Two weekends ago, Brian Eno — who burst into public consciousness
as the ostrich-feather-bedecked "non-musician" with the band Roxy Music
— descended on Long Beach, California, to inaugurate his audiovisual
installation "77 Million Paintings,"
with a packed auditorium of Enophiles at the Richard and Karen
Carpenter Center (yes, "those" Carpenters) at the local Cal State
university.
Eno, often described as "professorial," comes off
like a convincing cheeky hustler of the art world with more than a hint
of stand-up comedian (this is a compliment). He obviously loves to
lecture; his talk is a mix of grandiose statements, occasional
disarming self-effacement, and truly inspiring notions—and it somehow
all works, and has been for the last four decades of his charmed life.
His artwork, installed within the small University Art Museum, consumes
the entire display room. Filled with the strains of a new piece of
ambient music, the dark and narrow space is furnished with a few soft
loveseats, some earthy mounds of a strange material called vermiculite
("Go, touch it!" encourages the sensorial-junkie Eno), and, against the
back wall, the titular 77 million paintings, held in 12 frames.
This
is not the first unveiling of the "77 Million Paintings," a digital
"constantly evolving sound- and image-scape" (description courtesy
Eno's art partners Lumen London)
that's been showcased in galleries all over the world. For 22 years,
Eno created about 100 images — mostly abstract — that were later fed
into a computer program (what he calls the "engine" of the piece) that
phases them in and out of four monitors in randomly generated, aleatory
combinations. The Long Beach exhibit boasts 12 flat-screen monitors
arranged in a vague cruciform shape, potentially yielding -- if the
engine were to run for a long enough time -- 77 million cubed distinct combinations.
There's something in these shifting abstractions that unmistakably
reminds one of the post-World War II stained-glass windows, much
inflected by pre-war modernism, that replaced ancient windows shattered
during the Blitzkrieg. The effect of this environment is similar to
those multi-denominational chapels so common to airports during the
1970s and 1980s.
"I'm sure my early experiences as a
Catholic, prior to becoming a militant atheist, have left their mark on
me," says Eno before considering, for him, the far more compelling
airport connection, linking his current work with his revered 1978
project, Music for Airports. Flight and temporary detachment loom large in his personal mythology.
"The thing about airports that's interesting is that they are a weird
transitory state," Eno explains. When he's on a plane, he confesses,
he's shocked by how "incredibly open to being moved" he is by even the
stupidest, most sentimental in-flight movies, attributing it to "the
fact that you're unrooted, you're in the air, you're not in touch with
the world, and there's the slight possibility in the back of your mind
that you might die." He adds: "I think all of those things make you
emotionally open in a different way; and so I think the reason I was
attracted to the Music for Airports project was because I
thought, ‘This is a place where people are already in a different frame
of mind.' I was imagining, of course, that it would be played at
airports, and it has been played at a few, not many [times]. I'm
thinking of trying to make that frame of mind. I always thought that
the problem with the music you hear on airplanes and in airports is
that the secret message is, ‘Don't worry, you're not gonna die; it's
all gonna be fine.' The music was sort of relentlessly cheerful, and I
thought it would be nice to make music that sort of said to people,
‘Would it really matter if you died?' " (This gets big laughs.)
Eno recalls that when Music for Airports
originally came out, one of the reviews said, "There's no melody,
there's no beat, there's no story." Thought Eno: "Okay, that's quite a
success!" But the artist confides to having a complicated relationship
with professional criticism of his work, as he's often lambasted as a
celebrity dilettante. At the Long Beach talk, Eno's still smarting from
a very recent "snotty" review of "77 Million Paintings" by an LA Times critic who called him "a visual dabbler."
"I have been visually dabbling for the past 45 years!" the former
Winchester School of Art student protests to the converted, who laugh
at the hapless critic and shout back "We love you, Brian!" and "You are
an artist!"
"The popular acclaim, of course, it's fantastic,
and I love it, and I get my endorphin high from it," he says. "But it's
when people say something that slightly needles you that you start
thinking. … Criticism is completely painful. I hate it. I don't see why
I deserve it, but at the same time, I'm grateful for it in the long
term."
Still, in music, visual art, or even perfume-making,
Eno has always been much more interested in processes, systems, and
engines than in final results. "Suppose somebody builds a bridge, and
it connects the mainland to a kind of little island that everyone loves
going to," he muses. "So, suddenly everyone can go to this island, have
a lovely time, and go back and forth over the bridge, and everybody's
happy. And then an architecture critic comes along, and he looks at the
bridge and says, 'This isn't a very original bridge. I've seen much
better bridges than this.' And he misses the point that actually what
matters is what's happening, what it's doing in its time and place. And
I think this is something that very often happens with criticism,
because of this misunderstanding about what art is."
He
mentions a little light machine, "endlessly self-generating, never
repeating," that he had devised and patented when he was 19 — the
original ancestor to "77 Million Paintings," as well as his popular
iPhone apps, "Bloom" and the just-released "Trope."
"Very early on, I became fascinated by complex experiences that had
arisen from very simple initial materials, and this was an example of
that. Not long after I made that, I heard a piece of music that changed
my life, which was Steve Reich's piece ‘It's Gonna Rain.' " A piece as
minimal and elegant as Reich's pioneering 1965 experiment in process
music with tape loops, "was absolutely what I needed to hear." Along
with other forward-thinking British popsters with an art-school
background (e.g., John Cale or Pete Townshend, who decades later
dragged avant-garde sounds into the mainstream through CSI),
Eno also fell under the sway of Terry Riley. The composer's "extremely
economical" "In C" was another example of something that could be both
"ludicrously simple, but a very beautiful piece, too."
Systems and machines are what allow Eno to rethink the idea of "The
Artist." Inspired by Copernicus, Darwin, and his friend Richard
Dawkins, his idea of an artist "is someone who starts things, not
someone who finishes things."
"It's a different role for the
artist," he explains. "It's an idea of the artist not as the kind of
uber-being that the Romantics saw, as a person who's kind of next in
line from God, who somehow channeled the divine through their work.
It's quite a different idea. It's more humble than that. It's the idea
of the artist as someone who plants a seed somewhere, and then lets it
grow. So I often think that I'm thinking of my work as a gardener more
than as an architect."
By design, temperament, and luck
(which is to say aesthetics, ethics, and randomness — all Eno
mainstays), he's cultivated a position that allows him to tend his art
garden freely: "Luckily, I've remained sort of slightly under the
radar," Eno says. "I'm not very popular. A lot of the people I work
with are very popular, and I don't think I would trade places with them
because, you know, they can't walk into a porno store."
--Gustavo Turner
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