Monthly Archives: June 2009

playing grottos

On  a recent trip to the Venice Bienale, which was quite nice, by the way, I made a small 3 day trip to Sardenia.

I stayed outside of Alghero, in a tiny town named Fertilia. There, I was first greeted by its stark minimal appearance. img_0824

After a scorching and beautiful day at the beach, the next I traveled by bus to nearby Alghero. There, I and a friend stumbled upon a french tourist boat heading to Neptune’s Grotto.

After a rather bumpy and exhilerating boatride, we docked rather precariously and scuttled into the 70 million year old cave. img_0706img_0734

Once inside, I was stunned, both by its pristine enormity as well as its peaceful self-awareness that it projected. Whenever I feel humbled by nature, it brings me a sense of such intense grounding in both the particular and the general that I can only laugh outloud. Which I did.

And the laughter resonated off of growing walls in a most remarkable way.

Last night, in the backstage room at Le Poisson Rouge in New York, I was talking with Raz Mensai (Badawi), and he mentioned a project he will do in Oporto, Portugal’s catacombs.

It triggered a memory of a film I once saw, where Hermeto Pascoal played a cave as an instrument. Little did I know, it was a grotto.

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Hermeto Pascoal Grotto song

AC [ Institute Direct Chapel ] presents “Tone and Temperament” – June 18 – July 18, 2009 / Opening: Thursday, June 18, 6-8pm

I have a new work, telephone to speak with the dead,  in a group show opening this Thursday June 18 in Chelsea in New York. The phone, alongside Edison’s patents and other documents, will be available for use.

Hope to see you soon…

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AC [ Institute Direct Chapel ]

Presents A New Group Exhibition:

Tone and Temperament

Curated by Sophie Landres
June 18 – July 18, 2009 / Opening: Thursday, June 18, 6-8pm

AC [Institute Direct Chapel] is pleased to present Tone and Temperament, a group-exhibition that considers the temporal and expandable material of sound. Curated by Sophie Landres and in collaboration with the eight participating artists, this exhibition concentrates on sound as a condition for personal, social, political and metaphysical experience. In addition to the permanent fixtures in the gallery, performances will be scheduled to occur throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Tone and Temperament was conceived as an opportunity to explore literal and conceptual ideas of harmony versus discordance and innocence versus criminality that subsist within the framework of conflicting social norms and art historical precedents. The exhibition was regarded as a conduit for inconclusive experiments in redistricting discursive boundaries and expanding aesthetic properties. Despite sound’s reflexive predilection for interference, the participants created pieces either in response to the exhibition site or with the ambition that their work could co-exist within spatial proximity, without jeopardizing individual content. Though many of the pieces violate prevailing notions of harmony and composition, the refusal to abide is a victimless crime, motivated by a congenial faith in plurality. Allowing sound to flow without bleeding or hemorrhaging, we hope to maintain numerous elements in a constellate connection, free to generate their own alliance of possible meanings.

Chris Bors complicates the act of listening by juxtaposing pop-psychology relaxation techniques with a pop-cultural response to trauma. Jennie C. Jones stretches notes and manipulates tones to reconfigure musical history and exhume emotional content. In a sculpture that references both the harmony of the spheres and the politics of knowledge, Zach Layton uses looping phase structures to create an internally conflicting “chamber music” of the self. Audio recordings and corresponding images by Terry Nauheim describe imagined and site-specific geographies and measure the physical form of sounds against their content, examining how memory and objects are equally subject to decay. Exploring the theory of electronic voice phenomena Daniel Perlin utilizes Thomas Edison’s lost schemata to build a telephone that can speak with the dead. Through the visualization and sonification of Arctic data and electromagnetic lightening transmissions, Andrea Polli and Joe Gilmore express the fragility and interconnectedness of the global ecosystem. Mike Skinner enlists the viewer’s body in acts of compositional terrorism, working with mirrors and parabolic reverberating sine waves to demonstrate how the occupation of space can be an oppositional force.

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