In June.07 I made (for a company in Brazil) a short study about 2 recent (until that moment) Brian Eno’s works. Who knows me, knows how much I appreciate his music and everything that he is connected to.
Today during my bulletins reading I see that Neal Stephenson’s novel
Anathem, inspired by the
Millennium Clock from
The Long Now Foundation, will be launched on 9th September 02008. Then, I decided to post my modest investigation about this amazing artist and philosopher at the present time.
"
BRIAN ENO A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Michael Bracewell, January 2005
Brian Eno has become an iconic figure within international contemporary culture as an artist, musician, ideologue and systems-maker. He has not only written, performed, recorded and produced some of the most intoxicating and original music of the last thirty years, but has also established a philosophy of cultural production which links the enquiring spirit of conceptual art to the broadest applications of popular culture and sociology.
Best known in the field of music, Eno’s discography as a musician, producer and artistic collaborator includes some of the most acclaimed recordings in the history of modern music. Artists as seminal yet varied as John Cale, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Bono and Peter Gabriel have chosen to work with Eno, and he is one of the most sought after figures working across the spectrum of contemporary music, from guitar driven rock to film scores and electronic.
And yet, music is only one strand of Eno’s creative project. As a lecturer, visual artist, writer, political activist and futurologist, his opinions and ideas have been requested by institutions and think tanks on subjects as disparate as concepts of time, urban futures, perfume making and the history of art. The publications by Faber&Faber of his diary for 1995, under the title ‘A Year With Swollen Appendices’, proved a best seller and gave some indication of the extraordinary range and diversity of Eno’s activities.
Eno’s early dedication to the musical avant-garde was always steeped in wit and a passionate regard for the classic history of purely popular music. Is a founder member of the rock group ‘Roxy Music’, in 1971.
Meticulous crafting of songs has always run parallel to Eno’s instrumental recordings – the artistic starting points of which are related to notions of time as much as instrumentations. Hence his creation of ‘Ambient’ music – first using the term in 1978 – would provide the cultural lexicon with one of its principal epoch-defining concepts.
In 1975, in collaboration with the artist Peter Schmidt, Eno also developed the ‘Oblique Strategies’ set of problem-solving cards for artists. Each card states an act or attitude, which can make an immediate intervention into the creative process.
It was also in the 70’s that Eno established the ‘Obscure’ label of recordings. The series would include Eno’s own ‘Discreet Music’ – a recording of simple variants of musical tones, and a founding example of Eno’s creation of Ambient music. But, far from risking the earnest aridity of some ‘intellectual’ approaches to music making, the public perception of Eno’s role as a good humoured, made him a favourite with the music press as well as a new folk hero for liberal humanism.
By the late 70’s, Eno’s legendary collaboration with David Bowie combined with his own ‘Ambient’ series and ‘Music For Films’ releases, enthroned Eno as the presiding spirit of much immediately post-punk, industrial and electronic music. In his work with Talking Heads, Devo, Snatch, Ultravox, as well as his renewed curatorial role on the ‘No New York’ compilation of New York New Wave groups, Eno was regarded as a Phil Spector-like figure for the new groups enabled by punk.
A pioneer of extreme form of music making, Eno’s brilliance as a producer lies in his ability to enable musicians to re-enchant their own creativity in new and dramatic ways. His role as U2’s producer – on ‘Unforgettable Fire’,‘The Joshua Tree’, ‘Zooropa’, ‘Achtung Baby’ and ‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’, would transform the band from anthemic rockers into purveyors of multi-media spectacle – the anthemic rocking intact, but intensified into a hyper-stylized version of itself by the acuity of Eno’s production.
It is a testament to Eno’s standing as a musician that he has been cited as an inspiration by artists as varied in tone and temperament as Prince, Franz Ferdinand, Autechre and Public Enemy. His collaboration with David Byrne, ‘My Life In The Bush of Ghosts’, released in 1981. Eno’s continued work in the musical field has been matched by his site specific and environmental media projects – notably in the form of audio-visual installation. Asked by the Tate Gallery to present the prestigious Turner Prize, Eno has been as much an art historical reference point of inspiration of young artists as Warhol or Jeff Koons, and it is the pan media yet holistically intact nature of Eno’s work to which they most respond.
Eno’s audio-visual work – shown internationally in venues as prestigious as the Venice Biennale, the Pompidou Centre, the Hayward Gallery London, the Marble Palace at The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg – makes eloquent the social philosophy which seems to lie at the core of his thinking as an artist. These created environments ask the visitor to leave aside their preconceptions of what ‘looking at art’ might involve and instead attempt to experience the present moment, in the present moment.
Eno has spoken in the past of how such environments might become a part of civic architecture, providing space for people to take refuge from their hectic, short-term thinking – rather like public parks for the spirit. It is at such a point, perhaps, between aesthetics, science and politics, that all of Brian Eno’s remarkable achievements are ultimately combined."
The Long Now Foundation
In the early 90s a group of people were attracted to each other because of their shared interest in the idea of time, and in the idea of responsibility for the future. This group of people came to call themselves the Long Now Foundation. I say it this way rounds because I don’t want to give the impression that I started the whole thing: it was really the product of a group of people who had converged on this issue from many different directions and from many different experiences. We felt that there was a need to create some new form of human thinking about Time. We were all aware that everything was getting faster. One of our founder members was Danny Hillis, who built one of the fastest computers ever made, so he was particularly aware of the degree to which time had been sliced into finer and finer parts. We were also aware as we looked around that most of the ambitions and objectives of people in corporations and in government, even in education had become closer and closer in terms of time so corporations were living in fear of their quarterly results and politicians were living in fear of the next opinion poll. There seemed to be an ever-decreasing horizon into the future and very little encouragement from people in any direction to lay long term plans. No politician wants to start on a plan that doesn’t yield results pretty quickly at least within his or her term of office. The worst thing of all is if it yields results in the opposition’s term of office and of course the media don’t help this by always focusing on things that seem like blue-sky projects and criticizing them as being stupidly idealistic and pointless. We thought that there was first of all the need for an organization that would celebrate that kind of thinking, that would ally with it, that would support it, that would encourage it and in fact would try to do it itself.
The Long Now isn’t only about making things better for the future but also the idea of making art that’s intended to come to fruit over such a long period is something beautiful and new actually and something I think suggests a new era of culture of collaborative both in time and space, in long term collaborative projects.
We also wanted to think about memory and about the transition of ideas over long periods of time and the observation of process over long period of time.
Stewart Brand, in his book, called ‘The Clock of the Long Now’, which is the Little Red Book of the Long Now Foundation, talks about something he calls slow science, there’s very little encouragement to slow science - it doesn’t produce glamorous papers, quick results, peer approval, but there have been examples of very, very long slow observations. One is the admiralty of Great Britain has kept detailed weather charts since 1648, they’re daily weather charts, so this makes for the longest continuous survey of weather in existence and in fact it’s turned out to be very useful. Another similar survey was made in Hawaii over about a fifty year period, and was the first definitive evidence of global warming, it showed the continual rise in CO2 levels, so these long term studies are very important but again, they are not really institutionally recognized or encouraged. We wanted Long Now to be the kind of place where they would be encouraged, where we would become the repository and the facilitator for those kinds of long-term thoughts.
After that, 77 Million Paintings had another edition and much more…
Thinking to myself, in 1987 the best part of my participation in Bienal (arts) of Sao Paulo, was that Brian Eno was there as well. Such an honour!
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