On May 9, 2011, at 8:44 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
> Joanna: "You accept his translation of the political into the
> aesthetic. I do not."
>
> [WS:] I would hesitate to say that OBL transformed, translated or
> whatever the political into a spectacle.
http://www.osborne-conant.org/documentation_stockhausen.htm
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Sep. 25, 2001
Monstrous Art Julia Spinola
Four concerts featuring music by the German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen have been cancelled, following the composer's distasteful, tactless comments concerning the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The concerts were to have formed the thematic focus of the Hamburg Music Festival, which started last Saturday and continues through this Saturday.
Asked at a press conference on Monday for his view of the events, Stockhausen answered that the attacks were "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos." According to a tape transcript from public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, he went on: "Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for 10 years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn't do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing. Artists, too, sometimes try to go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world."
Asked by a journalist whether he equated art and crime, Stockhausen replied: "It's a crime because those involved didn't consent. They didn't come to the 'concert.' That's obvious. And no one announced that they risked losing their lives. What happened in spiritual terms, the leap out of security, out of what is usually taken for granted, out of life, that sometimes happens to a small extent in art, too, otherwise art is nothing."
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