2.3. The Field of Magnetism and Transcendence
2.3.1. A Field for Things to Happen
“Field” is the title of the last essay of John Berger’s collection About Looking. Its topic is an act of perception and an experience that lies beyond words. Berger hints at it through a set of examples like the following one.
From the city centre there are two ways back to the satellite city in which I live: the main road with a lot of traffic, and a side road which goes over a level crossing. The second is quicker unless you have to wait for a train at the crossing. During the spring and early summer I invariably take the side road, and I find myself hoping that the level crossing will be shut. In the angle between the railway lines and the road there is field, surrounded on its other two sides by trees. The grass is tall in the field and in the evening when the sun is low, the green of the grass divides into light and dark grains of colour – as might happen to a bunch of parsley if lit up by the beam of a powerful lamp at night. Blackbirds hide in the grass and rise up from it. Their coming and going remains quite unaffected by the trains. (Berger 2018: 31)
Picturesque is not what is needed, however, to constitute the experience of “field.” Berger continues:
This field affords me considerable pleasure. Why then do I not sometimes walk there – it is quite near my flat – instead of relying on being stopped there by the closed level crossing? It is a question of contingencies overlapping. The events which take place in the field – two birds chasing one another, a cloud crossing the sun and changing the colour of the green – acquire a special significance because they occur during the minute or two during which I am obliged to wait. It is as though these minutes fill a certain area of time which exactly fits the spatial area of the field. Time and space conjoin. (Berger 2018: 32)
Berger’s notion of “field” is the outcome of an intricate path of reasoning that runs through Cubism and Gestalt theory, up to Faraday’s wrestling with the problem of “action at distance” (Melia 2018: 41). Faraday had coined the phrase “magnetic field” in 1845. His and other’s works on magnetism around that date shifted conceptions of space and causality away from Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics, which were concerned with substantial bodies and their interactions, toward the idea of magnetism as a property of space itself. “Field,” in relation to magnetism and later to gravity, became used as an “expression of space saturated and governed by the behavior of (non-substantial) forces” (Melia 2018: 42). Berger saw in this shift “the genesis of an emergent modern subjectivity, [and] a new alignment of art with the physical sciences” (Melia 2018: 41).
The experience of “field” described by Berger is a place for things to happen. These things are scaled to one another and to their contemplative witness in such a way that they acquire a kind of unity of which the witness is also part. Nothing “overdramatic,” writes Berger: the field does not draw attention. Instead,
an experience of disinterested observation opens in its centre and gives birth to a happiness which is instantly recognisable as your own. The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life. (Berger 2018: 35)
Although Berger was primarily concerned with ways of looking, his concept of “field” relates to listening as well and to “field” recordings in particular. First, it is a most direct description of the experience proposed by John Cage in 4’33”. It is unclear whether Berger was aware of Cage’s piece, but Nicholas Melia showed the convergence between Berger’s “field” and the experiences proposed by the Wanderlust collective, which Cage’s work inspired. An explicit inspiration for the collective became François Jullien’s essay on the Daoist and Confucianist virtues of “blandness” (“Éloge de la fadeur,” 1993, published in English in 1999 as “In Praise of Blandness”). Had it been published a few decades earlier, Jullien’s book would certainly have interested Cage and Ferrari as well, if only for its section on the Confucianist views on silence and the fading out of sounds. Artistic research on “nearly nothing” flirts with the evanescent experience that Berger called “field” and, beyond that, with ideas of being, virtuality, and the passing of things.
This is, of course, diametrically opposed to the impulse of superposing a “self-reflexive narrative” onto the field. About his Presque Rien N°2, Ferrari explained that it took him two years after it was finished to release it publicly. In the interval, he deemed it “his own business,” an experience that was too private and perhaps too uninteresting (Ferrari 1994). And then finally he made it public (in a recording), but not because his opinion on the interest it held had changed radically: he simply saw “no reason to withhold it jealously. […] [He] had to free it, there was no reason for this secret night not to see the sunlight” (Ferrari 1994). The artist’s narrative should be read with caution, especially as Ferrari was a masterful forger of artistic narratives. It remains true, nevertheless, that fields of the intimate or the common, which convey the “anecdotal,” the “bland,” or “nearly nothing,” do raise the question of interest for a potential listener. If it is about a listening experience, an act of contemplating the world in its most mundane insignificance, should they be recorded at all? An answer is that the recording itself acts like Berger’s level crossing. It delimits a span of time and space which contains the unrelated and insignificant events, bringing them into correlated proportions. Not all level crossings predictably enable an experience of field. A “nearly nothing” is difficult to find, and the listener must be willing to wait.