In Praise of Wallpaper
I have big plans; I have a dream. I have a dream, a personal vision, for the world of art, and for my own ascent to dizzying heights of wealth and influence.
I will open an art gallery.
My plans do not stop there. This art gallery will feature within its spartan white walls nothing but wallpaper - swatches of stripes, fleur-de-lis, and Victorian squiggles of all kinds, all framed and duly labeled. Visitors to my gallery will be greeted by endless, perfectly aligned rows of perfectly square and perfectly modular patterns. Sheer beauty.
At this point, you are probably getting the wrong idea. You probably think this some snide comment on the commercialization of art, or the banality, perhaps, of modern living. You are sorely mistaken. This endeavour of mine will be absolutely sincere. It will be for the glorification of perfectly tilable, visually pleasing, functional art.
Nor will I stop there. Already I have plans for an expansion, perhaps even a whole new building (funded no doubt in part from the extremely lucrative home furnishing store tie-ins), designed to showcase exclusively computer wallpaper, those graphics - tiled or centered - designed for the express purpose of sitting behind all the other windows in a computer desktop. Can there be a nobler, more thankless task than that of desktop picture designer? He is our social realist hero for the computer age, an artist-artisan whose true greatness is realized when his work serves to enhance the viewer’s experience of something else entirely. My second gallery will be full solely of these works of pure aesthetic, these exercises in the purely visual - the less content, the better. No female nudes, no heroic gods, no families here; these heirs to Rothko and Kandinsky achieve the utterly noble goal of information without content, and pleasing as they are to the eye, they point to nothing outside of themselves.
My dream is one born out of deep social conscience, for in doing so I seek above all else to elevate these second-class citizens of the art world, the workhorses and commoners, to their rightful places. For sure, they get a bad rap. But in fact it is they who should stand at the top of the heap, for they stand alone, purely on the merit of their own appearance! There is no context, no symbolism, no concept to excuse ugly wallpaper.
For it is the noblest thing to be artistic materiel. To be the raw stuff, the wash and base which succeeds precisely because we are never focused directly on it, because it does not presume to demand our attention as though it transcended in some way this material existence, but nevertheless always, always lies in our field, in our eyes and ears.
The concept of ‘ambient music’ is not a new one. Those with a short memory will tell you that it was invented by Brian Eno, thus giving it a pedigree of some 30 years, but of course we all know that Erik Satie was writing about his ‘furniture music’ at the turn of the last century. And before that, of course, our now-revered symphonies and quartets were once nothing more or less than pleasant background music for the rich and liesurely.
But oh, ‘background music’. What a bitter taste in the mouth! Certainly there can be no compliment more left-handed, more immediately dismissal, than to praise a work as ‘good background music’. No musician is warmed in his heart when he learns that thousands do the dishes to his achingly constructed composition every night.
Let’s be realistic. How many minutes of our waking hours do we spend actually listening to music - not reading, or doodling, or checking email or talking with friends, but considering a piece of music to the exclusion of all other thoughts? To be sure, there is a sizable gap between what we consider active listening and doing the dishes, but the difference is one of degree; no musical experience is ever total. Music as it is received is always as single component - sometimes greater, sometimes smaller - of our sensory-cognitive experience. Before the music starts, there is sound. After, there is sound. It fills our sensory space like a gas.
Which brings me back to the problem of wallpaper. What we need is more better musical wallpaper. We need more better music to fill the moments walking to class, and getting into the car, eating lunch alone outside and also working out and rearranging furniture. We need it because once you start listening, you can’t stop. There is sound always everywhere, and it could be better. It could be more interesting. What we need is to stop thinking of the human manipulation and organization of sound - music - as a discrete, privileged, artistic activity, and come to understand that sound can be manipulated and apprehended as a single fabric, an all-pervasive substance to be colored and shaded just as you’d light a room or paper a wall.
What we do not need is more muzak. I seek not to celebrate or exalt elevator music, shopping mall music, car commercial music - indeed, those wastes of sound are precisely what happens when what we hear when we aren’t listening - ie, most of the time - is left to the hacks and the suits because everyone with talent is off making art. To agree that the music piped into your head during a jaunt through Bloomingdales is irritating and banal is to concede that a) wallpaper music matters and b) it’s certainly not easy to do.
There is for me, as an artist, no finer, nobler thing than to produce sound which is modular - which can be manipulated or sewn into a larger entity seamlessly - and which is functional, which can serve to please or to pique, to intrigue or to lull, certainly to challenge and ostend also when that is its purpose. It is all around us: the break, the sample, and yes, the pianist outside Nordstrom’s and the stereo in the background while there is company. To live is to hear (barring unfortunate and obvious exceptions), and there is very much material to work with.
Comments
- corrie on July 1, 2005, at 10:08 PM
