On Matthew Green’s “humming into a pot filled with water” (2011)


Like Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961),[1] Matthew Green’s “humming into a pot filled with water” describes the production of an artwork while making a case for its irrelevance. Do we need to hear Green’s piece after knowing its title? Or does the title allow us to focus on that which is expressed, as opposed to the means by which that expression is produced?

Another argument runs counter to that, for in naming the piece after its “own making,” Green is privileging production over product. In this case, a series of seven breath lines -- from the evenly-paced ascending and descending chromatic scales that open the work to a pattern of increased and, as a result, shortened bursts that on at least two occasions achieve musical figuration, like the triplets that come during the fifth breath.

Unlike Morris’s piece, whose cleanly recorded documentarian sound is encased within its finished form, Green’s considerably shorter 1:26 minute piece pushes further in its implication of the recording process through a distortion brought on by the increased force of the composer’s breath, a gesture that records not only the sonic aspect of the composition but the mind and body behind it, linking the composer, the composition and the deficiencies of the recording system that provides its documentation.

Box with the Sound of it’s own Making is an art historical hinge piece that anticipates an emergent conversation in sculpture (Michael Fried’s notion of “hollowness”[2]) while, at the same time, promotes and derides the artist as genius. Green’s achievement is similar, for he too draws attention to the artist: in the first instance, through the use of an object not normally associated with musical composition (a pot); and second, for those who must wash dishes for a living in order to support an exploration of the aesthetic – and social -- limits of the medium.


Michael Turner
Bayreuth, 2012


Notes:

1. Box with the Sound of it’s Own Making (1961) is in the Seattle Art Museum’s permanent collection.

2. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum, V:10, Summer, 1967, 12-23