“I’m interested in investigating things,” Thomas Gaudynski tells me. “My interest in performing music came about because I wanted to hear things I hadn’t heard and was forced to make it myself.” The Milwaukee multi-media artist remains known for his avant-garde musical tendencies in performance and on record. That same urge to investigate is also behind his latest project, a book of essays and drawings, Re: Re: Re:.
The writings in Re: Re: Re: were composed over the past 15 years in response to his reflections on (or investigations of) aspects of aesthetics. For example, “Homage to Jackson Mac Low” was written after the 2005 death of Mac Low, a poet associated with Fluxus, the 1960s experimental interdisciplinary art movement that has remained a profound source of inspiration for Gaudynski. The essay borrows its title from a work by Fluxus composer Joseph Byrd, which turned the poet’s words into performances by several voices based on the principle of indeterminacy. John Cage was “Mac Low’s teacher in theory and student in practice,” Gaudynski writes. And, he adds quickly, that collaboration as well as chance was the context for Fluxus’ efforts to escape (or at least diminish) the chains of ego that bind many artists.
“The Arc of Your Work,” which opens Re:, addresses the great aesthetic dilemma of our time. Sparked by a 2006 conversation with the late musician-poet-educator Martin Jack Rosenblum, “The Arc” reflects on how the “dialog of ideas” has been weakened by the speed of contemporary communications (and life itself). In the past, we had years “to encounter, explore, and learn directly about work” by artists we admire. But nowadays, years pass at a more rapid clip that brings “a glut of [new] work on a compressed timeline.” Who has time any longer to seriously consider anything at length under an incessant barrage of new data?
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The breadth of Re: is not surprising from an artist who has worked with musicians, poets, dancers and photographers, and has mounted exhibits of his own drawings at Woodland Pattern Book Center and Madison’s James Watrous Gallery. “I see the arts as a continuum, which confuses people who want you to be a specialist,” he says.
Gaudynski will present material from Re: Re: Re: at 7 p.m. on Thursday, June 30 at Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E. Locust St.
