Kill Your Wrinkles

A good friend of mine is spending her spring (their autumn) in Buenos Aires shopping and strolling after helping oversee the elections in El Salvador. She has been updating me via email and facebook. Since we have regular discussions when she's in the States, it only feels appropriate to attempt the same practice online. Her last email sparked much contemplation about noise and art.

Her adventures took her to a modern art museum where she stumbled across Wrinkle (1968) by argentine artist Liliana Porter (1). It's a series of ten photographs depicting "a still life of a dynamic process" in which Porter systematically crumples a sheet of paper -- and, arguably, flattens it back out.

The photos are interesting but a interview by fellow artist Emmett Williams (1, 2) has been included alongside the prints. I found a blown up photo if you want to read the entire piece. Emmett questions himself in true Ken Wilber (1, 2) fashion (have you ever read A Brief History of Everything? (1, 2)) to dig into a very interesting view of art.

emm: ...wrinkles aren't very nice. wrinkling things up is messy... destructive.
ett: don't moralize, so is god. in nature, whenever anything shrinks or contracts...

I saw Kill Your Idols (1, 2) the other week. Its about the short lived No-Wave scene in New York (1, 2, 3) -- including interviews from great bands like Theoretical Girls, Sonic Youth, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, etc. Arto Lindsay (1, 2, 3) from DNA struck a chord with me (no pun intended) when he discussed why noise was so prevocative at the time. He insisted that what ideas New York No Wave was tussling with were centered around re-construction. Noise music didn't need chords because blues-oriented "punk" bands were covering that. Noise didn't necessarily need rhythm, for that matter, and artists were trying to grapple with redefining the building blocks of music, perhaps by wrinkling it.