
Here we would need to adopt second-order cybernetics, the recognition that attempting to measure cultural location is relative, viewer dependent, unstable, shifting, and open-ended. Soon it would become apparent that a precise or consistent location cannot be determined, except by the abandonment of triangulation in favor of a dynamic network model. This triple triangulation will quickly be seen as insufficient, however, since those based on Asian and Middle Eastern cultures will also be required. In the foreword, legendary British artist, theorist, and cybernetics pioneer Roy Ascott, who was once Eno’s teacher, attempts to map where Eno belongs in the ecosystem of art:Īny attempt to locate Brian Eno’s work within an historical framework calls for a triple triangulation, whose trig points in the English tradition would seem to be Turner/Elgar/Blake in Europe, Matisse/Satie/ Bergson, and in the United States Rothko/La Monte Young/Rorty. The identity becomes a straightjacket it becomes progressively more dangerous to step outside of it. The assumption of the correct identity - painter, sculptor - fattens you up for the market. Their orientation is basically towards the production of specialists, and towards the provision of ambitions, of goals, and identities.
Brian eno oblique strategies amazon free#
Oblique Strategies, 1974Įno even employed the cards while producing David Bowie’s iconic 1977 album Heroes, using Oblique Strategies on the song “Sense of Doubt.” Oblique Strategies, 1974 Oblique Strategies, 1974 Oblique Strategies, 1974 Oblique Strategies, 1974Įno first confronted this interweaving of music and visual art in his formal arts education, amidst the groundswell of the avant-garde and the Fluxus movement with its bold proclamation that “anything can be art and anyone can do it.” He empathically embraced this inclusive model of creativity in defiance to the specializations and constraints of the traditional art world, asserting:Īrt schools manage to balance themselves on the fence between telling you what to do step by step, and leaving you free to do what you want.

Though a conceptual art project, the cards were essentially a practical tool for generating ideas, breaking through creative block, and breaking free of stale thought patterns. The project consisted of a set of 115 white cards with simple black text in a deck subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas.
Brian eno oblique strategies amazon series#
Eno and Schmidt created a series of art instructions - an underappreciated art genre unto itself - titled Oblique Strategies. Indeed, one of Eno’s most interesting projects is a mid-1970s collaboration with the German composer Peter Schmidt, who had just finished a set of 64 drawings based on the I Ching - the same ancient Chinese text that so inspired Cage. Though the failed works might be interesting too, they are not works that you would choose to share with other people or publish. If you consider yourself to be an experimental musician, you’ll have to accept that some of your experiments will fail. This is a fundamental difference between Cage and me. But my approach is, although I don’t interfere with the completion of a system, if the end result is not good, I’ll ditch it and do something else. The music systems designed by Cage are choice-free, he doesn’t filter what comes out of his mind people have to accept them passively.


I don’t reject interference I choose to interfere and guide. But the approach I have chosen was different from his.

John Cage … made a choice at a certain point: he chose not to interfere with the music content anymore. In a 2005 interview for the British Arts Council, Eno came to compare his work to that of John Cage: That is precisely what Christopher Scoates, director of the University Art Museum at California State University, explores with unprecedented depth and dimension in Brian Eno: Visual Music ( public library) - a magnificent monograph spanning more than four decades of Eno’s music projects and museum and gallery installations, contextualized amidst a wealth of exhibition notes, sketchbook pages, and other never-before-revealed archival materials. It is precisely this ethos that explains Eno’s medium-blind, experience-centric creative impulse underpinning the visual arts career that he undertook in the 1960s, which developed in tandem with his growth as a musician. “Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences,” ambient music pioneer Brian Eno wrote in his diary.
