Late last year I went to see Vladislav Delay, an electronic music
artist from Finland, perform in the Argus Building, a derelict art nouveau
office tower in Melbourne. I enjoyed it immensely and wrote some notes about it
a few days later.
Every work of art contains a theory of art. I learnt the following
about art from Vladislav Delay.
1. In Vladislav Delay we experience the total colonisation of our
world by machinery, the realisation that the ghost is the machine, that
technology is technique.
2. The work of art that takes time as it takes place can only take
form momentarily; each form is successively crushed and the particles
rearranged carefully. (Or: matter can be neither created nor destroyed; it is
constantly in flux.)
3. Such works of art have a fine-grained consistency apart from
any form.
4. The ghostly machine dies as soon as it takes form, producing a
new machine out of itself, an interruption in the fine-grained consistency that
is accommodated unconditionally but never assimilated. Many machines are at
work.
5. Never demand chronological consistency of an artwork. Instead,
6. Immerse yourself in the artwork’s consistency, in the
particular materials on whose changing organisation any new form is
precipitated.
7. The artwork may be encountered as an event (or a series of
events) but it does not consist in events. Its consistency precedes all events.
8. In Vladislav Delay, the creation and dissolution of forms by
machinery is the aesthetic self-organisation of a volatile elemental consistency.
Melbourne, November 2012
Melbourne, November 2012
You might be interested in the work of Luomo, the other name under which Vladislav Delay makes music. You can read about him here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?action=showall&boardid=41&threadid=16733