Wewak, New Guinea;
1969

Setting up a tape recorder here is enough to attract a crowd of teen-agers, each anxious to be recorded. Among the songs just recorded, in addition to a variety of indigenous ones, there is one in English, another in Japanese, a third in German. The first could come from radio, phonograph or school, but the second must date from the time Japanese occupation forces established a public school here, while the German song either survives from before World War I or has been learned more recently from a missionary.

Not one singer understood what he sang, yet each pronounced the words clearly. Local songs were also faithfully rendered, though the language & context were often alien to the singer.

In the past, songs were inseparable parts of sacred ceremonies & dances. They remained the identifiable property of local groups. Radio made them common property. The sacred & obscene now go out over the airwaves stripped of meaning: pure music. The only thing meaningful about them is the relationship of one musical note to another. They achieve the "musical" effects of geometrical abstraction.

To a lesser extent, this same principle applies to the graphic arts: detached from context, stripped of association or feeling, shared by aliens, they become abstract art. "Meaning" is no longer intellectual but sensory, unless, of course, art is clearly representational, in which case the viewer provides his own meaning.