Putting it Together and Finishing the Hat? Deconstructing the Art of Making Art

Abstract

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Sunday in the Park with George dramatises the life and work of Georges Seurat, inventor of pointillism. This neo-impressionist style of painting constructs the image out of tiny pixels of different coloured paint, a technique that Sondheim's musical was to portray both mimetically and stylistically. In doing this, Sondheim constructs a rhetoric of composition that consolidates conventional wisdom on how art is created: the artist starts with nothing and creates something. The musical is littered with references to this, not least in the titles of two of its most celebrated numbers, ‘Putting it together’ and ‘Finishing the hat’. However, Sondheim's show offers more complexity than this, and its culmination in the whiteness of ‘a blank page or canvas’ asks us to reconsider this rhetoric. This article deconstructs the rhetoric of composition, asking whether the ‘putting together’ of dots or notes actually serves to reveal meaning, or whether it obscures, paints over or drowns out what is beyond the dots.

Notes

1. Stephen Sondheim et al., Four by Sondheim, Wheeler, Lapine, Shevelove and Gelbart (New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2000), p. 645. References to Sunday in performance relate to the DVD of the original Broadway production: Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, Sunday in the Park with George, Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters, 1986, DVD 82876553289.

2. Sondheim describes his technique in an interview with Mark Eden Horowitz: Mark Eden Horowitz, Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), pp. 91–118.

3. Sondheim, Four by Sondheim, p. 592.

5. Rose-Marie Hagen and Rainer Hagen, What Great Paintings Say (Cologne: Taschen, 2005), p. 685.

4. Amongst the scientists known to have influenced Seurat were Michel Eugène Chevreul, whose 1839 work De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs was cited by Charles Blanc in his Grammaire des arts du dessin (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1867); David Sutter, whose ‘Les Phénomènes de la Vision’ was serialised in L'Art magazine, beginning with issue 1 (1880); and Ogden Rood, whose Students' Textbook of Colour: or, Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1879) was translated into French in 1881. An account of Seurat's learning can be found in Herschel B. Chipp, ‘Orphism and Color Theory’, in The Art Bulletin, 40.1 (1958), 55–63.

6. Sondheim, Four by Sondheim, p. 636.

7. Ibid., p. 645.

8. Hagen & Hagen, What Great Paintings Say, p. 685.

9. Sondheim, Four by Sondheim, p. 684. Sondheim has since observed that the ‘dots’ of Seurat's canvas are ‘more like blobs than dots’ (Sondheim & Lapine, Audio Commentary); elsewhere he refers to them as ‘dabs’ (Horowitz, Sondheim on Music, p. 93). In both sources he also speculates that the rate at which Seurat could have applied these would have been far slower than is implied by the tempo of ‘Colour and Light’.

10. Sondheim, Four by Sondheim, p. 708.

11. Ibid., p. 625.

12. Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 123–24.

13. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. with an introduction and additional notes by Barbara Johnson (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), p. 127.

14. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. with additional notes by Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 195.

15. Jacques Derrida, ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, in Derrida and Différance, ed. by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Warwick: Parousia Press, 1985), p. 4.

16. Derrida, Margins, p. 329.

17. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 22.

18. Derrida would place this word ‘under erasure’, striking through it to suggest the concept's impossibility.

19. The term ‘dots’ is commonly used by musicians to refer to the score.

20. Derrida, Margins, p. 329.

21. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 240.

22. Ibid., p. 65.

23. Ibid., p. 237.

24. Ibid., pp. 178–79.

25. Ibid., p. 241.

26. ‘I'm very old fashioned – I'm about 1890. I'm still early Ravel – that's my idea of terrific’. Sondheim in Horowitz, Sondheim on Music, p. 117.

27. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. with an introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 213. Here he is referring to Foucault's description of Laplanche's Hölderlin et la question du père.

28. Banfield, Sondheim's Broadway Musicals, p. 351.

29. Ibid., p. 349.

30. Though of course Seurat's crayon sketches would not have been pointillistic; this style would have been employed later, in paint, in the studio. Incidentally, discussions between Sondheim, Lapine, Patinkin and Peters on the Audio Commentary of the DVD make interesting reference to Seurat's other existing crayon sketches: ‘There's so little on the page, he's almost drawing what isn't there’ (Sondheim & Lapine, Sunday DVD Audio Commentary).

31. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, Sunday in the Park with George, Vocal Score (Van Nuys, CA: Alfred Publishing Co., 1997), ‘No. 3: Sunday in the Park with George’, bars 2a–5; again later at bars 9–12, 99–102, etc.

32. Like Seurat's dots, ‘when adjacent notes are clustered together […] we begin to hear them as a single sonority without worrying about the individual notes’. Stephen Banfield, Sondheim's Broadway Musicals (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 374.

33. Sondheim & Lapine, Sunday, Vocal Score, ‘No. 3: Sunday in the Park with George’, bars 2a–c.

34. Ibid., bars 7–8, 40–41, 43–44, etc.

35. Ibid., bars 18–23.

36. Ibid., bars 29–31, 119–22.

37. The phrase ‘White. A blank page or canvas’ bookends Sunday, and frames the thematic discussion of composition in the show (Sondheim, Four by Sondheim, pp. 575, 708).

38. If Derrida's discussions of silence are eloquent, his writings on music remain muted: ‘I don't have the confidence […] I am even more afraid about speaking nonsense in this area than any other’ (Peter Brunette and David Wills, Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 21). Despite this, he does make use of musical analogy: Artaud's art ‘penetrates the ear and the mind’ (Derrida, The Secret Art, p. 86); its ‘intonation is a detonation’ (ibid., p. 87).

39. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 200. This echoes his comments on writing, in which he sees as much importance in the under-valued ‘spacing’ of the text, ‘the unperceived, the nonpresent, and the nonconscious’ (ibid., p. 68), as he does in its content.

40. Horowitz, Sondheim on Music, p. 92.

41. Ibid., pp. 113–14.

42. See Steve Swayne, How Sondheim Found His Sound (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 232–33.

43. Banfield, Sondheim's Broadway Musicals, p. 356.

44. Ibid.

45. ‘Spacing (notice that this word speaks the articulation of space and time, the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space)’, Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 68. Derrida is keen to point out the space/time resonance, since this is central to his (concept) of différance; indeed, for Culler these terms are almost interchangeable (Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 97).

46. Derrida's play on the temporal dislocation of ‘deferral’ and the spatial relocation of ‘differal’ is central to his concept of différance.

47. Horowitz, Sondheim on Music, pp. 106–10. Sondheim attributes this aspect of the vocal arrangement to conductor of the original production Paul Gemignani.

48. Swayne, How Sondheim Found His Sound, pp. 232–33. Notice how Swayne recognises visual elements in the musical soundscape.

54. Marcel Cobussen, ‘Cage, White, Mallarmé, Silence’, Deconstruction in Music (Interactive Dissertation, Department of Art and Culture Studies, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, 2001), http://www.cobussen.com/proefschrift/300_john_cage/316_cage_and_silence/316a_cage_white_mallarme_silence/cage_white_mallarme_silence.htm[accessed 4 September 2007] (para. 4 of 7).

49. Michel Poizat, The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, trans. by Arthur Denner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 43.

50. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: Seminar of Jacques Lacan VII, trans. by Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 130.

51. Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 65–66.

52. See David Cecchetto, ‘vagrant(ana)music: Three (four) Plateaus of a Contingent Music’, Radical Musicology, 2 (2007).

53. John Cage's Notations (New York: Something Else Press, 1969) archives some of the mid-twentieth-century experiments in musical notation, causing us to reconsider the notated representation of a musical score. His writings – Silence (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), A Year from Monday (London: Marion Boyars, 1985) – like Mallarmé's, renegotiate the conventional trajectory of the written word to expose the play of space and inscription; his music – most famously 4:33 (1952) – needs little introduction; parallels between his thinking and that of Derrida are discussed in Cecchetto, ‘vagrant(ana)music’.

55. Derrida discusses Artaud's writing about theatre (Writing and Difference, pp. 212–45 and 292–316; Of Grammatology, pp. 302–13) rather than the non-language-based discourse of theatrical ‘texts’ themselves.

56. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 240, citing Artaud's The Theatre and its Double.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid.

59. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 87.

60. This has been a focus of Derrida's writings since the very early The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, trans. by Marian Hobson (London and Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).

61. These terms are both used throughout Dissemination.

62. Mrs, also not a Seurat character, has left the stage at the beginning of the number.

63. Derrida, Dissemination, throughout.

64. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 87.

65. Sometimes referred to by Derrida – often confusingly – as eidos or ideal.

66. See, for example, Sondheim and Lapine, Sunday, Vocal Score, ‘No. 24: Sunday’, bars 69–72.

67. ‘The meaning of meaning […] is infinite implication […] its force is a certain pure and infinite unequivocality which gives signified meaning no respite, no rest, but engages it in its own economy so that it always signifies again and differs?’ (Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 29).

68. Derrida's writing has consistently interrogated the philosophical quest for the origin, deconstructing texts on the origins of Art (he tackles Heidegger's On the Origins of the Work of Art in The Truth in Painting), Language (Rousseau's The Origin of Language in Of Grammatology), Geometry (Husserl's The Origin of Geometry in An Introduction) and Human Knowledge (Condillac's Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge in Margins).

69. ‘Within the voice, the presence of the object already disappears. The self-presence of the voice and of the heading [sic]-oneself speak conceals the very thing that visible space allows to be placed before us’ (Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 240).

70. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 31.

71. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's lengthy introduction to Of Grammatology paraphrases Derrida's project as a ‘notion that the verbal text is constituted by concealment as much as revelation, that the concealment is itself a revelation and vice versa’ (Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. xlvi).

72. Sondheim and Lapine, Sunday, Vocal Score, ‘No. 24: Sunday’, bars 73–76, noted by both Banfield (Sondheim's Broadway Musicals, p. 354) and Swayne (How Sondheim Found His Sound, p. 26).