Steve Reich, Richard Serra, and the Discovery of Process

Home , James Tenney, Kynaston McShine, La Monte Young, Michael Snow, Park Place Gallery, Pendulum Music

Michael Maizels

The work, the act, translates the psychologically given into the intentional, into a “world”—and thus transcends it. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters”

WHOOP —— WHOOP

our microphones swing, pendulum-like, from crossbeams suspended just beneath the ceiling. They pick up speed as they rush downward, passing Fjust above upturned speakers sitting on the floor. The microphones pick up little signal as they swing through the air, but as they cross over a narrow airspace just above the speakers, they briefly catch feedback and produce a blurry, almost percussive sound. At the outset of the piece, the microphones are released simultaneously, but eventually, they begin to move out of synchronization. Whoop/ Whoop—silence—Whoop/Whoop. As the microphone swings drift in and out of phase with each other, the feedback sounds evolve into an intricate rhythm that, eventually, unravels as the microphones come to rest and the piece ends.

As a kind of sound-producing sculpture, as well experimental music composition, Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music stands as an important predecessor for the contemporary florescence of work done in the borderlands between art and music. But while Reich’s composition points forward, as a proto-object of recent sound art, it also points outwards towards its own moment, attesting to the myriad crosscurrents that flowed between artists and composers through the course of the 1960s. Given the importance of the figures involved, these relationships have received remarkably little attention. Although the importance of the interactions between John Cage and artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns have already been documented, radical practice in the 1960s was animated by

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00348 by guest on 28 September 2021 a larger constellation of figures working across this boundary, including artists such as Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, and Bruce Nauman and their musical contem- poraries La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass.

As it was documented photographically during the Whitney Museum’s famed Anti-Illusion exhibition (1969), the first performance of Reich’s Pendulum Music can be seen as a kind of universe-in-miniature for this larger ferment. Flanking Reich (at the photograph’s center) are the composer and theorist James Tenney—an important performer of many of Cage’s early works—and Bruce Nauman, with whom Reich had discovered the acoustic effect at the heart of Pendulum Music. Furthest to the left is the structuralist filmmaker Michael Snow, whose Wavelength had been an important early influence on Reich. But for the purposes of this discussion, the most important of Reich’s ensemble members is Richard Serra, who you can see, barely in the shot, on the far left.

The importance of this photograph lies in the way that it insists upon a multi- disciplinary and multisensory history of experimental practice during the 1960s. The received separation of this material along disciplinary lines has blinded us to the many ways in which essential discoveries, such as the notion of a “process art,” were developed in concert between many kinds of makers. My essay repre- sents an attempt to stage a small-scale reintegration, one that revolves around three central contentions. First, that Reich’s musical ideas played a pivotal role in Serra’s development as a “process sculptor,” and second, to fail to attend to Reich’s imbrication within the currents of the art world is to misunderstand the origins of his music. Finally, understanding the tissue of this connection provides a new way of understanding the role that interactions between artists and composers played in articulating and then dismantling a vision of modernism.

THE STEVE REICH PHASE

In September 1965, Steve Reich returned to New York from San Francisco where he had recently been pursuing graduate studies at Mills College. After studying at Julliard from 1958 to 1961, which he attended alongside Philip Glass, Reich turned down an offer to attend graduate school in philosophy at Harvard and instead headed west to an unknown future in California. Though many of the hallmarks of his mature compositional output had coalesced on the West Coast by the mid-1960s, he had grown frustrated by the changing cultural climate of San Francisco, and he longed to return to what he perceived as the relative stability of New York.1

The following month, John Gibson and Paula Cooper moved their Park Place Gallery, the first contemporary commercial gallery in Lower Manhattan, into its

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00348 by guest on 28 September 2021 new location less than a mile north of Reich’s loft on Duane Street. The arrival of Park Place signaled the very beginnings of the maturation of the “downtown” art scene. Whereas the freewheeling Fluxus movement had fostered an aesthetic of intermedia cacophony, Park Place, with its subtitle The Gallery of Art Research, envisioned something closer to the controlled environment of a laboratory. Its short-lived exhibition program featured a mix of hard-edged abstract painting and geometric sculpture—often conceived in reference to esoteric scientific speculation—interspersed with experimental jazz concerts.2

Eight months after its opening, Reich was given his first headline concert at Park Place, and though it failed to garner much attention, his second Park Place concert helped mark his entry into the world of experimental art and music. Held in March 1967, the three-night concert series featured a number of recorded tape pieces, including a piece based on recordings he had made of the black Pente- costal preacher Brother Walter delivering one of his notoriously fiery sermons in San Francisco’s Union Square.3 Reich’s piece honed in on a small fragment of the sermon—a Jeremiah-esque prediction of an impending second Flood—and repeated it through a pair of tape players. The recordings, which begin synchro- nously, gradually slip out of phase with one another. This distortion was then re-recorded and amplified by Reich holding his thumb over one of the playback tapes in order to slow it down to the desired speed. The cumulative effect is a powerful, quasi-musical stammering, one that communicates the indignation and anguish of racial injustice not via affective language but through an insistent, almost offending repetition.

Reich’s three-night concert was an undisputed critical success. He received favor- able reviews in the New York Times and the Village Voice, and the comparatively well-established Robert Rauschenberg was impressed enough to offer the composer a chance to collaborate. But for both of their futures, the most significant audience member at this concert series was Reich’s former classmate Philip Glass, who had just returned from Paris along with the sculptor Richard Serra and his wife Nancy Graves. Though there was an active social and creative environment through which many of the now-highly regarded artists of this moment collabo- rated with one another, the trio of Reich, Glass, and Serra became particularly close. Not only did the three of them form a moving company that also eventually employed Chuck Close, Michael Snow, and Spalding Gray, but both Glass and Reich were active participants in the Serra studio.4

Upon coming to Reich’s loft, Serra was profoundly struck by what he heard. “Steve’s early work has had a lasting effect on me,” he recently recounted. “Come Out, It’s Gonna Rain, Clapping, Drumming, Piano Phase refuse to be eradicated from my mind. . . . Listening to Steve’s music is being in complicity with his

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00348 by guest on 28 September 2021 process. . . . It floored me. Come Out violated any notion of music that I held.”5 In Reich, Serra saw a composer working through a set of artistic questions parallel to his own. Reich’s sound samples, excerpted and manipulated on magnetic tape, offered an aural analog of territory Serra had been exploring in Europe, a single sculptural gesture frozen in tactile rubber.

Studying in Italy on a Guggenheim fellowship, Serra had become increasingly committed to foregrounding an obdurate, sticky materiality in his work. While his highly experimental first solo show featured a mixture of living and taxi- dermy animals—a project that bore traces of both early arte povera and Graves’s ongoing animal explorations—he soon turned to producing floor or wall-bound objects out of materials such as vulcanized rubber and latex. These earliest works conspicuously lacked the seemingly noble permanence of sculpture produced out of materials such as marble or bronze, and their unfinished appearances, which seem to still be hardening in the space of the gallery, serve to situate their making within the viewer’s ongoing present.

In the early part of 1967, Serra began his now iconic Verb List: Actions to Relate to Oneself, a delineation of over 100 single actions that a sculptor could perform on his material. While most art historians have sometimes tended to examine this work as a kind of text piece executed in the idiom of process rather than conceptual art, in the present context we may also think of it as a kind of verbal score for the future performance of sculptural gestures. The connection between Verb List and Reich’s repetitive cadence becomes evident when the piece is read aloud, an activity that might have occurred during the frequent visits that Reich and Serra made to each other’s studios. When given voice, the syntax of Verb List—“to roll/to crease/to fold/to store/to bend . . .”—easily takes on the choppy, repetitive effect of the tape pieces that so impressed Serra on their initial meeting.

SCULPTURE IN SLOW MOTION

For his part, Reich began considering an almost sculptural dilation of sound as the basis for a new composition. In September of 1967, soon after his first inter- change with Serra, Reich produced his own text-piece-cum-hypothetical-score, Slow Motion Sound. The one-sentence score, eventually acquired by Sol Le Witt—an active collector of Reich’s scores—calls for greatly augmenting the tempo of a recording, reducing its speed without lowering its pitch. As Reich described his concept in a subsequent statement:

The basic idea was to take a tape loop, probably of speech, and ever so gradually slow it down to enormous length. . . . In effect it would have been like the true synchronous sound track to a film loop gradually

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00348 by guest on 28 September 2021 presented in slower and slower motion. Extreme slow motion seemed particularly interesting since it allowed one to see minute details that were normally impossible to observe.6

Although this particular piece would have required complex technology Reich was unable to procure, his statement nevertheless provides insight into his early compositional practice. One of the goals of Slow Motion Sound was to distinguish differences between his own method and that of Terry Riley, whose repetitious patterns and experiments with tape loops had been an inspiration to Reich back in California. Contrary to Riley’s immersive sound, which Reich likened to bathing in tone, Reich was interested in cultivating an aesthetic of analytic precision that would lay bare the compositional logic for the listener. He sought, in his words, a kind of music that would function like “watching the minute hand on a watch.”7

While Reich may have been thinking primarily in and about musical composition, Slow Motion Sound takes on a different kind of significance when considered as part of the early dialogue between Reich and Serra. Shortly after the production of Reich’s score, Serra’s work became steeped in a thematic of congealing, material slowness, a development that led critic Robert Pincus-Witten to describe Serra’s works in the pages of Artforum as embodying “Slow Information.” Among the first works analyzed by Pincus-Witten was Candle Piece (1967–8), an elementary, floor-bound wooden candelabra with holes drilled for fifteen plumbers’ candles, which, tellingly, Serra eventually exchanged with Reich for the score to his Pen- dulum Music. Though art historian Benjamin Buchloh described Candle Piece, also known as Candle Rack, as a breakthrough work and the first example of true process art, Serra initially considered the work to be “illustratively simple- minded.”8 The dripping and accumulating candle wax, gradually accreting over the wooden beam, seemed too literal a manifestation of the slowly unfolding process in which he was growing increasingly interested.

Nevertheless, with Glass and Reich as frequent guest assistants in his studio, Serra was able to turn to a variety of new materials that could directly manifest the slow process of their making. Most importantly, Serra began working in earnest with lead, a material that, like the candles, may have presented itself through Glass’s ongoing employment as a plumber. For a brief and fertile moment, lead became Serra’s ideal medium. It was a visibly sculptural metal that, because of its similarly slow, viscous temperament, would register the cracks and bubbles of its formation. Though he had begun with the vulcanized rubber To Lift (1967), lead became the primary medium through which he explored the ideas laid out in Verb List. Over the next two years, Serra’s lead was subject to rolling (Thirty Five Feet of Led Rolled Up), bending (Bent Pipe Roll), arranging (1-1-1-1), support-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00348 by guest on 28 September 2021 ing (Corner Prop), dropping (Hand Catching Lead), tearing (Tearing Lead), and splashing (Splashing).

While Serra’s early innovations are permeated by musical ideas—from the act of augmenting tempo to the possibilities of splicing and repeating recorded material—his impact on Reich was slightly longer in development. At the outset, Reich was primarily focused on the ways in which Serra’s thoroughgoing materialism resonated with own shifting approach to music. As he explained in a recent interview:

For Richard a piece of lead was a piece of lead—it wasn’t an allusion to the strength of building materials or pliability; it was simply something that was what it was, and its physicality would dictate what could be done with it. There was some analogy in that basically, once I’d composed a pattern, I started putting it through the phasing process and let it go through different canonic relationships.9

However, Reich was soon discovering his own compositional breakthrough, one that was manifest in a suite of works produced by Reich and Serra in both literal and metaphorical concert with one another.

THE GRADUAL PROCESS

In the summer of 1968, Reich took his annual trip to escape the stifling heat of New York. He headed west to visit Bill Wiley, a leader of the so-called California Funk artists and an old friend from their days in San Francisco. At that particular moment, Wiley was teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and he had brought along Bruce Nauman, one of his more promising pupils, to assist with his summer school course. Wiley had been in New York for Reich’s 1967 concert at Park Place, where he had been particularly affected by Piano Phase, and approached Reich about creating a visual component of the piece in the form of a glowing waterfall.10

Shortly after arriving, Reich made a significant discovery. While relaxing with Nauman and Wiley, he picked up a small tape-recorder and, in a gesture he claims was meant to imitate the archetypal Western image of the cowboy twirl- ing his lasso, began to swing the attached microphone around by its cord. Reich was immediately struck by the blurry, almost percussive feedback sound that the recorder made when the microphone passed in front of the output speaker. The swinging microphone became the crux of his collaboration with Wiley and Nauman that summer, a multimedia performance piece they titled Over Evident Falls. While the staging included a live performance of Piano Phase alongside

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00348 by guest on 28 September 2021 Richard Serra, James Tenney, Steve Reich, Bruce Nauman and Michael Snow performing Reich’s Pendulum Music, May 1969. Photo: Courtesy Richard Landry.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00348 by guest on 28 September 2021 Top: Richard Serra’s Splashing (1968) on the cover of Artforum (Feb 1969). Photo: Courtesy Artforum. Bottom: Richard Serra, Candle Piece (1967–8) Wood, Plumbers’ candles, 14" x 104" x 4". Photo: © Peter Freedman, Inc.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00348 by guest on 28 September 2021 other tape music, the climax of the show was the moment at which Wiley cut a hole in an enormous bag of bright white laundry detergent that had been suspended from the ceiling. Glowing under blacklight, the soap flakes fell in an iridescent cascade, accumulating on a swing built into the middle of the stage. Dangling from the swing were a number of microphones that, as the changing weight distribution of the soap started to propel the swing, began to oscillate over their output speakers.

But while Over Evident Falls may have been the ostensible goal of his visit out to Colorado, the pendulum discovery opened onto broader ramifications for Reich’s music after he returned to New York. At the suggestion of Nancy Graves, Reich decided to put his thoughts into writing. While “Music as a Gradual Process” would go on to become one of his most significant works, at the moment of its writing Reich was primarily concerned to define the opposition between process and a more traditional mode of composition. “The distinctive thing about musical processes,” explained Reich, “is that they determine all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details and the over all form simultaneously.” Different than a composition, which was governed by note-to-note decisions thought to express the persona or the prowess of the composer, a process was inherently a much more all-at-once event—single verb repeated, extended, and layered into a larger aesthetic fabric.

This is not to say that processes were intended to be instantaneous. In fact, Reich returns repeatedly in this short essay to the thematic slowness that he and Serra had been jointly developing in their work. Rather, the central issue illustrated by Reich’s paradigmatic example of “pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually come to rest” was the way in which processes were fundamentally parsimonious; they would be allowed run their own course with no further interference from the composer. The method of working would allow the composer to move beyond personal expression towards something much more radically original.

Although it may have had an essentially musical agenda—offering a refutation of both Cagean chance procedures and orthodox serialist methods—“Gradual Process” was nevertheless inextricably situated within the currents of the art world. To fail to take seriously the extra-musical threads to which its discussion connects is ultimately to misunderstand the essay. As musicologist Keith Potter noted in his recent book Four Musical Minimalists, one of the most apparent of Reich’s touchstones from the visual arts is Sol LeWitt’s 1967 “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” Indeed, it certainly appears that Reich’s assertion that “once the process is set up and loaded it runs by itself” is intimately connected to LeWitt’s dictum that “the idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”11 Although he

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00348 by guest on 28 September 2021 would become close with LeWitt by the beginning of the 1970s, the date of their initial meeting is somewhat uncertain. It is not so important, however, if Reich had actually read LeWitt’s writing before his trip to Colorado: LeWitt’s ideas would have been so thoroughly familiar to Reich’s interlocutors, including Nauman, Graves, and Serra, as well as the larger cohort of Park Place artists, that they must have helped frame the writing of “Gradual Process,” whether consciously or not.

The same can be said of Robert Morris’s “Anti-Form” (Artforum, 1968), an important apologia for the kind of disarticulated, crumbling sculptures then also being produced by both Serra and Nauman. Though Reich may not have read Morris’s text, he was likely familiar with it. Not only was Morris one of the most highly visible and polemical artists of the moment, but the piece must have come up in his extended conversations with both Nauman and Serra, whose inclusion in Morris’s illustrations represented a major career breakthrough. In terms of Reich’s thinking, Morris’s praise of painters Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis for having finally pushed “beyond the personalism of the hand to the more direct revelation of matter itself” expresses a sentiment that would have resonated with the composer’s project. Not only do Morris’s words echo the Reich admiration for Serra’s lead-as-lead sculpture, but they also call to mind Reich’s own search for an apersonal, materialist creativity in which “a compositional process and a sounding music . . . are one and the same thing.”12 One might even say that, from an art-world perspective, Reich’s innovation was to read LeWitt’s ideas through Morris’s. In Reich’s essay, a conceptualist emphasis on predetermined procedure acquires a kind of anti-form translation—a new emphasis on materiality as such and an instance on the artist’s undisguised gesture persisting into finished product.

However, Morris’s importance to the story around “Gradual Process” arguably lies more in the way in which the ideas of the essay were received than in how they came to be written. Shortly after Reich completed his text in October 1968, Morris organized an exhibition that was intended to showcase the emerging idiom of anti-form. Borrowing the visual strategy he had seen at Park Place, Morris convinced his gallerist Leo Castelli, one of the elite dealers in the city, to hold his show not in the usual gallery space but instead in a storage warehouse up near Harlem. The eponymous 9 in a Warehouse offered a reprise of Lucy Lip- pard’s Eccentric Abstraction (1966): re-selecting Nauman as well as Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, and Alan Saret, alongside other additions, the most important of whom was certainly Richard Serra.

Serra mounted several works in Morris’s show, including Prop, a piece of lead pipe propped between a wall and floor mounted lead sheet, and Scatter Piece (1967), a torn rubber work that seems to closely presage Morris’s own Scatter Piece of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00348 by guest on 28 September 2021 1968–9. However, his most significant contribution was Splashing, a calf-high sculpture created by swinging ladlefuls of molten lead against the baseboard of the warehouse wall. The piece itself resembles a wave of molten lead permanently breaking against the resistant wall, a document of liquid movement perpetually frozen. The work, which earned Serra his first Artforum cover two months later and eventually became an art-historical icon, clearly bears out the importance of Serra’s interactions with Reich. Though its title and form emerges from his Verb List, the contingent material realization seems to derive directly from two of the three examples of “gradual process” provided by Reich: the motion of a swing and the slow breaking of small ocean waves.

The language in which he described the work’s creation also contains unmistak- able echoes of Reich’s ideas. In a recent interview with Serra, MOMA curator Kynaston McShine asked about the genealogy of his sculptural gesture, suggesting that it drew upon the principles of aleatoric composition outlined by Cage. Serra quickly rebuffed McShine, explaining that, “the splashing and castings were not involved with chance. I took a measured length of the juncture of wall and floor that I wanted to cast.” While his insistence on the distance between Cagean chance and a more analytic, measured mode of material exploration clearly reprises Reich, the way in which Serra emphasized an almost phase-like repetition of his gesture indelibly connects his notion of process to Reich’s. “Those casts,” Serra emphasized, “were made ladle-full by ladle-full—it was spoon against the wall, spoon against the wall, a conscientious repetition to build up a ton of lead.” Seen in this way, Splashing is not simply a work about material process, but one that offers a physical analogue to the phasing technique Reich developed in his music.

ANTI-ILLUSION/POST-MODERN Morris’s 9 in a Warehouse show itself turned out to prefigure a much larger exhibition mounted at the Whitney Museum six months later. Curated by Marcia Tucker and James Monte, Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials offered a sustained and highly visible investigation into the sort of tenuous, decomposing art championed by Morris. Building out from his contribution to the Warehouse show, Serra created a pair of works for the exhibition, One Ton Prop and Casting, an expanded version of Splashing in which the forms produced by the flung lead were pulled away from the wall, turned over, and arranged in sequence along the floor. One Ton Prop-House of Cards, a precarious arrangement of four lead sheets leaned against one another, functioned as part of a series of Prop pieces in which Serra explored the possibility of additive sculpture that appeared to have no permanent seams. These precarious configurations were intended as counter to the minimalist fixa- tion on tightly fabricated geometric forms, but they also dramatized the viscous slowness that he and Reich had been jointly exploring in their work. Serra’s

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00348 by guest on 28 September 2021 Props, as one contemporary account claimed of his other works from that time, realized a state of “arrested motion. His pieces . . . delay the act and isolate both time and movement.”13

Serra, Glass, and Reich, along with their close friends Michael Snow and Bruce Nauman, were each given the opportunity to present what curator Marcia Tucker termed an “extended time piece”—a term meant to flatten the traditional distinc- tion between performances of music, film, or theatre. Glass and Serra shared their evening, presenting a series of Serra’s films alongside Glass’s How Now (1968) and Two Pages (1969), a work based on the repeated transposition of an isolated string of notes that was dedicated to Reich. Reich’s concert featured Nauman as a performer in Pendulum Music, a purified version of the swinging microphone concept he had introduced in Over Evident Falls. Pendulum Music consisted of four “musicians”—including Serra and Nauman alongside Snow and the pianist James Tenney—simply releasing microphones that were suspended from crossbeams just beneath the ceiling. As the four-part, periodic motion of the microphones slowly slipped out of phase with itself, the piece produced an intricate rhythm that, eventually, unraveled as the microphones come to rest. The instruction-based “score” for Pendulum Music was reprinted in the exhibition catalogue alongside the first publication of “Music as a Gradual Process.”

Beyond its illustration of the extent to which Serra’s investigations in particular were bound up with those of his composer peers, the importance of Anti-Illusion resides primarily in the way it sought to connect its subject to a larger set of aesthetic and intellectual trajectories. Anti-Illusion became the first major museum show to foreground work that was not only site-specific but that was virtually all executed in situ. This unusual installation strategy, necessitated by the physically and mate- rially unstable art on display, served to undermine the traditional function of the museum to represent distant times and places in an isolated, homogenous present. This non-referential stance certainly resonated with the anti-idealism of Morris’s “Anti-Form” essay, but Tucker and Monte’s exhibition arguably pushed this point even further. Beyond the collapse of material or aesthetic hierarchies (composition/ parts, inspiration/execution, essence/realization), the Whitney show undercut the traditional demarcation of the museum as a space apart. Instead of a collection of fixed objects placed into an artificial homogeneity that cut across time and place, the works of Anti-Illusion insistently referred back to the real space of the galleries and the immediate present of their execution and reception. This condition of the real presence of the artwork would become an area of increasingly focused inter- rogation during the course of the next decade, and Anti-Illusion provides a key hinge between the embodied phenomenology of minimalism and the heterogeneous explorations of land, body, installation, and performance art during the 1970s.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00348 by guest on 28 September 2021 In hindsight, it has become clear that these explorations functioned as part of an opening salvo of what Rosalind Krauss would famously come to call the “post- medium condition,” a mode of art-making that disregarded as irrelevant the rules concerning medium specificity that had been understood as the governing logic of modernism in the visual arts. This was clear even as part of the curatorial logic at Anti-Illusion, where many of the works were specifically selected for the ways in which they put pressure on the traditional categories of “painting” and “sculpture.” Barry Le Va’s plane of sifted flour and Rafael Ferrer’s melting block of ice were “sculptures” that were neither volumetric nor permanent, while Rich- ard Tuttle’s dyed canvas polygons were “paintings” that were neither portable, nor in fact truly painted. Serra and Reich’s work functioned very much within this logic. While Reich referred to Pendulum Music as “audible sculpture,” Serra’s work sought what Benjamin Buchloh has described as the “liquefaction” of the sculptural object.

However, what has not been sufficiently appreciated is the role played by interactions between visual artists and composers at both the beginnings and the ends of the story. While Kandinsky’s collaborations with Schoenberg helped to articulate a concept of total visual abstraction that would rise above “mere orna- ment,” the work of composers such as Cage, Young, and Reich provided critical lessons to artists ranging from Serra to Robert Rauschenberg on the poetics of disarticulated form, un-authored compositions, pastiched sources and non- referential materials. But different from the Gesamtkunstwerk ambitions of the Kandinsky and Blue Rider group, the aim of these more recent figures was not a grand synthesis of the arts but a new freedom of transcription and retranslation between media. The prolonged flows of molten lead and musical tempo, or the staccato cadence of repeated words and gestures, are not intended as perceptual complements. Rather, they are parallel strategies to allow for a new kind of irreducible directness in place of an outmoded vision of artistic expression. The truth to materials—whether sound or stuff, audiotape or film—allowed both producer and receiver to move, as Reich put it, “away from he and she and you and me outwards towards it.”14

NOTES 1. For more on Reich’s biography, see Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 151–71. 2. Linda Henderson, Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York, exhibition catalogue (Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, 2009), 11–13. 3. Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Picador, 2007), 543.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00348 by guest on 28 September 2021 4. Kynaston McShine, Lynn Cooke, and John Rajchman, Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years, exhibition catalogue (Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 25. 5. Richard Serra, Speech Written for Reich’s MacDowell Medal Award Ceremony in 2005, accessed August 11, 2014, http://www.stevereich.com/articles/Richard_Serra.html. 6. Steve Reich, Writings on Music, 1965–2000 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 15. 7. Qtd. in Potter, 165. 8. Benjamin Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 411. 9. Dan Fox and Mark Godfrey, “Harmonious Life: An Interview with Steve Reich,” Frieze Magazine (October, 2006), accessed May 31, 2016, http://friezenewyork.com/article /harmonious-life. 10. William T. Wiley, “Sound and Vision,” Art in America 100.2 (Feb 2012), 59. 11. Reich, 9. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, eds. Kristine Stiles and Peter Howard Selz (Berkeley: U. of C. Press, 1996), 822. 12. Robert Morris, “Anti-Form,” Artforum 6, no. 8 (April 1968), 35; Reich, Writings about Music, 10. 13. “Nine Young Artists: Theodoron Awards at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum,” accessed August 11, 2014, http://archive.org/stream/nineyoungartists00solo/nineyoung artists00solo_djvu.txt. 14. Reich, 11.

MICHAEL MAIZELS is assistant professor of art history at the University of Arkansas. He has organized exhibitions of art and music, including recent installations produced by Guido van der Werve and Francesc Torres, as well as historical works by La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Mar- cel Duchamp, and Bruce Nauman. He is at work on his second book, Radical Composition, which will address interrelationships among artists and composers such as Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Meredith Monk.

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