INNOVATIVE ARTIST
77 MILLION PAINTINGS "The Art of Surrender"
"77 Million Paintings" by Brian Eno
Picture by Lumen London - lumenlondon.com
77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno was an audiovisual installation temporarily placed in Fabrica throughout the Brighton Festival 2010. 77 Million Paintingspremiered in Tokyo in 2006 and has since been exhibited in 13 countries around the world.
The art installation is made of high definition video screens placed as a symbolic stain glass window, where 296 original works are overlaid and faded extremely slowly, and two vermiculite cones are lighted from above in ever-changing colours, in a dark room with Eno's ambient music.
After the humdrum and dundrum of the busy streets, I personally found it extremely nice to enjoy the quiet and peaceful atmosphere that was to be found inside of Fabrica. 77 Million Paintings felt like an oasis of calm. As soon as I entered this inviting experience, I was enveloped by a sense of timelessness and it was almost as if the very worries of ordinary life were being washed away my bones.
The audience can sit on the sofas, sometimes for hours, enjoying a majestic art encounter instead of cruising quickly through a more traditional art show, where you read about the exhibition and spend a few minutes of your time staring at some art object before doing something more “valuable” with your time.
Soon you become aware of all your senses, and fall into a deep imaginary, intimate and very pleasant world.77 Million Paintings sonic and image scape offers a new world in which the spectator is guided to letting go, surrendering to the ever changing mosaic of infinite abstract colour combinations and ambient music. This experience allows you to relax, provoking the awakening of aesthetical and philosophical debate; a mystical experience for some…
It’s impossible not to talk about the fusion of art and religion. Brian Eon’s symbolic stain glass window is located at the very centre of a dark old church, it’s colourfully radiance of light appears as a divine intervention. This also highlights the point of taking a screen outside its normal location. We are so use to watch screens in cinemas, houses, and even museums, but not in a church. By placing the screen in a church, the meaning and the relation we usually have with this object changes, creating a variety of interesting outcomes.
"77 Million Paintings" by Brian Eno
Picture by Lumen London - lumenlondon.com
"I think of these things as visual music. The screen is not being used to tell a story - which is what screens normally do - but to show a painting that changes all the time... People now have larger screens, but these big objects sitting in their rooms are dormant for a lot of the time. If you’re not actually watching television, what you have is a big black hole in the wall. 77 Million Paintings is intended to occupy that downtime so that, instead of having a dead hole in the wall, you have a living picture." ---Brian Eno
"The Art of Surrender"
- By mjo for THE MDM Wonderlance
"77 Million Paintings" by Brian Eno
Picture by Lumen London - lumenlondon.com BRIAN ENO's WESITE/SHOP >>
Specials BRIAN ENO “We need to exercise our gifts”
ABOUT BRIAN ENO
Brian Eno, born in 1948 in Suffolk, was educated at St. Joseph´s College in Ipswich, where he adopted the name St. Juan Baptiste de la Salle and thus becoming: Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno.
He continued his studies at Ipswich Art School and Winchester School of Art. It is then that his interest in music is encouraged by Ipswich ´s school teacher and painter Tom Phillips.
INFLUENTIAL COMPOSER/MUSICIAN/ PRODUCER
Eno first appeared in the glam rock public scene as part of the group Roxy Music, lead by singer and songwriter Bryan Ferry. Eno performed with Roxy Music from behind his mixing decks, balancing volume levels and modifying the sound of the instruments through his VGS3 synthesizer, his tape recorders and other electric devices. He also contributed with backing vocals and his flamboyant costumes on stage became a stylemark.
Between 1973 and 1977 he released his influential art rock solo albums: Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).
More experimental musical styles with No Pussyfooting (1973) and Evening Star (1975) collaborations with Robert Fripp, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) by Genesis where he is credited with Enossification, the influential Another Green World (1975) and Discreet Music (1975).
It was also during this period that he played with Phill Manzanera in 801 and was also a prominent member of the art-classical orchestra Portsmouth Sinfonia.
Having coined the term “Ambient Music” for low volume music designed to modify one´s perception of surrounding environment, his series in this type of music, made for this new genre. These now classics of the Ambient genre are: Discreet Music (1975), Music For Films (1978), Ambient 1: Music For Airports (1978), Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror (1980, with Harold Budd), Possible Musics (1980, with Jon Hassell), and Ambient 4: On Land (1982), Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks (1983) which was composed for the documentary film For All Mankind.
Eno nevertheless continued to sing on some of his records, ranging from Before and After Science (1977) to Another Day on Earth (2005) as in Wrong Way Up (1990) with John Cale.
Using the studio as a compositional tool was also an innovation introduced by Eno, who describes himself as a “non-musician”. He also coined the term “treatments” to describe his alterations of the sound.
David Byrne, with whom he produced the influential My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981). He produced and performed on three albums by Talking Heads, including Remain in Light (1980), produced seven albums for U2, including The Joshua Tree (1987), and worked on records by James, Laurie Anderson, Coldplay, Paul Simon, Grace Jones and Slowdive, among others.
As an artist, Brian Eno pursues multimedia ventures in parallel to his music career, including art installations, a newspaper column in The Observer, and "Oblique Strategies" (written with Peter Schmidt), a deck of cards in which each card has a cryptic remark or random insight meant to resolve a dilemma. He continues to collaborate with other musicians, produce records, release his own music, and write.
Being his musical taste as varied as his experiential curiosity, Brian Eno declares: “I love Gospel, even if I am an atheist” and, in the other side of the spectrum, he does not hesitate in admiring the experimental in Rammstein and their use of metal guitar riffs, sampling, synthesizer/sequencer lines, and distorted vocals.
BRIAN ENO, THE ART THEORIST
“An Illustrated Talk” – Brighton Festival 2010 (Brighton & Hove, United Kingdom)
The Concert Hall at Brighton Dome fills up of an avid public rather quickly, just minutes before Brian Eno is set to appear on stage.
Eno, one of the most influential and innovative artists and composers of the past 3 decades, is giving his last talk in Brighton as Guest Artistic Director of its prestigious annual festival.
This time “Professor Eno”, a title that he has earned over the years due to his taste for theorising about the creative process, is ready to give us an illustrated talk on the purpose of Art and whether humanity needs it or just likes it.
He starts to talk us into the subject while showing some projections of screwdrivers, reminding us of the fact that, in even the simplest and most practical tools, the hand of men cannot help but turn artistic. He shows us how the handle in a screwdriver can be manufactured in so many different creative ways, most of which have little practical use (apart from their solid nature).
He tells us that the problem that some people have with art is that they try to put a value on it, irrespective of its context and its purpose, butt art should be valued as the role it takes on within the context it originated in and whether this lasts 1 day or 100 years.
Eno also says that there should not be absolute values and/or traditional considerations fixated particularly in eternal and ubiquitous values when it comes to art.
At one point he references John Carey, saying that he already tried to explain the purpose of art in his book “What Good are the Arts?” but whilst he succeeded criticizing, very fairly so, the snobbery and class assertion through the arts, overall failed to respond to the question within the very title of his book.
To Eno, art is the way in which our imagination is expressed and our imagination is precisely what distinguishes from other animals. It also comes as naturally to us as any other thought process, for all of us love picturing ourselves and others in other worlds and in different situations.
And while we try other ways of being through literature, we do so as well through films, music, paintings and other art forms.
We feel with art because we engage as naturally as unconsciously with the constant “what if” in our everyday lives. This “what if” represents our capacity for having contents of other creatures´minds in our own, meaning, we can extrapolate what other people may have in mind.
He reminds us that some monkeys can do that too at some basic level, telling us about the story of the experiment in which a monkey was shown a red light every time a door opens, for her to get food, so she learnt to await by the door. The monkey apparently learnt to wait with her foot resting on the door and, as soon as the red light went on, the scientists could see how she looked around her at the other monkeys, checking on whether they were paying any attention to her or not, so she could sneak out through the door opening. It was demostrated in this exercise that the monkey thought about what other monkeys could be thinking.
Most autistic children cannot extrapolate what other people think, they do not hypothesize about the thoughts in other person´s mind. That is why people find it difficult to communicate with them.
SURRENDER
Eno speaks about how back in the 70´s people started to listen to music in a different way; they begun to LIVE music as part of their lifestyle, their atmosphere.
He thinks that what is wrong in most records is that they have a mix of slow and fast songs while they should be either all slow or all fast, having a similar tempo, so once you go into a certain mood you can stay there for a while, as most people like doing. Probably that is why many people used to make compilation tapes, so they could hear the same type of mood songs sequentially.
This led him to the creation of “ambient music”, as an art that invited people to stay in a particular mood and surrender.
He opines that humanity has a history of increasing control. In fact he says that civilization is an exercise of evening out as we subdue natural circles as much as we can.
“I am not controllable”__he says.
He likes how surfers surrender in their shifts to adapt to the ocean instead of trying to control it.
“We are afraid to surrender; we do not see it like a viable option”
“But we need to rehearse our surrender, we need to exercise our gifts, like our imagination”
“There is no much money in surrendering but I like to think that I am creating the spaces where people can experience surrender”
Darwin theorized, theory that is becoming more and more solid fact, that life is not hierarchical but symbiotic. We are interconnected in a web of existence and all species are dependant of each other.
Surrendering is to Eno the experiencing of being part of the everything, and that is exactly what he is interested about.
“The part where you allow yourself to transcend is the part that interests me”
In the round of questions somebody asks him if we should surrender to a particular political party.
He brings out a memory of meeting Tony Blair at a music event, before he became Prime Minister, and Blair asked him, almost immediately, if he was committed. Eno thought it to be the strangest question that he had ever been asked.
He thinks that you should never commit to a political party and also regrets how propaganda and advertising manipulate our natural feelings in order to get us to do things that, if we thought about them rationally, we would never do otherwise.
He is very pleased that his 77 million paintings exhibit at Fabrica (Brighton) had received around 2800 visitors to that date.
Somebody else asks him if he thinks that science and art can be merged to create different types of art.
Eno believes that science and art are different things.
Whilst science describes, and very well, the world we are in, art is about imagining other worlds.
To Eno, only the Exploratorium in San Francisco shows a good result of the art-science blend.
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