September 13, 2004
1
opening night at uica
thanks to everyone for making it a smash
they've come back
Well, here we all are again, out there somewhere. I'd have some engaging wrap-up comment to make, but I'm lucky to be conscious. In lieu of saying anything, here's some cool images from this site, automatically-generated type designs:
It was a great week. Thanks, all.
September 04, 2004
September 01, 2004
No Turning Back Now
i've pretty much got my piece figured out now. it's all about sound, but not very friendly sound I'm afraid. I've committed to this one through some last minute purchases - no going back now.
I've been thinking a lot (thus my moving around between projects) about how to get as directly as possible to my thoughts on our subject matter. Here's where I'm at. I thought I should prepare y'all for discussions next week, but also for a piece that is going to be fairly unfriendly - think about the horror stuff way back on this blog.
I keep coming back to thinking of our show as being about what I've been calling "spaces of potentiality." These holes of presence. (uh-oh, that almost sounds like a cheesy pop ballad...who was that band, "extreme"?)
It seems like we've been looking for things we can make or see that facilitate this experience, this charging of an absence with a potential for presence.
This is something I've been very interested in for a while, as in my theotherend.net project, or the stuff I've been working on with dead air, or my photos of NYC from high points in the midwest.
But I've been troubled by the way in which I keep approaching the creation of "spaces of potentiality" as primarily structural. This has been a concern of mine for awhile. I remember just getting into Found magazine and Spoerri and the celebration of found things on their own, without making stuff from them, when 9/11 happened, and suddenly some NPR guy is going through Manhattan reading WTC memos live onair that he finds blowing around the street. I couldn't say "ah, one of my aesthetic desires is sated by this thing," because it was only there because a bunch of people were murdered.
Likewise with so many of my interests. When you're as structurally stimulated as I am, I think you end up finding yourself in a lot of moral quandaries. Examined structurally, my favorite dada or fluxus artworks are in no way different from a suicide bomb in a Tel-Aviv pizza parlor. This doesn't help anything or anyone.
Likewise, in our conversations here about "absent presence" or spaces of potentiality, I kept finding myself troubled by our lack of addressing content or context, as if all such phenomena were equal.
The other thing that kept nagging at me in our conversations was that the experience of living in a space of potentiality, in which everything ordinary had an aura of potential activation and was thus transformed, sounds a lot like living in a state of potential terrorist attack, (real, imagined, or invented), or even in a state of perpetual news watching.
I then began looking through my various project ideas with these two questions:
1 - How can I make a work about spaces of potentiality without ignoring my role as the artist in an art space, and thus in some kind of power over the viewer? (gnosticism looms everywhere in our subject matter for me)
2 - How can I make an artwork that acknowledges the potentially threatening uses of the structure of "absent presence"?
SO I've got this piece now. I think it will be called BREAKING.
It's very simple. In the middle of the big room, hanging from the ceiling, is an array of loudspeakers, like the ones used for alarms, rectangular horn speakers.
Hooked up to these speakers is a single sound source (a DVD actually, cause I can program it). It works like this:
When you start the piece, you hear a second of very loud, very irritating, high-pitched noise. Then, you will here the same sound again in no less than an hour. Then the cycle repeats until we turn it off. The interval between two sounds is never more than an hour, and changes with each alarm.
Every quiet moment will be one moment closer to hearing it again, but you won't know how close you are. Yikes. I'm afraid it's almost like torture that way, though it's possible some people will never hear it. In the context of our show, I think it helps me really get to some things I've been trying to figure out.
I may monkey around with the exact sound when I get there, but I think I've pretty much got it figured out.
I'm still really interested in the use of sound for haunting and such, but I can't find a way of going that more pleasant route and still address the content I feel I need to.
So that's what I'm doing. Hope it doesn't interfere with anyone else's work - I think the relationship between all the works will be pretty rich. As we've been saying for awhile, we've got a collection of approaches you won't often see under the same roof in the usual art worlds.
See you tuesday night or wednesday morning - sorry I have to miss the party!