A filmic corollary to the Dada poems was the montage, formulated by the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. Montage is so common today that we hardly recognize how revolutionary it must have been, but early 20th century Russia did not grow up on MTV. They were raised on plays that followed a rigidly discursive and logical structure, a view of dramatic action proponed by the stage director and acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavski. Montage, however, provided a non-discursive way of telling a story. The image of a ballon floating away juxtaposed with the face of a sad little boy might lead one to believe that the boy lost his balloon, but it does not "tell" the exact story. The story becomes a construction in the mind of a spectator based on a collage of individual images.
Happenings are such a sprawling subject that is difficult to give a brief of even coherent analysis without overlooking its importance as a movement. To most people, Happenings are just that: weird things that happen. They are not plays, they are not dance, they are not poetry. A happening can be a simple as watching the rain for 30 minutes or a complicated set of abstract physical movements. They are, however, relevant to the topic of tesselations in that they are defined as "non-matrixed performing" or, as Happenings guru Allan Kaprow describes them, an "allogical collage." Non-matrixed means that they lack the matrix of meaning available in traditional "plays" via the costumes, knowledge of the period, audience and character demographics, etc. They are simply events happening in a state of what Gertrude Stein calls "the continuous present." They are a performative version of a Penrose tiling. The events on their own are simply curious; what is important is the set of rules that allows them to be put together into a pattern. Not all Happenings follow patterns, but often they exhibit a mathematical, repeating, even fractal structure (e.g. people performing three actions each composed of three sub-actions, etc.) They are structured simplicity, structured life.The rise of electronic music and rap have ushered in a whole new era of tesselated art. Besides the plastic arts, music is probably the best suited to the use of tesselations because it relies on rhythmic structures which are themselves tesselations. Electronic sampling has allowed extremely precise aural collages that can be laid over the top of a predetermined rhythm. Rap artists can add a new dimension to older songs by the way they integrate them into the overall structure, as in Naughty By Nature's "O.P.P." which samples the Jackson Five's "ABC". ABC. O.P.P. Love. Sex. The differences between what is said and what is sampled create the overall effect, an audio montage. Repetition is another frequently used technique, especially in electronic music and techno. Laurie Anderson pioneered the technique with "O Superman," in which she alternates between robotic singing and robotic speaking over the top of an eight-minute loop of her speaking the single syllable "ah." The effect is haunting and the patterns are mechanically clear. Similar effects can be found in modern orchestral works, particularly the work of Philip Glass.
The aesthetics of tesselation seem far removed from the simple binary aesthetics of symmetry, but really they are one and the same. The difference lies in our perception. Our mind processes much faster than it once did. We no longer need to see the whole picture, hear the whole song, or read the whole story, but perhaps we have lost in depth of thought what we have gained in speed.
Page author: Max Dana