8 - The Modulated Subject: Stockhausen's Mikrophonie II

Summary

I. Environment as Verfransung

The beginnings of 1960s art, with its shift from austere formalism to performance and politics, appeared to be under the aegis of theater. The first “happenings” of Allan Kaprow in 1958 to 1959 were roughly contemporary with his “environments,” and followed closely on the period of John Cage's teaching at the New School for Social Research (1956–58). Kaprow consulted with Cage on “how to include tape-machines” and eventually added “electronic sounds from loudspeakers” to the second version of his “Untitled Environment/Beauty Parlor.” This specific coupling to electronic media was noted by Theodor Adorno a few years later (1967) in “Die Kunst und die Künste,” where he suggested that developments in contemporary art were leading to what he called a “Verfransung” of once-distinct media, genres, and arts. Verfransung is an ambiguous term, which might be translated as “erosion of boundaries,” “fraying,” “infringement,” or even getting lost (sich verfransen). Accordingly, Adorno's diagnosis is a cautious one, suggesting both that Verfransung was bound up to the technification of art and also that “the erosion (Verfransung) of artistic genres almost always accompanies a reaching of form after extra-aesthetic reality”—in other words, an avant-gardist sublation of art into life. This was certainly the case with Kaprow's environments and happenings, as for the soundscape projects of R. Murray Schafer and others from the later 1960s onward.