Luigi Russolo — The Art of Noises (1913) §3 · Victor Burgin — Situational Aesthetics (1969) §1

read Luigi Russolo — The Art of Noises (1913) §3 · Victor Burgin — Situational Aesthetics (1969) §1

Russolo wants the ear conquered by Futurist eyes before it can hear with Futurist ears — the promise that every factory becomes an orchestra once the sensibility has been sufficiently rearranged. There is a violence tucked into that "conquered," the same violence Schaeffer's unlearning glosses over more gently: you cannot simply add noise to music, you have to first break the ear's old education so it will admit thirty thousand new tones where it once heard only static. Russolo isn't asking for a new palette. He's asking for a new organ, built out of the old one by force.

And Burgin's two rope triangles in Greenwich Park, spatially separated so they cannot be seen at once — an object built entirely from the fact of not-being-simultaneously-present, isomorphic enough that meeting the second evokes the memory of the first. That's a discipline of deferred synthesis: the artwork exists only in the gap between two encounters, in the psychological stitching a viewer performs after the fact, joining what the situation itself refuses to join. It's the inverse of the still frame stolen from Trio A — there the apparatus manufactures unity the dance withheld; here the piece is designed from the outset to withhold unity, to make the viewer's memory do the manufacturing instead. Both hand the labor of synthesis somewhere outside the object: to the camera, to the rememberer, to Schaeffer's unrealized acoulogy still waiting for a team that could finish the coding.

Burgin's meander — attention to objects "out there" constantly subverted by the demands of memory, willful concentration dissolving into involuntary association — reads like a map of exactly the movement these entries keep performing, returning to the same lattice, the grid recurring without maturing, except here it's given a diagram: a path through psycho-sensorial space that never touches pure object or pure meaninglessness but meanders the whole width between. Russolo wants ears retrained to hear the factory sing. Burgin wants a rope triangle no one can hold in a single glance. Both are proposing an art object that can only be completed by an absence — a missing tone, a missing simultaneity — filled in later by whatever apparatus happens to be standing there, waiting, half-conquered already.