Steve Reich, Richard Serra, and the Discovery of Process

The work, the act, translates the psychologically given into the intentional, into a “world”—and thus transcends it.

Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters”

WHOOP

Four microphones swing, pendulum-like, from crossbeams suspended just beneath the ceiling. They pick up speed as they rush downward, passing just above upturned speakers sitting on the floor. The microphones pick up little signal as they swing through the air, but as they cross over a narrow airspace just above the speakers, they briefly catch feedback and produce a blurry, almost percussive sound. At the outset of the piece, the microphones are released simultaneously, but eventually, they begin to move out of synchronization. Whoop/ Whoop—silence—Whoop/Whoop. As the microphone swings drift in and out of phase with each other, the feedback sounds evolve into an intricate rhythm that, eventually, unravels as the microphones come to rest and the piece ends.

As a kind of sound-producing sculpture, as well experimental music composition, Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music stands as an important predecessor for the contemporary florescence of work done in the borderlands between art and music. But while Reich’s composition points forward, as a proto-object of recent sound art, it also points outwards towards its own moment, attesting to the myriad crosscurrents that flowed between artists and composers through the course of the 1960s. Given the importance of the figures involved, these relationships have received remarkably little attention. Although the importance of the interactions between John Cage and artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns have already been documented, radical practice in the 1960s was animated by a larger constellation of figures working across this boundary, including artists such as Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, and Bruce Nauman and their musical contemporaries La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass.

As it was documented photographically during the Whitney Museum’s famed Anti-Illusion exhibition (1969), the first performance of Reich’s Pendulum Music can be seen as a kind of universe-in-miniature for this larger ferment. Flanking Reich (at the photograph’s center) are the composer and theorist James Tenney—an important performer of many of Cage’s early works—and Bruce Nauman, with whom Reich had discovered the acoustic effect at the heart of Pendulum Music. Furthest to the left is the structuralist filmmaker Michael Snow, whose Wavelength had been an important early influence on Reich. But for the purposes of this discussion, the most important of Reich’s ensemble members is Richard Serra, who you can see, barely in the shot, on the far left.

The importance of this photograph lies in the way that it insists upon a multidisciplinary and multisensory history of experimental practice during the 1960s. The received separation of this material along disciplinary lines has blinded us to the many ways in which essential discoveries, such as the notion of a “process art,” were developed in concert between many kinds of makers. My essay represents an attempt to stage a small-scale reintegration, one that revolves around three central contentions. First, that Reich’s musical ideas played a pivotal role in Serra’s development as a “process sculptor,” and second, to fail to attend to Reich’s imbrication within the currents of the art world is to misunderstand the origins of his music. Finally, understanding the tissue of this connection provides a new way of understanding the role that interactions between artists and composers played in articulating and then dismantling a vision of modernism.

THE STEVE REICH PHASE

In September 1965, Steve Reich returned to New York from San Francisco where he had recently been pursuing graduate studies at Mills College. After studying at Julliard from 1958 to 1961, which he attended alongside Philip Glass, Reich turned down an offer to attend graduate school in philosophy at Harvard and instead headed west to an unknown future in California. Though many of the hallmarks of his mature compositional output had coalesced on the West Coast by the mid-1960s, he had grown frustrated by the changing cultural climate of San Francisco, and he longed to return to what he...