"The secret itself is much more beautiful than its revelation." Written backward and presented through translucent paper, this text can be deciphered on the obverse of a large framed page of the suppressed novel Becoming Tarden in Jill Magid's solo exhibition at the Yvon Lambert Gallery. On another wall hang seven detailed photographs of banal notebooks with brightly colored tabs and scrawled titles, a white pedestal with a glass case contains a stack of prints neatly wrapped in paper, and a monitor plays a fuzzy live feed from a security camera at the Tate Modern. "Objects to Be Handed Over or Destroyed" documents a project that explores the connections between transparency, secrecy, and, ultimately, power.
Image: Installation shots of Jill Magid's "Objects to be Handed Over or Destroyed" at Yvon Lambert New YorkIn 2005, the Dutch secret service (AIVD) invited Magid to create a work of art for their headquarters with the dual objective of improving the agency's public image as well as fulfilling a Dutch law requiring new buildings to commission art. In response to their offer, Magid posed as an undercover agent and interviewed members of the AIVD with the intention of giving a personal face to the organization without revealing individual identities. The commission resulted in the exhibition "Article 12" in 2008, but the agency refused to allow the public display of seven prints from the letterpress series "18 Spies", and heavily redacted a manuscript for a novel based on her experience.
Image: Jill Magid, Notebook I Personal Data, 2008Consistent with her earlier work, Magid's project attempts to personalize, and even lend intimacy to, an institutional system. She begins by entering an organization that is traditionally impenetrable and seemingly omnipotent. Her success in revealing its human side renders the agency unexpectedly vulnerable and asserts the unanticipated power of the artist. In response, the AIVD imposes further restrictions on Magid, creating both a literal and a psychological impasse. She ultimately appeases the secret service by displaying the novel under glass at the Tate Modern and then via closed circuit camera at Yvon Lambert-- a solution that plays with the paradoxical interaction of opacity and visibility, mirroring the constant flip-flop of power between artist and organization. Like French conceptualist Sophie Calle, Magid crosses boundaries to delve into the lives of strangers, but in the end, the project avoids inner reflection, instead commenting on entrenched government systems. Each work in the exhibition exists in an uncertain state of partial transparency, a testimony to the uneasy conflict between pervasive Big Brother organizations and the potential power of the individual.
Jeanne Gerrity is a Brooklyn-based curator and writer. She currently holds the position of Programs Manager at Smack Mellon.
"The secret itself is much more beautiful than its revelation." Written backward and presented through translucent paper, this text can be deciphered on the obverse of a large framed page of the suppressed novel Becoming Tarden in Jill Magid's solo exhibition at the Yvon Lambert Gallery. On another wall hang seven detailed photographs of banal notebooks with brightly colored tabs and scrawled titles, a white pedestal with a glass case contains a stack of prints neatly wrapped in paper, and a monitor plays a fuzzy live feed from a security camera at the Tate Modern. "Objects to Be Handed Over or Destroyed" documents a project that explores the connections between transparency, secrecy, and, ultimately, power.
Image: Installation shots of Jill Magid's "Objects to be Handed Over or Destroyed" at Yvon Lambert New YorkIn 2005, the Dutch secret service (AIVD) invited Magid to create a work of art for their headquarters with the dual objective of improving the agency's public image as well as fulfilling a Dutch law requiring new buildings to commission art. In response to their offer, Magid posed as an undercover agent and interviewed members of the AIVD with the intention of giving a personal face to the organization without revealing individual identities. The commission resulted in the exhibition "Article 12" in 2008, but the agency refused to allow the public display of seven prints from the letterpress series "18 Spies", and heavily redacted a manuscript for a novel based on her experience.
Image: Jill Magid, Notebook I Personal Data, 2008Consistent with her earlier work, Magid's project attempts to personalize, and even lend intimacy to, an institutional system. She begins by entering an organization that is traditionally impenetrable and seemingly omnipotent. Her success in revealing its human side renders the agency unexpectedly vulnerable and asserts the unanticipated power of the artist. In response, the AIVD imposes further restrictions on Magid, creating both a literal and a psychological impasse. She ultimately appeases the secret service by displaying the novel under glass at the Tate Modern and then via closed circuit camera at Yvon Lambert-- a solution that plays with the paradoxical interaction of opacity and visibility, mirroring the constant flip-flop of power between artist and organization. Like French conceptualist Sophie Calle, Magid crosses boundaries to delve into the lives of strangers, but in the end, the project avoids inner reflection, instead commenting on entrenched government systems. Each work in the exhibition exists in an uncertain state of partial transparency, a testimony to the uneasy conflict between pervasive Big Brother organizations and the potential power of the individual.
Jeanne Gerrity is a Brooklyn-based curator and writer. She currently holds the position of Programs Manager at Smack Mellon.
There seems to be an unshakable division of labor between two of our major senses. 'Sight and Sound' and 'Audio and Visual,' are often paired as binary opposites, understood both as semantically and biologically distinct yet totally interdependent. “See This Sound,” an exhibition currently on view at the Lentos Museum in Linz, Austria, delves deeply into this co-dependent relationship. Far from another "art and music" show, the exhibition looks at numerous cultural, metaphysical, biological and neurological explorations of these senses – and how artists have mined them for decades. By highlighting their distinct and convergent streams of influence, “See This Sound” uses sight and sound as a metaphor for similar divisions and dependencies between "visual," "sound" and "media" art.
Well over a hundred works fill the top floor of the Lentos. Typically, and for good reason, this show begins where most discussions around art and music begin -- in the 1920s with the work of filmmakers like Oskar Fischinger, Viking Eggling, Mary Ellen Bute, Hans Richter, Norman McLaren and Len Lye. Often grouped together under poetic monikers like "visual music," or "music for the eye," the themes explored by these artists, such as language, syntax, and sensory experimentation, are seen continuously throughout visual culture. Hans Richter's Rhythmus 21 (1921/24) is a classic early example of the form, and Norman McLaren's 1951 Pen Point Discussion, in which he illustrates his process of drawing directly on a film’s soundtrack, serves as a primer for the genre. Other works such as Len Lye's Colour Box (1933) and Mary Ellen Bute's Rhythm in Light (1934), as well as numerous drawings, paintings and film stills, challenge distinctions between vision and sound, and music and visual art -- providing fertile historical ground for the rest of the show.
Video: Norman McLaren, Pen Point Discussion, 1951A considerable amount of real estate in the show is dedicated to what the curators have called “New Modes of Perception.” This section frames a diverse range of works within the metaphysical, psychedelic and immersive sensory experiments of the 1960s and 70s.
LaMonte Young and Mariane Zazeela's complex sound and light installation Dream House is here with its "continuous periodic composite sound waveforms," but almost more absorbing is the simple Dreamachine (1960) by Brion Gysin. A cylinder with slits cut into it, a lighbulb and a turntable, Dreamachine is thought to be the first object designed to be seen with your eyes closed. Actually patented as a "method and device for producing artistic sensations" the machine produces an array of colors and shapes on the inside of your eyelids. Directly adjacent to Dreamachine is Ira Cohen's Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda (1968). Unfortunately installed on a small monitor with headphones (although with a beanbag chair) this work still manages to command attention. A fantastical exploration of sound, image, dreams, trance, music, sexuality and drugs, Thunderbolt Pagoda seems both dated and remarkably contemporary.
Image: Brion Gysin, Dreamachine, 1960“New Modes of Perception” also takes on the idea of "embodiment." A moving example is David Rokeby's Very Nervous System . Very Nervous System, both an artwork and a software system (written by Rokeby), translates the user’s actions into sound and music. Walk into an empty room, your body's movement animates the space with a variety of sounds both jarring and soothing. Although this type of motion tracking technology is far more ubiquitous now than it was in 1984 (when the piece was first made), it still manages to impress -- illuminating a deep connection between space, sound and our own bodies.
The transmission of sound through the body is also the subject of Laurie Anderson's Handphone Table (1978). At first glance it is just a simple table, but sit down with your head in your hands and you can hear music transmitted from the table to your ears, through your arm bones. While Rokeby's piece forces action in order to embody sound, Anderson's conversely rewards stillness and contemplation. Intensely personal, Handphone Table is one of the most moving and elegant works in the show.
Another major thematic stream of “See This Sound” is the relationship between sound and vision from a pop culture perspective. Although this is a curatorial perspective that has been privileged at length, within the carefully crafted historical context of “See This Sound” our understanding of the cultural connections between art and music is significantly enhanced.
While the show mines well-trodden territory of popular narrative cinema (through works like Louise Lawler, Douglas Gordon and others), where it is most effective is in the area of popular music; particularly the highly cultivated images and identities on which pop music depends. While I might not call Throbbing Gristle "pop" they were certainly masters of their own image, and a series of posters, album covers, photographs, films by Derek Jarman and photos of Andrew Gowans drive this home. Likewise, Peter Saville's post-punk images for Factory Records in the 1980s defined a new era of image production and identity politics for the music industry.
Identity politics plays out more pointedly in Adrian Piper's Funk Lessons . The video, which documents a series of performances from 1982 to 1984, is also notable for being one of a few works in the show to highlights the roll of dance in the relationship between image and sound. The videos show Piper and her black assistants teaching white people to dance to funk music. By playing on stereotypes of race and ability, she educates her audience about the role of funk in African American culture, its history and its African roots. What Piper called "listening by dancing" Funk Lessons is a welcome interjection of straight up dance music, and also provides a pointed political perspective that is absent from most of the show.
In Mathias Poledna's Version dance is again the subject as a group of good-looking people move through the static frame. We see heads, legs, torsos and arms moving rhythmically to music that we cannot hear. But despite the absence of sound, their bodies transmit a rhythm that is unmistakable -- so clear in fact that this was the only room in which I saw audience members dancing or moving along with any "beat."In this sense, it was a true embodiment of the "visual music" with which the exhibition began.
Image: Mathias Poledna, Version, 2004 (still)The few pieces covered here only scratch the surface of the works on view. John Baldessari, John Cage, Tony Conrad, Manon De Boer, Jeremy Deller, Valie Export, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, and countless others are included. Luckily, "See This Sound" devoted much time and effort into creating a website that provides a remarkable amount of contextual information, including original essays, photographs and links to works that were not included in the show but are relevant to the conversation. Currently available only in German, an English version of the site will be launched in December.
Currently a freelance curator and researcher, and also a writer for Rhizome, Caitlin Jones was formerly the Director of Programming at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York, NY. Prior to this, Jones held a combined curatorial and conservation position at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. At the Guggenheim, she co-curated the groundbreaking exhibition "Seeing Double: Emulation in Theory and Practice" and coordinated the Deutsche Guggenheim exhibition, "Nam June Paik: Global Groove 2004." As a key member of the Variable Media Network, Caitlin has also been responsible for developing important tools and policy for the preservation of electronic and ephemeral artworks. In addition to her work for Rhizome, her writings have appeared in a wide range of exhibition catalogs, periodicals and other international publications.
There seems to be an unshakable division of labor between two of our major senses. 'Sight and Sound' and 'Audio and Visual,' are often paired as binary opposites, understood both as semantically and biologically distinct yet totally interdependent. “See This Sound,” an exhibition currently on view at the Lentos Museum in Linz, Austria, delves deeply into this co-dependent relationship. Far from another "art and music" show, the exhibition looks at numerous cultural, metaphysical, biological and neurological explorations of these senses – and how artists have mined them for decades. By highlighting their distinct and convergent streams of influence, “See This Sound” uses sight and sound as a metaphor for similar divisions and dependencies between "visual," "sound" and "media" art.
Well over a hundred works fill the top floor of the Lentos. Typically, and for good reason, this show begins where most discussions around art and music begin -- in the 1920s with the work of filmmakers like Oskar Fischinger, Viking Eggling, Mary Ellen Bute, Hans Richter, Norman McLaren and Len Lye. Often grouped together under poetic monikers like "visual music," or "music for the eye," the themes explored by these artists, such as language, syntax, and sensory experimentation, are seen continuously throughout visual culture. Hans Richter's Rhythmus 21 (1921/24) is a classic early example of the form, and Norman McLaren's 1951 Pen Point Discussion, in which he illustrates his process of drawing directly on a film’s soundtrack, serves as a primer for the genre. Other works such as Len Lye's Colour Box (1933) and Mary Ellen Bute's Rhythm in Light (1934), as well as numerous drawings, paintings and film stills, challenge distinctions between vision and sound, and music and visual art -- providing fertile historical ground for the rest of the show.
Video: Norman McLaren, Pen Point Discussion, 1951A considerable amount of real estate in the show is dedicated to what the curators have called “New Modes of Perception.” This section frames a diverse range of works within the metaphysical, psychedelic and immersive sensory experiments of the 1960s and 70s.
LaMonte Young and Mariane Zazeela's complex sound and light installation Dream House is here with its "continuous periodic composite sound waveforms," but almost more absorbing is the simple Dreamachine (1960) by Brion Gysin. A cylinder with slits cut into it, a lighbulb and a turntable, Dreamachine is thought to be the first object designed to be seen with your eyes closed. Actually patented as a "method and device for producing artistic sensations" the machine produces an array of colors and shapes on the inside of your eyelids. Directly adjacent to Dreamachine is Ira Cohen's Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda (1968). Unfortunately installed on a small monitor with headphones (although with a beanbag chair) this work still manages to command attention. A fantastical exploration of sound, image, dreams, trance, music, sexuality and drugs, Thunderbolt Pagoda seems both dated and remarkably contemporary.
Image: Brion Gysin, Dreamachine, 1960“New Modes of Perception” also takes on the idea of "embodiment." A moving example is David Rokeby's Very Nervous System . Very Nervous System, both an artwork and a software system (written by Rokeby), translates the user’s actions into sound and music. Walk into an empty room, your body's movement animates the space with a variety of sounds both jarring and soothing. Although this type of motion tracking technology is far more ubiquitous now than it was in 1984 (when the piece was first made), it still manages to impress -- illuminating a deep connection between space, sound and our own bodies.
The transmission of sound through the body is also the subject of Laurie Anderson's Handphone Table (1978). At first glance it is just a simple table, but sit down with your head in your hands and you can hear music transmitted from the table to your ears, through your arm bones. While Rokeby's piece forces action in order to embody sound, Anderson's conversely rewards stillness and contemplation. Intensely personal, Handphone Table is one of the most moving and elegant works in the show.
Another major thematic stream of “See This Sound” is the relationship between sound and vision from a pop culture perspective. Although this is a curatorial perspective that has been privileged at length, within the carefully crafted historical context of “See This Sound” our understanding of the cultural connections between art and music is significantly enhanced.
While the show mines well-trodden territory of popular narrative cinema (through works like Louise Lawler, Douglas Gordon and others), where it is most effective is in the area of popular music; particularly the highly cultivated images and identities on which pop music depends. While I might not call Throbbing Gristle "pop" they were certainly masters of their own image, and a series of posters, album covers, photographs, films by Derek Jarman and photos of Andrew Gowans drive this home. Likewise, Peter Saville's post-punk images for Factory Records in the 1980s defined a new era of image production and identity politics for the music industry.
Identity politics plays out more pointedly in Adrian Piper's Funk Lessons . The video, which documents a series of performances from 1982 to 1984, is also notable for being one of a few works in the show to highlights the roll of dance in the relationship between image and sound. The videos show Piper and her black assistants teaching white people to dance to funk music. By playing on stereotypes of race and ability, she educates her audience about the role of funk in African American culture, its history and its African roots. What Piper called "listening by dancing" Funk Lessons is a welcome interjection of straight up dance music, and also provides a pointed political perspective that is absent from most of the show.
In Mathias Poledna's Version dance is again the subject as a group of good-looking people move through the static frame. We see heads, legs, torsos and arms moving rhythmically to music that we cannot hear. But despite the absence of sound, their bodies transmit a rhythm that is unmistakable -- so clear in fact that this was the only room in which I saw audience members dancing or moving along with any "beat."In this sense, it was a true embodiment of the "visual music" with which the exhibition began.
Image: Mathias Poledna, Version, 2004 (still)The few pieces covered here only scratch the surface of the works on view. John Baldessari, John Cage, Tony Conrad, Manon De Boer, Jeremy Deller, Valie Export, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, and countless others are included. Luckily, "See This Sound" devoted much time and effort into creating a website that provides a remarkable amount of contextual information, including original essays, photographs and links to works that were not included in the show but are relevant to the conversation. Currently available only in German, an English version of the site will be launched in December.
Currently a freelance curator and researcher, and also a writer for Rhizome, Caitlin Jones was formerly the Director of Programming at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York, NY. Prior to this, Jones held a combined curatorial and conservation position at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. At the Guggenheim, she co-curated the groundbreaking exhibition "Seeing Double: Emulation in Theory and Practice" and coordinated the Deutsche Guggenheim exhibition, "Nam June Paik: Global Groove 2004." As a key member of the Variable Media Network, Caitlin has also been responsible for developing important tools and policy for the preservation of electronic and ephemeral artworks. In addition to her work for Rhizome, her writings have appeared in a wide range of exhibition catalogs, periodicals and other international publications.
The New York art and music community mourns the loss of one of its fiercest advocates for experimental culture, Suzanne Fiol, founder and director of the ISSUE Project Room, a venue for music, performance, film, and literature currently located at the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus, Brooklyn. She passed away last Monday at age 49 after a year-long battle with lung cancer.
Born and raised in New York, Suzanne studied photography at Antioch College in Ohio and the Art Institute of Chicago, before returning home in 1983 to earn her MFA from Pratt Institute, cultivating a style that superimposed layers of paint over her original photos in an attempt to capture the “ecstatic moment” of her subject material. Her career yoked creative pursuits with the business end of the art world. She worked as a gallerist in SoHo while immersing herself in downtown’s No-Wave-tinged culture, where she met her husband, Joaquin Fiol at the Mudd Club. The birth of their daughter, Sarah in 1991, prompted a sabbatical, but after the dissolution of her marriage at the dawn of the 21st century, Suzanne was back on the scene, working with artists and, once again, engaging passionately with music, becoming active in the community that orbited around avant-jazz club Tonic on the Lower East Side.
In 2003, her involvement with the Issue Management photo agency, whose office space was on East 6th street, yielded the earliest version of ISSUE Project Room, which quickly took off as an important new venue for the presentation of experimental music and multi-disciplinary performance. When the photo agency folded and the landlord raised the rent, Suzanne fully committed herself to finding ISSUE Project Room a more permanent residence in the borough she called home, Brooklyn, relocating to a disused oil silo overlooking the Gowanus canal. The organization began to garner a unique reputation, implementing a signature 16-channel speaker system designed, built and donated by composer Stephan Moore, which reflected the organization’s commitment to nascent forms.
But it was Suzanne’s direct, outsized personality, filled with matronly warmth and elegance that lured artists of both the emerging and established varieties to the industrial no-man’s land of Gowanus. And her generosity was overly evident, from the spreads of wine, cheese, and fruit left for performers and interns to the attitude she held towards what kind of work was expected (“It's called ‘Project Room’ for a reason,” she said to Interview magazine. “It's important to have a space where you can try something new and, if you don't succeed, you don't succeed. I have issues with artists who are afraid of failing”). This nurturing quality once prompted ISSUE’s managing director Zach Layton to publicly introduce Suzanne as “The Mother of Us All,” which made her visibly annoyed. Still, she would jokingly refer to herself as “Mama Issue” and doled out a Jewish matriarch’s helping of affection, protection, and criticism towards those she worked with most intimately.
When landlord problems arose at the silo, ISSUE moved to its current home at the Can Factory, but efforts towards a more sustainable model of operation were secured when the organization won a competition against over 100 cultural organizations to house its operations in a former Elks Club located in downtown Brooklyn, for a 20-year rent-free lease. Even as Suzanne fought the good fight against a life-draining illness, she worked tirelessly to raise the money needed to move ISSUE into its new digs. And then earlier this year came the news that Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz would award ISSUE Project Room $1.1 million to offset moving and construction costs and that Suzanne’s dream for (in her words) a “Carnegie Hall of the avant-garde” would, in fact, become a reality.
Suzanne’s ultimate curation was a fundraiser scheduled for last Friday, an interdisciplinary evening to start off with a poetry reading, followed by bands, live cinema, and DJs. So it was with a heavy sadness when, upon news of Suzanne’s death, the event was reimagined as an ad hoc memorial. Hundreds gathered at the Can Factory, outside which a pink neon sign bearing her signature, designed by Nathan Elbogen and Lite Brite Neon Studio, hung above the front door. Inside, videographer Joly MacFie distributed one-inch punk pins donning Suzanne’s most recent portrait, at once warrior-like and glamorous, amongst the crowd. Moments of consolation yielded to the performance at hand. Backed by the frantic drumming of Ryan Sawyer, trapeze artist Suzanne Rogalsky somersaulted through the air, twisting and turning her body with an aggression not normally associated with the form. It was hard to take one’s eyes off the spectacle, in spite of the tragic situation that framed it. The Mother of Us All may not have been there to see it, but boy was her vision thriving.