Ode to Joy The Bruce High Quality Foundation
Oh friends, not these tones!
While some may contend a retrospective exhibition is premature for an artist “emerged” from the shadowless aftermath of September 11th, we heartily disagree. It remains the museum where “works of art go to die.”[1] And if we are to achieve the first order of business of any self-respecting Artist-cum-Institution, to “live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse,” well, then it is high time we got on our merry way up the mountain.
And so here we are in a room full of strangers at the Brooklyn Museum dragging our collaborative corpse out into the blinding brights of now with Ode to Joy, 2001-2013. For the record, the title of the exhibition is borrowed from a work in the exhibition that borrows the final movement of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (The Ode to Joy), which is itself a musical setting of a poem by Friedrich Schiller.
Speaking of Beethoven, he was utterly deaf when he composed his 9th Symphony and the radical Ode to Joy at its conclusion. Utterly deaf. Without irony, it seems, he added a significant preamble to Schiller’s Ode:
Oh friends, not these tones! Rather, let us raise our voices in more pleasing and more joyful sounds! Joy! (Joy!) Joy! (Joy!)
Joy. What is that? It is apparently not the three preceding instrumental movements of the symphony. And it very well may not be anything he’d composed up to that point. All that banging on a piano with no legs, it was all for nothing. What’s past is past. What’s done is done. This now – this is joy.
So it goes. For our own part, we’ve had a willful tendency to repeat, reconstitute, reanimate, return – to “never forget,” so to speak – to “redo” works for their new moment, in keeping with our institutional mission.
Speaking of Schiller, he had originally titled the piece, Ode to Freedom, but changed it apparently out of fear that such blatant politicking would get him into trouble in 1785. As if “Persist with courage, millions! Stand firm for a better world!” was not obviously directed to his friends across the Atlantic.
Joy for that. Joy in lieu of freedom. Joy as fear.
Speaking of fear, one Tuesday morning in New York in the fall of 2001, the color of a clear sky changed forever. Here was the change we could believe in: panic, confusion, anger, sympathy, frustration, panic again, another Xanax, and above all, absolute certainty – everyone, all at once, absolutely certain we felt something – anything.
So joy for that. Joy as panic and fear. Joy in lieu of freedom.
So joy for that. Joy to the world. Joy to a park in Turkey and a canvas in Brooklyn and to the deep blue sea.
Joy to you and me.
[1] Alan Watts said this. And then promptly died in November of 1973.
[2] “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” is the final movement of a cantata composed by Bach in 1716 and 1723. The most common English version was written by Robert Bridges and the concluding verses are as follows:
Through the way where hope is guiding, Hark, what peaceful music rings; Where the flock, in Thee confiding, Drink of joy from deathless springs.
Theirs is beauty’s fairest pleasure; Theirs is wisdom’s holiest treasure. Thou dost ever lead Thine own In the love of joys unknown.