Art History

ISSN 0141-6790

Vol. 24

No. 1

February 2001 pp. 132153

REVIEW ARTICLES
Ethno-Graphics
Ben Highmore

Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews by Krzysztof Wodiczko, Cambridge,

Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1999, 244 pp., 17.95.
Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World edited by Catherine De Zegher, Cambridge,
Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1999, 256 pp., 44 col. plates, 97 b. & w. illus., 19.95.
Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art edited by JoAnn
Wypijewski, Berkeley: University of California, 1999, 205 pp., 45 col. plates, 6 b. & w.
illus., 15.95.
In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the work of artists as diverse as Robert
Smithson, Dan Graham, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Mary Kelly, Lothar Baumgarten,
Fred Wilson, Jimmie Durham, and Edgar Heap of Birds, under the title `The Artist as
Ethnographer'.1 Consciously miming the title of Walter Benjamin's `The Author as
Producer', Foster not only charts what he sees as an `ethnographic turn' in recent artmaking, he also suggests a number of critical problematics facing such productions. If
Benjamin's famous essay was directed at undoing a cultural politics based solely on
sympathetic portrayals of the proletariat (a paternalistic tendency) in favour of a more
resolute intervention in the production process of culture, Foster wants similarly to
problematize recent ethnographic art practices in relation to representations of otherness.
The danger for Foster is that ethnographic art practices can result in the reification of
identity through the production of accounts of others as victims (this time the homeless,
the `native', the single parent, etc. take the place of the proletariat). Not only does this
often produce a `reverse-discourse'2 about otherness (reaffirming the binary operations of
difference) it can leave unquestioned the authority of ethnology in its various formations
(anthropology, sociology, etc). Alternatives to paternalistic ethnography (and Foster is less
than generous when it comes to supplying examples of the `enemy') might include a
continued silence in relation to the social life of others (a strategy of non-engagement that
marks a significant proportion of the history of modernism) or else various tactics of selfreflexivity. This has included the `framing of the framer' (a self-conscious ethnography
that foregrounds both the ethnographer and the problems of ethnographic knowledge)
and practices of self-othering, ranging from a Surrealist over-identification with `savages'
to auto-ethnography (a literal invocation of Deleuze's comment that Foucault teaches us
`the indignity of speaking for others'3). But self-reflexivity has its own dangers. A
paternalism replaced by certain forms of self-reflexivity can end up swapping reification
of the other for self-absorption a practice that Foster identifies as `narcissistic selfrefurbishing'.

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Foster provides a useful framework for any initial discussion of the work of the four
artists whose books are the topic of this review. The recognition of an ethnographic
orientation in the work of Martha Rosler, Krzysztof Wodiczko and in the recent work of
Komar and Melamid seems essential for grasping the challenges that this work holds. But
while Foster is primarily concerned with what an ethnographic orientation means for the
practice of contemporary art, I am more interested in what it means for the practice of
writing and picturing culture in general (an ethnography that would include art alongside
anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, etc.). If ethnography is the practice of writing
and picturing human culture, then the question of how to do it is going to be central to all
areas of the `human sciences'. The challenge that faces contemporary ethnography is
daunting: simply put, it is the challenge to fashion a practice that is at once both
deconstructive and constructive, both critical and generative. The work of Wodiczko,
Rosler, and Komar and Melamid do not constitute a new paradigm of ethnography (their
differences, as we will see, are too great) but they do suggest some inventive responses to
the ethnographic impasse (the impossibility of doing ethnography) that is often the
outcome of critiques of ethnography (Foster's included).
Historically the primal scene of ethnography is the `discovery' of the `New World'.
Here ethnography is `writing that conquers'. For Michel de Certeau this writing `will use
the New World as if it were a blank, ``savage'' page on which Western desire will be
written.'4 Ethnography emerges as both a repression and an inscription of power. The
work of Michel de Certeau is, I think, crucial for re-imagining ethnography and it
provides a productive resource for attending to the ethnographic work of Wodiczko,
Rosler and Komar and Melamid. In a number of essays and books, Michel de Certeau
charts an ethnology that expands and mutates from this inaugural moment of colonial
encounter across the centuries to the present. From Jean de Lery's sixteenth-century
account of his voyage to Brazil to recent television documentaries dedicated to `real life',
de Certeau argues that the writing and picturing of culture is based on repression (of the
other, of everyday life). For instance, de Certeau shows how the cataloguing of various
dialects and patois in France (in the years following the Revolution) coincides with the
repression of local languages and the establishment of a `proper' French language. He
writes in The Practice of Everyday Life that in contemporary culture the everyday is
` ''recorded'' in every imaginable way, normalized, audible everywhere, but only when it
has been ``cut'' (as one ``cuts a record''), and thus mediated by radio, television, or the
phonograph record, and ``cleaned up'' by the techniques of diffusion'.5
De Certeau's work is, in his own words, polemological. The productivity of his
position is therefore not to be tested through a realist mode that might (quite rightly
perhaps) worry about the validity of using the same terms to describe the colonization of
the Americas and the ethnography of contemporary Western culture. What it does provide
is an ethical provocation that sees repression as the unavoidable outcome of inscribing
culture in texts. Why, de Certeau seems to ask, would we want to exempt an ethnographic
study of modern dance culture (for instance) from being seen as an expansion of a
repressive ethnology? To do so is to offer a sanctuary, free from the contamination of
power and repression a false comfort. On the other hand what might it mean to
recognize ethnography as inevitably tied to repression? Instead of arriving at a dead end
(all ethnography is similarly repressive), de Certeau's work offers the chance to rethink
ethnography. If ethnography rests on a repression, de Certeau is also clear that
ethnography leaves traces of the other. Here de Certeau's psychoanalytic sensitivity is at
its most vivid: repression produces symptoms; what is repressed returns. Ethnography
then is constituted by a double movement; on the one hand a repression, but on the other
hand the traces of what it represses erupt in the text (even if these traces only appear as the
`presence of absences'). Rather than searching in vain for a scientifically validated
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`objectivity', an ethnographic perspective (following de Certeau) would witness `a return

of the ethical, of pleasure and of invention within the scientific institution'.6
Ethnographers would need to produce uncanny ethnographies (ethnographies that
render the familiar unknown, that leave space for the repressed to return). Ethnographers
would `inscribe ``artistic achievements'' on' their productions and `carve on it the graffiti
of their debts of honor'.7
The title of `artist as uncanny ethnographer' seems a fitting, if awkward, designation for
Krzysztof Wodiczko. If the uncanny is a haunting interruption of our familiar landscape by
repressed material, then much of Wodiczko's work purposefully privileges this condition.
Wodiczko himself, as well as critics like Denis Hollier and Dick Hebdige, recognizes the
specific spectral condition produced by his projections and vehicles.8 In a text from 1983,
included in Critical Vehicles, Wodiczko is explicit about the uncanny quality intended for
his public projections (images projected on to the side of buildings and monuments):
The attack [the projection] must be unexpected, frontal, and must come with the
night, when the building, undisturbed by its daily functions, is asleep and when its
body dreams of itself, when the architecture has its nightmares. This will be a
symbol-attack, a public psychoanalytical seance, unmasking and revealing the
unconscious of the building, its body, the `medium' of power. (p. 47)
For Wodiczko the `return of the repressed' is rendered both as an ideology critique of
urban architecture and as a literal `return of the oppressed'. City streets become haunted
by giant images of what so often passes as invisible. Wodiczko has used his projections to
turn public monuments into monuments of the homeless (or his preferred term
`evicts'). He has projected massive chains and locks on the side of empty buildings in New
York. Weapons and money have appeared on war memorials, and famously, in the 1980s,
a swastika on the front of South Africa House in London. In one of his most recent
projections City Hall Tower Projection, Krakow (1996), Wodiczko used video projection
and sound to re-animate the Central Marketplace in Krakow. Thousands of people
congregated in the marketplace to watch as images of pairs of hands performing various
gestures (making a hot drink, holding a candle, smoking a cigarette, etc.) were projected
onto the tower. Stories accompanying the video projection were amplified across the
square. These stories told of `private' lives, of things that go on (mainly at night) `behind
closed doors'. A woman tells of her alcoholic husband and the way that he abuses her and
their child. A young man tells of the night that his elder brother physically beat him when
he found him in bed with another boy. A blind man talks of his son's embarrassment
about being seen in the street with him.
These stories are both testimonies and ethnographies of the unseen city, but crucially
they are not `interpreted' by Wodiczko; rather they are sited. And it is the placing of such
ethnography that is crucial. If the similarity between colonial ethnography and more
recent cultural studies in ethnography is often evident in the separation of the place of the
ethnographic `object' from the site of ethnographic production (from an `over-there' to an
`over-here' where the over-here might be seen as the West, or the Academy, etc), then by
siting the work in the Street Wodiczko is doing something more than contesting the
legitimacy of the gallery. Such work intervenes in the field (the cardinal sin for traditional
anthropology) as both an interruption in the urban environment and an interruption in
the usual protocols of ethnography.
This uncanny ethnography is perhaps most evident in the various instruments that
Wodiczko has been making since the early 1990s (most through the resources of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, where Wodiczko is head of the
Interrogative Design Group). These instruments are designed for communication, but

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under altered conditions (a theme begun with the Homeless Vehicle Project). From 1992
Wodiczko's work has been particularly focused on the experiences of migration. He has
made a number of electronic instruments for people to use both to help tell their stories,
but also to give their stories a different visibility (to interrupt the invisibility of the migrant
experience). The alien Staff (19926) is a rod with a video monitor at the top. In the
central section, clear plastic cylinders can be filled with `relics' of migrations (immigration
papers, family photographs, etc.). The video monitor screens a testimony (an oral history)
of migration. The migrant, who is also the user of the Staff, composes these testimonies
and controls the `play-back' when out on the street. A similar logic informs the
Mouthpiece (Porte-Parole) (19926), which Wodiczko describes as a `cyborgian bandage'
(p. 201) a video monitor of a mouth talking which is placed in front of the user's mouth
thereby contesting the myth of `direct address' (as unmediated communication). These
instruments have been used in various cities across the world. In the United States they
were used by various groups to tell stories of what it means to be an immigrant, what it
means not to have a `green card' and to have to find the most poorly paid menial work.
Thus these instruments are not themselves messages, but tools for facilitating certain
utterances. In this sense Wodiczko does not `do' ethnography; rather, he builds
instruments that will allow ethnographic exchanges to take place. Critical Vehicles
details the rationale for the production of these devices, as well as the `ethnographic'
testimonies that they relay. In terms of ethnography, Wodiczko's instruments contest the
classic anthropological position of participant observation (where the utterances of the
`native informants' are sympathetically managed and interpreted by the ethnographic
observer) to a situation where `native informants' (and that means everybody) are invited
to be their own ethnographers. Ethnographic `objects' become subjects of their own
ethnographies. Critical Vehicles also gives an account of the experience of using these
devices: this is another turn in self-reflexivity and calls on the `client group' (or the
subjects of ethnography) to give account of the instruments' effects. In this sense these
works would need to be judged (ethnographically) for the different kinds of contact and
communication they allow to take place. Critical Vehicles evidences a range of
`communication scenes', from the painful and self-conscious use of testimony (an almost
confessionaltherapeutic use) to their use as `a starting point for [. . .] exchange and
sharing' (p. 195). Ironically, perhaps, the most successful use of the instruments might
come when they are abandoned: `Conversation developed so well between the immigrants
around the stick [the Alien Staff] that they forgot about it. They ended up in a restaurant
and the stick was just leaning against the wall.' (p. 204).
Like de Certeau (whom Wodiczko acknowledges as a reference), this work privileges
speech as the scene of otherness and everyday life. While the work exists in Critical Vehicles
as so much writing, these are documents of a much more oral and active performativity.
What makes Critical Vehicles such a useful resource is the mixture of documentation: an
`image track' (that continues along the bottom of the page) documents the devices and their
uses, and is coupled with a `sound track' that includes not simply Wodiczko's writing, but
the transcripts of testimonies, interviews with users, etc. Wodiczko's instruments provide a
way of operating that allows for a challenge of the various discourses around migration
(assimilation, for instance, as the neo-liberal dominant discourse) by the uncanny
strangeness of geographical displacement and the possible recognition (for those that
stumble across these instruments) to become `strangers to ourselves'.9
Although certain of her works have been consistently reproduced, most notably The
Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (19745), Martha Rosler's work has never
received the attention it deserved. Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World should begin
to redress this neglect.10 The book combines a number of critical essays focusing on
various aspects of her work with documentation of her many projects. If Wodiczko's
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work demands the full resources of MIT, Martha Rosler's production has always abjured
technological prowess. Rosler's work has been described as `intentionally flat-footed'11 or,
in her own words, `ham-fisted': `think of me as a ham-fisted person who is trying
something that they [the audience] could do better.' (pp. 545) If Rosler's work
purposefully looks like it is financed by welfare cheques rather than by the National
Endowment for the arts, then this is itself a tactic of a larger cultural politics. The basis of
this is in an explicit cross-current of Marxism and feminism that has informed all her
work. As an uncanny ethnographier, her work has often oriented itself to the spaces of
domesticity and everyday life (spaces traditionally associated with femininity), only to
undo the social separation of such spaces by infecting them from both outside and inside.
As she states on the back cover of Positions in the Life World:
I want to make art about the commonplace, art that illumines social life. I want to
enlist art to question the mythical explanations of everyday life that take shape as
an optimistic rationalism and to explore the relationship between individual
consciousness, family life, and the culture of monopoly capitalism.
In a range of early works the domestic everyday (cooking, looking after children, `keeping
house') is interrupted and invaded by other representations. In her collage series Bringing
the War Home (196772) Rosler takes images of bourgeois homes (culled from lifestyle
magazines) and inserts into them images from the Vietnam War. Patios become
battlefields and mutilated Vietnamese families populate the plush interiors of an ideal
suburban USA. In Semiotics of the Kitchen, a videotape from 1975, Rosler is shown in her
kitchen slowly speaking the names of kitchen utensils as she demonstrates possible uses.
`Knife', for instance, is named as she then maniacally stabs the air. In the tape Domination
and the Everyday (1978) images of the Chilean dictator and murderer Augusto Pinochet
are shown alongside the domestic routines of putting children to bed and other aspects of
possible family life. A series of titles relays a text putting domination at the centre of daily
life. The complex weaving of `simultaneous worlds' is impossible to unpack and to
manage, with the result that the everyday no longer fits into a comfortable realm `free'
from politics. Here feminism is not a specialized discourse of `identity issues' but a
position from which to engage all aspects of culture and society. These works have often
used an auto-ethnographic approach (Rosler is the one looking after her children in
Domination and the Everyday, for instance) but not so as to reveal an autobiographical
truth. Any simple recourse to ethnographic `truth' is undercut by the impossibility of
sewing together the various elements in the work.
Like Wodiczki, Rosler acts as an ethnographic facilitator. For instance the videotape
Seattle: Hidden Histories (19915) is a compilation of testimonies from Native Americans
living in and around Seattle. The role of ethnographer as archivist, organizer, educator,
public intellectual, etc. is shown most vividly in her curatorial project `If You Lived Here
. . .'12 which is described as
Comprising three exhibitions (Home Front; Homeless: The Street and Other
Venues; and City: Visions and Revisions) on housing, homelessness, and
architectural planning, with work by artists, film and videomakers, homeless
people, squatters, poets and writers, community groups, schoolchildren and others.
With four forums featuring the participation of artists, activists, advocates, elected
representatives, academics, and community members. (p. 299)
In her most recent work she has investigated aspects of modern culture that the
anthropologist Marc Auge has called the `non-places' of supermodernity.13 Indeed March

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Auge 's book would make a useful accompaniment to her works In the Place of the Public:
Airport series (19908) and Rights of Passage (1995). These works document the transit
spaces of international airports and the freeways around New York. Such non-places have
`surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral, [and]
offers the anthropologist (and others) a new object'.14
As Helen Molesworth has suggested, there are parallels between Rosler's work and
the work of people like Mary Kelly. Here, perhaps, is a strand of feminist ethnography
that combines a poetics of the everyday with an investigation into the political and
libidinal economy of otherness. Although traditional anthropologists have also been
concerned with cooking and childcare, this strand of uncanny feminist ethnography is
concerned with an `anthropology of the near'. The forms it takes deliberately un-manage
accounts of daily life, allowing for a `wild' orchestration of voices and marks.
Komar and Melamid's recent work is a series of paintings dedicated to the `People's
Choice'. As it states in the introduction: `To date, the artists have surveyed the opinions of
close to two billion people almost one-third of the world's population and have
translated the numbers into paint on canvas' (p. 2). Painting by Numbers is the story of
this project, illustrated with paintings based on the various national results obtained
(`Turkey's Most Unwanted' painting, `Turkey's Most Wanted painting', etc.) and
combined with samples of statistics, interviews and commentary. For the most part, the
paintings have an uncannily familiar look you have seen them before, but only in your
artistic nightmares. The `most wanted' are consistently blue/green landscapes with lots of
water and a combination of naturalistic elements. The `most unwanted' are usually
geometric abstractions in reds and purples. Komar and Melamid employed the services of
specialist poling agencies and have produced a statistical archive of massive proportions.
Of course, as you would expect from Komar and Melamid, this is all achieved with
humour and irony. The question though is where is the humour directed? Most evidently
it consists of insistently noting the disparity between what counts as `great art' and what
most people `want'. If 88 per cent of all those surveyed prefer `outdoor scenes' then how
can this possibly square with the kind of contemporary art that is current being circulated?
But this statistical naturalism is jeopardized immediately by the very absurdity of the task:
to create the paintings that are `most wanted'. Here the humour is directed at what might
be called `the democracy of the commodity' the tools that Komar and Melamid use (an
expensive and sophisticated from of market research) are the same as those that are used
for big business. So on the one hand Komar and Melamid point to a situation where most
people's desires are simply ignored (art), and on the other they seem to demonstrate that
where most people's desires are most evidently addressed (in high street shops, for
instance), `popular' desire is simply missing.
Thus the final joke is on the scientificity of knowledge. The massive resources that are
geared to finding out what people want is not underwritten by what people actually want,
it is undone by their desire. Along the bottom of each page of Painting by Numbers are
some of the answers given to the question: `If you had unlimited resources and could
commission your favorite artist to paint anything you wanted, what would it be?.' (p. 4)
These answers are significant precisely because none of the `most wanted' paintings come
close to satisfying any of the answers given. For instance:
Something with clear lines, bright colours yellows and reds something that
would show a distortion of the human form in an almost grotesque way, and that
would have some erotic aspect (Fred, Upper Darby, Penn.). (pp. 223)
A huge lizard walking across the Sahara saddled by this guy Phil I know (Jesse N.
Hive, Ithaca, emblem of my generation)
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Me, by Renoir, at an outdoor French peasant feast, surrounded by burly, ruddy,

healthy men (farmers, sailors, etc.), one of whom I am dancing with. He gazes at
me adoringly and I arch my swan-like neck and am looking at something offcamera that no one but me can see (Loretta Buckley, Ithaca, teenager). (pp. 357)
A mural that creates a distinction between the work that is beneficial for mankind
and for the persons themselves and work that is regulated by fear and insecurity
and scarcity. You'd have the heavens contrasted with the underworld, and the
middle you'd have a little child doing something in the nature of a finger-painting.
And that child is moving in two possible directions: one is toward a kind of
underworld and very dark-coloured area until they wind up as an adult and they're
a prison guard; and in the other direction, as they mature they become, in
luminescent colors, a boat builder and sail sway (Michael, Seattle). (pp. 625)
If Komar and Melamid end up with a production that contributes little to the re-imaging
of ethnography their wonderful ability to render ridiculous some of the most established
values of global capitalism and its ethnographic underpinnings (market research as
governmentality) is ethnographically productive.
All these books are documents of work that seeps out beyond the production of
discrete art works. The equivalent of field diaries and anthropological `notes and queries'
exist alongside putatively finished works. But there is also something inevitably lost in the
published forms. The text or photography cannot contain the act of passing through, of
the performativity in time and space of these video pieces and the uses of instruments. But
the inventiveness of the work is here matched by an inventiveness in publishing the
clashing of registers in layout and content work to de-privilege any one voice (including
the authorial voice).
`The Bororos of Brazil sink slowly into their collective death, and Levi-Strauss takes
his seat in the French Academy.'15 Michel de Certeau's insistence on the lack of symmetry
between intellectuals and those that are often the object of intellectual scrutiny is a
consistent reminder of the ethical aporia of ethnography. To insist on this is not to rule
such scrutiny out of court: to remain silent about the experience of homelessness (for
instance) is hardly taking the moral high ground. For de Certeau it meant finding tactical
ways of operating within the academy so that a space could be made for the voice of the
other. Rosler, Wodiczko, and Komar and Melamid (as well as de Certeau when he was
alive) all face the condition of ethnography as repression. How they negotiate such a
condition and how they pick at the ruptures that are already `present' in any ethnographic
inscription is their productivity. If these artists show some resourcefulness in avoiding the
worst discursive erasures then it is partly due to an aesthetics based on utility, complexity
and disintegration. But it is also one that makes use of humour, surprise and irony.
Ben Highmore
University of the West of England, Bristol
Notes
1 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The AvantGarde at the end of the Century, MIT Press,
1996.
2 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley, Peregrine Books, 1984, p. 101.

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3 Giles Deleuze in Michel Foucault, Language,

Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry
Simon, Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 209.
4 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History,
trans. Tom Conley, Columbia University Press,
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1988, p. xxv.
5 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
(Volume 1), trans. Steven Rendall, University of
California Press, 1984, p. 132.
6 ibid., p. 28.
7 ibid.
8 Denis Hollier, `While the City Sleeps: Mene,
Mene, Tekel, Upharsin', October, 64, 1993,
pp. 315. Dick Hebdige, `The Machine is
Unheimlich: Wodiczko's Homeless Vehicle
Project', Public Address: Krzysztof Wodiczko,
Walker Art Centre, 1992, pp. 5467. Dick
Hebdige, `Redeeming Witness: In the Tracks of
the Homeless Vehicle Project', Cultural Studies,
7:2, 1993, pp. 173223.
9 Kristeva is another resource; see Julia Kristeva,

10
11
12
13
14
15

Strangers to Ourselves, Columbia University

Press, 1991.
See also Helen Molesworth's essay, `House Work
and Art Work', October, 92, 2000, pp. 7197.
Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition:
Representation, Power, and Culture, University
of California Press, 1992, p. 178.
See Martha Rosler, If You Live Here: The City
in Art, Theory, and social Activism, ed. Brian
Wallis, Bay Press, 1991.
Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an
Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John
Howe, Verso, 1995.
ibid., p. 78.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday
Life, op. cit. (note 5), p. 25.

Sighting sound: Post media, a question of genre?

Simon Shaw-Miller

The Sound of Painting: Music in Modern Art by Karin v. Maur, Munich and New York:
Prestel, 1999, 128 pp., 60 col. plates, 30 b. & w. illus., 14.95
Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen by Michel Chion, foreword by Walter Murch, ed. and
trans. by Claudia Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 239 pp., 12.50
Analysing Musical Multimedia by Nicholas Cook, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, 278
pp., 35.00 hdbk; 2000, 13.99 pbk
Noise-Water-Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts by Douglas Kahn, The MIT Press,
1999, 466 pp., 1 col. plate, 4 b. & w. illus., $27.50
In 1985 (6 July22 September) Karin v. Maur curated a major exhibition at the Staatgalerie,
Stuttgart, entitled Vom Klang der Bilder: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20 Jahrhunderts. She
also edited the catalogue,1 a work which is still one of a small number to deal with the
interrelations of visual art and music and one of the most thorough empirically. This
catalogue was never translated from the German (although not all contributors involved
were German). It is known to specialists in the field, but has had a more limited impact on
the wider, English-speaking academic communities. Her recent book The Sound of Painting:
Music in Modern Art comes out of the earlier catalogue and exhibition, but is not a
substitute for it; it is more in the nature of a palimpsest, an abbreviated survey which is by no
means as scholarly, or as theoretically engaged as the earlier work.
However, surrogacy does not appear to be its purpose. It aims at a different market,
and as a book for a general readership it does fulfil a more modest function. It serves as an
introduction to issues raised by cross-disciplinary analysis of the impact of music on
modern visual art. Like others in the Pegasus library series, it is most accurately described
as an extended essay on an aspect of art's history, one that draws on current research but
provides fewer footnotes and other academic apparatus, in aiming for a fluid narrative.
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