Dirty Light - Marko Ciciliani

musical idiom this could however only work by consequently eradicating all sorts of virtuosity
and traditional craftsmanship. In other words, customary skill has become the “new noise” that
had to be kept out.
The relocation of the line between the aesthetically valuable and the banned, like in the two
aforementioned examples, seems to be an essential aspect in the development of a musical
idiom in western art. It seems as if at a certain point all taboos have been broken in Western
music. However, no single musical idiom can be identified that does not establish a new set of
taboos, even if the music appears to be as open and all-inclusive as for example does Cage’s.
Every musical idiom therefore relies on redefining the area of accepted musical sound. That
area might include previously unacceptable elements but it also entails a new set of taboos. No
idiom is all-inclusive. By positioning noise outside of the system, it is always challenging its
border, looking to find its way back in. By challenging the established system it also forms its
stimulus.
We are going to investigate how aspects of noise can be transferred to the realm of light, and
how this can play a role when using sound and light as compatible media in a work of art.
Before doing so, it is however necessary to further investigate the nature of cross-disciplinary
works of art. Along the way, we will make a comparison of sound and light and map out where
differences emerge in the human perception of the two.
3.4 Compatibility and differences between sound and light
As mentioned above, the combination of different media met with strong criticism from
writers in the modernist line of thinking. In opposition to their claim that a work of art has to
be self-sufficient and adhere to medium-specificity, the post-modern discourse proposed a
different approach to evaluate and interpret art, and also the crossing of borders between
media. As the art-historian Rosalind E. Krauss (1941- ) wrote in her influential article
“Sculpture in the Expanded Field” in 1978:
…within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given
medium… but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for
which any medium… might be used. 31
This means that the self-sufficiency of a single medium does not have to be the main criterion
in its artistic use. Rather, a specific idea can be applied to different media at the same time,
31 Krauss, Rosalind E.: “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1978) in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (1986), 288.
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