Benjamin Patterson’s colleague Wolf Vostell had branded his work décollage, a technique of disassembling, deconstructing, or removing material from an object to create a work. In this score written for an exhibition by Vostell, Patterson riffs on John Cage’s use of transparencies in scores, which Cage first used in 1958 in Variations I and Fontana Mix. The first transparency is a timeline with hashmarks indicating various actions of removal (“tearing, cutting, sawing, grinding, sanding, chiseling, scraping, burning, eating,”) from four surfaces marked “A,” “B,” “C,” and “D.” The underlying paper contains various regions that specify the surface to be deconstructed (or a rest, if no letter is in the region where the hashmark appears). Two additional transparencies indicate the dynamics of each individual action. In providing a score for a practice Vostell had already developed, Patterson reveals a latent game-like procedure in his fellow artist’s work that can be subject to formalization and chance procedures (via the free distribution of the transparencies). The presence of a timeline and dynamic markings reveals Patterson’s continued interest in elements of traditional musical notation.
© The Estate of Benjamin Patterson; © The Wolf Vostell Estate.
