"One of the functions of art is to offer a more desirable reality; a model as it were, of another style of existence with its own pace and its own cultural reference." Peter Schmidt
I've been trying to write this blog post on Artist Peter Schmidt for about three months now. More specifically his ongoing collaborative projects with Brian Eno until Schmidt's death in 1980. It's super hard because nailing down Schmidt's art is about as easy as accurately describing a feeling provoked from one of Eno's songs on his loosely themed albums...Like trying to find a bed made of clouds to sleep on in the misty mountains of Bhutan while on a lot of milligrams of Valium.
Schmidt frequently collaborated with Eno which is the main reason I've been so attracted to his work for years, not to mention scouring Ebay for salable goods... No easy feat.
Peter Schmidt was a German born British artist. He is known for helping pioneer multi-media art exhibitions and instalations in the early 1960's. His paintings, lithographs and drawings were often inspired by sounds and the reverberation of sound. Emphasizing the idea that art is not something easily delineated to one or even two mediums, but rather a kind of conjured set of choices made in the moment.
A couple of examples of this are "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy" and "Before and After Science".
Particularly in Eno's Tiger Mountain, Schmidt produced 1500 lithographs as well as Polaroids by Lorenz Zatecky of Eno… Four of the prints appear randomly for the cover in a kind of schizophrenic hidden repetition that very much matches the kind of tape looping experimentation Eno was working with at the time. I think most notably on the eponymous song "Taking Tiger Mountain" which is a kind of wasted repetition of lyrics that ebb in and out over a whirling sound scape that evokes the feeling of breeze and a kind of sideways movement through space.
Obviously the need to go on about Eno's process has been fully indulged my many people down though modern music history and I'm not clever enough to bother, but this blog post is trying to be about Peter Schmidt anyway.
To backtrack a little, Eno and Schmidt had collaborated before the making of Tiger Mountain. Schmidt's 1970 set of 55 wooden cards called "The Thoughts Behind The Thoughts" would eventually become Eno's and Schmidt's 1975 "Oblique Strategies"; printed cards that came in a black embossed container. The two described the cards as worthwhile dilemmas to be considered.
For the making of Tiger Mountain as well as Before and After Science, Eno would often use these cards, each of them containing an amorphism, a jumble of words that lacked definitive meaning and form. In the making of the two albums Eno frequently refered to one or more of the cards and allow them to kind of guide him in a direction that had not previously been considered. The idea was that the cards would provide a kind of "lateral thinking" in the music/art that otherwise would not have occurred. Or in otherwords ‘not doing the things that nobody had ever thought of not doing’. That's a good one to chew on for a bit.
Schmidt and Eno pictured with the prints from "Before and After Science"
For the Before and after Science album, Schmidt created four offset prints that came with the album and were considered as part of the process and total package. Under the title on the back sleeve of the record says fourteen pictures - referring to the ten recorded tracks and the four prints made to go with the music. Here are two of the prints... I have only seen them once IRT.
This is sort of a personal intro into Peter Schmidt's work. I've been interested in him for a long time and finally got up the gumption to try and put it into a written thought which is difficult, of course, because the work is not meant to be a tangible object as much as a fleeting thought or sense of motion.
xoxo Shaun SureThing for Seagull Salon
