In Conversation about “As Within So Without”

Ron Morosan
February 2022

Ron Morosan: My first question has to do with your title and analysis of the Boccioni’s painting series “ Stati d’animo”. You write: “this is a picture of internal states projecting out onto, and commingled with, the external world.” You bring to your discussions texts like Thought-Forms by two members of the Theosophical Society of London. This is a whole new way of looking at that series of paintings. Can you elaborate on how you arrived at this fresh insight, and its mystical implications regarding other works by Boccioni ?

Daniel Barbiero: It’s a good question. I first saw Boccioni’s series of paintings probably about forty years ago, when I first discovered Futurism. At the time I figured they were just about the excitement of high speed train travel. More generally, for a number of reasons largely having to do with Italy’s situation as an only semi-modernized country at the beginning of the last century (for example, I understand that the villages my grandfathers came from didn’t have electricity when they left), I thought of Futurism as reflecting the fascination with technological modernity one might expect to find in a country that didn’t really have much of it. Much later on I became familiar with Besant and Leadbeater’s book and was immediately struck by the resemblance between what they claimed to see clairvoyantly—thoughts visually manifested as colored shapes—and Boccioni’s portraying a scene literally colored by the moods of the people involved. By then I’d known that Thought-forms had played a significant role in the early development of abstract art—many avant-garde artists of the early 20th century were Theosophists or had been influenced by Theosophy or its offshoot, Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy—and consequently had discovered how deeply occult ideas ran in Futurism itself.

This last point at first was something of a surprise to me, but the closer I looked, the more I saw that some of the Futurists’ interest in speed and energy, which maybe a more conventional reading would ascribe to their fascination with modern technologies in and of themselves, really had to do with their beliefs about a purported spiritual dimension running invisibly through visible reality. Luciano Chessa wrote a fascinating book about Luigi Russolo that covers a lot of this—he describes Marinetti, the Futurist leader, as thinking of the machine as a metaphor for spiritual energy. Even the Futurist obsession with movement—so many of their paintings are about things in motion—seems to have come from an assumption that matter ultimately comes down to the vibration of something immaterial. You might even say that for many of them, physics was really just metaphysics in disguise. For Boccioni that certainly appears to have been the case, what with his advocating for a view of the painter as a clairvoyant and his fascination with X-rays as a model for the extension of the five physical senses. After drawing the connection to Thought-forms I came to see Boccioni’s paintings as not just depicting, say, the rush of a bicyclist or soccer player or cavalry charge, but also as showing the corresponding emotions of the figures involved, mostly through the way he handled color and form.

As for the title of the essay, and book too, I thought it captured what Boccioni was trying to do with the Stati d’anima series, which is showing how the inner state colors the external world just as the doings of the external world impact and color the inner state. Beyond Boccioni, though, I also thought it captured a larger, non-occult insight from Heidegger’s Being and Time, which is that our engagement of the world is colored by our affective states, which in turn are influenced by what the world around us presents us with. So, as within, so without—an interactive relationship between the internal and external worlds. Plus, I just thought it would be fun to parody the old neo-Platonic/alchemical formula of “As Above, So Below.”

RM: In your essays you tackle some of the most enigmatic artists of the Metaphysical and Surrealist movements. With Imaginary Numbers you engage in a bit of speculative interpretation. For me I think this is necessary because there is in this work a deliberate swerve away from an interpretation that might seem obvious:  as Tanguy is engaging in imaginary landscapes of dream.

Could you see in Tanguy some elements of an an imaginary future, one that is post apocalyptic, where
the world has settled into a numb reality?

DB: I’ve always been attracted to enigmatic works of whatever sort, maybe because to me they dramatize the human inclination to interpret—to read things as signs pointing beyond themselves to something else, even if that something else turns out to be mundane rather than profound. And of course both metaphysical painting and Surrealism in its various guises assume that drive to interpret, to unravel riddles or divine hidden meanings, no matter what specific meanings–fate, the workings of the unconscious, the metaphysical psychology or secret intimacy of things–they believed to be at the heart of the enigma.

My interpretation of Imaginary Numbers is speculative, but I think consistent with the kind of divinatory readings Surrealism tended to license and even encourage. Actually, when I first was thinking about the painting two precedents came immediately to mind, which influenced my own interpretation. There’s a painting by de Chirico from 1915 that shows a profile of Apollinaire with what looks like a target painted on his temple; in 1917 Apollinaire suffered a head wound that eventually proved to be fatal. De Chirico’s painting seemed to have predicted it—in fact in “The Situation of Surrealism Between the Wars” Breton described it as “pure divination.” The second precedent was Victor Brauner’s self-portrait with one eye put out. Several years after it was painted Brauner’s left eye was accidentally put out by a thrown bottle (meant for someone else) at a drunken party. The belief that the painting had been premonitory was so strong that Brauner blamed himself for having brought about the accident by having predicted it! Imaginary Numbers struck me as being liable to a similar reading—as a painting that seemed inadvertently to predict a personal fate, given a certain interpretation of its iconography.

But yes, I think that as you suggest the painting also could be read as predictive of a more general, civilizational fate. It certainly can be seen as depicting a vast plain filled with ruins. It was painted at a time when one apocalyptic event—World War II–had recently ended and when the threat of a future, nuclear apocalypse was keenly felt.

RM: Two ideas that arise in several of your essays are the concept of non- places with Atopias and then the idea of  asemic  writing. Both of these ideas deal with forms of negativity or absence.

Is this a negative something that arises from a structural issue in a system of logic, or is it a formal issue in an aesthetic or metaphorical concept? Or both?

DB: So much to address there…I guess I should start by saying that the idea of negativity in many of its forms—negation as a movement of erasure or subtraction; negativity as a kind of not-thisness; or more fundamentally, non-being or nothingness as a condition in relation to Being or to the presence of something that projects itself into the field of our physical or conscious awareness—has interested me for a very long time, and I tend to see it as an important concept for making sense of the world around us. The question of non-being or nothingness goes all the way back to the very beginnings of Western philosophy and is just one of those things that won’t go away. It’s like a riddle the world holds out to us and that we’re compelled to try to solve, even if we can’t find any satisfactory solution. I suppose it’s a guiding metaphor, to the extent that most if not all concepts are at some level metaphorical—which I think they are, although this may be one of those things that has to be taken on faith—but it does have a way of making the world intelligible and, at least in my case, meaningful. For example, to take non-being or nothingness as prior—in terms of its significance, not necessarily logically or even physically—to being, or that-which-is, is to take as fundamental the contingency and finitude of that-which-is. It’s really the first step in a metaphysical stance toward the world. (I know that metaphysics has a bad name in some quarters, but it seems to me to be an inevitable feature of the human way of being in the world. So why not embrace it, with all the appropriate caveats in place?)

Negativity works in different ways—or maybe shows different aspects of itself—in relation to atopia and asemic writing. Atopia—which is a concept I borrowed from Franco Rella—is the idea of a place as the negation of one’s sense of being in place. One feels out of place or dis-placed in an atopia, one’s sense of being in a place of one’s own is negated, and it’s precisely this sense that defines it as an atopia. In regard to asemic writing, the idea of which comes from Jim Leftwich, the negation involved is of reference and of writing’s denotative function. Asemic writing is asemic to the extent that it’s taken as not referring to anything in the world outside of itself, whether that world consists of things or intentions or affects or whatever. But as I try to show in my essay, it does refer nevertheless, it is “semic” after all—because at a very basic level it’s about the moment of writing, it indicates the situation in which writing is taking place. It’s reference that escapes the intention not to refer. (And part of this is just that humans are interpreting creatures—we tend to want to find meaning virtually everywhere, even where it isn’t meant to be. And we do!) If I can tie it into the essay on Klee’s angel, which makes a similar point in relation to the spoken word, what’s being referred to is the opening up of language, before it takes on a determinate content. Really, to the contingent fact of language being used, whether through writing or through the personal encounter assumed by the spoken word. Or by the email interview, even!

RM: My experience with the negative in literature is almost embodied in a playwright who set out to cure the Western World of philosophy or particularly of metaphysics. I’m referring to Samuel Beckett. His statements “nothing is more real than nothing” or “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness” causes me to see abstraction in a different light. Becket was an anti-philosopher. For me this was not an absurd idea.

The discovery of abstraction in art at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century in the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky also introduced the idea of improvisation as a technique of abstract thought. When Kandinsky painted Impression III (concert) after hearing Schoenberg’s String Quartet # 2 in 1911, a use of improvisation as a concept became an instrument of composition. Its influence was immense.

Your essay “Imagining Barnett Newman While Playing Long Tones” invites me to think of the idea of musicians composing improvisational pieces from many paintings. Could you see this as a possibility?Would you like to improvise from other paintings? (I can guarantee you this will be very popular in museums).

DB: I’m not really familiar with Beckett’s work in any depth, but what you say of him puts him right in the middle of a major intellectual trend of the last century. The 20th century was full of attempts to close the book on metaphysics or metaphysical thinking—which usually meant something like thinking in terms of essences, or Platonic Ideas, or some kind of transcendental source of meaning or telos or what-have-you. We often think of this as having been the consequence of the century’s unprecedented catastrophes, but I think it’s actually something inherited from the 19th century’s questioning of the underpinnings of Western metaphysics—its transvaluation of values, to use Nietzsche’s phrase–which is something we’re still living through. I should mention that the Newman essay engages with the idea of nothingness as well. Underlying it is the assumption that the meaning of being is time, and that in concrete terms this meaning translates out to finitude. Thus the long tones, long as they are, are finite in relation to the time that surrounds them on either side. They emerge from time as they would from a void, and revert back to that void after they fade into silence. I don’t know what the sound of one hand clapping would be, but for me the sound of finitude and the inevitable non-being it implies is the sound of a long tone welling up and fading out. Plus, it’s a good technical exercise on the instrument, so there’s that too.

Improvising to paintings not only is a possibility, it’s something I’ve done many times and love to do. In fact, when I was music director for the Havlik Dance Performance Group we once did an exercise during rehearsal where the dancers and I all improvised to a Kandinsky painting. So it all comes around—Kandinsky was inspired to paint by a piece of music, and we were inspired to improvise by one of his paintings. At about the same time, we did a performance at a gallery in downtown DC. I happened to be positioned in front of an abstract painting, which I very happily used as a score for the duration of the performance. I’ve played paintings by Franz Kline, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still—although I sure don’t know what they would’ve thought of what I did to their work! The one museum performance I did involved playing from paintings, but only indirectly. The featured exhibit was of Richard Diebenkorn’s work, so I wrote a score that tried to translate one of his Ocean Park paintings into sound gestures.

It really isn’t hard to do. Abstract paintings are so suggestive of what one can do musically—it’s easy to draw correspondences between the painting’s colors and the instrument’s timbres, or the shapes of lines on the canvas and the profiles of linear musical phrases, or the relative density of paint or saturation of color on the surface and the volume or harmonic thickness of the music. I can often “hear” abstract paintings when I see them, which I know seems strange, but synaesthesia will do what it will. And don’t forget, there’s a close relative here in graphic scores, which are prompts to what in effect are improvised, or at least semi-improvised, performances. I’ve done an entire album of realizations of graphic scores, some of which began life as works of visual art, though not necessarily paintings. Even a classic graphic score like Earle Brown’s December 1952, which I performed with a really terrific ensemble at the 2018 Sonic Circuits Festival, looks more like an abstract painting than a musical score. Being able to play a painting is almost a prerequisite for being a contemporary improvising musician!

RM: Improvisation is, in my view, the fundamental creative drive of modernist art. Of course, it’s the
same for many others, however improvisation is often not understood by many academic theorists.

When did you as a musician realize that improvisation would be a major aspect of your development?

DB: It’s funny, but I think I knew improvisation would be what I wanted from music from the time I first took a real interest in music. The first music I really responded to in a more than superficial way—or maybe a visceral way is closer to what it was like—was rock with long instrumental passages made up of improvised solos. The guitar-hero aspect of it didn’t impress me so much as the idea that someone could invent lines like that—lines with a forward momentum, mimicking an unbroken stream-of-consciousness–extemporaneously. The improvisations I was especially drawn to were lyrical, melodic, song-like things and I think that’s what I really wanted to do, play things like that as fluently and as easily and apparently spontaneously as speaking. It took me a while to understand how it all actually works—at first I thought these ideas just came out of the ether or something and took over to play the instrument automatically. Like inventing something out of nothing! Which really isn’t how it happens. Gradually I learned that to play extemporaneously like that requires a substantial knowledge of the instrument—its geography, the range of sounds it’s capable of getting—and of scales and harmony and how they can be made to work together—or against each other, if that’s the sound you want to create. When I got involved with more sound-oriented improvising much later on, I found I had to develop an ear for timbre and for finding the musical possibilities in unpitched sound.

Much of all that was technical learning, but in the course of it I naturally reflected on what it was I was doing, and why, and how it all fit together with what I knew how to do—and what it felt like when I was doing it. Which led me to give some thought to what I like to call the “existential” dimension of improvisation—what it means, how it means, what it reveals about us as particular musicians faced with the particular situation we’re playing in. The way we organize it as a set of possibilities we can recognize and realize, given our background abilities and musical sensibilities. And of course the interaction with other improvisers, which has—or at least should have—a huge effect on our own playing.

I like to think that I understand improvisation more than I did when I first heard it, but because of that, or maybe in spite of it, after all this time it’s really remained my first love in terms of what to play. Dots on paper—not so much!

RM: Yes, I agree that improvisation is existential and you describe aspects of this in your essay “Free Improvisation and How it Means.” For me this is a huge topic and could easily lend itself to book length treatment. As I wrote earlier, improvisation is very little understood because it is very difficult to ascertain how it happens. I’m a subscriber to the psychology of William James, who has said things like “thoughts and ideas happen to us,” which implies a pre-conscious consciousness. This registers with me and certainly helps me understand how this functions in my own art.

The being in the time of improvisation is particularly interesting when heard in collective improvisational performance. There is that “in the groove” that Jazz Performance demonstrates. Patrick Brennan describes this as a kind of community created through improvisation in his book Ways & Sounds. For me this is almost a description of an existential proof of collective consciousness.

When you improvise with others do you experience this kind of collective consciousness as a component of form in the music?

DB: Patrick and I have discussed this quite a lot, as we’re both very interested in analyzing and understanding the social relationships both constituting and constituted by ensemble improvisation. It’s one of the recurring themes of Ways & Sounds that I found most fascinating. An improvising ensemble is like a community, a temporary one built around a collective project. The model I’ve always had in the back of my mind is something like the Sartrean group-in-fusion—a formation of individuals who combine more or less spontaneously to pursue a common goal, while at the same time each preserves his or her own free activity within the collective activity. Which is quite a balancing act, when you think about it, and that’s one of the challenges of free improvisation: how do I, as an individual improviser with a given background and set of expectations, retain my own freedom to improvise in a way consistent with that background and those expectations while simultaneously acknowledging and facilitating the freedom of the other improvisers in the ensemble to do the same? And all of this in order that we can create something in common that will reflect our individual freedoms as well as take the form of an emergent object in which our individual freedoms blend into a coherent whole? That last point is important, because in a free improvisation you don’t really go into it with a preconceived idea of what the final product—what that emergent object—will be. There always will be a certain malleability to it as different improvisers with different backgrounds, technical abilities, temperaments and musical sensibilities shape it, pushing against and pulling with each other in different ways and different directions—surprising each other, responding to each other (in sympathetic and yes, even antagonistic ways), taking background or foreground roles as the moment seems to demand. It’s a subject I’ve mostly approached from the point of view of the individual improviser, the meaning of whose improvisation is to disclose something substantial of him- or herself. But it’s something that also can be understood from the perspective of the ensemble as a whole. Possibly a topic for a future essay…

To answer your question, though—which I don’t think I really have: Yes, there have been times during free improvisations when I’ve experienced the kind of fusion of individual praxes—of the free, purposive actions of different people with sometimes very different backgrounds, sensibilities and technical skills—that often does feel like a collective consciousness or group mind at work. It’s a feeling that generally signals that the improvisation is working, that it’s succeeding in balancing individual freedoms within the collective whole and that—which is what we want, isn’t it?–at the same time it’s resulting in something of musical value. But of course one has to go to the recording to be sure that that last is really the case!

RM: However, I have another question that goes beyond your book and into the world of virtual space that we all now deal with. The term atopia and what you write in your essay “Atopia: Soundings from Non-Places” really sparked many thoughts for me about how the digital world and social media have created spaces that exist in technological circuits but in fact have only a semblance of existence in our consciousness. Are these reinvented atopias? Or, are they new non-places that are more like techno—fictions?

DB: A very interesting question. Oddly enough, I recently finished an essay reconsidering the idea of atopia in light of the curtailment of social life during these past two years of the covid pandemic. It seems to me that—absence making one see what one took for granted and now misses—the sense of dis-placement or otherness that one has when one is in a place in which one feels out of place can be a kind of stimulant that opens one up to seeing meaning in what ostensibly seems meaningless. The parallel I tried to draw was to the sense of disponibilité– “availability”–that the early Surrealists tried to cultivate during their hauntings of various places around Paris—the arcades by the Opera, flea markets and such. The experience of places like that as atopias creates a kind of emotional tension, or it can at any rate, that fosters an affective receptivity to events and people in the surrounding world. With so much of public space being inaccessible these past two years it seemed to me that the possibility for that kind of openness—and with it the possibility of experiencing that kind of serendipity—was lost. What I took away from it was a stronger sense that “atopia” is less a place than a response to certain places that facilitate that sort of response, and that the sense of atopia, the sense of otherness or dis-placement, doesn’t have to be entirely alienating. We often think of “alienation” as consisting in a violation of one’s sense of self—and certainly it can be this–but I try to think of it in the broader and maybe even more literal sense of meaning “being other to oneself,” which can manifest itself in both positive and negative ways. The state of being in which “I is another,” in Rimbaud’s well-known phrase, can be revelatory as well as forbidding.

How does all that relate to virtual spaces? It’s a very good question and one I hadn’t thought about before you asked! The online world, or at least significant parts of it, does seem to function like the virtual equivalent of a public space, non-places included, which one can in many cases pass through anonymously or with whatever limited aspects of one’s personality one wants to present publicly. As in a physical public space there’s opportunity for interaction between what I guess could be called curated personae—the public faces we present to others, which are often based on a limited emotional engagement with the situation and admit a limited degree of penetration by those others who presumably as presenting curated personae themselves. I’m not on social media so I really don’t know what it’s like to participate in it, but I’d imagine it involves something like a community of curated personae, although I could be entirely wrong—such is the occupational hazard of trying to generalize over a universe of many and unique individuals! To the extent that it does, though, I’d say that it does have an element of atopia to it—a strong element—in that it’s a place that isn’t any one person’s “real” place, and that the adoption of the curated persona is a mode of being in that place that isn’t one’s own by in effect not being oneself, or not entirely oneself. The curated persona may in fact represent one manifestation of the sense of the anonymity associated with atopia—one way of negotiating one’s way through this world open to all and proper to none, whether it exists as a physical space, or as this virtual analogue of a physical public space. In the virtual world the curated persona is itself a form of techno-fiction—a fictional, or semi-fictional character based on a real person, that is one’s mode of being in the techno-fiction that is the virtual world.

On the other hand—and I say this as someone who only last night had a wonderful conversation with a friend in Greece via Zoom—electronic communication technologies, these techno-fictions we increasingly inhabit or at least resort to, can also create a genuine sense of interpersonal contact or of community transcending the accidents of geography. The virtual spaces opened up via Zoom—and I know how disliked meeting technologies like Zoom are, and understandably so when they’re the expedient substitute for what during more normal times would’ve been face-to-face encounters—at least in cases like last night’s conversation, can be spaces of genuine exchanges between people who otherwise may have no other means of meeting and sharing something important of themselves—something more real than the curated personae adopted for other virtual or real-world situations. Email is another example. It’s been around for so long we hardly even notice the strangeness of it it anymore—the strangeness of instantaneous communication with anyone anywhere, which was quite a novelty when it first was widely adopted–but it can be no different from the kind of traditional exchange of pen-and-paper letters in which correspondents could communicate with intimacy and sincerity. As I feel has been the case for both of us during this most welcome and gratifying email conversation.

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