NOTHINGTOSEENESS

VOID / WHITE / SILENCE

“Nothingtoseeness” is how John Cage described the equivalent of silence in the visual arts, translating nothingness into visual and sensory terms, but not, of course, in the sense of “seeing nothing” or “not seeing”. In this context, white as a colour and as a material takes centre stage, and this is the theme of the exhibition project “NOTHINGTOSEENESS”: white expresses immateriality, point zero, and emptiness, but is also “stillness and movement, is activity and passivity [...] boundless dimensional space [...] pure energy”, writes Raimund Girke.1 These and other historical and current artistic and aesthetic practices have led to a critical and process-based artistic approach in selected circles internationally from the 1950s/60s to the present, as exemplified by Raimund Girke, Otto Piene, Gotthard Graubner, and Günther Uecker and today by the painter David Ostrowski, Rutherford Chang’s We Buy White Albums installation, and Gregor Schneider’s HAUS u r. These are now to be experienced in an analogue experiential space in the aftermath of the pandemic-related shift of artistic and cultural encounters into the virtual realm. The exhibition “NOTHINGTOSEENESS” will take place from 15 September to 12 December 2021 at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, on Hanseatenweg.

WHITE, ZERO, NULL

PAINTING ON THE THRESHOLD TO INVISIBILITY IN THE 1960s

From the 1950s and ’60s at the latest, in the USA and in Europe, the broad semantic spectrum of the colour white, emptiness and silence, and the associated difference between materiality and immateriality gave rise to a change in the artist’s self-conception, as can be seen in the exhibitions of these early years, and resulted in a real exchange between artists on either side of the Atlantic.

Monochromatic and achromatic painting, together with Nouveau Réalisme, were permanent features of those early international art exhibitions dedicated to the “avant-garde”, the New European School, Arte Programmata, New Tendencies and Anti-Peinture, which categorised to some extent highly heterogeneous schools. What they shared was a turning away from Tachisme, but not yet a secure place in art historiography. In 1963, William E. Simmat described pre-war modernism as the driving force behind these “new tendencies” and stated that “their triumphal march [...] was in full swing”, but still without an academic penetration of the phenomenon.2 On the other hand, Curt Schweicher, a critic of recent modernism and then director of the Städtisches Museum Trier, staged his exhibition “Avantgarde ‘61”3 with the goal, according to the journal Vernissage, of confronting visitors with contemporary artistic articulations – the selection was the subject of controversy – and thus advancing the discourse.4 Two wings of the “new movement” were juxtaposed: the heavily criticised reversion to Constructivism and Suprematism of the 1920s on the one hand, and the younger generation that turned “energetically to colour” on the other: “The temperature [of] the pictures is above zero.” They were looking for an “equivalent of the complex, not of the particular”, and for a “static-dynamic space-surface unity” in which colour would be immaterial and serve as a medium of the “spiritual”. White monochromatic painting occupies a special place here – a fact recognised and described, especially with regard to the differing points of reference (“wings”), not only by those mentioned, but also by the Hannover gallery owner, writer, and publisher Adam Seide and above all by Udo Kultermann, who initiated the “Monochromie” exhibition with international participation in Leverkusen in 1964.5

Exhibition magazine of the Kunsthalle Bern, May 1966

When Frederick P. Walkey opened the exhibition “White On White”,6 co-initiated by George Rickey, in 1965 at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln (Massachusetts) with numerous international artists (including Lucio Fontana, Girke, Oskar Holweck, Walter Leblanc, Henk Peeters, Jan J. Schoonhoven, and Uecker from Europe) – which was then shown in 1966 at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover (Massachusetts) – he forcefully advocated against the rejectionist attitude of numerous American art critics and for collaboration between the American and European positions. As early as 1966, Harald Szeemann, who as the director of the Kunsthalle Bern from 1961 had made it a much-discussed venue, invited numerous artists from Europe and the USA to his exhibition “Weiss auf Weiss”, encouraging dialogue, the broadening of horizons, and networking. Yayoi Kusama, for example, who lived in New York, intensified her contacts with representatives of the ZERO movement, and Otto Piene organised a “ZERO” exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1964. Having emigrated in the meantime to the USA, Udo Kultermann wrote the thoroughly researched article for the exhibition magazine on all the cultural, symbolic, and artistic aspects of the colour white. The Europeans such as Girke, Uecker, and Piene, but also Fontana, Yves Klein, and Piero Manonzi worked in small formats, while the Americans, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Tobey, operated with impressively large canvases, with everything from drip painting to calm monochromaticism. Radical positions such as Robert Rauschenberg’s “White Paintings”, first shown in 1951 at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, were on display in Berne in 1966, as were works by Josef Albers, Sam Francis, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Ryman, and George Segal – at the time a uniquely enlightening and inspirational experience for all concerned.

ANKE HERVOL is secretary of the Visual Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste.

WULF HERZOGENRATH, art historian and curator, has been a member of the Akademie der Künste, Visual Arts Section since 2006 and Director of the section since 2012.

Gregor Schneider, Haus u r 1985–to date, (clockwise from top left): u 24, FLUR, Rheydt 1989–Venice 2001; u 28–29, FLUR, Rheydt 1989–93; u 30, TREPPENHAUS, Rheydt 1989–93; u 24, FLUR, Rheydt 1989–93

Rutherford Chang, We Buy White Albums (ongoing)

WHITE ALBUM – BLACK ALBUM

The Beatles’ White Album, designed by Richard Hamilton as a white projection surface, is contrasted with Prince’s Black Album, which can be understood as an expression of self-empowerment in the form of a black square. While the White Album sold millions of copies and was marked by Hamilton – as a comment on the mass-produced product – with an embossed serial number asserting the item’s unique status, the situation with Prince was entirely the opposite: the artist withdrew his music and the recording medium a few days before its scheduled release on 8 December 1987. Hundreds of thousands of vinyl albums were destroyed, and only approximately one hundred copies were inadvertently circulated as review copies – these are truly unique items compared to the Beatles’ White Album.

Both covers have their iconic precedents in painting – Malevich’s Black Square and Robert Ryman’s white squares. In 2007, the US conceptual artist Rutherford Chang began buying up all the copies of the White Album he could lay his hands on at flea markets and in secondhand shops. Since 2012, Chang has been exhibiting his collection of copies of the White Album, now amounting to 2,620, in increasingly large room-installations reminiscent of a record shop. Due to wear and tear along with water stains and “embellishments”, no two white squares look alike. All have aged individually. 100 Shades of White: While the various gradations of white in Rutherford Chang’s installation, We Buy White Albums, are displayed exactly a hundred times as in a record shop, Prince’s Black Album, which enjoys Holy Grail status in the music collectors’ world, is protected by a burglar-proof showcase. What’s more, the showcase stands on a plinth, built around which is a matt-black cube reminiscent of the pilgrimage site Mecca, while the white-painted interior of this space, a white cube, is the ideal setting for the presentation of art offered for sale in galleries. Finally, in the sightline from the entrance to the security showcase hangs the work Judas! I don’t believe you / You are a liar! by Michael Schirner on the facing wall of the white cube. It is an extension of Schirner’s “Pictures in Our Minds” series into the realm of music. Until the exhibition “Black Album / White Cube” curated by Max Dax in 2020 at the Kunsthal Rotterdam, the subjects of Schirner’s “Pictures in Our Minds” were limited to images that have imprinted themselves deeply into the collective consciousness: the footprint of the first man on the moon, the burning Twin Towers, Willy Brandt’s genuflection in Warsaw, etc. – in the form of a black square on which the very event of global significance is succinctly described in white Helvetica. The image is in the mind’s eye of the beholder. Bob Dylan’s famous response to the insult “Judas!” hurled from the audience in Manchester in 1966 was “I don’t believe you / You are a liar!” With his angry reaction, Dylan defended his own artistic stance as a musician rather than as a mere entertainer.

Art leads to new art through appropriation. Dylan’s spontaneous outburst of anger was incorporated into a new work by Schirner; a salvaged original of Prince’s Black Album becomes a monument as a testament to Black self-empowerment in the context of the blackand-white cube as well as a comment on Malevich; all the while the Beatles’ White Album in the context of Rutherford Chang’s We Buy White Albums installation becomes a meditation on the uniqueness of mass-produced products and the nature of projection surfaces.

MAX DAX, journalist, photographer, and curator, was editor-in-chief of the music magazine Spex from 2006 to 2010. He lives as a freelance author in Berlin. 1 https://www.raimundgirke.com 2 William E. Simmat, ed., Europäische Avantgarde, exh. cat. (Galerie d, Schwanenhalle, Römer, Frankfurt am Main, 1963). 3 See the list of all participating artists at https://www. artist-info.com/exhibition/Stadtmuseum-Trier-Id369150

4 Vernissage, vols 7/8, no. 2 (1962), n. p. 5 Udo Kultermann, “Monochrome Malerei – eine neue

Konzeption”, Monochrome Malerei, exh. cat. (Städtisches

Museum Leverkusen, Schloss Morsbroich, Leverkusen, 1960), n. p. See participating artists at https://www. artist-info.com/exhibition/Museum-Morsbroich-Id362776

6 The platform artistinfo.com has ranked the exhibition as one of the most “Influential Contemporary Art Exhibitions in the 20th and 21st Century”: “The ‘White on

White’ exhibition […] was chosen for this list because the selection of artists and artwork provides a thoughtful overview, based on George Rickey’s (Art Journal, 1964) and Barbara Rose’s (Art in America, 1965) texts on constructivist artists. The exhibition provides a view from the outside on what happened in Europe, and in

America. It was as well an important statement against the many art critics who disfavored the ‘cool art, ‘idiot art’, ‘know-nothing-nihilism’.” See https://www.artistinfo.com/blog/influential-exhibitions-in-the-20thand-21st-century/; and list of participating artists at https://www.artist-info.com/exhibition/deCordova-

Museum-Id372561

NOTHINGTOSEENESS –VOID / WHITE / SILENCE

An exhibition by the Akademie der Künste as part of BERLIN ART WEEK Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 15 September–12 December 2021 Curated by: Anke Hervol and Wulf Herzogenrath Exhibition opening: 15 September 2021

On 21 December 1960, African American saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman gathered eight musicians at New York City’s A & R Studios to record the album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet.

1

Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet, 1961, inner sleeve

Harald Kisiedu

The ensemble Coleman had assembled consisted of two quartets with two woodwind instruments and a rhythm section comprised of double bass and drums, and it included some of the foremost Black experimentalists, such as trumpeter Don Cherry and multi-reedist Eric Dolphy. At 37:03 minutes long, Free Jazz is a series of collective improvisations interspersed with composed fanfares and themes, with each wind instrument taking the lead while others improvise continuing responses, dispensing with harmony-based structure and deploying motivic association. When the album was released in September 1961, its inside cover featured Jackson Pollock’s 1954 painting White Light. Already in the liner notes for his album Change of the Century (1960), Coleman had asserted his mobility of concept and practice by drawing connections between his musical aesthetics and Pollock’s abstract expressionism. Pointing out “a continuity of expression, certain continually evolving strands of thought, that link all my compositions together”, Coleman suggested of his music: “Maybe it’s something like the paintings of Jackson Pollock.”2 For Robert K. McMichael, the late 1950s and early 1960s in the US were characterised by “a critical shift in the balance of moral authority from white to black which penetrated the entire social fabric” and for which significant gains made by the Civil Rights Movement during this period were crucial.3 Concurrently, Coleman fundamentally challenged the ongoing whiteness-based “possessive investment” in the construction of an ontologically stable Black Other.4 In the words of McMichael, Coleman’s recording of Free Jazz “underscored these social and cultural changes partly by decentering the body in musical representations of blackness through a deconstruction of rhythm and a recontextualization of the traditional blues-based harmonic structures of jazz”.5 The radical transfer of sonic ideas deployed by Coleman’s double quartet in Free Jazz would become a critically important point of reference for later landmark experimental jazz recordings made both in the US and in West Germany, such as John Coltrane’s Ascension (1965), Peter Brötzmann’s Machine Gun (1968), and Manfred Schoof’s European Echoes (1969).6

In January 1962, for the very first time in its history, the jazz magazine Down Beat published a double review of an album in which both reviewers rated Coleman’s Free Jazz on the publication’s usual five-star scale. Awarding the album “No Stars” and deploying psychopathological terms, the magazine’s associate editor John Tynan scathingly opined: “Where does neurosis end and psychosis begin? The answer must lie somewhere within this maelstrom… ‘Collective Improvisation’? Nonsense. The only semblance of collectivity lies in the fact that these eight nihilists were collected together in one studio at one time and with one common cause: to destroy the music that gave them birth.”7 The apparent horror with which Tynan responded to Coleman’s radical realisation of the concept of total improvisation suggests that perhaps something larger might have been at play here. As the descendant of people who were subjected to perpetual physical and psychological terror brought about by transatlantic slavery, Coleman’s utilisation of what scholar John Szwed has denoted as “maximal individualism within the framework of spontaneous egalitarian interaction”, not only had profound sociopolitical overtones, but took on a larger existential meaning.8 Referencing both the ring shout – a religious ritual first practised by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and US in which people form a circle, move in a counter clockwise direction, and sing aloud – and John Cage’s well-known composition 4’33”, composer, musicologist, and computer music pioneer George E. Lewis has observed: “It seems fitting that in the wake of the radical physical and even mental silencing of slavery (as distinct from, say, an aestheticised silence of four minutes or so), African Americans developed an array of musical practices that encouraged all to speak.”9 The comprehensive silencing of slavery addressed by Lewis thus produced a silence akin to the wilful absence of produced tones and sounds;10 this deliberate absence of sound and noise is the conducting of a produced silence.

Similarly, scholar Gascia Ouzounian has differentiated between two fundamentally different conceptions of silence: “One notion of silence understands it as a physical or acoustic phenomenon, that is, the absence of sound – the sense in which Cage used the term when he proclaimed that ‘there is no such thing as silence.’ Another conception of silence understands it in historical and sociocultural terms, as in the silencing of a person or people.”11 The latter conception of silence is brought about by the presence of conducting. In that regard, silence is not about absence but actually about presence, albeit not in a Cagean sense. Silence is about marking a blank space, which is occupied by a multitude of sounds. In a seemingly paradoxical fashion, it is not really silence but a scream comprised of the dense polyphony of unheard voices.

During the early 1960s, Coleman’s groundbreaking innovations began to have an impact on musical practices in West Germany too, a place not so often associated with the African diaspora, via the extended networks of Black experimentalism. Among the white German musicians profoundly impacted by what Ouzounian has denoted as the “radical collective expression” of African American experimentalists – of which Coleman’s work is clearly catalytic – was critically important saxophonist and visual artist Peter Brötzmann.12 Brötzmann’s work and activities have been instrumental in establishing post-war Germany as an important site for jazz experimentalism in Europe. Trained at Wuppertal’s Werkkunstschule (School of Applied Arts) during the early 1960s, Brötzmann began to forge important connections to visual artists and musicians during visits to the Netherlands, such as Jan Schoonhoven and Yoko Ono. Brötzmann’s formative years as a visual artist and musician intersected with the emergence of the international and transdisciplinary Fluxus network, whose experimental concepts and practices deeply resonated with the young Brötzmann. Out of all the artists associated with Fluxus, Nam June Paik was to have the most profound influence on him. In March 1963, Brötzmann had the opportunity to work with Paik on the occasion of the Korean artist’s first solo exhibition, “Exposition of Music – Electronic Television”, at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. As Brötzmann remembers: “I was lucky that I had the chance to work with Nam June Paik, who came from the music side. I was, for a couple of exhibitions and projects, a kind of assistant and he showed me that the rules are there to be broken.”13

Brötzmann is a member of a war-born, “damaged” generation, which came of age during the period of postwar “conservative modernisation” and which was especially receptive to the burden of Germany’s recent political history.14 Debates were taking off during the late 1950s and gaining in momentum during the 1960s in which issues at discussion included continuities between the Nazi era and the West German post-war, so-called “miracle years”, as well as the complicity of the parent generation in Nazi Germany’s atrocities. This led to a mounting intergenerational conflict which surfaced in the debates Brötzmann had with his uncle, formerly a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer. The demands of the war-born generation for answers to their questions about their parents’ complicity in the unspeakable atrocities of the Nazi racial state were usually met with silence. As Brötzmann has related about the significance of his engagement with African American musical knowledge for his individuation process:

“After the war, we Germans were in a very special situation. We had problems. The fathers we had brought the whole world nearly to the end, in a way. And so, we had to find answers for that. And, of course, we didn’t get answers from our fathers. So, we had to find answers to the question of what life is and why things like that can happen. I had to look somewhere else and, again, music was not only a help, but it was a kind of book I could read, and I could find little answers for myself.”15

In an undisguised fashion, Brötzmann’s remarks illustrate the dynamics of how, in Paul Gilroy’s words, “during the latter half of the twentieth century an appetite for various African American cultures was part of how Europe recomposed itself in the aftermath of fascism”.16

As a descendant of enslaved people and someone who had experienced segregation codified by Jim Crow laws during his formative years in Fort Worth, Texas, Coleman devised strategies that effectively resisted the silencing of radical Black voices. By means of engaging with Black musical knowledge, Brötzmann was able to break a different kind of silence in post-war West Germany and to artistically come into his own.

1 Ornette Coleman, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet [1961] (CD, Los Angeles, CA: Atlantic Records, 2004). 2 Ornette Coleman, liner notes for Ornette Coleman,

Change of the Century [1960] (CD, Los Angeles, CA: Atlantic Records, 2002). 3 Robert K. McMichael, “We Insist! Freedom Now: Black Moral Authority, Jazz, and the Changeable Shape of Whiteness”, American Music, vol. 16, no. 4 (1998), pp. 375–416, here p. 379. 4 I have borrowed the phrase “possessive investment” from George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness:

How White People Benefit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998). 5 McMichael, “We Insist!”, p. 399. 6 John Coltrane, Ascension [1965] (CD, Santa Monica, CA: Impulse, 2000); Peter Brötzmann, The Complete Machine

Gun Sessions [1968] (CD, Chicago, IL: Atavistic, 2007); Manfred Schoof, European Echoes [1969] (CD, Chicago, IL: Atavistic, 2002). 7 Pete Welding and John A. Tynan, “Double View of a Double Quartet”, Down Beat (18 Jan.1962), p. 28; reprinted in Robert Walser, ed., Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz

History (New York: Review Books, 1999), p. 255. Pete Welding awarded the maximum rating of five stars. 8 John Szwed, “Josef Škvorecký and the Tradition of Jazz Literature”, in John Szwed, Crossovers: Essays on Race,

Music, and American Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 187. 9 George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself:

The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. xii. 10 In this and the following paragraph, I’m drawing upon insightful ideas developed by my partner Andrea Rothaug during a recent conversation. 11 Gascia Ouzounian, “The Sonic Undercommons: Sound Art in Radical Black Arts Traditions”, in Jane Grant, John Matthias, and David Prior, eds, The Oxford Handbook of

Sound Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 510. 12 Ibid, p. 512. 13 Harald Kisiedu, European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany, 1950–1975 (Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 2020), p. 25. 14 Translated from the German, “konservative Modernisierung”. Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried, Deutsche

Kulturgeschichte: Die Bundesrepublik von 1945 bis zur

Gegenwart (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2009), p. 234. 15 Peter Brötzmann, interview with the author, Wuppertal, Germany, 2 July 2010; see also the version published in Kisiedu, European Echoes, p. 47. 16 See Paul Gilroy, “Foreword: Migrancy, Culture and a New Map of Europe”, in Heike Raphael-Hernandez, ed., Blackening Europe: The African American Presence (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. xviii.

HARALD KISIEDU is a historical musicologist and received his doctorate from Columbia University. His research interests include jazz as a global phenomenon, Afrodiasporic classical and experimental composers, music and politics, improvisation, transnationalism, and Wagner. Kisiedu is also a saxophonist and has performed with George Lewis, Branford Marsalis, and Henry Grimes. He is currently a lecturer at the Institute for Music at Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences and is the author of European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany, 1950–1975 published by Wolke Verlag in 2020.