Steve Reich, Richard Serra, and the Discovery of Process
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Steve Reich, Richard Serra, and the Discovery of Process 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 simul- taneously, 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 composi- tion, 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 24 PAJ 115 (2017), pp. 24–37. © 2017 Performing Arts Journal, Inc. doi:10.1162/PAJJ_a_00348 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 pro- vides 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 MAIZELS / Steve Reich, Richard Serra, and the Discovery of Process 25 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 con- cert 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 com- poser 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 eventu- ally 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 26 PAJ 115 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 paral- lel 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 mak- ing 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.