A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings

DIARY: AUDIENCE 1966

This text was written on the highways while driving from an audience in Rochester, New York, to one in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Following the writing plan I had used forzyxwvutsrq Diary: Emma Lake, I formulated in my mind while driving a statement having a given number of words. When it had jelled and I could repeat it, I drew up somewhere along the road, wrote it down, and then drove on. When I arrived in Philadelphia, the text was finished. It was used as my opening statement on a panel, The Changing Audience for the Changing Arts, May 21, 1966, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City for the Arts Councils of America, which later that year changed its name to Associated Council of the Arts. The others on the panel were William Alfred, Elizabeth Hardwick, Stanley Kauffmann, John H. MacFadyen, and Richard Schechner. My text was printed in The Arts: Planning for Changes, the title given to the published proceedings of the twelfth national conference of the ACA. zyxwvu DIARY: AUDIENCE 1966 I. Are we an audience for computer art? The answer's not No; it's Yes. What we need is a computer that isn't labor-saving but which increases the work for us to do, that puns (this is McLuhan's idea) as well as Joyce revealing bridges (this is Brown's idea) where we thought there weren't any, turns us (my idea) not "on" but into artists. Orthodox seating arrangement in synagogues. Indians have known it for ages: life's a dance, a play, illusion. Lila. Maya. Twentieth-century art's opened our eyes. Now music's opened our ears. Theatre? Just notice what's around. (If what you want in India is an audience, Gita Sarabhai told me, all you need is one or two people.) II. He said: Listening to your music I find it provokes me. What should I do to enjoy it? Answer: There're many ways to help you. I'd give you a lift, for instance, if you were going in my direction, but the last thing I'd do would be to tell you how to use your own aesthetic faculties. (You see? We're unemployed. If not yet, "soon again 'twill be." We have nothing to do. So what shall we do? Sit in an audience? Write criticism? Be creative?) We used to have the artist up on a pedestal. Now he's no more extraordinary than we are. III. Notice audiences at high altitudes and audiences in northern countries tend to be attentive during performances while audiences at sea level or in warm countries voice their feelings whenever they have them. Are we, so to speak, going south in the way we zy 50 experience art? Audience participation? (Having nothing to do, we do it nonetheless; our biggest problem is finding scraps of time in which to get it done. Discovery. Awareness.) "Leave the beaten track. You'll see something never seen before." zy After the first performance of my piece for twelve radios, Virgil Thomson said, "You can't do that sort of thing and expect people to pay for it." Separation. IV. When our time was given to physical labor, we needed a stiff upper lip and backbone . Now that we're changing our minds, intent on things invisible, inaudible, we have other spineless virtues: flexibility, fluency. Dreams, daily events, everything gets to and through us. (Art, if you want a definition of it, is criminal action. It conforms to no rules. Not even its own. Anyone who experiences a work of art is as guilty as the artist. It is not a question of sharing the guilt. Each one of us gets all of it.) They asked me about theatres in New York. I said we could use them. They should be small for the audiences, the performing areas large and spacious, equipped for television broadcast for those who prefer staying at home. There should be a cafe in connection having food and drink, no music, facilities for playing chess. V. What happened at Rochester? We'd no sooner begun playing than the audience began. Began what? Costumes. Food. Rolls of toilet paper projected in streamers from the balcony through the air. Programs, too, folded, then flown. Music, perambulations, conversations. Began festivities. An audience can sit quietly or make noises. People can whisper, talk and even shout. An audience can sit still or it can get up and move around. People...