[Glice]

While this is happening, Mattin faces the audience and turns on a spotlight pointing to the spectators, as if the situation was a police interrogation. He starts to say: “you’re a very polite audience, you are so quiet” in order to continue shouting: “Are you always so quiet, or is it just when you pay?” “Why are you here?” “What for?” “Why are you so quiet?” The audience is confused. A certain tension fills the room. Mattin keeps on repeating the questions. Some people try to answer and some others try to argue with him, but he keeps on repeating this sort of questions and then making very long silences. When the audience makes noises he strongly asks for silence. And when there is anxiety he asks: “Are you now asking yourself what’s coming next?”

[from here]



It's this sort of wankery. The naif-provocation. Again, it's the sort of thing that people did, or so I understand, in the early 80s, this interrogation of 'audience expectations'. Or further back, it's not far away from Dadaism, or at least Fluxus. The point being that the majority of grown-ups with a cursory awareness of art in general in the 20th-century find these sorts of 'art statements' to be horrendously patronising.



I know T&B has a problem with the Keith Rowe crowd (i.e., Seymour Wright) and I think the 'lower-case improv' thing of Sugimoto or Malfatti is similarly peurile - most people aware of the (Bailey) free-improv fallout are also aware of Cage's acts of philosophy - the task now is not to challenge our expectations of a 'concert' (Cage did that and made great music; Wolff rarely made good music that I heard) but to take an idea and do something with it.



I'm not saying some anti-avant type statement, but I think shouting about how 'avant-garde' you are is a bit like when Nickleback do something 'extreme'.