Word: phantasmagoria
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...went last week at the premiere of Cage's latest musical production, Hpschd. Scored for one electronic harpsichord, six conventional harpsichords, eight movie projectors, 52 tape recorders and 64 slide projectors, Hpschd is an eye-and ear-boggling kinetic phantasmagoria that turned out, in one sense at least, to be Cage's most durable work - 41 hours durable, to be exact. As usual, his operating premise is that art is more of a manifestation of nature than an expression of man. This means, to Cage, that a work ideally should be as based on random chance...
...line's phantasmagoria of apology and accusation calls for surrealist stage scenery and howling symbolism. A Seine barge becomes a houseboat on the Styx with doomed souls; Charon paddles with bones. Céline submerges readers in his stream-of-consciousness style, a brutal staccato in which about five words stutter out for every three dots. It sustains the impression of uncontrollable anger and unassuageable hatred as Céline rants against every contemporary literary and political figure, against the partisans who looted his apartment in Paris, against the post-Vichy government that imprisoned him. All is'"venom...
...creatures consume them selves with Steinbergian detachment. There are silk screens from Warholville and numbers from Indiana. Psychedelia explodes and art nouveau swirls in the most unexpected places. Corridor doors are open on surrealist nightmares, Freudian symbolisms and early movies-all combined in a swiveting, swirling splurge of phantasmagoria, puns, pastiches and visual non sequiturs...
Onto the screen flashes a shiny red dot, which turns out to be a maraschino cherry, which turns out to sit atop a chocolate sundae, which turns out to be the focal point for a swirling phantasmagoria of color. All of which, it also turns out, is a 60-second videotape commercial for a venerable Manhattan-based restaurant chain. "The chocolate sundae," proclaims a credit line that rolls diagonally across the TV tube, was "photographed for Schrafft's by Andy Warhol...
Nonetheless, the parley succeeded in dispelling the phantasmagoria that had issued from the U.N. and beclouded world affairs all week. The meeting substituted reality for rhetoric. And it gave two men, astonishingly alike in their experience of power and their awareness of its limitations, an unexampled opportunity to confront and assess one another. Neither Lyndon Johnson nor Aleksei Kosygin has ever won high acclaim as a diplomatist, but their first encounters proved that both men are as equally equipped for such a conference as any two statesmen the two nations have yet fielded simultaneously...