To Paint on Water: The Audiovisual Duet of Complementarity

Abstract

Concealed within television and today's electronic technology lies a world of untapped potential. Computer colors joined in harmony with offer the composer and the artist alike a precious new amalgam of dynamic art resources. Extraordinary possibilities remain untried, unknown, even barely imaginable. Concealed similarly from public view or understanding, certain painters at the start of this century began developing iconoclastic principles of composition in bold color abstraction, revealing potential forms of expression capable of intimate, feeling. To make color dance was beyond their reach, but despite the fixed nature of oil on canvas, their painterly forms did seem to deal with abstraction in musical ways. Elementary concepts and aspirations of these artists were perhaps first expressed in a few chosen words by pioneer abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky in this excerpt from his earliest letter to Arnold Sch6nberg, dated January 1911: your works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed in The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions is what I am trying to find in my painting (Crawford 1984). Kandinsky's dream of creating a painter's theory of harmony-color and line for their own sake, like Sch6nberg's radical compositional system of 12 tones, of equal potential-could be identified with many painters thereafter. Each in his or her own way-Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Sam Francis, and many others-without solidarity, and inadvertently, have become members of a unique group. With hindsight, one perceives that, to varying degrees, each artist was devoted to a spiritual or a universal concept of the pure plastic, to the notion of and content at one and the same These terms frequented Mondrian's essays. Such concepts evolved into a long-standing quest what I label today simply a musicalization of Walter Pater declared that all art aspires to the condition of music. Kandinsky wrote that those individual voices in Sch6nberg's were exactly what I am trying to find in my painting. And so too by an ironic inversion of this quest, Alexander Scriabin and perhaps even Sch6nberg himself envisioned a color counterpoint as partner to their musical ideas. In light of the high esteem accorded painters of this epoch, who would care whether or not their particular aspirations toward some kind of musical form actually might be realized through computer arts of motion? Even today, it remains obscure just how any new art (or music) could come from computing machines. Nevertheless, the impulse to deal creatively with and content at one and the same time, to aspire to the condition of music excited the intuitive aspirations of many artists throughout this century. These concepts indeed are about to come to fruition in an altogether different way-dealing with color and tone at one and the same time.