Though Brakhage almost never used sound in his films, we can see that his knowledge of music animates them. For example, we learn that Stan Brakhage studied with John Cage and Edgard Varèse and even considered becoming a composer. The book’s concept of “visual music” allows us to reconsider many twentieth-century artists-even those who have had every shred of output reissued and reevaluated over the years. Consider Synchromism, an American art movement of the early twentieth century that wedded sound to color, and its quixotic quest for a “kinetic light machine,” or the groundbreaking experimental films of John and James Whitney, like the stunning Lapis, an inspiration for the abstract imagery in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Many of the usual suspects are examined-Wassily Kandinsky, for example, had strong ties to Arnold Schoenberg and other composers of his time, and Paul Klee doubled as an accomplished violinist-but there are also several revelatory moments in these pages. This lavish book, based on a 2005 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, examines the relationship between abstract art, music, and synesthesia in the twentieth century. Toop quotes novelist Paul Auster, on the “crystalline silence” of Vermeer’s Woman in Blue, and Samuel Beckett, who once wrote in his notebook of Emil Nolde’s painting Christus und die Kinder that he wanted “to spend a long time before it, and play it over and over again like the record of a quartet.” The BLDG BLOG Book by Geoff Manaugh 2, Toop writes, “In her descent, she clatters, freezing a sequence of moments both sonic and kinesthetic.” Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square is an exercise in silence Yves Klein’s famed monochrome paintings-and his extended search for the perfect hue of blue-are heard as a single, ringing note.
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Reading Sinister Resonance, we begin to hear the sounds behind paintings of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No.
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“The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” Toop rethinks Berger’s maxim in this intriguing book (forthcoming this spring) and develops a persuasive argument for “ways of hearing.” “Seeing comes before words,” wrote John Berger in 1972, in the opening of his classic book Ways of Seeing.