Chto Delat vs Fluxus

There is a battle for the soul of creativity, which rages across genres, across time, across art forms. In certain periods, one side will dominate: yet even in the most polarised skirmish, neither side can deny the opposition’s importance. Ranged on the high ground, with battalions of conceptualists and scholiasts, are The Forces That Believe in Form. The plains are held by Those Who Believe in Content.

The 1960s looked tasty for the Formalists. Their enthusiasm is for the way that art is presented. Recognisable tricks include the classic “Ah, but what is art?” bombshell, dropped by Marcel Duchamp when he exhibited a pissoir in a gallery; the adventures of Fluxus, as booked by Minimal Extreme; the abstract choreographer of ballet.

Yet the Content Young Team has always been more populist. Emphasising what the art is actually about, their ranks feature the great romantic ballets (sod finding new moves, let’s get down to Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy) and Chto Delat, Russian troublemakers and stars of Arika Episode 3. Critics, always an alienated bunch, might be able to play both sides. This critic is sufficiently lazy to have grasped hold of a tagline  - I don’t believe in systematising taste – and so gets to run with both packs.

Glass/Flux was a sweet introduction to the Fluxus gang – kicking off with LaMonte Young’s hummed Composition 1960 #7. It wasn’t clear whether Ars Nova had actually started: as a teacher, it brought back nasty memories of those times a class acted in unison to create a low level buzz that might just be my hearing aid playing up, again. But the interludes taken from Philip Glass’ opera Einstein on the Beach were cunning interjections. They marked the shift between pieces – Jackson Mac Low’s The Blueburd Assymetries and Dick Higgins’ hank and mary, a love story, a choral could have run into each other too easily, since they both juggled words in disordered orders – and gave a quick blast of how Glass enjoyed playing with form without getting hung up on content. The choir sung them beautifully, Jonathan Morton gave it laldy on the violin, but the actual words were just numbers, counting.

Fluxus were naughty youngsters meddling with the zeitgeist: on the rump of hippy culture (LaMonte Young inspired The Velvet Underground via John Cale) and a more rigorous classical heritage, their selection at ME was psychedelic and witty. Emmett Williams had Paul Hillier, the big chief of contemporary choral, grunt and grumble his way through Genesis until the strange candle lighting ritual resolved into the Grand Phrase That Started the Universe. It’s high concept all the way – every piece questioned what a choir could do and still call it music – but equally funny. A score for the Formalists.

Chto Delat weighed in with The Russian Woods. The references to post-modern dance, the lecture demonstration and choral sing-along were in place, but secondary to the clear enunciation of the idea. The Russian Woods are a transparent metaphor for contemporary Russian capitalism. Broad enough to apply to any country, but made specific by some fancy video footage, The Russian Woods made a stark comment on how the apparently diffuse layers of society – from celebrities to internet geeks – are part of a social ecosystem.

Despite the laboured interludes, The Russian Woods is healthy food for thought. Rather than wail against the system, it sought to understand how it operates, linking the activities of the church to those of the media. The direct address to the audience, the self-deprecating chatter of the performers as they reflect on the process of the product while they make it: Chto Delat are more interested in saying their piece, and making it stick in the memory.

This cosmic square-go is, perhaps, ultimately about the purpose of art. The Formalist tend to see it as an end in itself, although they might add that the cognitive dissonance produced by artists messing with the way art is presented might have a social and political dimension: the Contentualists (sorry) often grade art according to its social or political function, even when they consciously exploit the format to support the content. Both the Fluxus crew and the Chto Delat gang are provocative. They hot-wire the easy judgement – I am not sure whether The Russian Woods is amateur propaganda or a subtle parody of  the way that media is screwing my mind – and expect the audience to engage. I’ll call it a draw, or plaintively ask whether I can have both.  

Arika vs Minimal Extreme

While they aren’t always lessons I wish to learn – I am determinedly not sold on Marxist foundations for aesthetic endeavour – Arika’s triple festival took an exciting stroll into theory and format. The first two episodes emphasised discussion and concepts, while the third dives straight into the ways that contemporary art can respond to political situations. I might quibble with some of the speakers – again, it’s about my low tolerance for Marxism as anything more than just another competing ideology, alongside a few questions about how the impressive sounding language transforms into meaningful mundane action – but Arika’s format, which places the actual artistic happenings between intelligent lectures and debates, points a way out of the usual festival grind.

Over in The City Halls, Minimal Extreme goes old school, offering more minimalism than before and ranging away from the predictable runs of Glass and Reich. Like the lamented National Review of Live Art, and this year’s noob, Buzzcut, Minimal Extreme throws a huge variety at the audience. The audience is left to find their own way through the programme. Yet the balance between the familiar (Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet by Gavin Bryars even got covered by Tom Waits) and the awkward (the new works from Bang On A Can, the selections from Louis Andriessen).

Barry Esson, Arika’s public face, did express his intention to reconsider what it means to hold an “experimental festival”. This reconsideration was an astounding success. Instead of a relentless succession of bands (compare Arika’s Instal, which was wonderful in its own right), there is time to shoot the breeze, listen in to the latest theories on “positive nihilism” and realise that a Japanese artist knobbing about amongst some cupboard boxes can be a moving attempt to embody the hopelessness of human existence. For Minimal Extreme, director Sven Brown is following the value for money route: for the price of a fancy symphonic orchestra, he can put on an entire weekend.

Ironically, since Minimal Extreme and Episode 3 occupied the same weekend and undoubtedly share an audience with a taste for the extraordinary, the two festivals have a great deal to teach each other. While Minimal Extreme could do with a little more of the chat that made Episodes 1 and 2 powerful exercises, Arika’s musical programming would benefit from a touch of contemporary classical. Esson pointed out that so-called experimental music has increasingly followed an aesthetic designed in the 1960s, and has lost its true edge of adventure: while this is true for rock based music, the energy of minimalist composers often comes from a freedom of investigation into alternative traditions.

Hoketus, by Andriessen, is a fine example of how a composer can chafe at the restrictions of minimalist phrasing – he calls it a technique or strategy, not a genre – and then compose a knock down battle that questions the style. Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion – performed by Theatre of Voices on the Saturday to less effect than Cryptic’s recent staging – juggles with the religious heritage of song and its contemporary secular context. Perhaps it is because of the training given classical musicians, but they are far more comfortable messing up traditional assumptions without rejecting them outright. Many of the bands that Arika booked for Instal flung the rule book out the window. The minimalists tended to make annotations or correct it.

Both Arika’s triptych and Minimal Extreme are baby festivals, and their current incarnations are not completed works, yet they both emphasise the curatorial creativity of their directors. A good evolution would be for them not to clash next year: an even better one would be for them to take notes from each other.

Bad Interview of Great Composer: a new Series from the Vile Arts

I would like to take a moment to thank Wendy Grannon. Not only did she organise a bunch of interviews with the performers and composers and organisers of this weekend's Minimal Extreme festival (when a press person takes the Vile Arts seriously, it makes me feel warm inside), but she got hold of Louis Andriessen for me. I am easily impressed whenever I get to talk to someone who has a proper Wikipedia entry (as opposed to ones written by the person themselves). But Andriessen took the time to call me back - after I messed up the times - and almost immediately mentioned his previous visit to Glasgow. He played jazz at Tramway.

I am just annoyed I don't have more of his back catalogue.

Sven Brown, artistic director of Minimal Extreme, said that Andriessen's Hoketus would be the loudest event of the weekend. It kicks off three days of hot classical action, both the intense (Bang on a Can have a very NYC energy about them, and a leader who plays the clarinet like it is a rock guitar) and the drifting (see my rambles about Feldman and Riley). Andriessen says that he isn't all about the volume, but he does want it to be intense.

In my brief conversation with Andriessen - and through my pitiful research - I realised that here was a composer who stood right at the cross-roads of jazz, improvisation and what he doesn't like to call minimalism. I kept on describing his work as "minimalist", but he patiently pointed out that that is more a technique than a style of music. Then I decided to ask him about his use of modern technology, noting that his recent compositions involved film. He observed that film isn't all that modern.

There's nothing I enjoy more than making a fool of myself in front of an artist that I both admire and - as the interview progressed - really liked as a person.  As I flicked over his lists of works, the names of his collaborators jumped out at me: Hal Hartley and Peter Greenaway (fim makers), plus texts from Homer, Dante, Nietzsche, Job out of the Old Testament...

Lessons learnt: Hoketus is free and worth catching. Andriessen is more lively than I am, and he was borin in 1939. I ought to do a bit more research.