Violently boiling water in some monstrous kettle
What I like about this website is that it’s not just “art” but art with a purpose. The subtitle of this project is Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975 and covers artists I’ve heard of, such as John Cage, and many I haven’t.
What they share is an ability to rethink the way in which their art is denoted. For example:
The pointillism of Morton Feldman’s Intersection 3 is an early example of experimental musical notation. One of many pieces in the 1950s that Feldman wrote on graph paper, the work features a metronomic tempo while inviting its performer, the pianist David Tudor, to decide what pitches to play, prescribing only the number of notes and the general pitch range. The sounds that resulted evoked associations of combat and even brutality among critics, an aesthetic that Feldman himself described as “violently boiling water in some monstrous kettle.”
Ambiguity often gets a bad rap, but it’s something that fascinates me – and is, I believe, at the heart of creativity. You can see what I mean by looking at the overlapping circles diagram in this paper I wrote with my thesis supervisor 15 years ago.
TL;DR: words and symbols both denote and connote things, and it’s at the overlap of this denotation and connotation that interesting things happen.
Source: The Scores Project