276] Paradoxically, Kusama tried to achieve an expression of this idea of the obliterated self by exposing herself (and others) fully nude and painted with polka-dots in various Happenings at high-profile New York City locations. Kusama staged several public demonstrations of painted polka-dotted nakedness entitled Anatomic Explosion, most notably on Wall Street, in the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1968 at the statue of Alice in Wonderland in Central Park.

Certainly, we must also briefly recall the Happenings of Jim Dine, most notably Car Crash (1960) and those of Wolf Vostell, for example his You (1964). Important, too, were the Happenings of Al Hansen, Dick Higgins (1938–1998), Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms, Robert Whitman, Meredith Monk, Jeff Nuttall, John Latham and later the group improvisations of the Movement Collective.

But the Abstract Expressionist ancestry of noise as aesthetic experience is not confined to post-Pollock aesthetics. In this respect it is significant to note that a motion-picture immersive environment called Impressions of Speed appeared at the 1958 Brussels World Fair which seated 25 people at a time in the cab of a simulated railroad-engine. On view via wide screens was a color landscape in the front and on the two sides as well; a continuous, all-encompassing image projected on the simulated windows in an attempt to duplicate the total impression of actual peripheral noise experience.

To review the history of painting in relation to aspects of noise, I would be remiss to neglect to mention Post-Abstract Expressionist applications as practised by Robert Ryman. The 'pure' opticality of the color white embraced by Ryman is a prime example of subtle noise, as in his white paintings he addresses the problems arising from the tension created from the opposition between surface materiality and opticality in relationship to the edge of the painting and its relationship to the wall on which it is hung. This ambiguity of the painting's boundary in relation to the wall that contains it draws attention into an expanded subtle noise field which we will see will come to define the immersive art of the 1960s and 70s. Ryman does this by extending the optical white shimmering-field of color/light out from the painting onto the white gallery walls which present it. Now it is really the wall that provides the painter with his ground which Ryman himself clarifies when he writes “the wall plane is actually part of the painting and it extends out three or four feet...”. Hence Ryman presents his paintings as part of the white cube that has come to represent modernist ideals of purity and neutrality. The whiteness of the paintings require the whiteness of the walls, as the white-painted optical field spills out over the confining edge of the painting to fill, theoretically, the entire wall and room, thus texture, surface-plane, color and wall are unified. As Ryman himself says: “The wall becomes very much a part of the work”, and so by blurring the difference between painting and wall, Ryman extends our consciousness of painting into an expanded, immersive, subtle, visual noise environment. Of course, this liberation of color from form in the service of filling a room can also be seen in the neon-tube installations of Dan Flavin, where color spills out over the walls of the gallery in which the piece is installed, expanding its presence dramatically and soaking the visitor to the space in its soft, vibrating light.

So in the Viennese Actionist disposition, to move away from Abstract Expressionist action painting in the 1960s and towards the performance-oriented tendency of Actionism, was for the Viennese Actionists, very much in stride with the significant art of their era, impelled, as they were, by a Herculean sense of nosiy idealism based on a felt necessity for emancipation from what they saw as the repressive constraints of church and state power. Consequently, their Actions were intentionally and noisily inciting: deliberately exhibitionist, abhorrent, sexist and/or sacrilegious.

In a sense, Actionism can be seen in retrospect as a logical extenuation of the heroic male individuality of the Abstract Expressionist generation and their idealistic attempt to create a new post-war world based on an intimate subjectivity in pursuit of societal freedoms by turning their back on ideological traditions and engaging in the supposed non-ideological material world of the immediate. Though this seems an overly naïve belief to us now, it did provide the idealistic engine to what became a body of incredible noise work. In the early 1960s, the Actionists Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Alfons Schilling and Rudolf Schwarzkogler began sensing their late connection with the Abstract Expressionist movement when already the arbitrary nature of personal subjective expression was beginning to become apparent in the repetitions of what became the Abstract Expressionist gestural formula. By the time the Actionists engaged in it, what was originally hailed as a new common language, gestural abstraction, began to degenerate into a self-indulgent, dipsomaniac activity in the hands of the more recent Abstract Expressionist neophytes. To their credit, the Actionist artists began to see that the total reliance on Abstract Expressionism's subjective feeling of personal assertion (which surprisingly began to look ever more and more similar) meant that Abstract Expressionism's message of immediacy and physicality was arbitrary. To counterbalance this, the Actionists, in a peculiarly comparative manner to the Pop and especially the Fluxus artists, aimed to produce art closer to real life and to re-mix aspects of reality into their art. [277] Thus they moved away from Abstract Expressionist ideology and eventually towards a greater "objectivity" of real life, which in turn led to the urge to challenge the power structures of church and state. Therefore, the Actionists moved art away from represented conflict (as recorded on the Abstract Expressionist canvas) and towards political conflicts and social associations in life between people.

In the Viennese studio, Günter Brus had been drawn towards Abstract Expressionist type informel painting and, following Pollock's lead, began identifying himself as working from inside of nature. Early on, he exemplified this ideology in his Labyrinth Paintings which he executed through the means of disorientation in immersive space. In the autumn of 1960, Brus almost entirely cleaned out his 2.5 by 6 meter (roughly 8.2 by 19.6 feet) painting studio and placed white-painted paper over all the available walls and began making use of the entire room (from floor to ceiling) in the unfettered splattering application of black paint, utilizing all three of the available surfaces simultaneously in an attempt to fracture the domination of the compositional mid-point and to penetrate into a much fuller sensation of immersive space. By doing so, Brus developed the ideal of the all-pervasive sphere in which the artist would be enclosed and in which the artist would then paint thoroughly in three-dimensions, using both feet and both hands.

Günter Brus's close painter friend at the time was Alfons Schilling, an artist who went on to utilize a mechanical machine in the creation of his paintings and who still later developed a brilliant series of consequential FOV modifying viewer head-pieces.

As documentation of the ideals under pursuit in the Actionist circle, Schilling left us some interesting extracts from his notebook from early-1961, which also shed light on the issue of immersive thinking in post-Abstract Expressionist painting. In them he wrote, “I can only feel infinity if I break out and reach beyond the closed composition and the frame. [...]. One must be able to enter my pictures from all sides and be able to leave it from all sides; the picture then continues like a tone that has been struck. [...]. The possibility of a limitless, never-ending painting can only be represented by means of a section. How can I possibly perceive 'infinity' in a picture, as long as the possibility of seeing pictures as something complete in themselves, is still not removed. Every barrier must be removed from one's vision (even if it is only the edge of the picture). A picture must offer no opportunity of beginning or ending anywhere. [...]. Getting inside, being inside, and having achieved unity I experience everything in a state of transformation”.

In 1963, Günter Brus received 5000 schillings from the Institut zur Förderung der Künste to assist him in the creation of a series of large-scale paintings. To do these large paintings, he stretched string backwards and forwards across empty gallery rooms and hung molino (a cheap substitute for canvas) and paper so that they reached the floor in order to create a labyrinth which would help prevent him from preconceiving a compositional idea too quickly. He then painted all the surfaces as if it were one large painting that completely surrounded him. Few people saw the painted labyrinth, however.

Subsequently, in the autumn of 1964, Brus carried out his first real Action titled Ana which took place in Otto Mühl's studio, a fellow artist and friend. In preparation for Ana, Brus painted Mühl's studio and several objects in the room (typical of a Viennese bourgeois apartment) a stark white. In effect, he began his Action with the classic white canvas, now extended out into the third-dimension. Hence he begins in an enveloping, immersive, unified, total-space. On starting the work, he emphasized this enveloping further by rolling across the floor of the room with his body completely wrapped in pieces of white cloth. The pieces of cloth unwound as a result of the motion and he remained motionless for a long period of time. Then Brus began to stream black paint over the white objects and over his wife who also participated (passively) in the action, with the aim of making a living painting. He then burst into a bout of painting and besmeared the walls until exhausted.

After Ana, Brus decides to produce the action called Self-Painting in which his own physique was to serve as a painting surface with the intent of binding himself into the picture-plane in order to “become one with the picture” and to thereby “disappear into the picture”. words which remind us of Yayoi Kusama's avowed ideal of doing likewise. As mentioned, Kusama has described the emergence of this perception/ideal by recounting a moment when she was watching a red pattern of a tablecloth coat everything around her and then swallow her up this way; “When I looked up, I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows, and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness”. [278] With apparently similar aims, Brus designed Self-Painting as a soundless action separated into three separate tableaux in which Brus placed together different parts of his painted white body with disparate objects that were also painted milky white. A jet black streak is painted vertically over Brus's face by himself and along his forearm as if his body had been ripped open by one of Barnett Newman's majestic zips.

In January 1965, Brus went on to perform painting actions Silver, Self-Painting II and Self-Mutilation for a film-maker and photographer and, on July 6^th, 1965, he performed a Self-Painting at the Galerie Junge Generation in Vienna. The day before, on July 5^th, he painted himself as in the Self-Painting Actions and proceeded to stride across Vienna as a living painting, but was stopped and arrested by a policeman for causing a civic disturbance.

Brus's peer Otto Mühl, too, was coming from the process-oriented matière side of Art Informel and the related assemblage movement of the Nouveaux Réalistes (for example Arman's accumulations of everyday rubbish) and the American junk sculpture movement. The term assemblage was coined in 1953 by Jean Dubuffet (1901–1983) to refer to works that supposedly went beyond the collage of Synthetic Cubism. In junk/assemblage sculpture of the late-1950s (and with Robert Rauschenberg's combines) art further challenged the boundary between everyday objects and High Art and the entire world opened up and became the raw material for the creation of art.

Mühl had met Brus in early December of 1960 at the famed Gesamtkunstwerk-oriented Sezession building and they shortly thereafter became engaged in an artistic discourse which eventually indelibly shaped both men's work. Otto Mühl wrote in “Weg aus dem Sumpf” in 1977 of Brus that “Brus painted in psychomotoric expressionist style, a wild criss-cross of lines hurled onto the paper. The paint sometimes exploded like a bomb when it hit the picture. That was total creative excess. I understood right away and was full of enthusiasm. The pictures were often 5 meters long by 3 meters high. The whole room was covered with splatters of paint, on the floor there was a centimeter thick layer of paint ooze that had dried up”. In 1961, Mühl gave up traditionally-scaled easel painting and began a series of Actions in which he poured paint and pigment onto paper and then wallowed in it, bringing structure to the pools of color. In a letter to his friend Erika Stocker dated January 8^th, 1961, Mühl writes, “I have, so to speak, produced my first tachiste picture. To do it I have developed an original technique. I painted it by laying it on the floor. It doesn't work on the easel anymore”. And on March 23^rd, 1961 he writes her again saying, “I wallowed in paint [...]. I slid from one end to the other, turning over once. In the process I worked the surface with my hands... “. Taking this sense of wallowing further, in May of 1961, Mühl created a full room installation in his studio called The Overcoming of the Easel Picture by the Representation of its Destruction Process by nailing or tying together his paintings into a unified Gesamtkunstwerk. Following this installation, Mühl moved increasingly towards creating three-dimensional assemblages and from there deeper into performance Actions.

Disappearance of the Noisy Art Object into the System

In retrospect, the shift in art in the 1960s and 1970s towards an open, more immersively inviting noise dominion of self-attentiveness, with its emphasis on recontextualization and release from the framing apparatus, can be seen as an anticipation of and desire for omni-directional ambient noise consciousness, with its ideal 360° bubble-like vista. This optic, which is located radiating out in all virtual directions at once, can be seen as a further extenuation of the expanded field that cybernetic-influenced art instigated. [279]

The disappearance of the objet d'art in roughly 1965 marked the emergence indicative of post-modernist immersive noise experimentation, which was postulated on the assumption that the art experience needed broadening. Frank Popper's seminal book Art-Action and Participation is an important reference to this development, as is Jack Burnham's book Beyond Modern Sculpture. Burnham arrived at the conclusion that cybernetic sculpture, or rather the cybernetically-informed sculptor, is not simply adopting new materials and new standards of fabrication, but evolving a new aesthetic, now synchronized with technical ideals. Cybernetics had demonstrated that the configuration of a system is an index of the performance that may be expected from it, hence cybernetics' extremely circular-state yields an extended aesthetic noise consciousness on the basis of connected self-attentiveness, and it is within this elastic self-attentive aesthetic framework where we will expect to find new noise attitudes emerging in art.

The recontextualization of the objet d'art into the global envelopment of the noise environment (where the viewer is pulled away from the constraining aperture of the picture frame and more and more from the gallery frame) is indicative of the immersive qualities of the era under investigation here. This radical deframing opened up the viewing cone of the 1950s' post-cubist/post-war painting space towards a more thorough literalization of the imagined (or implied) non-partial field of universal noise surroundings/conceptualizations of abstract space. Here, framed areas of noise may not be singled out and made to represent the totality of range.

This noise immersive space, where partial framed and arranged views may not be cut out of the total surround, finds a very real literalization in the open field of art in the 1960s and 1970s, and the broad holonogic gaze which it provokes is a huge step in the direction of escaping the limits of narrow representation in the interests of hyper-noise consciousness. From this point on, only a technique that fully undermines the proscenium and window-like frame can stand in for the abstract, all-over, intemperate 360° bubble-noise which the frame cuts and excludes. In this drift towards anti-representationalism, noise art begins leaving the orbit of the framing apparatus and of the tunnel vision that fixed a segment of the objective world at one end and the viewer at the other. What had enabled that narrow cone of vision to simulate the entire visual atmospheric field previously, was possible precisely with the enclosure of that framing cone (tangent tunnel). But once that framing cone has dissolved through Kant's indeterminate supersensible, noise’s distributed spatiality, expansion, dematerialization, excess and/or any other number of Op, Cybernetic or Conceptualist artistic strategies, that narrow cone of representation is found wanting and a much more encompassing, atmospheric, scopic hyper-noise art is conceivable.

Art in the 1960s' open arena, then, is generally conceived of as a noise cluster of optical vectors which suggest a hyper-total, enveloping, non-vectored space that creates unaccustomed situations and sensations for the enthusiastic in an attempt to shift the political/social vortex away from outdated symbolic allegiances and towards sensate dynamic forces of change. As such, it stands in contrast to the standard histories and doctrines and ideas that were being propagated in the mass media at the time.

Here I will review some pertinent noise examples concerning the semi-disappearance of the objet d'art which occurred in the late-1960s that to a great extent set the tone for vanguard art on through to the late-1970s when a revival of painting occurred under the designation of post-modernist appropriation/simulation. Of course, artists continued to paint and sculpt throughout the period of the 1960s and 1970s, and still up to this day, but they do so from a derrière-garde position, as traditionalists. This is so because a change in art occurred in the late-1960s when art typically lost its artisanal materiality (as discrete paintings and sculptures) and became increasingly time-based and ambient as a repercussion (primarily) of the legacy of painterly abstraction in the early and mid-20^th century. In terms of the immersive noise inclination, this expansion away from the two-dimensional canvas freed the spectator from stasis and encouraged an active atmosphere of contemplative reception within the work of art which was essentially attained through the compliant motion of the immersant in contact with the strategic liberties exacted in the expanded art. Artists increasingly aimed in this era to evoke noise possibilities within the imagination of their audience, to engage their active participation and to release art from its previous obligatory fidelities to the hypothetical and material status quo. Underlying this aim is a miasmatic noise idea which questions linear and hierarchical structures and seeks to replace them with atmospheric loose structures, keyed to a penetrable, reciprocal flow of events. This inclination might be further characterized as the deposit of hyper-noise within the immersant that will manifest at a later date as a personal and private inner art: the creation of future noise artists, in other words.

Much of the disappearance, de-definition and de-materialization of the art object that went beyond Modernism in the search for a total art of noise developed out of the visual spectator's participation that was called for in viewing Op Art: a hard-edge geometrical movement that flourished in the early-1960s (largely inspired by various optical experiments of Marcel Duchamp) in the work of Jesus-Rafael Soto, Bridget Riley, the GRAV group, Yayoi Kusama, Yaacov Agam, Pol Bury, Josef Albers, Marian Zazeela and Victor Vasarely, among others. Op Art called attention to the spectator's individual, constructive and changing perceptions, and thus called upon the attitude of the spectator to transfer the creative act increasingly upon him or herself. This ideal, in turn, beckons forth a consideration of the enlargement of the audience's normal participation, both in regard to the spectator’s ocular aptitude to instigate variations in the perceived optic, and to his or her capability to produce kinetic and aggregate exchanges on or within the work of art itself.

Indeed, Kinetic Art also played an important part in pioneering the unambiguous use of optical movement and in fashioning links between science, technology and art relating to the notion of the environment. Simply stated, the term kinetic means the study of the relationship between moving bodies, hence the term Kinetic Art is usually used to describe either three-dimensional mobiles or constructions that move in either foreordained or unplanned ways. With Op Art (which is kinetic in that Op situations employ optical illusion that effect an appearance of motion) and Kinetic Art (both conceptual descendants of the shifting noise perceptions initiated in 20^th century painting with Impressionism, Cubism and Futurism), the artwork under consideration is no longer merely a categorical system but increasingly an invocation to noise perception. The cognitive noise encounter that a spectator may undergo in an Op situation, perhaps best exemplified by Bridget Riley's projected circular Op environment done for the 1960 exhibition Situations in London, was instigated by the certitude that the spectator was obliged to take up consecutive positions in front of the display, in order to detect the series of shifting patterns and lines that were offering themselves to the onlooker from contrary and incompatible angles. Thus the element of personal choice and physical motion by the beholder is emphasized, resulting in a decline in the art object's sequestered, fetishistic standing as an objet d'art. This is well exemplified, too, by Jesus-Rafael Soto's process-based walk-through Op environments called Penetrables, which incorporated a tactile immersion into visual noise (with occasional sonorous elements) notable for their immersive noise attributes (given their realization on an architectural scale). The work increasingly becomes a co-operative production of the operation between the former objet d'art and me, as I am projecting my selfhood into the noise form and am thereby enabled to sense the various spatial possibilities the shifting hyper-noise suggests.

Many sensory noise projects, installations and environmental events produced by the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) excellently exemplify this trend. In Oiticica's work, the once established correlations between the spectator, the objet d'art and the artist is radically modified. With Oiticica, the emphasis is no longer on the objet d'art created by the artist, and certainly not solely on the personal fancy of the immersant, but on a third dramatizing maneuver similar to what Brion Gysin (1916–1986) and William S. Burroughs call the third mind. The third mind is based on Brion Gysin's rediscovery of Tristan Tzara's (1896–1963) Dada cut-up writing method which he encountered while cutting through a newspaper he was using to trim floor mats. Gysin did several experiments with cut-ups while living in Tangiers and shared them with his friend William S. Burroughs. Thereafter Burroughs used cut-ups in his books Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, and others. Gysin, too, was responsible for the absolutely noise-immersive optical Dream Machine that he invented based on the sparkling and flickering of the sun through the trees.

The principle behind the Dream Machine is that it generates wave-like patterns which strobe at around 10 Hz, the frequency of the alpha waves sometimes present in the part of the brainstem responsible for determining states of creative consciousness. As one sits (relaxed) in a room filled with the machine-generated flickering light, spectacular hyper-noise visualizations may occur due to the optical twinkle at work.

When I saw the The Third Mind exhibition in the fall of 2007 at Le Palais de Tokyo in Paris (curated by Ugo Rondinone) many noise issues arose in my mind. The show contained work from: Ronald Bladen, Lee Bontecou, Martin, Boyce, Joe Brainard, Valentin Carron, Vija Celmins, Bruce Conner, Verne Dawson, Jay Defeo, Trisha Donnelly, Urs Fischer, Bruno Gironcoli, Robert Gober, Nancy Grossman, Hans Josephsohn, Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, Toba Khedoori, Karen Kilimnik, Emma Kunz, Andrew Lord, Sarah Lucas, Hugo Markl, Cady Noland, Laurie Parsons, Jean-Frederic Schnyder, Josh Smith, Paul Thek, Andy Warhol, Rebecca Warren, and Sue Williams.

What is interesting about this disquieting show is to look at how this group show differs in its conjoining (or not) from other group shows by pinning it to the collaborative work of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs from the early 1960s known as The Third Mind. Moreover, can we place this Third Mind in the context of wider noise connections and ponder at what point does homage turn into exploitation?

Burroughs and Gysin, known predominantly, as mentioned, for the rediscovery of the Dada master Tristan Tzara's cut-up technique and for co-inventing the flickering Dream Machine device, worked together in the early 1960s on a publishing project that used a chance-based cut-up method. A cut-up method consists of cutting up and randomly reassembling various fragments of something to give them a completely new and unexpected meaning: 1+1=3. In the recent biography of Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Celebrate Myself, Ginsberg’s archivist, Bill Morgan, recounts some of the geneses of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs forays into radical Dada cut-up technique and collaboration based on Ginsberg’s diary entries.

In the mid-1950’s, Gysin pointed out to Burroughs that collage technique has been a regular tool in painting and graphics since half a century. This came as late news to the young Beat writers of that time, so it is perhaps not surprising that Ginsberg’s first exposure to Burroughs’s use of the cut-up was met with disdain—Ginsberg considered it something along the lines of a parlor trick. [280] Even more, Ginsberg speculated from NYC that Burroughs had lost his mind through lack of sex. [281] As a joke, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky cut up some of their own poems and rearranged them and sent them to Burroughs with the note, “Just having a little fun mother”. [282] However, Burroughs was so dedicated to the random cut-up method that he often defended his use of the technique. When Ginsberg and Orlovsky arrived in Tangiers in 1961, Burroughs was working on an even more advanced use of the cut-up; he and Ian Sommerville (1940–1976) were cutting and splicing audiotapes and Burroughs was making collages from newspapers and photographs while proclaiming that poetry and words were dead. [283]

Burroughs, however, soon began work on a cut-up novel, the Soft Machine, drawing material from his The Word Hoard. The Word Hoard is a collection of Burroughs’s manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, and London that all together created the mother-load manuscript that served as the basis for much of Burroughs’ cut-up writings: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, (together referred to as The Nova Trilogy or Nova Epic). Even Naked Lunch was taken from sections of The Word Hoard. A text was also produced called Dead Fingers Talk in 1963, which contains excerpts from Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded combined together to create a new narrative. Also, via Burroughs’s artistic collaborations with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, the cut-up technique was combined with images, Gysin's paintings, and sound, via Somerville's tape recorders.

The Soft Machine manuscript was soon being assembled and edited by Ian Sommerville and Michael Portman, Burroughs’s companions. Sommerville was regularly speaking of building electrical cut-up machines. Shortly thereafter, Burroughs would begin collaborating on a book project with Brion Gysin using the cut-up method, cutting up and reassembling various fragments of sentences and images to give them a new and unexpected meaning. The Third Mind is the title of the book they devised together following this method, and they were so overwhelmed by the results that they felt it had been composed by a third person; a third author (mind) made of a synthesis of their two personalities. Ginsberg remained highly skeptical for some time, but following his travels in India came to appreciate the cut-up technique, even while never employing it.

Now for The Third Mind show. Many artworks found here advance Rondinone’s thesis of the third mind. Of course, foremost is the Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs collaboration, The Third Mind. An entire gallery is devoted to the maquettes for this unpublished book from the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—and it does not disillusion the fourth mind: that of the viewer/reader. It is a golden hodgepodge feast and serves as the noise underpinnings of the exhibit.

Then there is the glamorous video installation/accumulation of Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) Screen Tests from 1964–1966: a group of silent black & white three-minute films in which visitors to the Warhol factory try to sit still. Here we see an interlaced presentation that visually connects the youthful faces of Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971), Susan Sontag (1933–2004), Nico (1938–1988), John Giorno, Jonas Mekas, Gerard Malanga, Jack Smith (1932–1989), Paul Thek (1933–1988), Lou Reed and the distinguished Marcel Duchamp. The presentation is structurally connectivist given its four-directional presentation as a low laying sculpture. It is incredibly enjoyable. Plus the room is ringed with black haunting photograms called Angels by the fascinating Bruce Conner (1933–2008) from 1973–75.

In terms of a more traditional, synthetic, associational, curatorial fission, the strongest effect was achieved for me in the Ronald Bladen, Nancy Grossman, Cady Noland gallery. Everything here was screaming power, sex and violence. The entire space felt hard as nails—most all of it a macho silver and black. Bracketing the huge gallery were long rows of Nancy Grossman’s famous black-leathered heads, aggressively sprouting phallic shapes like picks and horns. Bladen’s 1969 minimal masterwork, The Cathedral Evening, aggressively dominated the interior space with a mammoth triangle breach. This was backed up by his famous work, Three Elements (1965). Then, giving the gallery a sense of an almost palpably Oedipal contest [284] was a large group of superb black-on-silver Cady Noland anthropological silk-screens on metal. [285]

The other room that really collectively worked for me held Paul Thek and the mysterious yet suave Emma Kunz (1892–1963). Three wonderful Paul Thek Meat Piece are there; marvellous, weird post-minimal sculptures that sickly encase flayed body sections in wax in long yellow transparent plexiglas shrines that literally shine—suggesting an odd passion for eccentric alternation between lassitude and enthusiasm. This meat-machine mix is counter-pointed with the healing magnetic-field ephemerality of Emma Kunz’s geometric drawings, done with lead and colored pencils (or chalk) on graph paper. It was easy to envision some fierce spiritual forces zapping each other without inhibition throughout that room.

Other rooms brought the link-up to a jolting halt. I simply admired Martin Boyce’s huge neon sculpture (Boyce channeling the maîtres, Dan Flavin), but it produced no associative noise effects with what else was in the room. Worst of all was a room entirely devoted to the work of Joe Brainard. What was that doing there? One strains to see (or imagine) even a second mind in that space. So the unavoidable thought arises, well, Rondinone must like this stuff—so that is at least two minds in synch. But does Rondinone think there is anything still interesting or perturbing in a Gober sink? His The Split-up Conflicted Sink from 1985 also played a huge flat note for me in this supposed visual noise symphony, as did the overly unembellished black crosses of Valentin Carron, the stupid car bashed installation by Sarah Lucas, and the cloying faux-naïve canvases of Karen Kilimnik. How to connect this boring, stupid and naïve work to the third mind connectivity theme then?

Nevertheless, I will. On thinking about the show on my way home, I concluded that the show’s thwarted relationship to connectivity is gravely naïve and passé (if pleasant in a quaint, charming way) in lieu of the multi-networked world in which we now reside. By now, various theories of complexity have established an undeniable influence on cultural theory by emphasizing open systems and collaborative adaptability. One ponders if Rondinone has ever even heard of the theories of Tiziana Terranova, [286] Eugene Thacker or other cultural workers involved in the issues of human-machine symbiosis as interface within our inter-networked media ecology. So yes, part of the pleasure for me was bathing in this old-fashioned naïvety, having just spent some serious time reading and writing on the topics of conspiratorial shadow activities and viral software logic based on complex inter-connectionism. Placed against issues of avant-garde cybernetics, the coupling of nature and biology via code, media ecologies, distributed management teams, Internet mash-up music, artificial life swarms, the political herd mind, and Negri/Hardt’s multitudes, The Third Mind played in my mind like a romp through a kindergarten playpen. Nice infant noise. It felt good to forget about that pervasive nagging political/cultural feeling of stalemate created by the resilience of our current reality in that it assimilates everything.

But no, Ugo Rondinone did not randomly cut and reassemble art to create a new third meaning. He did not cut up anything. Just like every dj, fashion designer, and group show curator, he remixed contemporary expression from recent decades to permit new meanings to emerge. The ideas in the collaborative work of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs were not needed to achieve this end—and perhaps they were poorly intellectually served here (even though it was great to see the work). There was no use of chance or randomness evident here (even the re-shuffled catalogue pages I heard were rather suspiciously non-random) that is necessary for a really unexpected—and perhaps disastrous—result. This show did not go that far. There was no random reassembling of various fragments of something to give them a completely new and unexpected meaning (like I saw in the show Rolywholyover: A Composition for Museum by John Cage at the Guggenheim Museum in Soho, NYC in 1994). The Third Mind is just a standard, but good, heterogeneous art show where the whole is greater than its parts. Which is as it must be.

Anyway, to get back to my main point: as the blending between the artist and spectator took on greater and greater emphasis in the late-1960s, new forms of aesthetic immersion into noise opened up. It is precisely in this third mind blending that the question of art as noise ambience arises. Indeed, ambience as art is a fruitful domain in which to find the art of noise aesthetic in all of its varieties and forms of manifestation.

The term ambience used here follows Frank Popper's definition of the artistic environment as a meeting ground of physical and psychological factors, which implicate the spectator's inherent participation in the art's fulfilment in a delicate, atmospheric way. [287] This is indeed the case with La Monte Young's and Marian Zazeela's Dream House: a fully immersive light and subtle sound environment in which the visitor may move about and thereby participate in the formation of the noise-sounds and optical effects encountered. An artistic ambient environment is a key concept for aesthetic immersion into noise and we shall return to it.

In Art, Action and Participation, Frank Popper showed (with particular reference to post-kinetic research) the convergence and specificity of the notions of environment and creative participation which combined to form the principal direction of art research in the theoretical and practical domains. In Art, Action and Participation, a source book from which I drew many examples from this period, Popper found that mixed-media expressions that involve all the senses are conducive to the more complete involvement of the spectator, and that science and technology can act as creative stimulants. In terms of artists of the 1960s working in this new expanded-field, a good example is GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuels), created by Jean-Pierre Vasarely aka Yvaral, son of Victor Vasarely—a group of eleven artists who picked up on Victor Vasarely's concept that the sole artist was outdated. GRAV was active in Paris from 1960 to 1968. Their main aim was to merge the individual identities of the members into a collective and individually anonymous activity linked to the scientific and technological disciplines based around collective events called Labyrinths.

Their ideals incited them to investigate a wide spectrum of kinetic and optical effects by using various types of artificial light and mechanical movement. In their first Labyrinth, held in 1963 at the Paris Biennale, they presented three years’ work based on optical and kinetic devices. Thereafter they discovered that their effort to engage the human eye had shifted their concerns towards those of spectator participation, a foreshadow of interactivity. On April 19^th, 1966, GRAV created Une Journée Dans la Rue (Day in the Street) in Paris where they invited passing participants to involve themselves in various kinetic activities such as having them walk on uneven blocks of wood and/or experience a distorted world by wearing elaborate distorting spectacles. Their agreed dissolution in November 1968 was based on their recognition that it was impossible to maintain the rigor of a joint program.

Relevant here is the Nicolas Schöffer Exhibition I saw in Paris in fall 2005, for if one discounts the existence of László Moholy-Nagy’s (1895–1946) Bauhaus Light Space Modulator (1923–30) [288] —a visionary multimedia noise artwork that helped inaugurate the artistic dialogue between machines, light, shadow and motion—there is something to the claim that the Hungarian-born French artist Nicolas Schöffer (1912–1992) is “the Father of Cybernetic Art”. At the very least, this premise was entertained while viewing actual work (mostly mobile sculpture under theatrical lighting effects) and an incredible amount of documentation at the museum of the French electricity company Espace EDF Electra.

What is immediately evident in this exceptional historic presentation is that Schöffer’s career touched on painting, kinetic sculpture, architecture, urbanism, film, TV, and even music (he collaborated with Pierre Henry)—all in the pursuit of a noise dynamism in art which was originally initiated by the Cubo-Futurists and then intensified and solidified by the Russian Constructivists such as Naum Gabo (1890–1977), Anton Pevsner (1866–1962) and Moholy-Nagy. All were concerned with opening up the static three-dimensional sculptural form to a fourth dimension of time and motion, and this was Schöffer’s intention as well. Schöffer however, coming well after, benefited pleasingly from cybernetic theories (theories of feedback systems (interactivity) primarily based on the ideas of Norbert Wiener) in that they suggested to him artistic processes in terms of the organization of the system manifesting it (e.g., the circular causality of feedback-loops). For Schöffer, this enabled cybernetics to elucidate complex artistic relationships from within the work itself.

His CYSP 1, from 1956, is considered the first cybernetic sculpture in art history in that it made use of electronic computations as developed by the Philips Company. The sculpture is set on a base mounted on four rollers, which contains the mechanism and the electronic brain. Small motors located under their axis operated the plates. Photoelectric cells and a microphone built into the sculpture catch all the variations in the fields of color light intensity (and sound intensity). All these changes occasion reactions on the part of the sculpture.

Consequently, Schöffer’s kinetic sculptural compositions were able to parallel Warren McCulloch's (1898–1969) adaptation of cybernetics in formulating a creative epistemology concerned with the self-communication within an observer's psyche and between the psyche and the surrounding environment. This is cybernetics’ primary usefulness in studying the supposed subject/object polarity in terms of artistic experience. That is the theoretical premise, at least.

In actuality, I was treated here to dramatic light shows (some on the trippy side) that come whirling out of his spinning mechanical metal sculptures. Colored lights bounce off revolving polished metal towers, casting ever-changing lights and shadows onto huge wall screens and into my eyes. There also was a very basic interactive room consisting of a group of smaller whirling sculptures which responded to my presence and a large prismatic triangle structure containing infinity views.

In Schöffer’s triangular structure, my image was ceaselessly mixed and reflected within spinning lights. As such, I was made to feel an integral part of an exploding noise. In general, this infinity noise experience invited me to view myself in infinity, and so to feel space not in the traditional passive Euclidean custom, but in a conceptually operative and viractual (viractive) manner.

In addition, the exhibition demonstrated Schöffer’s three period styles. First, his “spatio-dynamic” constructions from 1948 on: attempts at a synthesis of spatial and dynamic elements. Next came the “lumo-dynamic” constructions of 1957, which connect light projections to music. In his “chrono-dynamic” works of 1959, word and tone, movement and space, light and color all form together a sum of space-time noise. Also well documented was Schöffer’s 52 meter high Cybernetic Tower from 1961, which was constructed in Liege with 66 revolving mirrors.

Given the period-piece nature of the exhibition, I found it stylistically engaging in terms of noise art and not overly retro-looking. Indeed, the show surprisingly did not appear all that dated, even though of course it recalled the early Paris 1960’s and the futuristic “space age” designs of Paco Rabanne, which involved the use of moving metallic discs or plates. Yet my subject/object polarity never shifted much.

But given this, shouldn’t Nicolas Schöffer’s work be considered something other than an art object per se? Perhaps it is more appropriate to think of it as a means of transforming static perspective vision into a luminous study. We might just as well consider it then as stage props. Or better, an apparatus for painting with light.

With his video works of 1961, Schöffer is additionally regarded as an early representative of video art—so perhaps it all funnels into special effects broadcast TV (which he did). For me, the final interest of this show (which I saw three times) is in its allowing me to better position Schöffer in a certain art-tech artist-engineer intellectual history—a living history that has not yet exhausted itself. Indeed it is touching to consider that László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator—which was driven by a motor and equipped with 128 electric bulbs in different colors—was finally demonstrated at the 1930 Paris Werkbund exhibition. So I see Nicolas Schöffer here not only as a pioneer of cybernetic art, kinetic sculptor, town planner, architect and theoretician of art, but as a key player in the middle of the art-tech intellectual narration—a narration that increasingly defines artistic achievement in the beginning of the 21^st century.

Also significant in immersive noise terms from that period is Stan Vanderbeek's 1966 Movie Drome, a hemispherical “movie-mural” created in upstate New York State where the viewer assumed a supine position to look upon an onslaught of hemispheric cinematic projections. [289] As Vanderbeek himself described it, the Movie Drome operated as follows: “In a spherical dome, simultaneous images of all sorts would be projected on the entire dome-screen. The audience lies down at the outer edge of the dome with their feet towards the center, thus almost their complete field-of-view is the dome-screen. Thousands of images would be projected on the screen”. [290] According to Vanderbeek, details of this hour-long “multi-plex” dense image flow (inherently excessive) were not important. What was important was a “total scale” felt in rapport with the “rapid panoply” (what Vanderbeek called the dome's “visual-velocity”) which functioned so as to “penetrate to unconscious levels”. [291] This hemispheric reconfiguration of the screen (so as to heighten film's immersive appeal in terms of filling the FOV) conforms to what Jonas Mekas called absolute cinema. [292]

In addition, Francis Thompson, best artistically known for a six screen projection arrangement called We Are Young which covered a total area of 885.6 square meters (2,952 square feet) at the Expo '67 in Montreal, produced large-scale immersive projections based on his interest in having films optically swallowing an audience. Thompson said about these large displays that he “would like to see a theater with so great an area that you no longer think in terms of a screen: it's the area you're projecting on”. Then images would “come out of this surrounding area and hit you in the eye or go off into infinity. So you're no longer working with a flat surface but rather an infinite volume”. [293]

Non-immersive noise cinema makes use of what is called framing. Framing is intended to eliminate what is deemed unessential in the motion picture, to direct the spectator's attention to what is important and to give it special meaning and force. Each frame of film, which corresponds in shape to the image projected on the screen, forms the basis for a graphic composition in the same way as the frame of a painting encloses the area in which the painting must be organized. Several different ratios of frame width to frame height (called aspect ratios) have been used in motion pictures. The most common, known as the Academy ratio, is 1.33 to 1, or 4 to 3, a ratio corresponding to the dimensions of the frame of 35 millimeter film. By using 70 millimeter film or a special CinemaScope lens, an image with wider horizontal and shorter vertical dimensions is achieved; a proportion of about 5 to 2, or between 2.2 to 1 and 2.65 to 1. A similar effect, called wide-screen, was sometimes achieved without the expensive equipment required for CinemaScope by using 35 millimeter film and masking the top or bottom, or both, giving a ratio of 1.75 to 1, or 7 to 4. Although some theaters in the 1970s were enlarged and widened to accommodate 70 millimeter images, a trend toward smaller theaters fixed the image ratio close to 1.85 to 1 in the United States and 1.66 to 1 in Europe.

Rejecting the framing trope for art, in 1954 Yaacov Agam began to undertake research into what he called transformable structures (the equivalent of paintings and reliefs) and transformable objects (the equivalent of sculpture) where the spectator was obliged to take up successive positions in front of the reliefs in order to discover the sequence of changing lines, forms, colors and structures which offered themselves from different exclusive angles. Agam himself pointed out that all his works are in fact transformable, but he reserves the term in particular for those in which the basis of the transformation lies in being able to modify the pictorial structure, for example in the 1953 piece, Nuit. He extended this premise immersively with his Total Picture Environment Salon at l'Eysée in Paris.

According to Gene Youngblood, with the art of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Andy Warhol (1928–1987), western civilization “rediscovered art in the ancient Platonic sense in which there's no difference between the aesthetic and the mundane”. [294] This, we can say, is the basis of Pop Art (a term coined in 1958 by the critic Lawrence Alloway) as Pop Art found its imagery and many of its techniques in the realm of advertising and consumer packaging and pop stars and cinema idols.

Most definitely, the Pop-Happenings of Andy Warhol's art-music group, the Exploding Plastic Inevitables (E.P.I.) (which eventually became the rock group The Velvet Underground) is the most conspicuous Pop noise work, as the audience and the players/performers were embedded in a high volume light/sound/film show which dominated the space and stirred the consciousness of those watching or dancing. E.P.I. Happenings first were performed in the spring of 1966 at a Polish dance hall on St. Mark’s Place in New York City called Polsky Dom Narodny. Warhol rented the Dom (home) from two artists who “sculpted with light”, Rudy Stern and Jackie Cassen, and painted it white so that movies and slide projections could be cast on the walls in wallpaper-like fashion. Five movie projectors were utilized along with five carousel-type slide projectors which could each change an image every ten seconds. The slides were projected directly onto the films, whose sound tracks would sometimes be played, and thus blend in with the live music/hullabaloo. A mirror-ball also was utilized along with spot-lights and strobe-lights. [295]

E.P.I.'s noise Happenings aimed to achieve a traumatically dazzling ontological restructuring of consciousness. Here the space of the Happening (light-show/concert/film-show/live-performance) verges on the all-consuming in a way now familiar to those who have participated in techno-raves, rock concerts, and/or house music clubs (such as the legendary Paradise Garage (1976–1987) in New York City, a club that attained an added immersive noise sweep to its milieu by embedding powerful sound-speakers under its dance floor). Indeed, the now ubiquitous mirror-ball (whose inventor I was not able to uncover) must be recognized as an immersive noise artwork of significant stature.

In 1969, a 210° immersive noise Gesamtkunstwerk model was first created by the Los Angeles wing of the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) [296] project for the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. The 210° mirrored sphere, whose prototype was shown in the U.S.A. in a Santa Ana blimp hanger in September 1969, was simply a light-weight mirrored sphere constructed from 3,900 square meters (13,000 square feet) of mirrored mylar 2,540th of a centimeter thick (1,000th of an inch) which spanned 27 meters (90 feet) in diameter and 16.5 meters (55 feet) in height. [297]

Another Pop-Happening artist emblematic of an all-consuming immersive noise aesthetic is the previously mentioned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who in 1958 moved for a time to New York City. Kusama's dominant obsessions have been the excessive accumulation of polka-dots (or extraordinary milky phallic growths) which on occasion span entire rooms and create very noisy experiences. As a juvenile in Japan, Kusama developed an obsessive-compulsive disorder that caused encircling hallucinations, as mentioned previously. Kusama's obliterating installations strive to characterize a waking hallucinated-vision she experienced as a young woman, where sitting at a table covered with a floral tablecloth, in a room covered with floral wallpaper, she saw that her hands, too, were covered with flowers. As she herself has said, “There was a vase of golden violets and when I looked at them and then looked away they began to cover everything. They were on the drawings I was doing and then I saw that they were all over the phone book, and going up the walls and then they covered the doors so that I could not see a way out of the room. These experiences were typical”. [298] As a result, it is as if Kusama was agonizing to overwhelm the entire world with the noise of her polka-dots, and it is this explosive and immersive-noise model that places her at the forefront of the noise-Pop post-war avant-garde, reflective, as her installations, happenings, and even paintings are, of noisy psychological obsessions.

Kusama's noisy Infinity Net paintings are comprised of small, overlapping, looping brush strokes which create optical-fields reminiscent of a boundless sea. This, of course, ties her paintings into issues of the previously discussed painterly noise sublime. Moreover, she also has created an extraordinary group of Net Paintings in the late-1950s and early-1960s (for example Yellow Net) which insinuate the overall webbed-infinite hyper-total aesthetic accomplished by Jackson Pollock. This implied immersive-overall noise hyper-space becomes literalized in her infinity cubed mirror installations at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s.

As she has said, “In New York, I was painting the red nets and then I noticed that it spread to the floor and the curtain and to the window. So I went to catch the red net, and I examined it without noticing at first that my hands were also covered by the red nets. And that was the turning point, and I started creating sculpture, so that I could put the patterns on everything”. [299] This desire is realized in the installations Repetitive Vision and Dots Obsession. In Dots Obsession, a room 4.8 meters wide by 15 meters long by 3 meters high (16 by 50 by 10 feet) had been painted an intense yellow with different sized black dots randomly placed on the walls, floor, and ceiling. Three huge, organically-shaped balloons (one was 9 meters long by 3 meters high (30 feet by 10 feet)) are the same color as the room, right down to the black dots that filled the total space.

Her grottoesque noise installation Repetitive Vision was approached by walking first into a black corridor and then into an intensely lit space whose floor was covered in hot-red dots. I encountered there three female mannequins painted white, their bodies and hair covered with the dots, reflecting to infinity in the mirrored walls and ceilings.

As Kusama is consistently motivated by her desire for an obliteration of the self in visual-noise-infinity characterized by the all-over use of polka-dots (so immersive is this impulse that Kusama often covered her skin and hair in polka-dots), her mirrored immersive installations are salient noise sites in which to explore issues of disembodiment (issues of self devastation of cognitive self-body-image) and willed visual self-obliteration, as when within them the viewer may merge with, and dissolve into, the visual panorama reflected ad infinitum in the walls of mirrors. The effect is as if being itself was being circuitously inhaled.

To immerse one more fully in her proliferating noise environments, in 1965 Kusama turned to the use of mirrored-rooms to enhance the feeling of expansive immersion into noise ad infinitum with the construction of Narcissus Garden, Kusama's Peep Show and Endless Love Room, for example.

Stylistically, this work can be seen as a synthesis of Op, Pop and Psychedelic Art, and there is the obvious communality she shares with Lucas Samaras' 1966 Room 2 and Christian Megert's environments (which also incorporate mirrors) as in the Spiegelraum that was included in the Environments exhibition in Utrecht in 1968 and in Mirror Environment included in Documenta 4, Kassel. Moreover, though less immediately all-encompassing, but perhaps even more highly charged with total noise symbolism applicable to the entire environment, in 1969 Robert Smithson (1938–1973) began producing works in the landscape called Nine Mirror Displacements, Mirror Shore by placing mirrors on a beach or in the jungle of the Yucatán. Smithson then took photographs of these ordinary mirrors set out on the ground and what they were reflecting back.

The Italian artist Getulio Alviani, in his 1964–9 Cubic Environment, also made use of reflective media towards immersive noise ends on an architectural scale, and again in Surface and Texture (1969), an aluminium wall 3.20 by 5.60 meters in size (about 10.5 by 18.4 feet). His Interelazione Cromospeculare was wonderful to experience, as I did, at the Italics: L'art italien entre tradition et révolution 1968–2008 show in Venice at the Palazzo Grassi in 2008. Luc Peire's Environment was also constructed as an enveloping reflective arrangement where mirrored surfaces rebound amplitude to an indefinite degree in order to help one achieve noise consciousness of the unlimited dimensions of vibrant space.

In like manner, Domingo Alvarez created mirrored rooms out of a number of large mirrors in an entirely closed construction which projected a self-conscious space outward ad infinitum, as in his 1972 Mirror Environment. Its seemingly immeasurable space might seem exclusively and merely external to one at first glance, but if considered closely, penetrates consciousness noisily. We saw this in Kusama's installation Infinity Dots Mirrored Room where a white Formica floor was covered with three sizes of colored fluorescent dots within a mirrored-room teeming with black-light. By being ceaselessly reflected on the ceiling and walls, one felt an integral part of the exploding noise. In general, then, the infinity noise experience bound me to view and feel space not in the traditional passive custom but in a conceptually operative and viractual (viractive) manner.

It is partly for this reason of noise visuality, I submit, that the use of mirrors in art flourished during the late-1960s, curiously around the same time the post-structuralist French psychologist Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) was broadly publishing his theory of the mirror stage in human development in the chapter titled “The Mirror-Phase as Formative of the Function of the I” in Ecrits (originally published in 1949 in French). The Lacanian term mirror stage indicated the point in a child's growth when the psychological feeling of undifferentiated unity with the mother is substituted with a conception of a disconnected self. According to Lacan, the experience of perceiving oneself in a mirror, literally or figuratively, generates internal trepidation (noise) inasmuch as one anticipates and wills for oneself a homogeneous total being over which the ego has dominion. However, this totality is never achieved, so that one's spellbound ego comes to feel inadequate. [300]

Moreover, Lacan emphasized the primacy of language as the mirror of the unconscious mind, and he tried to introduce the study of language (as practised in modern linguistics, philosophy, and poetics) into psychoanalytic theory. His major achievement was his reinterpretation of Freud's work in terms of the structural linguistics developed by French writers in the second half of the 20^th century. The influence he gained extended well beyond the field of psychoanalysis to make him one of the dominant figures in French cultural life during the 1970s, and in Critical Studies within Anglo-Saxon academic circles from the early 1980s on. [301]

Coming at this noise mirror issue from an almost polar-opposite position is the American artist Bruce Nauman's 1968 efficacious noise installation called Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room, that consisted of an empty, small, white room, filled only with noise that seems to come from all directions. Simply constructed, it consisted of loud-speakers invisibly embedded into the walls which played a male voice shouting and moaning the injunction of the title. There is nothing to see, yet the rhythmic pattern of the voice bleating out this repetitious ornately coupled incantation without end locks one into a surround-sound cognitive/dissonant noise situation of attraction/repulsion. However, if we are not to settle for affirmations of the emptiness of our being, it seems to me that any noise art proposition must also be an initiatory one done at the limits of ourselves which must, on the one hand, open up a realm of ontological doubt, but on the other, put itself to the test of affinity with contemporary ideas of infinity, both to grasp the points where noise expansion is possible and desirable, and to ascertain the accurate form the expansive proposition should take. This means that the constructed ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be determined and restricting by persisting in an immersive noise consciousness both rhizomatic and infinite.

In terms of the immersive noise art of the 1960s which addressed contemporary concepts of the infinite, mention should be made of the Dvizjenije movement in Moscow and its leader Lev Nusberg. The Dvizjenije movement adapted the “cosmic ideas of the Malevich tradition” [302] in an attempt to construct what were called Living Machines (i.e., kinetic environments) between the years 1962 and 1967. Lev Nusberg himself had in effect been working since 1964 through 1967 on noise projects concerned with setting up artificial kinetic milieus which would register kinetic sensations within them, though only partly realized. One Nusberg project idea was for a kinetic labyrinth that was to extend 500 meters (1,640 feet) and branch off into several different directions containing a large number of consecutive shaped and colored rooms accommodating, at various points, film, music, mime performance, text, kinetic objects, smells, and even air currents. This atmospheric approach to art is also evident in Carlos Cruz-Diez's environmental color-events called Chromosaturations where atmospheric three-dimensional color experiences were encouraged in various rooms or booths, thus bringing one in direct contact with a unique sensory encounter by hanging homogeneous color in space. In some of his Chromosaturations, the visitor, after being “decontaminated” in transitional coal-black chambers, passed through a sequence of consecutive chromatic situations in which one experiences sheer blue, red, and green. In his Chromosaturations for a Public Place in the Open Air, exhibited at Venice, Cruz-Diez returned to an idea which he had already put into effect at the Carrefour de l'Odéon (Paris) in 1969 where pedestrians were invited to enter and pass through a series of differently colored-filled booths. In the version exhibited at Venice, this principle was carried further by inducing the spectator to follow a corridor of continuous color saturation so that one successively experienced absolute blue, absolute red and absolute green. Cruz-Diez thus achieved a total vision [303] through the summation of distinct monochrome perceptions. Mathilde Perez also created complete color experiences by constructing a prolonged corridor of unified chroma which essentially brought one into the experience of pure color carefully modified in such a way as to permit the sensory perception of colored space.

This noise emphasis on art as “a kind of sensory-stimulation laboratory” [304] took on the cybernetically charged open-field and provided inputs for a post-modern noise activity generally characterized by a process aesthetic and a de-objectification that emphasized the artist's encounter with the palpable and malleable properties of reality from within the conglomerate atmosphere. In the open-field, "sculpture" came to incorporate wholly new modes of compositional events, such as earthworks and media art: film, video and electronics. Various conditions of presentation (including site-specific installations and street works) brought art further from the framework constraints of the picture frame and the traditional function of the gallery and deeper into noise. In Process Art, Conceptual Art, and Earthworks, there was a sense of common motivation: an effort to escape the conventional terms of the art object as nurtured by the museum/gallery milieu and to move art out into a broader context. Here was a definite opening towards the noisy environment, coupled with an appeal to general creativity that was evident from the very simplicity of the materials and statements.

Another aspect of noise practice in the expanded-field is that of the artist becoming his or her own work of art, totally losing the usual boundaries between 'art' and 'life' and 'artist' and 'work'. This tendency is best represented by Linda Montano, the founder of the Art/Life Institute and the main defender of Living Art. Living Art is an attempt to merge art and lifestyle through long-term performance works, defined as any work/play that artists/non-artists are willing to perform together or alone. Montano's Living Art performances, which she has created over the past 25 years, include Three-Day Blindfold (1975) and a co-operative work with Tehching Hsieh in which the two artists spent a year tied together by a 2.4 meter (8 foot) rope (1983–84). This work had the additional stipulation that the artists not touch.

The 1981 immersive noise performance collaboration between Bill Seaman and Carlos Hernandez called Architectural Hearing Aids touches on this immersive Living Art mode in a noisy way, as it drove the participant in a car installed with two different sound systems and a 4-track mixer and seven speakers on a specific tour of San Francisco. Sound/music was composed specifically to alter perceptions of the real architectural structure of the city.

Noisily, Joseph E. Furey's (1906–1990) Brooklyn railroad apartment at 447 Sixteenth Street was completely covered with brightly painted cardboard appliqués, shells, and other found objects so that the walls were teeming with stippled dots of black, green, beige and red paint that covered thousands of clam shells and hand-cut cardboard hearts, cross shapes, and diamonds. Mussel shells, spread open to resemble butterflies, were bordered by colored tile and chips of mirror, lima beans, and glass beads. Bits of collage, pictures of monkeys, butterflies, and dogs, dotted the wallpaper landscape mural.

There, too, is ST EOM's Pasaquan, created between 1958 and 1984 by Eddie Owens Martin (1908–1986) [305] located in the sand hills of south-west Georgia, near the small town of Buena Vista. Pasaquan consists of eight grass covered acres, surrounded by pine trees and adorned with walls, pagodas, buildings, temples, and walkways—all brilliantly decorated, inside and out. This all-over noise tendency to address a space aesthetically has recently merited the term Installation Art, an artform I will illustrate with Milton Cohn's late-1960's Space Theater. The essence of Cohn's Space Theater was a rotating assembly of mirrors and prisms adjustably mounted on a flywheel around which were arranged a battery of light, film, and slide projectors. Essentially, Space Theater was an expanded version of Moholy-Nagy's Space-Light Modulator into which one may enter. Cohn's intention was to “free film from its flat and frontal orientation and to present it within an ambience of total space”. [306]

This desire to create a surrounding projective noise space was also the intent of Jud Yalkut's late-1960s Floating Theater. The Floating Theater consisted of a parachute canopy 9.6 to 15 meters (32 to 50 feet) in diameter anchored with nylon strings on which projections were cast. The canopy, which reflected both rear and frontal multiple-projections, was suspended over and around the audience by the use of fans. [307] Henry Jacobs and Jordan Belson's intermedia Vortex Concerts, realized intermittently between 1957 and 1960 in the 18 meter (60 foot) domed Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park firmly established the surrounded/expanded field-of-view objective as well. As reported by Youngblood, [308] the Vortex Concerts consisted of an abstract light/sound presentation created with “interference-pattern projectors” that intermixed with the surrounding star projections and strobe lights, an experience which engulfed the onlooker in art noise. Belson explained that in the Vortex they were able to “project images over the entire dome so that things would come pouring down from the center, sliding along the walls”. [309] Also, Aldo Tambellini's mid-1960s environmental Electomedia Theater served as a robust precursor to this surrounded/expanded noise trend. Particularly significant are Tambellini's 1965 Black Zero environment, which engulfed the viewer in a “maelstrom of audio-visual events”, [310] and his 1968 collaboration with Otto Piene on the multi-channel, closed-circuit environment called Black Gate Cologne, a performance environment that helped re-establish this surrounded/expanded noise inclination again in Europe.

More recently, this appetite to fill us in projection noise was appeased in inverse micro-fashion in a one-on-one interactive assisted film-performance by Bradley Eros called Movie Head Box which he presented as part of The Extremist Show at ABC No Rio in New York City in 1983. Eros provided me with a screen-box which slid over my head (like a primitive HMD). He then projected a color super-8 film onto my head-screen's façade (which insinuated a noisy erotic chronicle dipped in alchemy) thereby over-flooding my visional capacities, as the erotic/alchemical images seeped into the box and were reflected off its inner sides. A walkman provided an intimate noise soundscape [311] accompaniment made up of metallic abstract sounds.

All of the above examples demonstrate that there has been a developing taste for what I have identified as immersive noise art: art that attempts to project its aesthetic noise value ambiently but coherently throughout an expanded aesthetic field-of-view.