[Dixielandjazz] What Color is OKOM? (Synaesthesletically that is)

[Steve barbone]

The relationship between music and visual arts was discussed a few months
ago. Here is an interesting follow-up for the curious.

All I know is that when I would see Monk, or Ornette Coleman at the Five
Spot in NYC in the 50's/60's, the joint was packed with modern artists like
Jackson Pollack et al, as well as musicians/composers of the caliber of
Leonard Bernstein et al.

Those in the Washington DC area might want to take a peek at this exhibit.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Art Review- 'Visual Music ' -By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN July 1, 2005 -NY TIMES

With Music for the Eye and Colors for the Ear

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: July 1, 2005

Washington ‹ "Visual Music" is a fine-tuned, highly diverting, deceptively
radical exhibition about the relationship of music and modern art, lately
arrived here at the Hirshhorn Museum. In its hippy-trippy way, it rewrites a
crucial chapter of history.
  
Its subtitle is "Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900." Aristotle
formulated the idea that each of the five senses - smell, taste, touch,
hearing and sight - had its own proper and distinct sphere of activity.
There were overlaps, he said (movement pertained both to sight and touch);
and he speculated that the mysteries of color harmony might have something
to do with musical harmony, an idea that would resonate for centuries.
Musical harmony, as an expression of geometry, was thought to be useful to
the study of art and architecture from the Renaissance on.

But the notion that there was an essential separation among the sensual
spheres persisted into the early 19th century.

At the same time reports began to emerge of rare people who said they
experienced two sensations simultaneously: they saw colors when they heard
sounds, or they heard sounds when they ate something. The condition was
called synaesthesia.

It's no coincidence that scientific interest in synaesthesia coincided with
the Symbolist movement in Europe, with its stresses on metaphor, allusion
and mystery. Synaesthesia was both metaphorical and mysterious. Scientists
were puzzled. People who claimed to have it couldn't agree about exactly
what they experienced. "To ordinary individuals one of these accounts seems
just as wild and lunatic as another but when the account of one seer is
submitted to another seer," noted the Victorian psychologist and polymath
Sir Francis Galton in 1883, "the latter is scandalized and almost angry at
the heresy of the former."

I have come across via the color historian John Gage an amusing account from
some years later by the phonologist Roman Jakobson, who studied a
multilingual woman with synaesthesia. The woman described to him perceiving
colors when she heard consonants and vowels or even whole words:

"As time went on words became simply sounds, differently colored, and the
more outstanding one color was, the better it remained in my memory. That is
why, on the other hand, I have great difficulty with short English words
like jut, jug, lie, lag, etc.: their colors simply run together." Russian,
she also told Jakobson, has "a lot of long, black and brown words," while
German scientific expressions "are accompanied by a strange, dull yellowish
glimmer." 

"Visual Music" is full of strange, glimmering yellowish and other colored
shapes. What might visual art look like if it were akin to music? That's the
question the various artists here asked themselves - a question that goes
back to Richard Wagner, the Symbolists' patron saint for his dream of a
Gesamtkunstwerk, a universal artwork uniting music and art. Painters like
Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Mikhail Matiushin (he was a Russian composer,
influenced by Arnold Schoenberg, who like Schoenberg also painted) and
Arthur Dove, with whom "Visual Music" begins, elaborated on Wagner's theme.
They painted pictures that claimed to have the condition of music - pure
abstractions with occasional shapes that resembled staves, musical notes or
violins. Through the medium of musical metaphor, in other words,
synaesthesia gave birth to abstract art.

This is the show's quite radical, if not altogether original, point: that
abstraction's history is not just the familiar sequence of isms
(Constructivism, Suprematism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism) but also
the consequence of a particular idea. The idea is synaesthesia. And its
protagonists, while including a few famous names like Kandinsky, were on the
whole cultish and now forgotten figures or total outsiders to the art world:
they were filmmakers, animators, computer geeks and 1960's psychedelic light
show performers.

Blurring high and low, their legacy represented not a corruption or
cul-de-sac of traditional modernism but a parallel strand of it, which has
made its way, willy-nilly, right up to the present. The show here ends with
digitally enhanced multimedia works by Jennifer Steinkamp, Jim Hodges and
Leo Villareal.