Leonardo

art teacher myself, I am eager to see artists write about color. Since 1976 I served on the editorial board of the journal Color Research and Application with the specific task of searching out people from the arts who can find the time to contribute important articles on color. A few brief clarifications on points Sloane raises in her reply: PRIVATE PARTS (THE RECORD) by Robert Ashley. Lovely Music, 105 Hudson Street, New York, NY, U.S.A. LCD 1001. YELLOW MAN WITH HEART WITH WINGS by Robert Ashley. Lovely Music, 105 Hudson Street, New York, NY,U.S.A. LCD 1003. Reviewed byChristopher Shultis, UniversityofNewMexico , Albuquerque, NM, U.S.A. Robert Ashley mentions the name Giordano Bruno in The Backyard, one of two compositions recorded in 1977 for PrivateParts. Bruno was a Renaissance philosopher who followed Copernican theory with such vigor that he was burned at the stake-for "looking at the geocentric map", Ashley says. Bruno heretically declared that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Neither, saysAshley, are we: "the center is between us." Both of these recordings explore the openness of human experience, this lack of a single center. In Yellow Man with Wings, commissioned by the radio station KUNM in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A., and recorded in 1978, Ashley uses a text called "Ideas from the Church". The first section is in Spanish, recited by its translator, Guillermo Grenier. Agriculture is discussed as a system of flatness and confinement ; an 'answer', which, in turn, is an enclosure. Ashley's response? "My mind is full of doubt". Ashley's doubts find fertile ground in the human experiences he explores in his work. Accepted parameters of knowledge are tested, boundaries explored ; apparent contradictions are transformed into likenesses. In the I certainly agree with Sloane that all is not yet understood about color. The Munsell system has not changed in any fundamental waysince its introduction. The 1943 renotation merely adjusted the color spacing to incorporate additional information from visual studies conducted in cooperation with the then U.S. Bureau of Standards. Il, Recording Reviews second section of Yellow Man With Heart With Wings, the English text actually becomes an instrument sound. The 'cornbelt' is the location for PrivateParts.Are there 'answers' in the agricultural Midwest? In The Park, (the first selection of PrivateParts), Ashley offers this cautiou.s reply: "one never knows". There are no answers when our perceptions are open to the possibility of change. Ashley's frequent collaborator, 'Blue' Gene Tyranny is credited for the instrumental setting of Private Parts. Acoustic and electronic keyboards (playing tonal music ofextreme banality) are paired with an exotic and repetitious performance on tabla. Combined with two imaginative texts, the results are disconcerting and complex. However, combination does not imply coherence. The contrasting elements simply co-exist. The texts themselves are extraordinary . One of the characters in Private Partsloathes the darkness. Living in the light, Isolde believes that "uncertainties are wrong". Toward the end of the The Backyard, Ashley describes the various conditions of twilight, dusk, sundown. The world becomes darker and darker. At the very end (if any of these compositions end), Isolde sighs: "Dear George, what's going on? I'm not the same person I used to be." Neither are we. Ashley is a poet with remarkable vision and his voice is an instrument of rare beauty. He is truly a bard of this uncertain age. In Apocalypse, a lecture given by Norman O. Brown in 1960 and reprinted in Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1991), Brown prefaces the possibility of 'blessing' with the necessity of madness. For him, the issue is not sanity versus insanity. Our world, by nature, is insane. Instead, one chooses (if one wishes to be Colorimetry is a technology based firmly on the physical sciences. The section I quoted about subtractive mixture, which is on page 324 of her book, is not footnoted so I can only assume that the misunderstanding was hers and not some other author's. JOVTURNER LuKE blessed) between holy and unholy madness. This is a mystery, for madness, by definition, cannot be understood. Robert Ashley's work is mysterious...