Everyday Experimental: November 17 – 19, 2011
Annea Lockwood, Piano Burning. Photo by Geoff Adams.
April 16, 17 & 21 – The Sonic Unconscious: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris & Gina Badger
The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.
“When the fissures between mind and matter multiply into an infinity of gaps, the studio begins to crumble like the House of Usher, so that mind and matter get endlessly confounded.”
—Robert Smithson
Saturday April 16
Gina Badger
Mongrels, Part 1: Weeds
3 – 4:30 PM ($10 / $8 Members)
Yolande Harris
Pink Noise (The Pink Noise of Pleasure Yachts in Turquoise Sea)
& Tropical Storm
5 – 7 PM (FREE)
& April 17 5 – 7:30 PM
Scorescapes
7 PM ($12 / $10 Members)
Sunday April 17
Gina Badger
Mongrels, Part 2: Elixirs
6 – 7:30 PM ($10 / $8 Members)
Mongrels: Screening & Reception
8 – 10 PM (FREE)
Thursday April 21
Jana Winderen
Scuttling around in the shallows
8 PM ($12 / $10 Members)
Pierre Schaeffer’s term acousmatic music—recorded sounds, arranged on tape—produces the first audible interstice between sound and its source. By imagining the cut to be clean, the mechanisms of reproduction create a sonic fetish: the tape. The disembodied sounds of the tape or record, alienated from their sources, create a metaphysical field for exploration of pure sound isolated from the visible. This surgical move, meant to attack the opticentric nature of modernism, relegates the aural into the realm of representation and replicates the privileging of sight. But what is happening at the source? Is Pythagoras unaffected by his students?
The Sonic Unconscious — Gina Badger: Mongrels: Screening and Reception
The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.
Mongrels, a short film
Chased around by the ghosts of a paved-over salt marsh and equipped with perverted botanists’ tools, voices of divination and herbal elixirs, we will explore the neighborhood of Gowanus on foot and onscreen.
Badger’s work for The Sonic Unconscious will conclude with a free reception and screening of a video that builds around an interview with herbalist and social justice activist Dori Midnight.
The Sonic Unconscious — Gina Badger: Mongrels, Part 2: Elixirs
The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.
Mongrels, Part 2: Elixirs
Chased around by the ghosts of a paved-over salt marsh and equipped with perverted botanists’ tools, voices of divination and herbal elixirs, we will explore the neighborhood of Gowanus on foot and onscreen.
Meet at ISSUE Project Room, from which Gina Badger will lead a field botany tour exploring the place of edible and medicinal weeds in ecologies of decolonization. Advance ticket purchase is highly recommended as attendance is extremely limited.
The Sonic Unconscious — Gina Badger: Mongrels, Part 1: Weeds
The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.
Mongrels, Part 1: Weeds
Chased around by the ghosts of a paved-over salt marsh and equipped with perverted botanists’ tools, voices of divination and herbal elixirs, we will explore the neighborhood of Gowanus on foot and onscreen.
Meet at ISSUE Project Room, from which Gina Badger will lead a field botany tour exploring the place of edible and medicinal weeds in ecologies of decolonization. Advance ticket purchase is highly recommended as attendance is extremely limited.
Littoral: Jacques Demierre and Vincent Barras – Voicing Through Saussure
ISSUE’s Littoral series presents Jacues Demierre and Vincent Barras this month. The detailed analysis of the sonorities of the ancient and modern languages, their re-elaboration and re-composition is finally embodied in a score-text, spread out on stage in its concrete dimensions through the language performance of the two sound artists. Barras & Demierre have previously published Voicing Through Saussure, a film by Véronique Goël.
Talk, verbal stuff, is taken as a primary component, drawn from materials found in the work of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure on various ancient and modern languages (the so called “Indo-European” languages). The detailed analysis of the sonorities of the ancient and modern languages, their re-elaboration and re-composition is finally embodied in a score-text, spread out on stage in its concrete dimensions through the language performance of the two sound artists. The body is where this vocal investigation takes place, digging in the primitive sound matter of language
Theoretical: Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality
Theoretical, ISSUE’s bi-monthly series of critical discourse, continues in April with ethnomusicologist, musicologist, anthropologist, and cultural historian Veit Erlmann. Erlmann’s book, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality, examines hearing’s role as the “second sense,” — less rational and modern than seeing, the master of all senses, the “first sense.” Reason and Resonance is the first full-length study to explode this myth by reconstructing the history of aurality and the process through which the ear assumed a central role in modern culture and rationality.
Theoretical Music: Two panel discussions focusing on the crossing of the New York art and music scenes
Buy the three-night package for $25, a discount of $5.
“Theoretical Music: No Wave, New Music, and the New York Art Scene, 1978-1983” is a three-day event organized by art historian Branden W. Joseph and musician David Grubbs to take place at ISSUE Project Room. Its purpose is to examine the intersections as well as the failed encounters of art, music, and cinema in downtown Manhattan from 1978-1983. In addition to an evening of panel discussions (Thursday, Nov. 4) among some of the most notable figures to emerge from the art, music, and film scenes of the time, the event will include a rare screening of James Nares’s no wave epic, Rome ’78 (Wednesday, Nov. 3) and conclude with a concert performance headlined by the first New York appearance in years by the fearless, crucial downtown band, Ut (Friday, Nov. 5).
Robert Longo: Untitled (drawing for Glenn Branca Album Cover), from the series Men in the Cities, 1981 Graphite and charcoal on paper 60 x 60 inches/152.4 x 152.4 cm Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures Gallery, New York
Panel One
Director Beth B, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, contemporary artist Dan Graham, artist/critic John Miller, painter/singer/musician Taro Suzuki, moderated by Branden W. Joseph.
Panel Two
Fashion designer/guitarist Nina Canal, writer/archivist Byron Coley, founder of Love of Life Orchestra (LOLO) Peter Gordon, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, author Neb Sublette, moderated by David Grubbs.
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Theoretical Music: No Wave, New Music, and the New York Art Scene, 1978-1983
An event organized by Branden W. Joseph and David Grubbs for ISSUE Project Room
November 3-5, 2010
Buy the three-night package for $25, a discount of $5.
The last several years have been witness to an increasing number of exhibitions, books, and archival audio releases representing New York art, music, and underground cinema from the years that hinge the late 1970s and the early 1980s. The Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, the traveling retrospective Dan Graham: Beyond, Thurston Moore and Byron Coley’s No Wave: Post-Punk, Underground, New York, 1976-1980, Marc Masters’ No Wave, Tim Lawrence’s Hold on to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992, and the DVD release of Ericka Beckman’s 135 Grand Street New York 1979 all speak to a growing interest in historicizing this period of multidisciplinary ferment.
“Theoretical Music: No Wave, New Music, and the New York Art Scene, 1978-1983” is a three-day event organized by art historian Branden W. Joseph and musician David Grubbs to take place at ISSUE Project Room. Its purpose is to examine the intersections as well as the failed encounters of art, music, and cinema in downtown Manhattan from 1978-1983. In addition to an evening of panel discussions (Thursday, Nov. 4) among some of the most notable figures to emerge from the art, music, and film scenes of the time, the event will include a rare screening of James Nares’s no wave epic, Rome ’78 (Wednesday, Nov. 3) and conclude with a concert performance headlined by the first New York appearance in years by the fearless, crucial downtown band, Ut (Friday, Nov. 5).
Theoretical Music: Rome ’78 – Film Screening and Conversation with Filmmaker and Artist, James Nares
Buy the three-night package for $25, a discount of $5.
“Theoretical Music: No Wave, New Music, and the New York Art Scene, 1978-1983” is a three-day event organized by art historian Branden W. Joseph and musician David Grubbs to take place at ISSUE Project Room. Its purpose is to examine the intersections as well as the failed encounters of art, music, and cinema in downtown Manhattan from 1978-1983. In addition to an evening of panel discussions (Thursday, Nov. 4) among some of the most notable figures to emerge from the art, music, and film scenes of the time, the event will include a rare screening of James Nares’s no wave epic, Rome ’78 (Wednesday, Nov. 3) and conclude with a concert performance headlined by the first New York appearance in years by the fearless, crucial downtown band, Ut (Friday, Nov. 5).
Rome ’78 (1978, 90 minutes, dir. James Nares)
Starring Patti Astor, James Chance, Bradley Field, David McDermott, Eric Mitchell, Lance Loud, John Lurie, Lydia Lunch, Anya Phillips, and Pat Place, among others.
British-born artist James Nares has lived and worked in New York for more than three decades. He is known both as a painter and as a filmmaker, and his films were the subject of a 2008 retrospective at Anthology Film Archives. Jim Jarmusch described Nares’s films as “luminous jewels scattered in the dirt—as varied and striking as his paintings, his photographs, and his train of thought.” As a painter, Nares uses his mastery of the balance between spontaneity and control to create a single elegant stroke that pulsates with energy, relating to Franz Kline as well as to the cartoon brushstrokes of Roy Lichtenstein. As a musician, Nares played with the Contortions and the Del-Byzanteens.
LITTORAL: Harry Mathews
Harry Mathews is the author of various novels, poems, short fiction,
and essays from New York (1930). He settled in Europe in 1952, and since then has lived in Spain, Germany, Italy, and (chiefly) France. In 1978, he returned to the United States to teach for several years at Bennington College, Columbia University, and the New School University. Now married to the French writer Marie Chaix, he divides his time between Paris and Key West. When Mathews published his first poems in 1956, he was associated with the “ New York School of poets”, with three of whom (John Ashbery, Keneth Koch, James Schuyler) he founded the review Locus Solus in 1961. Through his friendship with Georges Perec, he became a member of the Oulipo in 1972. The author of six novels and several collections of poetry, his most recent publications are Sainte Catherine, a novella written in French (Éditions P.O.L, 2000), The Human Country: the Collected Short Stories (Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), Oulipo Compendium (co-edited with Alastair Brotchie; Atlas Press and Make Now Press, 2005), and My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).
ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
Theoretical: “Book Burning — In Honor of Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War” Alex Galloway and Jason Smith
A Book Burning:
Come celebrate the launch of the new book Introduction to Civil War by Tiqqun It will be an evening of fire and words hosted by translators Alexander Galloway and Jason Smith.
“Society no longer exists, at least in the sense of a differentiated whole. There is only a tangle of norms and mechanisms through which THEY hold together the scattered tatters of the global bio-political fabric, through which THEY prevent its violent disintegration. Empire is the administrator of this desolation, the supreme manager of a process of this listless implosion.” –Tiqqun
Merzbow + MV Carbon and Philip White (First Set)
Masami Akita, born in Tokyo in 1956, performs under the name Merzbow. Taken from Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, or “Merz building,” the name refers to a building created with rubbish. Merzbow made his earliest music from tape loops, combined with creatively recorded percussion and metal, after which he began cutting up his old recordings in search of new methods of creation. He released his music on cassettes through his own label, Lowest Music & Arts, which was founded in 1979.
ISSUE Artist-in-Residence MV Carbon and Philip White will be opening for Merzbow before both performances.
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Theoretical: Thinking Out Loud: Christoph Cox and Seth Kim-Cohen
Thinking Out Loud: Christoph Cox and Seth Kim-Cohen
Everybody likes a good fight. Earlier this year, in the pages of Artforum, Christoph Cox and Seth Kim-Cohen publicly disagreed on how to think about the sonic arts. Cox advocates a sonic naturalism “which short-circuits the aesthetics of representation and mediation and instead affirms an aesthetics of force, flux, and resonance.” Kim-Cohen, argues that “it is the worldly, rather than the earthly, that presents the possibility of meaning – sound derives its meaning from context, from intertextuality, from the play of difference in its conceptual and material strata.”
Oftentimes, the only thing you get out of a good fight is a bloody nose. Hoping for more, Cox and Kim-Cohen will sidestep the ad hominem upper cuts that sometimes pass for critical debate in the art world, exchanging their ideas of the sonic and trying genuinely to think out loud. Each will come armed with examples: audio, video, image, and text. These might include works by John Cage, Robert Morris, Francisco López, Christina Kubisch, Vito Acconci, and the work that started the debate: Doug Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion. Theorists are likely to be dragged into this as well: Friedrich Kittler, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Manuel de Landa, et al.
No champion will be declared, no belt will be awarded. The hoped-for outcome is a few new ideas, a more thorough understanding, maybe even one or two “ah-has.” By thinking out loud about the sonic, Cox and Kim-Cohen believe they can accomplish more in tandem than either could in isolation. It’ll be a friendly fight: Marquess of Queensberry rules.
Seth Kim-Cohen
Seth Kim-Cohen is an artist and theorist. His work has been presented at venues spanning the cultural spectrum, including: CBGBs, Tate Modern, PS 122, ZKM, Issue Project Room, Peer Gallery. His recent book, In The Blink of An Ear: Toward A Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, (Continuum 2009), argues for a wide-ranging sonic conceptualism and against sound-in-itselfism. Kim-Cohen has written for Artforum, The Chicago Reader, Art Review, Pitchfork, and Pop-Stock. He received his PhD from the London Consortium and has taught at Yale University and Pratt Institute. Seth Kim-Cohen is Director and Assistant Professor of Art and Theory at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.
More at www.kim-cohen.com
Christoph Cox
Christoph Cox, Professor of Philosophy, teaches and writes on contemporary European philosophy and contemporary art and music. He is also on the faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, and a member of the CCS Graduate Committee. Cox is the author of Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (University of California Press, 1999) and co-editor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum, 2004). The recipient of a 2009 Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, Cox is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine and regularly writes for Artforum, The Wire, and other magazines. He has curated exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Kitchen in New York City, New Langton Arts in San Francisco, and G Fine Art Gallery in Washington D.C. Cox has written catalog essays for exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Mass MoCA, the South London Gallery, Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Seattle Center, and the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. He is currently at work on a philosophical and historical book about sound art and experimental music.
Theoretical: The Music and Theory of Kenneth Gaburo with Chris Mann, David Dunn, Larry Polansky and Nate Wooley
Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) was renowned as a teacher, pioneer of electronics in music, jazz pianist, writer, ecologist, publisher, and proponent of compositional linguistics. Over the course of a dedicated career, his uncompromising work carved out its own patch in the territory of American experimentalism. But despite being sought after for his radical work in the fields of music composition, teaching, publishing and writing, and having had a profound influence on a generation of musical thinkers, Kenneth Gaburo remains an undersung hero.
Born in 1926 in Somerville, New Jersey, to an immigrant Italian family in the laundry business, Gaburo excelled at musical studies, playing the piano and singing in choirs at an early age. As a child he was familiar with the New York jazz scene, and an underlying jazz feel can be sensed in even the most experimental of his later works. His time at the Eastman School of Music which began in 1943 was interrupted by service in the army. Initially stationed in the Philippines as a strafer bomber his musical skills were soon recognized. He spent the remainder of the war travelling with a jazz band around the Pacific as pianist and arranger.
After returning to complete his M.M. degree at Eastman with Bernard Rogers, Gaburo taught at Kent State University, Ohio, and then McNeese State College, Louisiana. A Fulbright Fellowship in 1954 enabled him to travel to Rome to study composition with Goffredo Petrassi at the Conservatorio de Santa Cecilia. In 1962 he completed his D.M.A. at the University of Illinois, studying composition with Burrill Phillips and Hubert Kessler. He remained there on the faculty until 1968. During this time he was an active organizer of the annual international Festival of Contemporary Arts. In 1955 he began to work with combining concrete sounds on tape with live performers; an interest that was to continue for the rest of his life-the series of ten Antiphonies featuring live instruments and pre-recorded tape were made from 1958 to 1991.
Growing from a concern for music-as-language and language-as-music Gaburo started formal studies in linguistics in 1959, formulating the term Compositional Linguistics. In 1965 he founded the New Music Choral Ensemble (NMCE) one of the first choirs in the U.S. to perform avant-garde music for voice. This group performed over 100 new works in the decade of its existence, from the choral music of Schoenberg, Nono, Oliveros, Kagel, and Messiaen, to the theater works of Becket and Albee. Improvisation was combined with electronics, body and verbal linguistics, computers, dance, mime, film, slides, and tape. For his work up to this time Gaburo had received awards from the Guggenheim, UNESCO, Thorne, Fromm, and Koussevitsky Foundations.
In 1967 he joined the faculty at the new San Diego campus of the University of California where in 1972 a Rockefeller Foundation grant enabled him to start NMCE IV, this time with one singer, one actor, one speaker, one mime, and one sound-movement-instrumentalist. Until his resignation from UCSD in 1975 he produced a large number of integrated theatrical works, such as the collection Lingua and Privacy.
In 1974 Gaburo founded Lingua Press Publishers, dedicated to putting forth unique artist-produced works in all media having to do with language and music. Many of the publications have been exhibited in book art shows throughout the world. Gaburo lived in the Anzo-Borrego desert writing and teaching from 1980 until 1983. In 1980 he was artistic director for the first “authentic” production of Harry Partch’s The Bewitched for the Berlin Festival (recorded on Enclosure Five: Harry Partch, innova 405). His understanding of Partch’s concept of corporeality has deep connections with his own concern for physicality and how it informs compositions. His 1982 tape work, RE-RUN, for instance, was generated after a 20-hour sensory deprivation exercise.
He became Director of the Experimental Music Studio at the University of Iowa in 1983. The studio put intensive focus on composition, technology, psycho-acoustic perception, performance, and the affirmation of the uniqueness of the individual to create his/her own language reality. At the studio he founded the Seminar for Cognitive Studies, a forum for discussion of the creative process. His concern for the investigation of music as legitimate research, and composition as the creation of intrinsic appropriate language, led to a series of readings in compositional linguistics for solo performer.
Antiphony VIII: Revolution, for percussion (Steve Schick) and tape, Antiphony IX: A Dot for orchestra, children, and tape, and Antiphony X: Winded, for organ (Gary Verkade) and tape, continued his series of works for live instruments and tape as well as the use of graphic notations and random processes to generate small and large scale events. Gaburo’s archive is housed at the University of Illinois Music Library and Lingua Press is represented by Frog Peak Music.
Marina Rosenfeld + Kusum + LoVid
Marina Rosenfeld
Marina Rosenfeld’s work has been widely commissioned by museums and institutions in Europe and North America, including the Whitney Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Tate Modern, The Kitchen, and festivals including Faster Than Sound, Performa Biennial, Holland Festival, Wien Modern, Donaueschingen, Ars Electronica, and Los Angeles’ Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology, among many others. She has created live scores for the Merce Cunningham and Douglas Dunn dance companies and has collaborated with artists including George Lewis, Christian Marclay, Ikue Mori, DJ Olive, Anthony Coleman and many more. Rosenfeld recordings can be found on Room 40, Charhizma, Softl Music, and Innova. She’s been a member of the faculty at Bard College’s Milton Avery School of the Arts in New York since 2003, and co-chair of its graduate program in Music/Sound since 2007.
Kusum
Focusing on the voice in performance and installation, Kusum Normoyle performs with noise, intervention and the rearrangement of performance structures, utilising site specific locations and high energy physical and vocal output. Her vocal style has formed an alignment with extreme extended vocal techniques, using the microphone and amplification system as an instrument on which the performance is dependant. Pushing the threshold of violence, short in duration and coming up from behind you, Kusums performances are highly specific events that effect through volume and her clipping, broken vocal style. Residing in Sydney, her work has taken her interstate and internationally as a solo and collaborative performer and musician.
LoVid
LoVid is an interdisciplinary artist duo composed of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus. Our work includes live video installations, sculptures, digital prints, patchworks, media projects, performances, and video recordings. We combine many opposing elements in our work, contrasting hard electronics with soft patchworks, analog and digital, or handmade and machine produced objects. This multidirectional approach is also reflected in the content of our work: romantic and aggressive, wireless and wire-full. We are interested in the ways in which the human body and mind observe, process, and respond to both natural and technological environments, and in the preservation of data, signals, and memory.
Theoretical: Cracked Media The Sound of Malfunction with Caleb Kelly
Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction
Caleb Kelly
From the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked, and broke audio media technologies to produce novel sounds and performances. Artists and musicians, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yasunao Tone, and Oval, pulled apart both playback devices (phonographs and compact disc players) and the recorded media (vinyl records and compact discs) to create an extended sound palette. In Cracked Media, Caleb Kelly explores how the deliberate utilization of the normally undesirable (a crack, a break) has become the site of productive creation. Cracked media, Kelly writes, slides across disciplines, through music, sound, and noise. Cracked media encompasses everything from Cage’s silences and indeterminacies, to Paik’s often humorous tape works, to the cold and clean sounds of digital glitch in the work of Tone and Oval. Kelly offers a detailed historical account of these practices, arguing that they can be read as precursors to contemporary new media.
Kelly looks at the nature of recording technology and the music industry in relation to the crack and the break, and discusses the various manifestations of noise, concluding that neither theories of recording nor theories of noise offer an adequate framework for understanding cracked media. Connecting the historical avant-garde to modern-day turntablism, and predigital destructive techniques to the digital ticks, pops, and clicks of the glitch, Kelly proposes new media theorizations of cracked media that focus on materiality and the everyday.
“Caleb Kelly’s Cracked Media is a welcome addition to the growing body of critical writing on the role of sound in the history of modern and postmodern art. It helpfully extends Douglas Kahn’s monumental Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts by focusing on a powerful strain of contemporary sonic art: the creative mis-use of audio playback technologies. As Kelly ably theorizes it, the ‘crack’ is a productive break that articulates past and future, archaeology and innovation, analog and digital. Hence, this book combines an exhaustive survey and taxonomy of recent experiments with turntables and CD technology (Oval, Christian Marclay, Yasunao Tone, etc.) with a detailed genealogy of these practices that traces them back to earlier moments of sonic experimentation (Futurism, Fluxus, John Cage, etc.). Informed, but not overloaded, by theoretical accounts of phonography and digital media, Kelly helpfully sorts out what is at issue in cracked sound and places this at the center of contemporary debates about art and technology.”
Caleb Kelly is a lecturer at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney
—Christoph Cox, Professor of Philosophy, Hampshire College, co-editor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music “Finally, a deep, scholarly accounting of the aesthetics of failure. Props to Caleb Kelly for laying bare the various histories of ‘malfunction’ as a compositional device. This book should be required reading for anyone working in electronic music today.”
—Kim Cascone, Composer and Writer “For those of us who witnessed and accompanied the advent of the laptop music scene in the late 1990s, this book situates the movement within broader contexts of sound exploration in the 20th century. While theories of the everyday have been applied to music listening, they have not been used to discuss music creation. Kelly shows how the mechanisms of consumer music culture led to new directions in artistic creation. What we see is how the creative act in the age of mechanical reproduction becomes a music of cracked reproduction, and ultimately an art of manual mechanical deconstruction.”
—Atau Tanaka, Artist, Director of Culture Lab Newcastle
For more information, please click here
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Caleb Kelly is an academic, event producer and curator from New Zealand who lives and works in Sydney, Australia. His first book was published by MIT Press in October 2009 and is entitled Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction. The book looks at the deliberate use of cracked and broken everyday playback technologies for the creation of music and art.
Caleb has been producing experimental sound events since 2000, including impermanent.audio (http://impermanent.info) and the Australian experimental music festival What is Music? Musicians who have performed at his events include: Tony Conrad (USA), Merzbow (JP), Bernard Parmegiani (FR), Haino Keiji (JP) Akio Suzuki (JP), kk null (JP), Ami Yoshida (JP), Atau Tanaka (JP/FR), Haco (JP), Taku Sugimoto (JP), Kaffe Mathews (UK), Kim Cascone (USA), Toshimaru Nakamura (JP), Jojo Hiroshige (JP), Phil Dadson (NZ), Tetuzi Akiyama (JP), Rosy Parlane (NZ), Aki Onda (JP), Francisco Lopez (SP), Chris Abrahams, and Oren Ambarchi.
Caleb has also curated numerous sound exhibitions, run the year long sound in gallery space project PELT, and written on the sound arts for numerous publications.
Caleb is a lecturer in contemporary art theory at the Sydney College of the Arts, at the University of Sydney.
Littoral: Gregg Bordowitz
Gregg Bordowitz
Volition
For one year, every day, from August 2007 to June 2008, Gregg Bordowitz wrote questions, one line after the other. On May 2nd, the author will read aloud all the collected questions recently published by Printed Matter in a book titled Volition—
Consisting entirely of questions, Volition is 142 pages of active, mind-bending engagement with the reader, who is led down paths of inquiry involving art, meaning, philosophy, choice, happiness, and identity. Bordowitz organizes his questions into lists, paragraphs, and stanzas, which are themselves organized into five chapters: Questions, Topics, Aesthetics, Beliefs, and Morals. The resulting text is something like a spiritual guide crossed with an epic poem crossed with a transcription of the meandering thoughts of a philosophic insomniac, kept awake by such questions as “How can I touch creation as a principle without reproach?” and “How does gratitude unfold from virtue?” *
Suspending any responsibility to answers, Volition presents all the ways questions approach their objects—seducing, beseeching, mocking, taking, giving, shining, withdrawing. Reading his questions aloud over the course of an afternoon, Bordowitz will exhaust the will to know through a kind of public liquidation.
Starting at 2PM and continuing (with breaks) until approximately 7PM, the performance will be segmented into four sections. Food, beer, wine and tea will be served.
2:00 PM Welcome
2:15PM—3:00PM
Book I: Questions
Book II: Topics
3:15PM—3:45PM
Book III: Aesthetics
4:00PM—4:30PM
Book IV: Beliefs
4:45PM—6:45PM
Book V: Morals
Appendix: On Why
* Volition is published and distributed by Printed Matter; description taken from catalog
http://printedmatter.org 195 10th Avenue New York, NY 10011 (212) 925-0325
Gregg Bordowitz (Born August 14, 1964, Brooklyn, N.Y.} is a writer, film and video maker and teacher. A collection of his essays, titled The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003, was published by MIT Press in the fall of 2004. For this collection, Bordowitz received the 2006 Frank Jewitt Mather Award from the College Art Association. Recently, his writings have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Fence, Casco, and Texte Zur Kunst. A long poem titled Admissions was included in the book Considering Forgiveness, edited by Aleksandra Wagner and Carin Cuoni (Vera List Center, 2009). His most recent book consisting entirely of questions, titled Volition, was published by Printed Matter (2009). His films, including Habit (2001), The Suicide (1996), A Cloud In Trousers (1995), and Fast Trip Long Drop (1993) have been widely shown in festivals, museums, movie theaters and broadcast internationally. In addition, he has received a Rockefeller Intercultural Arts Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, among other grants and awards. Bordowitz is Chair of the Film, Video, and New Media Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he is on the faculty of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
ISSUE’s Littoral Series is supported, in part, by The Casement Fund and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Littoral: MUSIC OF THE HEMISPHERES (w/ The Lickets)
MUSIC OF THE HEMISPHERES
The idea for –MUSIC OF THE HEMISPHERES—originates in the work of neuro-philosopher Dan Lloyd, Thomas C. Brownell Professor of Philosophy and a faculty member of the Neuroscience program at Trinity College, Connecticut. Dr. Lloyd’s research focuses on taking patterns found in brain activity and converting them into musical score. These scores are not biofeedback or music cognition experiments, but rather extracting the ‘architecture of consciousness,’ as it occurs in the brain, and assigning its varying components musical tones. The result is musical scores meant to reflect brain activity itself. Through this, Lloyd found that recognizable musical structures emerge, and he thus formulated a theory that consciousness operates within a musical structure – or rather, that music is an expressive interpretation of how our brains work.
The “music” generated through Lloyd’s project seems oddly familiar, and is surprisingly harmonious and musical. Now, should this theory be proven, the philosophical implications are both joyous and endless. The idea that we are, in fact, music – or that music is, in fact, truly human: a reflection or interpretation of the human mind.
The event will serve as both an exhibition and an experiment. Elisa Da Prato, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker who had initiated the event and is currently working on a film concerning this theme, will be pairing Dan Lloyd with different ensembles/musicians who will be assigned with the task of interpreting the scores that are the result of his studies. The event will be divided into three parts: a screening of a short film about Lloyd’s experiments that would spell out the context for the experiment; the staging of these scores as interpreted by the musicians; and a discussion concerning both the aesthetics and the musical validity of the aforementioned scores. The panel is shaping to include Lloyd, a neuroscientist, a music theorist, and the musicians assigned to the task.
Da Prato states that her goal is to create a discussion about the emotional and biological necessity of music itself. She wishes to assimilate Lloyd’s theory to the scientific/philosophical equivalent of Woody Allen’s joke concluding his film Annie Hall: “we need the eggs.” The idea being that, for some reason, we need to both express and experience people in musical form. Almost a scientific case for joy.
The evening will feature:
DAN LLOYD is the Thomas C. Brownell Professor of Philosophy and a faculty member of the Neuroscience program at Trinity College, Connecticut. For several years, he has been pursuing the connections between music and mind, a project at the intersection of art and science. Using art to explore complexity is at the heart of several past and ongoing projects as well. He is the author of Radiant Cool: a novel theory of consciousness. (Cambridge:MIT Press, 2004), a book joining noir fiction with a theory of consciousness, and Simple Minds (MIT Press, 1989). His current projects include Ghosts in the Machine (Rowan and Littlefield, forthcoming), a philosophical drama about minds, brains, and computers, and Subjective Time (MIT Press, forthcoming), an anthology on the philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of experienced temporality. He is the editor of the journal Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology.
ZORAN JOSIPOVIC, PhD, is a Research Associate and an Adjunct Professor in the Psychology Department and Center for Neural Science, New York University. His research focuses on the effects of meditation and other contemplative techniques on the brain, and on what these effects can tell us about the nature of consciousness. Zoran is a long-term practitioner of meditation in the nondual traditions of Dzogchen, Mahamudra and Advaita Vedanta. He has also worked as a psychotherapist and a bodyworker and has taught meditation at Esalen Institute for many years.
DOUGLAS BRUCE JOHNSON is a composer and music therapist, currently based in Hartford, CT. Performances of his compositions have been heard on three continents, and recorded on Zimbel (USA) and on BITMusik (Germany). Dedicated to live musicking, Johnson’s music celebrates the emotional connectedness that, together, performers and listeners can explore in music. His work in music therapy brings this interactive, celebratory approach to music into a variety of supportive and restorative healing contexts. From 1988 to 2009, Johnson was a member of the music faculty at Trinity College, Hartford
“THE LICKETS deploy a mini-orchestra of acoustic instruments—cello, flute, acoustic guitar, organ, sitar, harmonium, hand percussion, et al.—to call into being undulating vistas of luminous mantras and soundscapes. The Lickets’ raga-like settings suggest a strong Indian influence, and traces of visionary ‘60s jazz artists like John and Alice Coltrane, the time-transcending drones of La Monte Young and his Theatre of Eternal Music, and ‘60s psychedelic rock surface too as parts of the trio’s trippy mix.” – Textura
ELISA DA PRATO is a writer, director and editor currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She worked for documentary filmmaker Murray Lerner on several films featuring artists such as The Who, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. As of late, Da Prato is developing a film aiming to narratively explore the intersection of philosophy, neuro-science, and music theory. Elisa is a regular video contributor to indexmagazine.com and theblackharbor.com. She studied motion picture production at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, CA.
Littoral series is made possible, in part, by the Casement Fund together with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Hans Grüsel’s Krankenkabinet + Occasional Detroit (O-D) The Best In ABSTRAKT ENT
Hans Grüsel’s Krankenkabinet
Hans Grüsel’s Krankenkabinet is an ever-changing woodgrain diorama of dark forest characters. Started in 1999 in San Francisco, California, by Hans Grüsel, the ensemble uses electronics, concrète recording, and acoustic instruments to explore the lost Teutonic rites of the past while stumbling into the failure of the future.
Hans Grusel’s “sound” might best be described as the sounds of a Bavarian music box designed by an artist who had been bonked on the head with a brass cuckoo clock chime and left in a dark room for three years with only the music of Scriabin, Wagner, and Prokofiev mixed with off-speed 1960s sci-fi soundtracks and folkloric anthems pumping through the slightly clogged vents. HGKK audio combines numerous divergent elements—rigid structures and sweeping washes of plucky improvisation; classic violin sounds twisting in a mobius strip of clashing yet beautiful sounds and tones; flitting marches and delicate traipsing at the bottom of the sea—to create dense and blissful audio rainstorms.
There are very few bands who truly baffle. Who confuse and confound, both musically and conceptually. Sure, plenty of bands are weird, or strange, or hard to describe, some might even be described as fucked up or damaged, but very very few truly baffle. Hans Grusel’s Krankenkabinet is most definitely one of those bafflingly confusional elite. . . Hans Grusel and his Krankenkabinet create a bizarre cacophony of sound, theatrical, dramatic, noisy for sure, but weirdly melodic and playful and more than anything, confounding.
Occasional Detroit
My NAME IS Towondo”Beyababa”Clayborn I am a part of the abstrakt hip-hop duo Occasional Detroit (O-D) THE BEST IN ABSTRAKT ENT..
We are an abstrakt hip-hop duo CONSISTING OF MYSELF Towondo’Beyababa’Clayborn”
AND DEMETRISA L. ANDERSON
we will kill it on may 1st the best in ABSTRAKT ENT.
It is not an understatement. We like too show what it feels like in our own words, on how it feels after recovering from taking a piss under scrutiny. So, that is A SYNOPSIS ON how we roll.
Come see us (O-D) THE BEST IN ABSTRAKT ENT..
Theoretical: David Joselit in Conversation with Jutta Koether
Jutta Koether and David Joselit will stage a dialogue about painting. How do paintings slip from subjects to objects, and back again, never staying secure in either position. Why and how have paintings become performative? In the era of digital networks is the outmoded practice of applying pigment on canvas, linen, or wood, our best hope for understanding digital space?
David Joselit
David Joselit worked as a curator at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston from 1983-1989 where he co-organized several exhibitions including “DISSENT: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston,” (1985) “Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture” (1986) and “The British Edge” (1987). After receiving his Ph.D. in Art History from Harvard in 1995, he began teaching in the Department of Art History and Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies at University of California, Irvine, where he taught until 2003. He is currently Carnegie Professor of the History of Art at Yale where he served as Department Chair from 2006-2009. Joselit is author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (MIT Press, 1998), American Art Since 1945 (Thames and Hudson, World of Art Series, 2003), and Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT Press, 2007). He is and editor of the journal OCTOBER and writes regularly on contemporary art and culture.
Jutta Koether
Jutta Koether is one of the central figures in contemporary painting. Yet she is more than just a painter. She is also a performance artist, musician, writer and theoretician. . Her role as an artist was long reduced to being regarded as a feminist response to a specific scene of the late 1980s in Cologne, Germany. With her translucent color fields, the gestural brush stroke, drawings of female bodies and the lyrical appropriation of poetry and art history, she frequently seems to assume positions in contrast to artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke and Albert Oehlen. As critic and editor of the music and pop culture magazine Spex and as performance artist and musician, however, Koether did not fit the typical image of the art scene of that time. Since the start of her artistic career Jutta Koether has sought to make expansion her program. At the same time, it has always been important to her not to take an unequivocal role as an artist, but always to work from several positions.
Since coming to New York in the 1990s, she moves in an expanded field of experiment and improvisation, literature and theory in the New York scene. Cooperation with musicians like Tom Verlaine (Television) or Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth) often provides her with more important inspiration than the work of other visual artists. It is specifically through these apparent detours and alternative forms of energy that she has created a kind of free space for herself, which enables a reevaluation of the medium of painting and its potential that is so urgently needed in today’s situation.
Theoretical: Liam Gillick in conversation with Seth Kim-Cohen
Theoretical is a new critical discourse series at ISSUE Project Room curated in collaboration with Brandon W. Joseph (Columbia University), David Grubbs (Brooklyn College), and Seth Kim-Cohen (Yale University). Through monthly talks, panels, and classes, this series seeks to actively engage artists, writers, and audiences in examining and discussing key issues in contemporary aesthetic theory, media, urban space and politics.
Kenneth Goldsmith sings Roland Barthes with live String Quartet
A live String Quartet (Mari Kimura, Dana Lyn, violins; Jessica Pavone, viola; Egil Rostad, cello) will perform Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and improvisations in the style of Anton Webern while Kenneth Goldsmith sings text by Roland Barthes.
Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of nine books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which is the basis for an opera, “Trans-Warhol,” premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, “sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith” premiered at the British Library in 2007. Kenneth Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He has been awarded the The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship at Princeton University for 2010. A book of critical essays, Uncreative Writing, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
Tony Conrad and Branden W Joseph: a reading, discussion and performance
ISSUE Project Room is pleased to present:
Tony Conrad and Brandon W Joseph in a reading and discussion followed by a performance by Tony Conrad.
Branden W. Joseph is Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He is the author of Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (MIT Press 2003), Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works (ed. Christopher Eamon; Northwestern University Press/Steidl, 2005) and, most recently, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone Books, 2008). His writings have also appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Art Journal, Critical Inquiry, October, Texte zur Kunst, Parkett, and Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, as well as in such catalogues as CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (2002), X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s (2003), andRobert Rauschenberg: Combines (2005). He is also a founding editor of Grey Room, a journal of architecture, art, media, and politics, published quarterly by MIT Press since 2000.
On January 25, ISSUE Project Room will inaugurate its new space at 110 Livingston with Gaudeamus Muziekweek, a four-day festival celebrating groundbreaking and challenging new music by emerging composers from around the world. Working in partnership ...
ISSUE is starting off the New Year with a change of scenery. That's right, Issue Project Room is moving out of our space at the Old American Can Factory and into 110 Livingston in Downtown Brooklyn. We've had a great run at the Can Factory,...