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Morton Feldman in Conversation with Stuart Morgan the Following Pie-Slicing and Small Moves: exemplified in the twentieth century by Mondrian. Tact informs Feldman's art criticism, which is Morton Feldman in conversation with Stuart meditative, daring and partisan. (See, for example, Morgan "Some Elementary Questions" Art News April 1967; "After Modernism" Art in America December 1971; "The Anxiety of Art" Art in The following interview was originally published in America September-October 1973.) A heightened Artscribe (April 1978) pp 34-37. sensitivity to time and the gradual progression of artistic careers underlies both his reminiscences "I don't know what a composer is," said Morton ("Give my Regards to Eighth Street" Art in Feldman two years ago. "I never knew as a young America March-April 1971) and an eloquent man, I don't know now and I'm gonna be fifty tribute to his friend Frank O'Hara ("Frank next month." Feldman (at present Edgar Varèse O'Hara: Lost Times and Future Hopes" Art in Professor of Music at the State University of New America March-April 1972). Preoccupation with York at Buffalo) studied composition with images of life and death is evident in his images of Wallingford Riegger and Stefan Wolpe. In New creative work. "What it really amounts to is York in the fifties he met John Cage and joined a whether you want to be in the work, in the circle that included Earle Brown, Christian Wolff medium or outside it . I feel that Cage and and pianist David Tudor. A second major myself are in the work . Stockhausen and influence was painting; friendships with Rothko, Boulez are out of it". (Alan Beckett "Morton Kline, Pollock, Guston and de Kooning are Feldman" International Times no.3, November 14- commemorated in his music. "What was great 27, 1966). Later he elaborates: "Secreted in Frank about the fifties," he wrote in 1971, "is that for O'Hara's thought is the possibility that we create one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - only as dead men . Death seems the only nobody understood art. That's why it all metaphor distant enough to truly measure our happened. Because for a short while, these people existence . Only the artist who is close to his were left alone. Six weeks is all it takes to get own life gives us an art that is like death." For started." Interviewed five years later he made the Feldman, being "in the work", "close to life", same point but reduced the period of time to a seems to entail loss of some kind, perhaps a week. "But the week was important . we began shedding of personal feeling. "For the work to to listen . " Operating at the edges of the succeed, the artist must fail". audible, his music seems to recreate this process of composition by listening. Interviewers have Feldman's talk has been reported frequently and compared it with his conversation; long silences well. (See Gavin Bryars / Fred Orton "Morton occur while he puffs hard at a cigarette and Feldman" Studio International November- patiently unravels an idea which suggested itself December 1976 which covers both music and art, because it needed to be said. Hesitantly, for example; also Walter Zimmerman "Desert repetitively, he allows it to emerge. Serious talk is Plants" Vancouver Canada ARC Publications a pleasure for him, but a private pleasure. He uses 1976 pages 4-20.) Nevertheless, on a visit to his interlocutor to prompt an even denser London late last year, he was reluctant to consent monologue. "Everybody has to learn what it is to to an interview. be lonely again . That's why, WHO said it recently? I think it was Paul Valery, that when something is beautiful, it is tragic. And I think the * * * implication for me as I see it is that something that is beautiful is made in isolation. And tragedy Why don't you like interviews? in a sense is a kind of psychic flavour of this loneliness." One of the things about interviews is that I made some remark in Studio about Rauschenberg's Feldman admires hard work. "If Cage comes to cardboard works, how chic they look, and I was stay he will wake you up at 7.30 to ask if you have very, very unhappy about it because it was to a dictionary. It will take us ten years to catch up some degree out of context with what I was with the things he's doing now". Titles such as talking about and the interview didn't get into it. I Routine Investigations and Elemental Procedures focus think we have to talk about the history of the on the "small moves" of a daily life in art. In his galleries sometimes as well as the history of art. private pantheon Seurat, Giorgioni, Rembrandt, What were the first galleries? I mean public Piero della Francesca are guided towards exact galleries, not the Louvre which was a palace. I measurement and precise judgement by means of think the great economist Veblen talks about "total sensuousness . total intuition", official architecture. In other words the campus where I'm teaching with the Greek columns, the Is this intimacy what you've tried for in your music? pompousness of the official look of buildings and the whole history of the National Gallery or the Always. Metropolitan Museum . At the old Guggenheim, Sweeney framed every picture the Do you still look at painting a lot? same way, with a certain type of stripping no matter what. I like the look of the Tate - it's pretty seedy. The Whitechapel's a disaster, a caricature It's very difficult for me to look at painting now of a private place, and here we put art into it. without having a personal concern about the artist. I haven't been in anyone's studio for ten years. Without the personal involvement of the It's a problem that needs some discussion. And artist it goes into another - I wouldn't say when I saw that Rauschenberg's cardboard art criterion, but another . kind of ballpark. looks a little too chic on those walls, I feel it does look a little too chic. You get some kind of swank Milano gallery and you hang this thing there. It But you have a remarkable feeling for Piero della looks fantastic but it also robs from it. That's Francesca, for example, or Mondrian. what I meant in that interview. Not that Rauschenberg was making chic art but what Yes, but that's the other ballpark. I was looking at happens to the art once these sharpies get hold of Piero again yesterday. I wonder what happens to it and start packaging. Orchestras are like galleries. the work when it goes into a gallery or a museum. A certain type of orchestra has a pretentiousness It's confusing because it gains somehow. within its tone before it plays your tones. Its own delivery, its own attitude. That's like a gallery. I'm Because it's out of time or because the mind is free to attach writing a lot of big pieces now. Even when they any meaning at all to it? play softly, quietly, nicely it's still lost a lot; it's hanging in this streamlined gallery where you can't I think because it's dead. If we love someone and have an ashtray in the room because it would kill they die, they mean more because we've lost the room. You're fighting an insidious packaging them. You understand how someone would love conspiracy. At the same time I don't like that something from the past if only because it's dead. funky 'I-am-an-artist' look and 'This is an artist's painting so let's just slop it on the wall'. That's another kind of attitudinising. In your statements about music you talk a lot about "dying away". We're talking about intimacy, aren't we? Well, since I was a young man I always tried to work like a dead artist. How else can you get the Which is non-existent in England. Most art in objectivity? England is public art. England never really had a tradition of private art. Even someone like Anthony Caro would be a reduction of the Don't you feel that this opposes any idea of Modernism as monumentality of the English sculptural tradition contemporaneity, what Baudelaire talks about in "The of artists like Moore. Artist of Modern Life", the feeling that you can enjoy something because it is of the present, like clothes or design? What is the relation of scale to intimacy? I'm not exactly on Baudelaire's side. No matter how smart we are, we still see things in clichés, we feel that something big is monumental. What's the opposite side? That's a delusion. I feel that scale is no barrier to an intimate art. Just the other day I saw that There isn't any. gorgeous Watteau in the Wallace Collection, a large-scale painting that reaches unparalleled But you're on it whatever it is. I would envisage the intimacy. A lot of people went into the big picture opposite side as someone like Greenberg, perhaps? in terms of its design potential. It's as simple as that. Or just in terms of its look divorced from What would that be? any other kind of connotation. I don't feel it's in Al Held's mind to make monumental paintings. You could have a big American painting and it Greenberg seems to want to erect a perimeter around could he intimate.
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