Minimalism is dead

..says the minimalist.
Minimalism was a necessary reaction to the geologic accretion of cultural memory and traditions. It had to be shown by Alvin Lucier and Robert Irwin and the rest of 'em that the experience of art can rest solely with the observer, inside the fundamental structures of perception, without the crutch of narration, communication and their building blocks (figure and ground, beginning and ending, tension and release, etc).
But as I think about how to advance my own work, I'm thinking more and more that minimalism has run its course, and that it's now time to re-engage the modernist-surrealist inquiry into the borders of narrativity, the possibilities and impossibilities for communicating across the unbridgeable distance between us.
And here I'm in no way advocating a postmodernist pastiche aesthetic, where we rely on the supposedly shared referents of cultural signifiers, redeployed in nonessential and arbitrary kaliedoscopes of recycled trash. Nor am I advocating a return to traditional narrativities to tell "new stories" in old structures like new franzia in old nostalgia-tinted bottles.
What I'm asking for is a resumption of the research programme of Proust and Joyce, for concerted boundary-pushing of what it means to communicate--and to commune.
Yet in my work, I haven't gotten there yet. I just heard a performance by some magnificent players here in San Diego of my Loop Generating Algorithms scores (first debuted at the Public Art show last spring), and I realized that I'm still writing minimal music almost against my own will, music that steadfastly refuses to communicate anything, that presents ears with "empty words," as in the Cage piece of that name. I'm also not sure that I've encountered much contemporary, boundary pushing narrativity of the kind I'm calling for. And no, I never got around to reading House of Leaves. Maybe I need new heroes (in addition, of course, to permaheroes on Cascus, whose work and posts are a constant source of inspiration)

I was in the ocean today, totally unshiveringly. Ha!