One Hand
Clapping:
The Taoe of Music
WholeArts and
The Psychic Internet is proud to present the
"Preface" and "Part One" of this
remarkable book by Daniel d'Quincy. "One Hand
Clapping: The Tao of Music," originally published by
WholeArts in 1991, is a book-length essay on the
performance of music from the perspective of Eastern
philosophy and religion. Mr. d'Quincy is a noted
composer, musician, author, inventor, educator, speaker,
and photographer. Please visit his unique music sites at WholeArts: syNThony, and the WholeArts Online Music Conservatory.
Page 43
This is most
evident in the popular commercial art that today clutters
the homes and offices of the hoi polloi. The
subjects, whether flowers or people, blobs of color or
patterns of design, are invariably placed smack dab in
the center of the frame. The shape and content of the
background is not valued in itself, and so little is it
an integral part of the picture that its dimension is
determined less by the subject than the size of the wall.
In this way, Manet’s “Water Lilies” come
in all sizes, carved up into details large, medium, and
small.
The same visual
orientation is transposed in a curiously opposite way
into the snapshots of amateur, and inept, photographers.
Here, the untrained and insensitive eye peers through the
lens at a subject or subjects in whom it is so
exhaustively interested that the background disappears
completely not only from view, but also from the
conscious calculations of the amateur photographer. He
fails to notice that his lens angle has caused a
meaningless and unaesthetic background to dominate
nine-tenths of the picture frame. This is how the world's
family albums have become littered with very nearly
abstract images of telephone poles and blank walls,
kitchen sinks and cabinets, all arranged into weird
angles and juxtapositions, with the head of Uncle Pete or
Aunt Sue in the bottom left corner. During the early
1980's, some of these amateur snapshots were assembled by
avant-garde artists in a comprehensive exhibit. They
suggested that by chance, and in ignorance, the layman
armed with Canon or Kodak had unwittingly severed the
ball and chain of conscious fixation, rendering him free
of the enslavement to the foreground which is the
hallmark of all western art.
To countenance
such an obtuse formulation, one may have to be already
somewhat under the influence of Zen, or something like
it. For our purposes in this inquiry, however, we can
find no true signs of reorientation in our basic view of
things. With respect to the foreground and the
background, nothing substantial has changed in the
aesthetic consciousness of the West since its inception
in Greece and Rome. (Next Page)
|
