ABSTRACT
Martin Creed conducting an ‘orchestra’ playing one note; Hayley Newman staging a choir that smokes cigareĴes; and Anri Sala, so captivated by the detuned clash of two contrasting musical pieces on a radio, that he recreates it as a video performance in a gallery. Each of these pieces by contemporary artists not only reference sound as their basic material, but also question the social context, collective activity, and assumptions that surround the performance of those sounds. How do we differentiate these performance-based works from those of the 1960s and 1970s? And what is at stake when works become purely – or rather impurely – interdisciplinary? These are some of the questions that this chapter will raise and aĴempt at least some provisional answers. Needless to say, it will be necessary to view recent practices through the lens of both philosophical and historical debates in order to get some way to approaching those questions. AĴempting a cross-disciplinary discussion is rife with its own problems, as in the ‘and’ of the title. It is one thing to put these two disciplines next to each other, but what does this ‘and’ signify: Cross-fertilization? Influence? Correspondence? Juxtaposition? Interpenetration? Obviously there are many different ways of reading this ‘and’: each will be relevant here, as will the issue of approaching a working definition of the ‘experimental’ common to both music and art.
