Paul Klee in “On the Refrain”

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Paul Klee in “On the Refrain”

July 25, 2008 by cltroyan

I will talk a bit more about this on Saturday if anyone is interested, but I think it opens up the text a bit more in “On the Refrain” to have some provided images of Paul Klee’s work. (I know some members in the group said they were not very familiar with his work.) His work often focuses on the materialization of language and sound through painting, or aiming to create symphonies in color. In works such as “The Vocal Fabric of Rosa Silber,” he turns the intangibility of a song and voice into visible substance. The follow quotes are areas that I believe specifically deal with this issue of sound and color in relation to Paul Klee.

“It is now a question of elaborating a material charged with harnessing forces of a different order: the visual material must capture nonvisible forces. Render visible, Klee said; not render or reproduce the visible” (On the Refrain 342).

“According to Klee, what is needed in order to ‘render visible’ or harness the Cosmos is a pure and simple line accompanied by the idea of an object, and nothing more: if you multiply the lines and take the whole object, you get nothing but a scramble, and visual sound effects” (344).

“There is surely no question here of declaring a given art supreme on the basis of a formal hierarchy of absolute criteria. Our problem is more modest: comparing the powers or coefficients of deterritorialization of sonorous and visual components. It seems that when sound deterritorializes, it becomes more and more refined; it becomes specialized and autonomous. Color clings more, not necessarily to the object, but to territoriality. When it deterritorializes, it tends to dissolve, to let itself be steered by other components” (347).