The Tank in Rangely, Colorado, is considered one of the sonic marvels of the world within a certain circle of composers and sound artists. (Photo courtesy Friends of the Tank)

Is there a connection between noise and money?  Which sounds are healing to us as humans, and which are damaging? And what does an abandoned water tank in Colorado have in common with the Taj Mahal or a Gothic cathedral?

These are questions that sound artist and composer Bruce Odland has been pondering for decades. While Odland began his career in the traditional music world—one that emphasized Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms—Odland discovered that his academic training didn’t correspond with his own experiences in the American landscape. While traveling in the mountains out West, he began to invent a new musical language—one based on the random sounds of nature instead of the repeated sounds and rhythms found in both Western music and in man-made machines.

Composer Bruce Odland recording inside the abandoned water tank in Rangely, Colorado (Photo courtesy Friends of the Tank)

Bruce Odland making recordings for Hearing View, a project involving the oldest mental hospital in Switzerland. The project is a collaboration with Sam Auinger. (Photo courtesy Bruce Odland)

For Blue Moon, O + A (Sam Auinger and Bruce Odland) created an installation that transformed the environment of the World Financial Center Plaza in New York City into an ambient soundscape activated by the rising tides of the river, docking commuter ferries, helicopter and jet traffic, car horns, waves, bird song, and breezes off the Hudson. (Photo courtesy Bruce Odland)

Odland is known for his large-scale, public space sound installations which transform city noise into harmony, realtime. In 2004 he and collaborator Sam Auinger altered the harmonic mix of the World Financial Center Plaza in New York City, using the moon, tides, harmonic tuning tubes, and cement loudspeakers. Together they have changed the sonic character of many public spaces around the world. His most recent project with Auinger involves transforming Switzerland’s oldest mental hospital into a space filled with healing sounds. Odland has also worked with artists like Laurie Anderson, Dan Graham, Andre Gregory, Wally Shawn, Peter Sellars, and the Wooster Group.

Bruce recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to save an abandoned water tank in Colorado. The Tank is considered one of the sonic marvels of the world within a certain circle of composers and sound artists. The group, called Friends of the Tank, has started a nonprofit to preserve the unique structure as a space for community gatherings, music events, and recording sessions. The group needs to raise $42,000 in order to preserve the space, and they won’t receive any donations if they don’t meet their goal by March 31st.

A glimpse inside The Tank (Photo courtesy Friends of the Tank)

The Tank in Rangely, Colorado is in danger of being lost. (Photo courtesy of Friends of the Tank)

Light inside The Tank (Photo courtesy Friends of the Tank)

A few weeks ago Bruce and I had an in-depth conversation about the Tank, sonic space, and the political and personal implications of the sounds we encounter each day.

As Bruce explained during our interview, “We won’t understand ourselves as a culture until we also understand the sounds we make.”

Bruce opened my eyes to the connection between noise, money, and energy. ”Noise is the sound of all of the power that we’re using at this moment,” he said. Our surroundings are “resonating with the sound of the wastestream of our economy and we have to walk through it and wade through it, and it affects what we can think that day, it affects our potential connection to the ecology, to the environment, to ourselves as people walking about with connections to other things on the planet.” In other words, almost anything that makes money is allowed to make noise. An “ultra-quiet” Cadillac is quiet for the owner, not for the person walking down the sidewalk when the car passes.

Bruce Odland making recordings in Switzerland (Photo Courtesy Bruce Odland)

Jeremiah, Bruce, Mark, and Max recording at The Tank (Photo courtesy Friends of the Tank)

Bruce Odland at The Tank in Rangely, Colorado (Photo courtesy Friends of the Tank)

We live in a visual cultural, and we have lost our “hearing perspective,” a term coined by Odland and his collaborator Sam Auinger. While an architect like Yoshio Taniguchi, can design a breathtaking new space at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the design, like so many contemporary structures, doesn’t take sound into consideration. The end result: a beautiful space that is an acoustical nightmare. But as Odland explains, we don’t teach architects the nuances of sound. Our disciplines are too insular and not always as collaborative as they could be.

According to Odland, we have repressed our sonic skills as a survival mechanism. There are no repeating tones in nature, unlike the repetitive hum of a jet or car engine, or the whine of a refrigerator. Such sounds “freeze us in time and space,” Bruce says.

Odland’s work attempts to resurrect our buried aural senses. During my interview, you’ll hear a number of Bruce’s compositions, including a water and snow harp (created and recorded outdoors), recordings made at The Tank in Colorado, and elaborate artworks that transform noisy urban landscapes into deeper experiences.

You can listen to the interview below or choose download to listen on your i-Pod or phone or in i-Tunes.

(If you’re reading this article in an email and can’t see the interview below, click here to listen on the Gwarlingo website.)
 

To learn more about the sounds of Bruce Odland, visit his website. You can contribute to the Friends of the Tank Kickstarter campaign and help them reach their $42,000 goal by March 31st by visiting the Save the Tank Kickstarter page. You can explore music from The Tank here. Bruce’s collaborations with Sam Auinger can be found at the O+A website.

An Update on the Gwarlingo Membership Drive

Thanks to all of the readers who have contributed to the Gwarlingo Membership Drive. Instead of selling out to advertisers, I’m “selling out” to my readers instead! 100+ Gwarlingo readers have contributed so far and $10,800 of the $15,000 goal has been raised. If you haven’t donated yet, you can check out my video and all of the member rewards, including some limited-edition artwork, here on the Gwarlingo site.

Stay up on the latest poetry, books, and art news by having Gwarlingo delivered to your email inbox. It’s easy and free! You can also follow Gwarlingo on Twitter and Facebook.

Sam Green narrating his live documentary The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (Photo by Sam Allison)

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.”

–R. Buckminster Fuller

In 1927 designer, architect, and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller was contemplating suicide on the shore of Lake Michigan, when he had an epiphany:

“The thought then came that my impulse to commit suicide was a consequence of my being expressly overconcerned with ‘me’ and ‘my pains,’ and that doing so would mean that I would be making the supremely selfish mistake of possibly losing forever some evolutionary information link essential to the ultimately realization of the as-yet-to-be-known human function in Universe.”

According to legend, Fuller decided to “throw away” his “personal ego” instead of committing suicide, and use himself “as a scientific `guinea pig’… on behalf of all humanity.” He resolved to “make the world work for one hundred percent of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

At least that is the story as Fuller told it.

Although he grew up in an elite New England family, he flunked out of Harvard (twice), worked as a meatpacker, and served in the Navy before reinventing himself as a philosopher, engineer, writer, inventor, and lecturer. Never content to work in only one field, Fuller, or “Bucky” as his friends called him, embraced an interdisciplinary approach to global problems like poverty, shelter, transportation, education, energy, and ecological destruction. By the time of his death in 1983, Fuller held 28 patents, had authored 28 books, and received 47 honorary degrees.

F. Buckminster Fuller has influenced everyone from Pritzker Prize–winning architect Thom Mayne to Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and The WELL, one of the oldest virtual communities. (Photo by Roger Stroller)

Part TED Talk, part travelogue, and part Japanese benshi, Sam Green’s “live documentary,” The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, was like no other film screening I’ve been to. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

But neither Fuller’s biography, nor his legacy are simple.

“If you really look for the details of his life at the time, it’s easy to see that the suicide story was a creation,” Stanford historian Barry Katz told the New York Times in 2008.

“There was nothing even remotely in the archives suggesting feelings on the scale he later described” in 1927, he said…

Mr. Katz said he found instead signs of depression and anxiety stretching from the time…[Fuller's] first daughter, Alexandra, died in 1922, through his financial failures and, finally, the collapse of a torrid extramarital romance in 1931. Still, he said, the suicide story seemed to serve a purpose.

“That’s why I now call it a myth,” [said Katz,] “but it was an effective myth. It gave a trajectory to his career. The story was constructed after the fact to show how he suddenly developed these new ideas. I think he came to believe the story himself…”

In recurrent dark periods Fuller was not trying only to persuade others his ideas were important, but to persuade himself that he mattered….

Supporting that view is [the late] Evelyn Schwartz Nef. “Those days were really quite exciting because he was so convincing that he was trying to save the world,” she said in an interview…“The question I had is whether he was as convinced as we were. He was trying to reassure himself that he was something.”

Buckminster Fuller in his Black Mountain College studio (Photo courtesy of SFMoMA)

Sam Green and Yo La Tengo performing the “live documentary” The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at the ICA in Boston (Photo by Sam Allison. Click to Enlarge)

As James Sterngold writes in the New York Times, “by conventional measures…[Fuller] accomplished little. The efforts to mass-produce his houses, though written about widely, failed. His project to develop his efficient three-wheeled autos collapsed after an accident killed the driver of one. His soaring geodesic domes, built with a distinctive pattern of triangles, have been used — memorably for the United States pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal — but never for the large-scale projects he envisioned.”

Mention Fuller’s name to a group of artists and architects and you’re likely to be bombarded with passionate responses from both supporters and detractors.

Philip Johnson once called Fuller a “lousy architect,” and Fuller’s vision for Manhattan provoked this response from one architect I know: “Fuller envisioned covering mid-town Manhattan by an enormous climate-controlled bubble. How in the world is that an environmental improvement? It would have consumed enormous amounts of energy, contributing immensely to air pollution and global warming. And the prospect of enclosing city dwellers in a bubble, cut off from wind and rain and sun and the play of the elements, is something that I find horrifying…I’m very suspicious of big universal theories, like those of Fuller, when it comes to architecture.”

But Fuller’s impact can’t be discounted. He has influenced everyone from Pritzker Prize–winning architect Thom Mayne to Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and The WELL, one of the oldest virtual communities.

“Bucky…looked at the world big-scale, in terms of the number of people who didn’t have enough to eat,” architect Nicholas Grimshaw says. “He talked about the really big issues, like food and water and shelter. And that’s really just coming home to roost. Everything he wrote then he could have written right now.”

The Dymaxion House as presented by Buckminster Fuller in Fortune magazine in July of 1932 (Click to Enlarge)

Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao Dome Over Manhattan, 1960. Black-and-white photograph mounted on board, 13 3/4 x 18 3/8″ Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries (Image courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller)

As K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, explained to me via email, focusing too much attention on Fuller’s popularization of the geodesic dome or his idea to shroud the city of Manhattan in a bubble misses the point. According to Hayes, Fuller made other contributions that are still relevant today, if we can look past the outdated designs and cultural critique:

The current generation of artists and architects who rediscover Buckminster Fuller will not be inspired by his structural inventions or cultural critique but by his spatial modeling of a globalized system of pattern and contingency, organization and change, temporary stability and constant renewal. That is his legacy.

“Bucky…looked at the world big-scale, in terms of the number of people who didn’t have enough to eat,” architect Nicholas Grimshaw says. “He talked about the really big issues, like food and water and shelter. And that’s really just coming home to roost. Everything he wrote then he could have written right now.”

“Fuller was the original systems thinker, with regards to the ecology of a building and its relationship to the environment,” explains artist, designer, and engineer Chuck Hoberman:

When he asked, ‘How much does your building weigh?’ it immediately put it into the realm of material usage and embodied energy, all of which are now very hot topics of discussion—not driven by stylistic concern, but simply by the need to make buildings more sustainable. His work framed a lot of those issues very early on…

I think he’s been highly influential as an iconoclastic spirit, who never accepted that the boundaries between disciplines were anything other than something to be climbed over or circumvented in some way. To me that’s not so much a heroic stance as much as a very practical way to proceed in the world today.

Whether R. Buckminster Fuller was visionary or naive in his beliefs is one of the subjects that interests Sam Green, a genre-bending artist in his own right. (Photo by Sam Allison)

Fuller’s sketch of a Three-Frequency Geodesic Sphere. Felt-tip pen and graphite on paper, 8 1/2 x 10 1/4 in. Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries (Photograph by Ben Blackwell courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller)

“At many other points in history…people had high hopes and a great imagintion for the future. You remember: we’d all be living in space, or flying around using jetpacks, or robots would be doing all the work for us. Today, it seems to me that most people don’t look at the future with fancy or hope or a great imagination.” (Photo by Sam Allison)

We live in a dystopian age—one more interested in zombies from The Walking Dead and Cormac McCarthy’s grim, apocalyptic vision than in slick, futuristic fantasies about jet-packs and cars that drive themselves. “There are too many of us who wonder whether civilization is going to make it or not,” former Vice-President Al Gore commented in a recent interview. “When people flirt with despair about the future, they are less likely to take the actions necessary to safeguard it.”

In marked contrast, R. Buckminster Fuller believed that cooperation, not competition, was the key to a better life, and he remained optimistic about humanity’s future. ”It no longer has to be you or me,” Fuller wrote in Critical Path. “Selfishness is unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable.”

Whether R. Buckminster Fuller was visionary or naive in his beliefs is one of the subjects that interests Sam Green, a genre-bending artist in his own right.

It’s fitting that a multi-media artist like Green should tackle an enigma like Fuller, while accompanied by the live music of a critically-acclaimed, three-piece band that also defies categorization. Part TED Talk, part travelogue, and part Japanese benshi, The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller was like no other film screening I’ve been to, with Green narrating a special cut of his film (created for his Boston audience), while the intoxicating sounds of Yo La Tengo pulsed through the glass-walled auditorium. As writer Rebecca Solnit described the experience, it’s like “a movie being born as you see it and hear it, as alive as music.”

“It’s really exciting to perform this way,” Yo La Tengo band member Georgia Hubley told me via email. “You feel like you are a piece of something bigger and doing your part. It is different than presenting yourself as a band with songs etc., which is more personal.” (Yo La Tengo photo by Ed Dittenhoefer courtesy Sam Green)

The ICA in Boston on the afternoon of the screening  (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

The ICA in Boston is at its best from inside the spacious auditorium, which juts out over the ocean, giving visitors breathtaking views of the harbor and Boston skyline, shown here in the distance. (Photo by Sam Allison)

“I was commissioned to make this film by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. They were doing an exhibit on Fuller and they asked me to create a multi-channel video installation and also this live documentary about Fuller.” (Photo courtesy At-Hand Guides: Robert Gray)

The Buckminster Fuller exhibit at SFMoMA (Photo courtesy At-Hand Guides: Robert Gray)

Green spent months watching archival footage of Fuller, collecting images, and combing through the Dymaxion Chronofile, Fuller’s extensive archive at Stanford University. Much to Fuller’s disappointment, he was pigeonholed as “the dome guy,” a gross oversimplification of his ideas and philosophy. This was Green’s primary impression of Fuller when he began his project, but this impression was quickly contradicted:

I was commissioned to make this film by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. They were doing an exhibit on Fuller and they asked me to create a multi-channel video installation and also this live documentary about Fuller. Before that, I had known a little about Fuller but…I  basically knew him as “the dome guy.”

Going to Stanford and looking through his papers was a phenomenal experience. I love going through archives. I’m an inveterate snoop and voyeur…Fuller’s archive is enormous. He called his papers the Dymaxion Chronofile and saved everything that came over his desk for more than 50 years. There are telegrams there, laundry receipts, letters, photos, objects — just everything.

One of the funniest moments in The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller is a clip from a video in the archive labeled “BF Meets the Hippies on Hippie Hill,” a lo-fi recording made at the height of the counterculture movement that shows Fuller discussing Spaceship Earth, science, geodesic living, and utopian aspirations with “hippies” in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. It’s moments like these when Green’s title reference to the pathetic, frustrated narrator of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” seems spot on.

I was enthralled by him first as a character. He was a fascinating mixture of intense ambition, drive, energy, idealism, but also he was profoundly insecure and thin-skinned. Full of contradictions and wrinkles. He worked incredibly hard — he lectured and wrote and traveled and worked on projects in a huge, 50-year project to see if a single person could change the world. He was utterly indefatigable.

One of the funniest moments is a clip from a video labeled “BF Meets the Hippies on Hippie Hill,” a lo-fi recording made at the height of the counterculture movement that shows Fuller discussing Spaceship Earth, science, geodesic living, and utopian aspirations with “hippies” in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. (Photo by  Sam Allison)

“I do think that Fuller is relevant today. Perhaps only through contrast, as a reminder of how much we’ve accepted about the world and ‘human nature.’” (Photo by Sam Allison)

My time spent going through his papers gave me a much greater appreciation of who he was, and also the slightly unsavory parts. He definitely took credit for work that his associates came up with. There’s even some question as to whether he invented the Geodesic dome — it actually appears that he didn’t. Someone built one in Germany in the early 1900s.

But to me, at the end of the day, his drive and ambition and enormous efforts were ultimately more about promoting his ideas and trying to better the world than his ego as an ends unto itself, or getting rich off of it.

I was surprised by how contemporary his ideas were/are. He was talking about doing more with less, and a design revolution, and distributing limited resources fairly way back in the 1930s and 40s and 50s (and all the way up to the time he died actually)…It didn’t seem like there were limited resources in the 1950s — that was a moment of seeming material abundance. But everything Fuller was talking about 40 years ago is completely in the air now. It’s striking. The world really has caught up with him.

This isn’t Green’s first project on the subject of Utopia. The filmmaker, who was nominated for an Academy Award for The Weather Underground, released his first “live documentary,” Utopia In Four Movements, in 2009.  (You can watch his film The Universal Language here). The film was a “poetic meditation on the fact that we are living in an anti-utopian time,” but it wasn’t working as a “normal” movie, so Green invented the live form.

“More and more we are watching films (and having other cultural experiences) on our laptops while checking email, or on an i-Pad while riding the subway. I have nothing against the internet, …but these ways of watching films are not the way I want my work experienced.” (Photo by Sam Allison)

“With these live events, the connection between artist and audience is a very visceral and tangible one,” says Green. “You can feel when the piece lags or when an audience doesn’t think a joke is funny.” (Photo by Sam Allison)

Sam and I recently discussed how a “live documentary” differs from traditional film:

In a world where more and more of our experiences of culture are mediated by screens and devices, the idea of going to a theater and sitting with strangers and turning your phone off, and having the lights go down — that’s all the magic of cinema! You are transported somewhere — you give yourself over completely to the experience. It’s utopian. And that context infuses what you see with meaning and significance.

That’s what I’m trying to do with these live pieces. The piece will never be the same as you saw it that night at ICA — the things we included, that particular soundtrack, the comments after by Peter Chermayeff. We traveled all that way to perform it for you, and you traveled all that way to be in the audience and together we made something that was infinitely more meaningful than had you seen the piece on Hulu (with ads) or streamed it through Netflix on your laptop.

Doing these live pieces is a huge challenge for me, and I really like that. I get nervous as hell. I’m not really a  performormer — or I don’t think of myself as one. I am a shy documentary filmmaker. So it’s been and continues to be a great learning and challenging experience.

Filmmaker Sam Green and Yo La Tengo band member Ira Kaplan discuss their work with high school students participating in an art program at the ICA. The Boston waterfront can be seen in the distance. (Photo by Sam Allison)

“It’s a fascinating moment for the film industry. The old models of making and distributing movies are definitely in tatters, and no one really knows what’s next.”  (Photo by Sam Allison)

Also, it’s made me infinitely more sensitive to venues. When you are making traditional films, you don’t really care much where they show. Yes, it would be great if the sound system is good. And a nice projector is a plus. But with these live events, everything becomes important: the size of the room, the time of the screening (9 p.m. is usually too late — people are tired), the rake of the seats, the depth of the space. All of these things are the subtle intangible factors that add up to a good show or a not so good show.

I am charmed and really fascinated these days with “liveness.” With these pieces, I am using all of the elements of a traditional film like a soundtrack, narration, and images on a screen, and putting them together as a live performance. Sometimes people will point that out during a Q and A and say something like “why don’t you just put all these pieces together on a DVD and send it to the venue. It would be way easier! That way you don’t have to travel all the way here.” It’s funny because the implication of the question…is that there’s no difference between hearing a pre-recorded voice-over coming through the theater speakers, or a pre-recorded soundtrack, and hearing someone say those exact same words or play those exact same notes live.

The difference gets to the heart of  ”liveness.”

Sam Green introduces Peter Chermayeff, one of the Cambridge Seven, who worked with Fuller on the  U.S. Pavilion for the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

“With these live events, everything becomes important: the size of the room, the time of the screening (9 p.m. is usually too late — people are tired), the rake of the seats, the depth of the space. All of these things are the subtle intangible factors that add up to a good show or a not so good show. (ICA photo by Sam Allison)

…I like this form for political, aesthetic, and economic reasons.

By “political,” I mean that more and more we are watching films (and having other cultural experiences) on our laptops while checking email, or on an i-Pad while riding the subway. I have nothing against the internet — I use it all the time — but these ways of watching films are not the way I want my work experienced. This goes back to that idea that it’s the same film whether you see it in a theater or if you watch it on Hulu while doing a Facebook status update, and that’s something I completely and wholeheartedly disagree with. I think that the context in which we view things is a huge part of shaping our experiences…

With these live events, the connection between artist and audience is a very visceral and tangible one. You can feel when the piece lags or when an audience doesn’t think a joke is funny. It’s very different than the experience of making a tradition film where occasionally you might sit in an audience watching your movie and get some feeling from them about their engagement.

Doing these live film events is probably much more like the experience of a comedian, where you need the audience in order to see what works and what doesn’t. Comedians do lots of live shows just to shape and hone an act. You can’t really write jokes and see how they work while sitting alone at home.

From left to right: Sam Green, band member James McNew, curator Dave Filipi, Georgia Hubley, and Ira Kaplan at the Wexner Center for the Arts (Photo courtesy Sam Green)

Green has been a fan of the critically-acclaimed band Yo La Tengo for years now, but it was seeing them perform a live soundtrack to the films of Jean Painlevé in San Francisco many years ago that lodged in his memory. “Painlevé was an amazing, and weird, French surrealist filmmaker. He made all these mind-blowing movies about seahorses and octopi and such. The San Francisco International Film Festival commissioned Yo La Tengo to create a score to his films, and it was at the great Castro theater in 2001. It was sublime. Just marvelous. One of the top five cinematic experiences I’ve ever had.”

The collaboration between Green and band members Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew is nothing less than transcendent. My favorite moment of the performance was the breathtaking interior footage of the 1967 Montreal dome, which was made immensely more compelling by Yo La Tengo’s soaring, climactic sounds.

Buckminster Fuller, U.S. Pavilion for the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, 1967. (Image courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller)

First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy explores the interior of the U.S. Pavilion for the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, 1967.

Sam Green and Yo La Tengo take questions from the audience at the ICA in Boston (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

“We put the piece together in a very organic way,” Green explained.

Sam “referenced score compositions we had written previously for other film projects as the jumping off point, and then we let our musical imagination take over,” Yo La Tengo bandmember Georgia Hubley explained to me via email.

We would try out simple melodies on a variety of instruments–eventually we reached something that we agreed worked with whatever the particular images and narrative called out for. The right balance of repeated themes and moods with variety in intensity and sound was key.

In the case of the Expo 67 section, which is kind of a climactic spot in the overall presentation, we opted to do something a little more open-ended and not so melody-driven. We felt accentuating the heightened emotion of exploratory ideas and possibilities musically would speak to similar characteristics of Fuller’s constructions.

It’s really exciting to perform this way. You feel like you are a piece of something bigger and doing your part. It is different than presenting yourself as a band with songs etc., which is more personal. There are often people in attendance who do not know the band, or are not there to see the band. Also, the setting is so much more formal, it changes how people are perceiving the performance. It’s really a film-going experience–even with the live music and narration. The screen is where most of the attention is focused, and it is truly rewarding to be a part of it.

Yo La Tengo’s new record, Fade, has just been released and is definitely worth a listen. There is no bigger fan of the band than Green himself: “My favorite Yo La Tengo record is And then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, …which has a lot of memories and emotional valence for me. The Sounds of the Sounds of Science is amazing too — that’s the soundtrack for the Painleve films that I mentioned.”

Over the years, Sam and I have had many talks about the evolution of independent film, particularly the lack of viable distribution models for filmmakers. Sam believes that the film industry could learn a thing or two from Yo La Tengo and the indie music scene.

My friend Sarah Jacobson, who came out of the rock world and was very smart about the film biz, once said to me that the film world is always a couple of years behind the music world in terms of business and disribution. And it’s true. Nobody in the music world makes money selling records or songs anymore, unless you’re Adele. These days, you have to tour, and that’s how bands do it — by performing live. And that’s the way the film world is headed, I think. It’s already starting in that direction.

It’s a fascinating moment for the film industry. The old models of making and distributing movies are definitely in tatters, and no one really knows what’s next. Or there are many emerging notions of what the future might hold, but no certain way forward. On one hand, this is a depressing and worrying moment because it’s now harder then ever to know how to make a living from any of it. At the same time, it is a time of exciting change and lots of possiblity. Even though I worry about the former, I am also excited to embrace the latter. So I’m into experimenting.

With a recent documentary I made about Esperanto, I distributed it through a website where people could download the film for $5. It was great because there are thousands and thousands of Esperantists all over the world, and this was by far the smartest and most economical way to reach them. We sold tons of downloads of the film, and I learned a lot about distributing something that way. Ultimately, there are only so many Esperanto speakers in the world, so the movie was not any kind of blockbuster, but there’s lots of potential there, and with the right kind of project, a filmmaker could do very well and also keep everything in his or her own hands.

One thing that’s been very surprising is that with these live pieces, there’s much more money than there ever would be for a regular film…The bottom has already dropped out on the film world, but there’s still a structure and set of expectations in the dance and performance world that artists need and should get paid a decent amount. Museums and art centers are still operating with that model, and that’s fantastic. More power to them. They treat artists with the respect and value that artists deserve. So I’m happy to have one foot in that world.

Filmmaker Sam Green discusses film with high school students participating in an art program at the ICA. (Photo by Sam Allison)

A photo within a photo: Sam Green shows footage of himself, Yo La Tengo, and The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller being performed in another venue. (Photo by Sam Allison)

The question of technology’s role in society is always with us, and it’s a topic that Green himself has given a lot of thought to:

At many other points in history – the 1920s, the 50s, even the 70s, people had high hopes and a great imagintion for the future. You remember: we’d all be living in space, or flying around using jetpacks, or robots would be doing all the work for us. Today, it seems to me that most people don’t look at the future with fancy or hope or a great imagination — today I would guess most people see the future as being just a worse version of today — more pollution, disease, war.

Why is this? It’s a very slippery subject — I don’t necessarily have a pat answer, although I do have some ideas.

One of the things I like about Fuller is that he lived at a time when people really did believe that we could radically remake the world. Fuller’s worldview was shaped in the teens and twenties, and industrialization really had done that. It was a brave new world. One of the things I find most inspring about Fuller is that his core message was that we have all the resources to ensure that every single person can live a materially comfortable life. It’s true. This is not a matter of scarcity or the fact that there’s not enough to go around. It’s that we don’t distribute the resources well.

In some sense that is naive — to believe that we might be able to create a world where no one starves and there are no more conflicts over resources. But in some ways, I think the fact that we think that’s naive says more about who we are, and how atrophied our ambitions have become, than it says anything about Fuller.

I do think that Fuller is relevant today. Perhaps only through contrast, as a reminder of how much we’ve accepted about the world and “human nature.”

Fuller at Black Mountain College in 1948 constructing a dome from Venetian blinds (Photo by Beaumont Newhall courtesy the Estate of Beaumont and Nancy Newhall and Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd., Santa Fe, New Mexico)

“In some sense that is naive — to believe that we might be able to create a world where no one starves and there are no more conflicts over resources. But in some ways, I think the fact that we think that’s naive says more about who we are, and how atrophied our ambitions have become, than it says anything about Fuller.” (Photo by Sam Allison)

Fuller did have some pie-in-the-sky ideas but he had a lot of pretty sound ideas as well. After all he was an engineer. He thought concretely. One of my favorite proposals of his was that everybody in the world be given a government stipend. A modest stipend, but enough to live off of. He thought then that if people wanted to work, great. But if they didn’t, they could spend their time fishing, or lying on the couch watching TV.

At first, this seems crazy! Where would the money come from?!? But Fuller explained that there would be a fair number of people who would tinker with things — would come up with solutions to problems, would create new products, would do all sorts of things with their free time and the opportunity to be creative. He thought that these creators and tinkerers and improvers would probably be able to come up with great new solutions to problems and would invent amazing things, and all of that would create enough economic energy to more than offset all those folks who were just kicking back and enjoying life. And there’s actually something to this! It sounds nutty at first, but it’s actually a pretty good idea.”

There will be four live screenings of The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at The Kitchen in New York City on April 9th and 10th. Don’t miss it! You can find out more about the films of Sam Green by visiting his website.

Yo La Tengo’s new album Fade is available from iTunes or Amazon (a bargain at only $5). The band will be touring the U.S. and Europe extensively over the next few months, with dates in Atlanta, Nashville, New York, Boston, D.C., Cleveland, Burlington, Berlin, Milan, London, Paris, and more. Check out their full tour schedule on the Yo La Tengo website.

An Update on the Gwarlingo Membership Drive

Thanks to all of the readers who have contributed to the Gwarlingo Membership Drive. Instead of selling out to advertisers, I’m “selling out” to my readers instead and offering you some amazing perks in return. 90+ Gwarlingo readers have contributed so far and just over $8500 of the $15,000 goal has been raised. If you haven’t donated yet, you can check out my video and all of the member rewards here on the Gwarlingo site.

Stay up on the latest books, music, and art news by having Gwarlingo delivered to your email inbox. It’s easy and free! You can also follow Gwarlingo on Twitter and Facebook.

This drawing may look like a maze or an artist’s sketch, but it’s actually a musical score created by Emmy-award-winning composer Steve Heitzeg.

A few years ago pianist Teresa McCollough received a surprise gift in the mail from Heitzeg: 192 scores titled World Piece. Each score was named for one of the 192 countries in the United Nations at that time and made a political or environmental statement through one chord, or a few notes beautifully expressed through Steve’s evocative drawings.

“World Piece arrived during a very difficult time in my life,” Teresa told me via phone this week. “I couldn’t believe that he had kept the project a secret for so many months. I cried when I opened the package.”

From the very beginning, Heitzeg conceived of the project as a thank you to McCollough. Heitzeg describes the evolution of the idea:

In 2000 Teresa McCollough had a call for scores for her new CD of music for solo piano by living American composers listed in the American Composers Forum newsletter. I submitted my Sandhill Crane (Migration Variations) and fortunately, I was one of the composers selected for her CD New American Piano Music that was released on the Innova label in 2001. Since the release of that CD she has performed my Sandhill Crane numerous times internationally–from China to Canada. She would always send me programs from the performances, too. So, I wanted to send her a thank you for her kindness.

I had been ruminating about composing a piece about world peace. Then, one day while walking through the Barnes and Noble in Minneapolis, I came upon Lonely Planet’s The Travel Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the World.  I thought I could honor each country in the world with a brief chord or gesture. The UN works tirelessly for peace and most of the countries in the world are member states, that is why I chose the UN.

I use a single chord or small musical fragments to symbolize the notion that the smallest acts of kindness can change the world in a positive way.

“When I was in school, the only people who were doing improv were jazz players, and the jazz world and the classical worlds never met.” (Photo: Pianist Teresa McCollough. Image courtesy the artist)

My own discovery of Heitzeg’s World Piece project occurred last year when I saw Teresa perform selections of the work at Roulette in Brooklyn during a concert featuring compositions by Alvin Singleton, Alex Shapiro, and the Wet Ink Ensemble. Seeing each score projected behind the piano as Teresa performed was a memorable experience, and I was particularly struck by how much creative freedom Heitzeg had given to McCollough. (Not every composer is so trusting of performers, and not every performer is up to the task of improvisation). As I talked to Teresa about the evolution of the piece after her Roulette performance, I knew immediately that I wanted to share World Piece with Gwarlingo readers on October 24th: United Nations Day.

Throughout this highly-improvisatory work, McCollough is called upon to play all parts of the piano (the keys, the strings inside the piano, the wood), to whistle, to make animal sounds, whisper and sing into the piano. In the Bhutan movement, she plays a high cluster of chords in honor of “the roof of the world” and the Canadian movement is a tender “song for seal pups.” In a light-hearted moment, McCollough tosses Euros into the piano for the Monaco movement; as a protest to war, she is directed to scream into the piano for the Vietnam movement, which is represented with a black hole in the score.

(NOTE: If you are reading this post in an email and can’t see the below videos, click here to watch the videos on the Gwarlingo website).

Why compose a piece of music for the United Nations? “I’ve always believed in the United Nations,” says Steve. “I was raised by two liberal and democratic parents. My dad still lives on the dairy farm I grew up on. My mom died last year. She was an incredibly positive and hopeful person. She always saw the best in everyone and reminded my sister and me to be kind to and help others and those in need. It was in my junior year in high school that I was able to go on a Know Your Government seminar for one week to Washington, D.C. and New York City. It was my first trip to NYC and I was hooked!  We toured the UN and that changed my life.”

“I started the piece on Valentine’s Day 2006 (as sort of a love letter to the world),” Heitzeg explains. “My routine would be to compose a movement for one country each day, consecutively through August, and then research the next country (I went in alphabetical order) that same evening. My wife Gwen is the Director of Public Relations at the Minnesota Orchestra. Our daughter Zadie was born in the summer of 2005, so while Gwen as at work I usually composed these movements during Zadie’s naps right after lunch at noon. Sometimes I would compose the movements in the evening when Gwen was home with Zadie.”

Heitzeg says he was influenced by composer Lou Harrison’s Peace Piece (Nos. 1-3), John Cage’s Litany for the Whale, and nature photographer Jim Brandenburg’s project where he challenged himself to take only one photograph per day between the autumnal equinox and winter solstice.

Steve’s musical score for the Afghanistan movement of World Piece

“I use a single chord or small musical fragments to symbolize the notion that the smallest acts of kindness can change the world in a positive way.” (Photo: Steve Heitzeg by John Noltner courtesy the artist)

Steve’s musical score for the Madagascar movement of World Piece

I asked Steve if the various movements were based on research or more intuitive in nature. “In most cases I researched the country either through The Travel Book, the internet or with books I previously owned. Some movements arose from sheer intuition as you say. I wanted to vary it a bit, so, yes, some are an attempt to draw upon musical styles and sounds of that particular country, while others are more about an imaginative or visual mixed with sonic representation.”

“I did not let Teresa know I was composing this piece for her. I simply mailed it to her that fall right before the December holidays. She called me up and was so gracious and pleased with the piece…I simply wanted her to have a gift of thanks for all of her wonderful dedication to new music and living composers.”

Not only did Steve’s gift help Teresa through a challenging time in her personal life, but the act of recording the scores over a period of three years opened her up as a performer.

“I started with the scores that contained actual musical notes,” Teresa told me on the phone, “and then I moved onto the more difficult pieces. It required a great deal of trust because I wasn’t alone in the room. I worked very closely with a sound engineer during the recording sessions. It was an act of faith to let myself go in front of another person. At times, the engineer would help me by playing an instrument, doing vocals, or giving me feedback on his favorite version of a piece. He would then edit the recordings and send them to me. Steve never heard any of the recordings until they were done.”

 
The act of performing Steve’s music was liberating for Teresa in many ways. “Classical musicians are not trained to improvise,” she explained on the phone. “This is a failure of music education. When I was in school, the only people who were doing improv were jazz players, and the jazz world and the classical worlds never met.”

McCollough is a well-respected performer in new music circles and has commissioned, premiered, and performed new compositions by George Crumb, Joan Tower, Alex Shapiro, Belinda Reynolds, Zhou Long, Charles Griffin, David Rakowski, Tomas Svoboda, Henry Martin, and others. Performing Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto and various works by Atlanta-based composer Alvin Singleton has given her experience with improvising on stage, but Heitzeg’s unique, often ambiguous, graphic scores required Teresa to dig deeper as a performer.

While talking to her by phone from her California home, she unearthed the original World Piece score and flipped through its pages. “There are about eight to ten countries per page. As the score progresses, it becomes more and more artistic and improvisatory. As you move alphabetically through each country, the scores become less about notes and more about pictures and gestures.”

Some countries McCollough knew well, and others she had little or no knowledge of. “Aided by Lonely Planet’s The Travel Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the World I went on my own musical journey, using Steve’s music, the text and images in the book, and my imagination, to interpret the score. Those sessions, which took place over the course of more than three years, represent my creative voice at that time, and as I experienced each piece or country, in that moment.”

Those performances, some of which are included here, capture a unique moment of improvisation. Each time McCollough performs movements from World Piece, her performance is unique.

This was the first time I had been given so much freedom as a performer. A lot of classically trained performers have a hard time moving away from the score. If a composer said, “Improvise for five measures,” I used to find this very hard to do. I thought I didn’t have the skill set or personal freedom. But the more I had to improvise when recording World Piece, the freer I became. The process of making these recordings opened me up, and not just when performing Steve’s music, but when performing other music too. I didn’t worry about whether my performance was “good” or “appropriate.” These recordings became a vehicle for me to learn how to express myself musically.

“I left some of the movements more improvisatory or open to interpretation for philosophical reasons,” Heitzeg explains, “(i.e.–I didn’t want every movement to have my sonic imprint.) It felt too self-absorbed that way; especially when you are trying to honor a country that has a history of being occupied, colonized or dishonored through slavery. Having some movements with more of a visual reference and non-traditional musical notation allows for the performer to make the piece ‘their own’ in a different way. Knowing Teresa’s highly creative and imaginative mind, I knew she would enjoy ‘creating’ these movements sonically.”

McCollough has a special fondness for working with contemporary composers. “There’s more freedom for collaboration when working with living composers. What I like is that I can call them up and talk to them about the performance. I can’t call up Beethoven. Whenever I called Steve and said, “What do you think about this?” he was never like “No. Don’t do that. He was incredibly supportive.”

This week McCollough is performing in a number of concerts at Santa Clara University celebrating the music of John Cage. “Cage was the kind of composer who didn’t have a hang-up about being true to the score. For my upcoming performance of ‘Dream,’ for example, I’ve decided to add an extra instrument and to use a vibraphone. I don’t think Cage would have cared at all. There are some composers who have very precise scores with lots of specific notations. There was a time in new music when the only way you could get the music right was to take the performer out of the equation—Milton Babbitt for example. But now, certain new music composers are embracing improvisation again. Many laptop composers, for instance, are focused on improvising and creating music for a specific moment.”

“I am thrilled that Teresa has performed some of these movements live in performance,” says Heitzeg. “I am also grateful that she has a website and YouTube channel devoted to World Piece. She has been so respectful of me and the piece…It is a true honor to know and work with her.”

McCollough’s vision for this unique composition is to find a gallery or alternative space that would show the scores, while allowing visitors to listen to each musical interpretation using headphones or a cell phone. She also plans to continue posting new videos on the World Piece YouTube Channel until all 192 movements are available to the public.

“It is my hope,” says McCollough, “that World Piece will be discovered and enjoyed by a more diverse audience on the internet, reaching out to many people, and spreading a message of tolerance and understanding to all who listen.”

You can hear Teresa McCollough perform the music of John Cage, John Adams, Olivier Messiaen, and Claude DeBussy in a special series of free and ticketed concerts at Santa Clara University from October 24th through the 27th. For more information about the Musical Mavericks series and the John Cage 100-year celebration, visit the SCU website. You can learn more about Teresa McCollough and her work at her website. Samples and recordings of her work are available here.

Composer Steve Heitzeg is currently working on a trumpet concerto for Charles Lazarus and an anti-plastic symphony. His Symphony in Sculpture was commissioned and premiered last month by the Des Moines Symphony Orchestra and is based on nine sculptures in the new John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park in downtown Des Moines, Iowa. For more information about Steve and his music, you can visit his website. Recordings of his music are available here. You can watch a Twin Cities Public Television interview with Steve in his home in St. Paul on YouTube.

Composer Steve Heitzeg at the United Nations in New York City with Kare Fredrik Reutersward’s sculpture Non-Violence (Photo by Gwen Pappas courtesy the artist)

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British Street artist Slinkachu left this miniature “Hanging On” in the streets of Hong Kong. It’s one of the many images on view in his New York and London show, Global Model Village. (Photo © Slinkachu courtesy the artist)

I wish I could attend everything listed here, but since I can’t, I hope you’ll venture out in the coming weeks and report back on what you loved (and what you didn’t).

Here is my completely biased Don’t-Miss List for the coming month (in no particular order).

If I’ve overlooked an event you think Gwarlingo readers would enjoy, feel free to add your event to the Comments section below or to the Gwarlingo Facebook page.

Slinkachu in London and New York

British street artist Slinkachu (a favorite here at Gwarlingo) is celebrating the launch of his new book with two solo shows in London and New York. Global Model Village opens to the public September 27th at Andipa Gallery in London and runs until October 27th. There will also be a pop-up show in New York City from October 3rd through the 7th. Both shows will feature new work shot in different cities around the world.

 

 
Also be sure to check out Slinkachu‘s new book Global Model Village: The International Street Art of Slinkachu, which collects together images of installations the street artist has left in cities around the world, including New York, Moscow, Cape Town, Beijing, Berlin, Hong Kong and, of course, his hometown of London. The books is available in UK, US, and German editions. There will also be a Japanese version released in the new year by Sogensha (図書出版 創元社), along with a Japanese version of Slinkachu’s original book. 驚くべき.

John Kelly in 1993 as Cocteau in Light Shall Lift Them (Photo by Rick Gillette courtesy John Kelly)

John Kelly at Joe’s Pub in New York City

When performance artist-actor-writer-video artist-singer-dancer John Kelly is scheduled to perform, count me in. Kelly has the reputation as an artist’s artist. Over the years, he has worked with everyone from Nan Goldin to Antony and the Johnsons and James Franco. His work is so daring and original it can be difficult to boil down to a bite-sized blurb. He has received numerous awards, including Obies, Bessies, and The Rome Prize (a testament to how diverse his work is). If you don’t know Kelly’s work yet, keep him on your radar. I’m building an entire New York trip around his upcoming cabaret performances at Joe’s Pub. Seeing Kelly perform is always revelatory.
 

John Kelly (Photo by Billy Erb courtesy John Kelly)

OPERAtion Brooklyn 2012. Back Row: Zach Redler, Sidney Marquez Boquiren, Daniel Neer, Kayleigh Butcher, Daniel Felsenfeld. Front Row: Sara Cooper, Noah Himmelstein. (Photo by Meghan Hickey courtesy of American Opera Projects)

OPERAtion Brooklyn Brings Opera to The BEAT Festival

American Opera Projects and Opera on Tap’s acclaimed series returns for a new showcase of operatic works from and inspired by Brooklyn.

Composer Daniel Felsenfeld will premiere A Genuine Willingness to Help (Book I), the first installment in the composer’s “Author Project,” which features music and multi-media performance based on texts by living writers and songwriters, such as Rick Moody, Jonathan Lethem, Stephen Elliott, and Fiona Maazel. Felsenfeld’s Raw Footage: Composer’s Cut, based on Robert Coover’s novel The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director’s Cut, is also on the program, along with Stop and Frisk by composer Sidney Marquez Boquiren and librettist Daniel Neer and Male Identity by composer Zach Redler and librettist Sara Cooper.
 

Topping off the program are four songs drawn from One Ring Zero’s album As Smart As We Are (The Author Project). Viggo Mortensen (yes, that Viggo Mortensen) calls these “mysterious pop songs,” arranged for piano and chamber ensemble by Michael Hearst and Joshua Camp,  “…a well-orchestrated booby trap for music lovers everywhere…“ The works feature texts by Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Isa Chandra Moskowitz, and David Wondrich.

OPERAtion Brooklyn is part of the first annual BEAT Festival. BEAT creates a platform to celebrate Brooklyn’s finest performing artists, ”extraordinary world-class performers who stand as the greatest innovators of the performing arts,” says festival artistic director Stephen Shelley. From September 12-23, artists will perform in venues throughout the borough. For complete information and festival passes visit www.beatbrooklyn.com.

Individual tickets for OPERAtion Brooklyn are $20 (passes to the entire BEAT Festival are also available). There will be three opportunities to see this special OPERAtion Brooklyn performance:
 

Thursday, Sept. 13 – 7:30 PM
Flatbush Reformed Church
890 Flatbush Avenue, Flatbush

Wednesday, Sept. 19 – 7:30 PM
Brooklyn Conservatory of Music
58 7th Avenue, Park Slope

Saturday, Sept. 22 – 7:30 PM
The Irondale Center
85 S. Oxford Street, Ft Greene

Andrew Ohanesian’s The House Party under construction at Pierogi’s The Boiler (Photo by Will Femia courtesy ny.curbed.com)

Andrew Ohanesian’s The House Party at Pierogi’s The Boiler in Williamsburg

Artist Andrew Ohanesian is fascinated with art that imitates reality. He’s built a confessional-booth-sized bar for one (with beer on tap), a row house  and a fully stocked, walk-in, refrigerated cooler (installed at English Kills Art Gallery). For his latest work, The House Party, Ohanesian has constructed a full-sized suburban home inside Pierogi’s satellite gallery, The Boiler, a former factory boiler room with 40 foot ceilings located at 191 N. 14th St. in Willisamburg.

Ohanesian’s house will be opened up to the public for a house party on September 14th, the opening night of the exhibition. In this at once creative and destructive act, the artist enlists the audience to provide the final element of the work itself, giving each viewer the unique opportunity to physically leave his or her own scar on the House, by partying within it throughout the evening. You can see an animation of the house in this video:
 

There will be a lot of openings to choose from the night of the 14th, but be sure to put this one on the must-see list.

Andrew Ohanesian’s The House Party is on view at Pierogi’s The Boiler at 191 North 14th Street in Brooklyn September 14th-November 18th.

Fred Hersch Trio at the Village Vanguard and On Tour

Composer and pianist Fred Hersch’s return to jazz after several months in an AIDS-related coma was nothing short of miraculous. (You can hear Hersch discuss his illness and recovery with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross here). Hersch is back with a new tour, a new album, and is better than ever.

The Grammy-nominated performer is currently performing at the Village Vanguard with his trio, John Hébert on bass and Eric McPherson on drums, to celebrate the release of his new two-disk CD, Alive at the Vanguard. Recorded in February 2012, the new album contains seven new Hersch compositions, as well as music by Coleman, Kern, Porter and Monk.

I’ve seen Hersch perform over seven times now, and he never disappoints. If you can’t catch The Fred Hersch Trio for their six-night performance at the Village Vanguard in New York, you can also see them on tour this September in Boston, Chicago, D.C., Baltimore, and Cincinnati. Tour dates and venues are listed below. You can listen to tracks off the new album right here:

You can purchase a copy of the Fred Hersch Trio’s new album Alive at the Vanguard from Amazon or iTunes. (A portion of your purchase will benefit Gwarlingo).

Tatzu Nishi’s Discovering Columbus in New York City

Thanks to the Public Art Fund, Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi has created a different kind of “house party” at Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Discovering Columbus places the 13-foot-tall statue of Columbus in the center of an American living room six stories above the city streets, temporarily transforming it into a contemporary artwork. According to the Public Art Fund website, the room will feature many of the trappings of a domestic living room—lamps, a couch, a coffee table, a television, and more—as well as custom wallpaper by the artist. Through large, loft-style windows, visitors will have dramatic views of Central Park and Midtown Manhattan that will be seen from Columbus’s perspective for the first time.

Tatzu Nishi’s Discovering Columbus (Photo courtesy of the artist and the Public Art Fund, NY)

In a stroke of genius, the Public Art Fund is simultaneously overseeing the conservation of the 1892 Columbus Monument in cooperation with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. The scaffolding supporting Nishi’s living room is allowing conservators to access the column and figure at its top. The restoration is expected to be completed by January of 2013. (Why can’t all government bureaucracies be this creative with their resources?)

Over 100,000 people are expected to visit the installation, which is on view from September 20th through November 18th.

Tickets to climb six stories to this home-away-from-home are free, but must be booked in advance. (Elevator access is available for those who require special assistance.) Register for free tickets at the Public Art website.

Norman Mooney, Series 4 No. 1, 2007. Carbon on aluminum panel, 72 x 144 inches. (Photo courtesy the artist and Causey Contemporary)

Norman Mooney’s Close Your Eyes at Causey Contemporary in Williamsburg

If you’re in Williamsburg Friday night to catch the opening of Andrew Ohanesian’s The House Party, stop by Causey Contemporary for Norman Mooney’s solo show of monumental carbon smoke drawings, Close Your Eyes. The Irish artist’s carbon drawings are created with layers of billowing smoke preserved on aluminum panel and have both a physical and metaphysical presence.

Causey Contemporary is located at 92 Wythe Avenue in Brooklyn. The gallery will be participating in the Williamsburg Gallery Association‘s Every Second Friday on September 14, 2012 from 6-10 p.m. along with Art101, Figureworks, Front Room, Gitana Rosa, Parker’s Box, Pierogi, P339, Skink Ink Editions, T.A.P.S. Gallery, The Boiler, Ventana 244 and Williamsburg Art and Historical Society. Galleries will be open late and the wine and cheese will be in heavy supply. More information is available at the Causey Contemporary website.

Bill Jacobson, ‘Place’ series #539, 2011. Pigment print on Epson Ultrasmooth paper, mounted to museum board. Print 28 x 22 inches; board 37 x 31 inches.
Edition of 7 (Photo © Bill Jacobson courtesy the artist)

Bill Jacobson at the Robert Klein Gallery in Boston

I’ve shared Bill Jacobson‘s striking photographs with Gwarlingo readers before. Boston art lovers don’t get many opportunities to see a show of Jacobson’s work. On Saturday I’ll be heading South for the opening of Bill’s most recent exhibit, Place (Series), at the Robert Klein Gallery.

This new body of work, for which Jacobson won a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, consists of minimal still-life images. These rectangles suggest both a range of architectures and the contradictions between architecture and nature. Like Jacobson’s earlier out-of-focus work, the new series makes the viewer wonder what is real and what is abstract.

Robert Klein opened his Newbury Street space in 1980 with early exhibitions of Diane Arbus, Annie Leibovitz, Sally Mann, and Hiroshi Sugimoto and has become THE place to see photography in Boston. Klein’s remarkable eye and international following has earned this Newbury Street boutique gallery a Best of Boston award two years in a row.

The opening of Bill Jacobson’s Place (Series) is Saturday, September 15th from 2:00-5:00 p.m. at the Robert Klein Gallery on 38 Newbury Street in Boston. The show is on view through October 27th. For more information, visit the gallery website.

Release Party for Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy at Housing Works in New York City

And now for something completely different… If you’re a fan of singer-songwriter, actor, and cult figure Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy), you’ll want to stop by Housing Works at 7 p.m. on Monday, September 24th for the release party of Oldham’s new book, Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy, just published by W.W. Norton.

Oldham’s work in indie rock and independent cinema has found him intersecting with such disparate figures as Johnny Cash, Bjork, James Earl Jones, and R. Kelly; each is discussed at length in the book with editor, longtime friend and associate Alan Licht. Housing Works reports that at present, Will Oldham is NOT scheduled to attend the event, which is a big disappointment to fans. (I guess The Prince has important royal business that night). But the launch party is free and Oldham fans in New York will finally have a chance to sport their best cowboy boots and trucker hats in honor of the Appalachian, post-punk song writer.

Housing Works bookstore and cafe is located at 126 Crosby Street in Manhattan. For more information, please visit their website.

Vetiver on Tour in Peterborough, New England, New York, and Canada

Lest you think that only big cities have fun, indie-folk band Vetiver will be making one of their semi-regular tour stops in Peterborough, New Hampshire, on Monday, September 17th (and yes, it really is New Hampshire in spite of what the above poster says). I’ve been a fan of this band since I first heard their 2006 album To Find Me Gone. Vetiver has toured and collaborated with Devendra Banhart, Vashti Bunyan, and Joanna Newsom. Thanks to local musician and concert organizer Eric Gagne, Vetiver has once-again put Peterborough on their tour list.

The band is touring to promote their most recent album The Errant Charm (from Sub Pop Records). If you aren’t in Peterborough, you can also catch Andy and the rest of the gang in Hudson, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Cambridge, Northampton, Montreal, and more. Visit the Vetiver website for full tour information.

And here’s a little Vetiver sampler to wet your whistle…

 
Tickets to Vetiver’s Peterborough concert are no longer available online, but you can still purchase tickets at the door for $15. The show starts at 7 p.m. at the Peterborough Historical Society on 19 Grove Street. Habibi and Bar Harbor band Coke Weed will open. Visit the Historical Society website or this Facebook page for more information.

You can also explore and purchase records by Vetiver from Amazon or iTunes (a portion of your purchase benefits Gwarlingo).

The Quay Brothers, Tailor’s Shop, decor for the film Street of Crocodiles. 1986. Wood, glass, plaster, and fabric, 35 7⁄16 × 26 × 30 5⁄16″ (Photograph by Robert Barker, Cornell University, courtesy of MoMA)

The Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets at MoMA

The first time I saw a film by the Quay Brothers many years ago, I was simultaneously awed, baffled, and distrubed by their offbeat, haunting world. The brothers are best known for their stop-motion puppet animations, Street of Crocodiles in particular, an adaptation of a story by Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer murdered by the Nazis in 1942.

The Quay Brothers were born outside Philadelphia and have worked from their London studio, Atelier Koninck, since the late 1970s. For over 30 years, they have been creating avant-garde, stop-motion puppet animation and live-action films in the Eastern European tradition of filmmakers like Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Svankmajer and the Russian Yuri Norstein (featured here on Gwarlingo).
 

The Quay Brothers, Kafka’s The Dream, 1970. Pencil on illustration board, 7 1/2 x 7 1/2″ (Image courtesy of the Quay Brothers and MoMA)

The Quay Brothers on the set of Street of Crocodiles. 1986. (Image courtesy of the filmmakers and MoMA)

This MoMA gallery exhibition and accompanying film retrospective is the first presentation of the Quay Brothers’ work in all their fields of creative activity. In addition to their better known films, this exhibition also includes never-before-seen moving image works and graphic design, drawings, and calligraphy, music videos, presenting animated and live-action films alongside installations, objects, and works on paper.

Whether you’re a longtime fan of the Brothers Quay or just discovering them, this exhibit offers a worthy departure from some of the minimalist gallery shows I’ve highlighted here. Heaven knows they’re boldness and originality are difficult to top.

Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets is on view at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan) through January 7, 2013. For more information and an in-depth look at the show, check out the Hyperallergic website.

Brendan Cass, Moonless Night (Kent), Painting for Norman Rockwell, 2012. Acrylic on canvas. 24 x 36 (Image courtesy Brendan Cass and KANSAS)

Brendan Cass’s 7 North at KANSAS in New York City

The new Tribeca gallery KANSAS has been on my radar since I saw Matthew Northridge’s stunning show there a year ago.

In his newest body of work and first solo show at KANSAS, painter Brendan Cass deviates from his trademark neon (mostly European) landscapes and delves into a darkly chromatic palette. Cass’s latest series was made within the last year while residing in the historic (and inoperative) Cornwall Bridge train station in Connecticut. The Housatonic Railroad runs parallel with one of America’s earliest highways, Route 7, from Norwalk, Connecticut, into Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The atmosphere of New England mixed with the lingering history of the station play a special role in this major transformation of Cass’s aesthetic tone.

Personally, I think this is an exciting, new direction for Cass. His inky images evoke night, loss, and New England Puritanism and are certainly worth a visit to Tribeca.

KANSAS is located at 59 Franklin Street in Manhattan. 7 North opens September 13th and is on view through October 27th. For more information visit the KANSAS website.

Robert Irwin, Untitled (Acrylic Column), 1969-2011, acrylic. © 2012 Robert Irwin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (Photo © 2011 Philipp Scholz Rittermann)

Robert Irwin’s Dotting the i’s & Crossing the t’s: Part II at Pace Gallery in New York City

Along with James Turrell and Larry Bell, Robert Irwin is one of the major artists of the Light and Space Movement. Although Irwin started his art career as a painter in the 1950s, he eventually moved away from the idea of “art as object” and instead, embraced the notion of “art as experience.”

New materials and technology have allowed Irwin to realize his iconic acrylic columns as he always envisioned them — nearly transparent prisms stretching more than fifteen feet into the air. These acrylic columns are the last works Irwin conceived prior to abandoning his studio practice more than fifty years ago. The artist will turn 85 this month, so it’s a great time to revisit his work. This video gives a preview of the exhibit.
 

The breathtaking New Museum Sky Room (Photo by Paul Soulellis courtesy Tektonik)

Tektonik at the New Museum’s Sky Room in Manhattan

On Wednesday, September 19th, composer Dana Leong will lead a quartet of cello, tabla, sitar, and electronics for a one-of-a-kind sundown concert in the breathtaking New Museum Sky Room, which offers panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline.

Leong’s collage of musical styles has garnered critical acclaim and led to collaborations with artists as diverse as Paquito D’Rivera, Christian McBride, Ray Charles, Kanye West, Wynton Marsalis, Bjork, Yoko Ono, and Lila Downs. He was a featured guest music director and performer in Fela! on Broadway in 2010 and is the first ever Composer-In-Residence for The Museum of Chinese in America in New York City.

Hailing from Japan, China, Haiti, and India — all countries recently affected by earthquakes, also known as “tectonic disruptions” – the quartet musicians of Tektonik will create a unique musical collaboration in this memorable space.

The event is part of the Locating the Sacred Festival, a 12-day, 25-event arts festival coordinated by the Asian American Arts Alliance.

Tickets have been released for purchase and are limited due to the intimate space of the venue.

The debut performance of Tektonik in conjunction with the Asian American Art Alliance’s inaugural Locating the Sacred Festival will be presented at sunset on Wednesday, Sept. 19 2012 from 6:15 p.m. to 9 p.m. in the New Museum’s Sky Room. For more information, visit the festival website or go directly to the box office web page to purchase tickets.

The Brooklyn Book Festival will take place September 23rd. (Photo by Kathryn Kirk courtesy the Gothamist)

The Brooklyn Book Festival & the Pen American Center’s Stand Up For Freedom Comedy Event

On Sunday, September 23, 2012, from 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m., more than 280 authors and participants will join bibliophiles, booksellers and literary organizations on 14 stages for the seventh annual Brooklyn Book Festival. This year’s participants include Paul Auster, Sapphire, Joyce Carol Oates, Colson Whitehead, Edwidge Danticat, Dennis Lehane, Kwame Dawes, Walter Mosley, Philip Levine, Kurt Andersen, and more.

Writer Paul Auster is one of the many Brooklyn authors who will be taking part in the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, September 23rd.

According to Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn has more writers per square inch than almost anywhere else in the country, all contributing to the area’s growing literary reputation. “With an entire week of literary events celebrating the written and spoken word, the seventh annual Brooklyn Book Festival will be bigger and better than ever,” said Johnny Temple, chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council. “The Festival has matured into one of the world’s premier literary destinations, attracting renowned authors, publishers of all sizes, musicians, humorists, graphic novelists, and all of the creative forces that make up our eclectic and constantly evolving literary universe.”

All Festival events on Sunday, September 23, are free and—for the first time this year—there will be “Clix not Tix,” meaning no more tickets or ticket lines. Additionally, for the first time ever, the expanded “Bookend” literary-themed events comprise a full week of more than 50 happenings at venues that include clubs, bookstores, theaters and libraries across the borough from September 17 – 23.

 
One of the “Bookend events” literary types have on their radar is the PEN American Center’s Stand Up For Freedom comedy event. Some of New York’s top progressive performers will joke, jab, vent, and revel in their right to express themselves at a one-night comedy event celebrating freedom of expression. For the first time ever, PEN American Center will partner with Laughing Liberally, whose performers have appeared on Comedy Central, HBO, MSNBC, and in the pages of The Onion, The Nation and The Huffington Post.  No topic is off-limits, and no politician is safe.

Stand Up For Freedom will take place on Wednesday, September 19 at the Galapagos Art Space on 16 Main Street in Brooklyn. Participants include Baratunde Thurston, Katie Halper, and John Fugelsang.

Tickets are $15 at the PEN website, but Gwarlingo readers can receive a $5 discount on their ticket by choosing the MEMBER option when checking out. Thanks to the Pen American Center for offering this special discount!

For a full schedule of events for the Brooklyn Book Festival, please visit the festival’s website.

Michael Aaron Lee, Hello I Must Be Going, 2012. India ink on paper. (Photo courtesy Michael Aaron Lee)

D I S Q U I E T U D E at Geoffrey Young in Great Barrington, Massachusetts

And here, finally, is a wildcard event to top off the list — Disquietude at Geoffrey Young’s Gallery in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Images from this show, which opens on the 15th of September, are sorely lacking on the gallery’s website, so I honestly have no idea what you’ll find if you stop by. But Michael Aaron Lee’s work caught my eye, while wading through all of the emails and press releases in my email inbox this week. Lee’s work looks intriguing, and I’d like to see more.

Other artists included in the show: Mike Glier, Donald Baechler, Daniel Heidkamp, Amy Lincoln, Zohar Lazar, Cary Smith, Sue Knoll, Phil Knoll, Fred Cooper, Morgan Bulkeley, Valaire Van Slyck, and Vince Contarino.

Also, at 6 p.m. on October 4th, London-based writer and artist Tom Raworth will give a special reading at the gallery.

The opening reception for  D I S Q U I E T U D E  is Saturday, September 15th from 5:30-7:30 p.m. The show runs through October 13, 2012. The gallery is open Thursday through Saturday from 11-5 p.m. Geoffrey Young Gallery is located at 40 Railroad Street in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

For more information visit the Geoffrey Young website. You can see more of Michael Aaron Lee’s work here.

Installation view of Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets at The Museum of Modern Art, 2012. (Photo © Jason Mandella courtesy MoMA)

 
This is just a handful of the many quality arts events that are happening this month. I’ll be covering additional shows in more detail in the coming weeks (Stacey Steers’ exhibit, Night Hunter House, at the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire, is not to be missed, for instance). Stay tuned!

If there’s an event I’ve missed that you’d like to share with Gwarlingo readers, please add it to the Comments section below or to the Gwarlingo Facebook page.

Don’t miss the next Gwarlingo feature. Stay up on the latest art news by having Gwarlingo delivered to your email inbox. It’s easy and free! You can also follow Gwarlingo on Twitter and Facebook.

Also, don’t forget that the Gwarlingo bookstore has an assortment of book titles on my personal recommendation list, including poetry, fiction, art and photography books, and more. A portion of your purchases benefit Gwarlingo. You can also make purchases from your favorite independent bookstore through IndieBound. A percentage of your purchases made through this link also benefit Gwarlingo.
 

Filmmaker Samein Priester with his daughter Syann (Photo courtesy Samein Priester)

How do you learn to be a father, particularly when there are no fathers around to be an example?

This is the question at the heart of Samein Priester’s personal documentary 1st&4ever. The dilemma of fatherhood has taken on new significance for Samein since the tragic loss of his partner, artist Denyse Thomasos, last month.

Denyse’s visit to the hospital on July 19th was supposed to be routine. She was there for an MRI, but during the procedure she suffered a fatal allergic reaction. Her sudden death has left her husband, friends, family, students, colleagues, and the New York art community in shock. Denyse was only 47 years old.

Since 1995, Denyse taught in the Arts, Culture and Media Department at Rutgers University, Newark. When she met Samein, he was preparing to complete his undergraduate degree at Hunter. It was Denyse who pushed Samein to apply to graduate school at the City College of New York. “When I first got into grad school,” Samein explains in 1st&4ever, “my mother didn’t even know what that was, but she knew it was something big.” In December 2009, during his first semester, Samein’s mother passed away. She was the glue that held the family together, and her loss was a terrible blow to the family. In June of 2011 Samein graduated from City College.

Denyse and Samein were not only best friends, but also partners in life, work, and parenthood. In June of 2010 the couple adopted their first child, Syann, a joyful event that Samein chronicles at the end of his documentary 1st&4ever. (Photo courtesy Samein Priester)

Denyse and Samein were not only best friends and spouses, but also partners in life, work, and parenthood. In June of 2010 the couple adopted their first child, Syann, a joyful event that Samein chronicles at the end of 1st&4ever. “I’m going to be the best father that Syann can possibly ever have,” he says in his film. Samein repeated the same sentiment when we spoke at length on the phone last week. He is clearly stunned and grieving the sudden loss of his partner, but he is also focused on his daughter and creating a healthy, stable life for her in spite of Denyse’s absence.

“From the moment I met Denyse my life turned around,” Samein told me today via email. “She really made all of my dreams come true, down to my baby girl Syann. That was a name I had since I was 15. I always knew I’d have a daughter and her name would be Syann.”

Denyse Thomasos’s visit to the hospital on July 19th was supposed to be routine. She was there for an MRI, but during the procedure she suffered a fatal allergic reaction. Her sudden death has left her husband, friends, family, students, colleagues, and the New York art community in shock. (Photo courtesy Samein Priester)

The final version of Denyse Thomasos’s Arc, 2009, also shown above (Photo courtesy Olga Korper Gallery)

Samein and Denyse were both fellows at The MacDowell Colony. I met Samein at the Colony in the spring, just as I was leaving my job after 13 years to work on Gwarlingo full time. “Denyse told me I should apply,” Samein told me. “She knew I needed time to work, but she also thought the experience would be good for me as an artist.” Denyse clearly was supportive of her husband’s film career, just as he was supportive of her residencies, teaching job, and career as a painter. Tending to work and parenting was clearly a juggling act, but he said that he and Denyse were up to the challenge.

While in Peterborough, Samein talked a lot about his daughter, Syann, and how hard it was to be away from her, even for a short time. Each day when I ran into Samein returning his lunch basket in the main building, he smiled and expressed gratitude for the time, space, food, and community that MacDowell was providing him. He was well-liked by residents and staff alike, and we were all sorry when family obligations required him to return to New York after only a brief stay in New Hampshire.

But none of us forgot Samein or his powerful, short film 1st&4ever, which he screened during his residency. Half of the audience was in tears by the time it ended, but 1st&4ever is far from a sentimental tearjerker. It’s an honest, intimate portrait of a family doing their best to overcome the absent fathers who have left gaping holes in their lives. The minute the film was finished I knew that I wanted to share 1st&4ever with Gwarlingo readers.

Priester’s film won “Best Documentary” in the Newark Museum Black Film Festival 2012, as well as “Best Documentary” and “Best Cinematography in a Documentary” in the 2011 Citivision thesis show.

“Donte’s father was never around. My father wasn’t ever around. Really nobody’s father was around. They were in jail, dead, or missing in action. It was like no-man’s land. I thought it was normal, but it’s really not.”

The central focus of the film is Samein’s nephew, Donte Clark, a football player whose mother was only 18 years old when he was born. Donte has had contact with his father only twice in his life — once by phone and once through a letter his father sent him from jail. Samein was 13 when Donte was born, but he stepped up to the plate to help his sister Vanessa by mixing baby formula, changing diapers, and babysitting. “When you’re in the hood,” Sameine says in his film, “you don’t have a choice. It’s like all hands on deck. You don’t set out to be a father figure. You just start to multitask…There’s no daycare or nannies. There’s just family.”

“Donte’s father was never around. My father wasn’t ever around. Really nobody’s father was around. They were in jail, dead, or missing in action. It was like no-man’s land. I thought it was normal, but it’s really not.”

These intimate glimpses of Samein, his mother, and Donte are interspersed with memorable images of Harlem, subway trains, and the distant skyscrapers of New York City. But these views are mostly seen through mesh screens or chain-link fences. In Priester’s film, there is always something standing in the way.

Football is a lifeline for Donte. While other kids are “getting beat-up or shot,” he spends time in the park playing football. New York Venom head football coach Booker T. McJunkins says that his job is to be a foster father by helping each individual ball player. He explains that being a father figure is more important than accolades or the team’s success as a whole:

“A lot of these kids don’t know how to be men, they don’t know how to raise a family. They don’t know how to show compassion. That’s why we have the problems we have in the city, because a lot of these kids don’t have male figures in their lives…People look at these 18, 19-year-olds, 2o-year-olds, 21-year olds, even 22-year-olds as grown up men, but those are still little boys wrapped in a grown man’s package.”

Samein lost his own father when he was three. “He wasn’t there to teach me how to be a man or to teach me how to be a father,” Samein says in 1st&4ever. “None of us have role models for that. Helping raise Donte made me want to be a father, but how do you learn to be a father without examples?”

“From the moment I met Denyse my life turned around,” Samein told me via email. “She really made all of my dreams come true, down to my baby girl Syann. That was a name I had since I was 15. I always knew I’d have a daughter and her name would be Syann.” (Photo courtesy Cityvisions)

Denyse, Syann, and Samein (Photo courtesy Samein Priester)

The intimate images of Syann, Denise, and Samein that conclude 1st&4ever are supposed to be a hopeful ending to this story of a close-knit, fatherless family. Seeing the three of them together during and after the adoption, we’re confident that some old patterns have been broken at last.

But as I watched the film again today, it was impossible not to feel the sting of Denyse’s loss. Being “a good father” is challenging under the best of circumstances. Now Samein must tackle the job without the support of his wife and partner. I can only admire Samein’s dedication to Syann and his nephew Donte. The path to fatherhood has been, and will be, hard-won for Samein, but he has a strong support network, including the help of Denyse’s family in Canada.

When I asked Samein to share some of the directors who inspire him most, he mentioned John Cassavetes, Spike Lee, and Francis Ford Coppola. Favorite movies include Fight Club, The Conversation, True Romance, Reds, The Piano, and She’s Gotta Have It.

Priester has two new projects in the works. The first is a film called Harlem Sons about three men from Harlem who are released from prison after serving nearly 30 years. Like 1st&4ever, Harlem Sons focuses on family and redemption.

While continuing the search for a full-time film teaching job, Samein has also been piecing together a film about Denyse for Syann. “I have received cards and calls from around the world with people wanting Syann and I to know how sorry they are,” Samein told me by email. “Every card or call is a message of love. Every person has a personal story to tell about Denyse. I plan to take the road trip and capture each story, no matter how short the story or how far away the person lives. When the time comes, I’ll be able to show Syann who her mother was.”

Sorting out the intricacies of Denyse’s estate is going to take some time, Samein told me on the phone. Friends have set up two different funds in Denyse’s honor to help Syann. One is a college fund for Syann, which she can use for her education in 2034; the other fund will help with her immediate needs. (Photo courtesy Samein Priester)

Denyse “was the kind of person you were very attracted to — fun to be with, smart, talented, outspoken, generous. She had a real creative sense about how to make her life rich and bring that to whatever she did. She was really an admirable creative woman.” (Photo courtesy Samein Priester)

Denyse Thomasos was born in 1964 in Trinidad, but her family moved to Canada when she was 6 years old. In 1987 Denyse graduated from the University of Toronto with a BA in painting and art history and then attended Yale, where she received an MFA in painting and sculpture in 1989. After graduating, she moved to New York and began teaching at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. In 1995 she became an Assistant Professor in Painting at Rutgers. Priester met Thomasos in a restaurant called Mumbles on 17th and 3rd Avenue. The two started talking and hit it off. They became close friends and eventually fell in love.

Over the course of her career Thomasos won numerous grants and more than 40 awards, including a Guggenheim and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, PEW, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Ucross, Bellagio, Yaddo, and The MacDowell Colony. Artist Andrea Belag met Thomasos at Yaddo, and told Hyperallergic the following:

“She was the kind of person you were very attracted to — fun to be with, smart, talented, outspoken, generous. She had a real creative sense about how to make her life rich and bring that to whatever she did. She was really an admirable creative woman.”

Denyse’s semi-abstract, political paintings were reviewed in ArtForum, Art in America, Canadian Art, The Globe and Mail and The New York Times. As artcritical reported, Denyse traveled frequently in Africa, China, India, and South America, where she spent time studying prisons and slums and looking at the ways in which disenfranchised people are constrained, both physically and socially. These structures made their way into her paintings.

As artcritical reported, Denyse traveled in Africa, China, South America, and India where she spent time studying prisons and slums and looking at the ways in which disenfranchised people are constrained, both physically and socially. These structures made their way into her paintings. (Photo courtesy Samein Priester)

Denyse Thomasos, Yves Blue. Acrylic on canvas, 78″ x 72″ (Photo courtesy Hyperallergic)

From 1995 until her death, Denyse served as an associate professor of art at Rutgers University, where editor and writer John Yau is also on the faculty. Yau offered this appreciation of Thomasos and her art on the Hyperallergic website:

“Thomasos is known for her abstract paintings in which images of housing blocks, tiered parking garages, warehouses, scaffolding and abstract passages occupied an expanding, hyperbolic space. Her multi-layered, constructed space evokes something between a merry-go-round and a tornado, something under extreme centrifugal pressure. It’s as if everything is threatening to bust loose, and the painting itself can barely contain the accumulating forces. As Thomasos’ friends will readily attest, the dynamic forces found in her paintings were synonymous with her being. She was a force of nature.”

Interviewed for Rutgers Observer TV in February 2011, Denyse said, “I have had the most magical life I could imagine…Every dream I’ve ever dreamed has come true…to travel around the world.  Being an artist you have the opportunity to live a creative life every minute of the day…It feels like I’m an explorer…and I get to translate everything that I’ve seen, show it in a gallery, and get feedback from audiences. I love every aspect of it.”

Denyse’s sudden death is a loss not only to Samein, her daughter Syann, and to her friends and family, it is also a loss to the art world as a whole. We have lost a colleague, a friend, a teacher, and a unique, creative visionary.

“Every person has a personal story to tell about Denyse,” Samein explained via email. “I plan to take the road trip and capture each story, no matter how short the story or how far away the person lives. When the time comes, I’ll be able to show Syann who her mother was.” (Photo courtesy Samein Priester)

Sorting out the intricacies of Denyse’s estate is going to take some time, Samein told me on the phone. Friends have set up two different funds in Denyse’s honor to help Syann. One is a college fund for Syann, which she can use for her education in 2034; the other fund will help with her immediate needs.

If you’d like to contribute to the fund for Syann’s immediate needs, you can send a donation in any amount here through Samein’s Pay Pal account:

I’m happy to share Samein Priester’s marvelous 1st&4ever here in its entirety (length: 15 minutes). I only wish it were under different circumstances. I think you’ll find, as I did, that 1st&4ever contains a great deal of honesty and beauty mixed with the sadness. But isn’t this always what the best art does?
 
 

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Stills from The Clock by Christian Marclay (Photo courtesy arkitipintel.com)

(NOTE: This review is from the summer of 2012. Marclay’s The Clock is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through January 21, 2013, with a special 24-hour screening on New Year’s Eve. For more information, visit MoMA’s website.)

Last week I made the four-and-a-half-hour drive to New York City and stood in line for an hour in the rain to see a rare screening of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, currently on view at The Lincoln Center Festival. Before I arrived, playwright Wallace Shawn had been spotted in the queue. The Twitter feed for the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center has also reported sightings of Angelica Huston, Marlo Thomas, and Dr. Ruth. Wait times for screenings have burgeoned to two hours at some points and can be longest around midnight, when the ultimate climax of this 24-hour art installation occurs.

So is The Clock really worth of all this trouble? I’m happy to report that it is.

The Clock is the brainchild of Swiss sound and video artist Christan Marclay, the same artist who created the brilliant video works Telephone (1995) and Video Quartet (2002). (Note: You can watch Marclay’s Telephone at the end of this article).

But while Video Quartet was only fourteen minutes long, and Telephone a mere seven, The Clock is Marclay’s magnum opus, a mesmerizing 24-hour montage of thousands of time-related movie clips that have been masterfully edited and synchronized to show the actual time. The time is conveyed through dialogue, clocks, watches, and other timepieces. One moment Patrick Macnee is looking at his pocket watch in The Avengers; the next, Tobey Maguire is racing to deliver pizzas in Spiderman. The Clock has no beginning and no end, but endlessly loops, just as a real clock does.

As the clocks tick and we see snippets of shootouts, bank heists, chase scenes, romances, comedies, and detective dramas all appropriated from the rich history of cinema, patterns begin to emerge—travelers rushing to catch trains, men with hangovers smashing alarm clocks. The top of the hour is a popular time for cinema’s most dramatic moments—hangings, bombings, shootouts, trains leaving the station. But life is less outlandish when the hour hand passes the 12. This is the time when people wait, comb their hair, smoke, call a friend on the phone, commute to work, or cook dinner. In other words, its more like real life. In The Clock time passes not only in minutes, but also in years, as we glimpse actors like Joan Crawford, Catherine Deneuve, and Jack Nicholson in youth and in old age.

It took Marclay three years to make The Clock with the help of six assistants.

It took Marclay three years to make The Clock with the help of six assistants. The assistants’ job was to watch movies all day long and to bring Marclay any time-related clips they could find. For the first year, Marclay wasn’t even sure the project would be possible. Were there enough time-related clips in film history to create a 24-hour artwork?

For three years Marclay sat at his computer editing. “It was a gruesome three years,” Marclay told David Zlaewski in The New Yorker:

“But I became addicted to finding those little solutions. It gives you a bit of a high. You put two things together, and you get, like, ‘Oh my God, this works!’…The worst was when I worked really hard on figuring out some nice transition at 10:46 a.m. and someone would bring another 10:46, which was better footage or worked better with the narrative. There was constant remodeling.”

The Clock is a film about film, but also a film about our own mortality and obsession with time. (Photo courtesy galleristny.com)

The Clock finally debuted at the end of 2010 at London’s White Cube Gallery and was first shown in New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery. Both galleries gave Marclay financial support to cover the budget of creating the piece, which cost more than $100,000.

One cost that didn‘t factor into Marclay’s budget was copyright payments. As Zalewski details in his New Yorker profile, no one has ever objected to the artist’s appropriation of sounds and images in the past, so using thousands of film and music clips in The Clock didn’t give Marclay pause. “If you make something good and interesting and not ridiculing someone or being offensive, the creators of the original material will like it,” Marclay told Zalweski. At the 2011 Venice Biennale, Marclay won the Golden Lion for best artist in the exhibit. Accepting the Golden Lion, the artist humorously invoked Andy Warhol, thanking the jury “for giving The Clock its fifteen minutes.”

No description of this 24-hour installation can possibly convey its genius. Marclay’s collage is nothing less than a masterpiece, and one that must be experienced in person to be appreciated.

First, there is the event of it all, of gathering together with fellow film-goers to have a common and unique experience. Even the wait in line adds to the anticipation. The ability to watch any film or television show on demand in the privacy of our homes whenever we feel like it makes the rarity of The Clock screenings quite exceptional. The Clock is a live event, meant to be seen in real time. The audience is an integral part of the piece. The experience begins the moment we enter the space and ends the second we leave it.

It’s Marclay’s brilliance as an editor, his uncanny ability to stitch the right scenes and sounds together, that is the secret of The Clock‘s power as a work of art. (Photo courtesy Time Out New York)

The fact that only six copies of The Clock exist has turned these live screenings into a kind of competitive sport. Five copies of The Clock have been acquired by museums (or collectors who intend to donate the piece to a museum), including MoMA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. One copy has been purchased jointly by the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and in February of this year, the Tate, Israel Museum, and Centre Pompidou collaboratively purchased one of the last remaining copies. The sixth copy was sold to Steven A. Cohen, a Connecticut hedge-fund manager. These institutions were right to act quickly, for I have no doubt that Marclay’s piece is destined to become a seminal piece of 21st century art.

When I learned that Lincoln Center was offering a rare chance to see The Clock for free as part of The Lincoln Center Festival in New York City, I immediately made plans to visit. After waiting in line for an hour outside the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, I was ushered into a darkened room and directed to one of the carefully arranged IKEA couches. I had forgotten my cell phone during the screening, but conveniently, keeping track of time wasn’t an issue.

With the hard work of getting there behind me, I settled into my front row seat and put myself into Marclay’s hands.

The artist doesn’t disappoint. Marclay is a gifted editor, particularly when it comes to sound. He has had a long-standing interest in fusing fine art and audio culture. Earlier in his career, he was known for creating sound collages out of broken records, which he would cut up and then rejoin. Playing these assemblages produced a mix of music, as well as strange pops and hisses each time the turntable needle hit a seam. The artist began working with turntables in the late 1970s independently, but also parallel to hip hop’s use of the instrument.

Christian Marclay, Recycled Records, 1983. Collaged vinyl records, 10 inches diameter. (Photo © Christian Marclay. Courtesy of the artist and the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York)

What surprised me most about The Clock was its emotional pulse. There are moments of poignancy, humor, and surprise: a sudden car wreck, humorous, well-timed cameo appearances from Woody Allen, clock-watching lovers who have been left waiting a bit too long. (Photo: The Clock by Christian Marclay)

Marclay’s experience as a d.j. and sound artist serves him well in The Clock. Whenever he joins two scenes together, transitioning from one film clip to the next, he carefully chooses which sounds to highlight and which to exclude—everything from conversation, background music and noise, clocks and watches ticking, crickets and birds, etc. must be taken into consideration. Marclay expertly stitches these disparate pieces together, introducing a strange sound in one scene, only to have the sound explained when it is carried through and revealed in the next clip. He makes similar choices when assembling various music scores together. He might keep the soundtrack from one film running as The Clock transitions from one scene to the next, give a scene an entirely new score, or eliminate the music entirely and opt for silence instead. The sound is literally the acoustic glue that holds The Clock together, and gives the piece its continuity. The real art lies in the brilliance of these transitions.

While Marclay did all of the visual editing himself, he did enlist Brooklyn sound artist Quentin Chiappetta to hone The Clock’s sonic elements. In The New Yorker article, Chiappetta explains Marclay’s philosophy on sound editing, which eschews easy solutions:

“He doesn’t like fadeouts…He thinks it’s weak. It’s his work with turntables—the easiest way to get out of a spot is to turn the knob down. So to do it in a more clever, rhythmic way became the goal.”

The mere technical feat of creating The Clock is astounding in of itself, but technical virtuosity alone is not enough to create memorable art. What surprised me most about The Clock was its emotional pulse. There are moments of poignancy, humor, and surprise: a sudden car wreck, humorous, well-timed cameo appearances from Woody Allen, clock-watching lovers who have been left waiting a bit too long.

It doesn’t matter if the clip is from some Chinese or French film and that there are no subtitles. The specifics of a scene don’t matter, for Marclay expertly conveys universal feelings of longing and heartbreak, anger and joy, on the faces of his chosen actors. It’s Marclay’s brilliance as an editor, his uncanny ability to stitch the right scenes and sounds together, that is the secret of The Clock‘s power as a work of art. Marclay’s timing an intuition are impeccable, and its remarkable that he can conjure so much feeling and anticipation by assembling thousands of disparate images.

I was mesmerized, and yet also made painfully aware that watching actors replicating life on screen is not the same thing as living life itself. (Photo courtesy guestofaguest.com)

During the three and a half hours I spent in the theater, I found the potency of The Clock to be formidable, and the effect resonated long after I left the theater. Typically, we go to the movies to escape the grind of reality–to forget time. Time in film is an artificial construct; but in The Clock reality collides with the artificial. The Clock is a film about film, but also a film about our own mortality and obsession with time.

Marclay’s work never let me forget where I was and how much time I had spent shifting around on the over-sized IKEA couch. At mid-afternoon The Clock shows people eating lunch, sipping glasses of wine, and discussing official business. There are workers in offices, trains leaving the station, factories humming, and lovers making love. The on-screen actions are carefully choreographed to coincide with daily life outside of the theater. After three and half hours I wanted to linger, to see what was next. And yet, Marclay’s piece was constantly reminding me that I had a long drive home ahead of me. It was Friday, there was traffic to consider, and the minutes were ticking away. And what about all of those lengthy French lunches, the work being accomplished, and the passionate lovemaking? I was mesmerized, and yet also made painfully aware that watching actors replicating life on screen is not the same thing as living life itself.

The Clock made me hyper aware of time in a more immediate sense, as well as in a larger one. The artwork is essentially one, giant, 24-hour memento-mori. But this is a memento-mori for the 21st century. No skulls or tombstones are needed to experience the full force of our impermanence. While watching The Clock, time’s passage is literally staring us in the face.

When I left the David Rubenstein Atrium that rainy afternoon, I couldn’t help but notice clocks and watches everywhere I went. And as I inched my car down the West Side Highway, a woman announced the time over the radio. 4:30. Did I regret not leaving The Clock sooner to avoid rush hour traffic? Not for a minute.

The Clock is on view at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center through August 1st as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. It runs continuously only from Friday morning to Sunday night; from Tuesday to Thursday, it can be viewed from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Admission is free. Visitors are admitted on a first-come, first-served basis; there are no reservations. Once inside the installation, visitors are invited to stay as long as they like. The installation has couches and standing room to accommodate 96 visitors at one time. For information about current wait times, please check the David Rubenstein Atrium website and follow @LCAtrium on Twitter.

You can watch Christian Marclay’s 1995 piece Telephone above.

A special thanks to Dean Klingler at The MacDowell Colony and Matt Barolo at the Keith Haring Foundation, who made my visit to New York possible.

New Perks for Gwarlingo Members

Thanks to all of the readers who have contributed to the Gwarlingo Membership Drive. $5000 of the $15,000 goal has been raised so far. Thank you!

Though art work by Matthew Northridge, Bill Jacobson, and Rachel Perry Welty quickly sold out, I have added a new perk for $100 donors. This gorgeous, signed, limited-edition book by Margaret Lanzetta…

This special edition photograph by Barry Underwood has just arrived in the Gwarlingo studio, as well. The print is limited to ten lucky donors, so don’t wait too long…

Rachel Perry Welty’s artist books were quickly snatched up, but ONE $1000 donor will receive a fruit sticker drawing by Rachel similar to this one…

Rachel Perry Welty, Sin and Paradise, 2009. Fruit stickers and archival adhesive on paper. 21.5 x 21.5 inches (Photo by Clements Howcroft, Boston courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York)

The interactive Member Profiles available to donors who give $50 are more are proving to be extremely popular as well. This is a great chance to share your own work or the work of your arts organization with Gwarlingo readers…

There are lots of other cool rewards too, including a personalized Complete Creative Intensive with me. It’s a great way to jump-start your work in 2013.

If you haven’t donated yet, you can check out my video, artist bios, and all of the member perks here on the Gwarlingo site. A big thank you to everyone who has already supported Gwarlingo. I couldn’t do it without you.

Would you like Gwarlingo delivered to your inbox? It’s easy and free to sign up! You can also follow Gwarlingo on Twitter and Facebook.

Country music legend Kitty Wells died Monday at her home in Madison, Tennessee, after suffering complications from a stroke. She was 92.

The music of Kitty Wells and other country artists played frequently on the turntable in our Georgia house. My grandmother, who grew up on a farm in the North Georgia mountains as one of twelve children, was raised on the sounds of Mother Maybelle and The Carter Family. Music was an integral part of the church services she attended, and my grandmother (who is still living) always loved to belt out hymns on Sunday mornings in an off-key whine reminiscent of both Mother Maybelle and Wells. When I hear the gospel-tinged moan of Kitty Wells today, it still feels like home to me.

Without Wells, it’s possible that a young Loretta Webb born into poverty in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, and married at the ripe age of 15, never would have found the courage to teach herself to play a $17 Harmony Guitar or to write songs like “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “The Pill,” “One’s on the Way,” or “Rated X.”  (Photo courtesy the Associated Press)

From where we sit today, it’s easy to forget how important Wells was to country music. Before Mother Maybelle and Kitty Wells, country music was very much a man’s world. Singers like Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Hank Thompson, and Ernest Tubb emerged from a conservative, working class life obsessed with both sin and salvation. There was poverty, drinking, hard living, followed by the usual Sunday morning repentance. The female characters who inhabit these country music songs were often portrayed as either “angels” or “whores.”

Take Hank Thompson’s number one hit “The Wild Side of Life” (see video below), which tells the story of a woman shirking her domestic duties in pursuit of a wild, night life. “Wild Side” co-writer William Warren based the song on a young woman he once met — a honky tonk angel, as it were — who “found the glitter of the gay night life too hard to resist.” In his book The Grand Ole Opry History of Country Music Paul Kingsbury writes that the song appealed to people who “thought the world was going to hell and that faithless women deserved a good deal of the blame.”

Until Mother Maybelle and Kitty Wells, the female perspective was notably absent from commercial country music. One has to look to Appalachian, Scotch-Irish, and New England folk tunes to find female singers and writers “telling it like it is.” (One of my favorite examples is this Vermont folk tune “Single Again,” which was collected and recorded by legendary song catcher Margaret MacArthur and recently re-recorded by Margaret MacArthur’s granddaughter Robin and her husband Tyler Gibbons.)

Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” was the perfect comeback song to Hank Thompson’s “Wild Side.” It should be noted that the tune wasn’t written by Wells herself, but by J.D. “Jay” Miller, but it was Wells who made it a success. It became the first number one Billboard country hit for a solo female artist, which was in and of itself, a major breakthrough. Here is Bill Friskics-Warren writing in The New York Times:

Ms. Wells was an unlikely and unassuming pioneer. When she recorded “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” she was a 33-year-old wife and mother intending to retire from the business to devote herself to her family full time. The only reason she made the record, she told the weekly newspaper Nashville Scene in 1999, was to collect the union-scale wage ($125) that the session would bring.

“I wasn’t expecting it to make a hit,” she said. “I just thought it was another song.”

But Ms. Wells’s record proved to be much more than just “another song.” It was a rejoinder to Hank Thompson’s No. 1 hit “Wild Side of Life,” a brooding lament in which the singer blames a woman he picks up in a bar for breaking up his marriage, and it became her signature song.

“Honky Tonk Angels” resonated with women who had been outraged by Mr. Thompson’s record, which called into question their morals and their increasing social and sexual freedom. At a time when divorce rates were rising and sexual mores changing in postwar America, the song, with lyrics by J. D. Miller, resounded like a protofeminist anthem.

“As I sit here tonight, the jukebox playin’/The tune about the wild side of life,” Ms. Wells sings, she reflects on married men pretending to be single and causing “many a good girl to go wrong.” She continues:

It’s a shame that all the blame is on us women

It’s not true that only you men feel the same

From the start most every heart that’s ever broken

Was because there always was a man to blame.

The NBC radio network banned Ms. Wells’s record, deeming it “suggestive,” and officials at the Grand Ole Opry would not at first let her perform it on their show. The Opry eventually relented, in part because of the song’s popularity and Ms. Wells’s nonthreatening image.

It was the remarkable Kitty Wells who paved the way for singers like Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline, and Tammy Wynette, whose popular songs defied the typical stereotype of being submissive to men and putting up with their philandering ways.

Without Wells, it’s possible that a young Loretta Webb, born into poverty in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, and married at the ripe age of 15, never would have found the courage to teach herself to play a $17 Harmony Guitar or to write songs like “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “The Pill,” “One’s on the Way,” or “Rated X.” Like Wells, the conservative country music community was slow to embrace Loretta Lynn’s frank songs about sexuality, and often refused to play them on the radio, but both Lynn and Wells found widespread commercial success — a testament to the fact that their voices were appreciated by listeners, if not by the male dominated music business.

Here’s Kitty Wells performing her #1 hit at the Grand Ole Opry. I love this video for the way it captures commercial country music at this moment in history. Everything about the set, band, and television production plays it safe — it’s conservative, white, and non-threatening. The real innovation here is Kitty Wells herself, the woman who voiced an alternative point of view and made it possible for the groundbreaking female voices that followed in her footsteps.

(Note: If you’re reading this article in an email, please click here to watch the videos.)

 
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Filmmaker Jem Cohen produced the late Vic Chesnutt's album "North Star Deserter." Cohen's films, including "Anecdotal Evidence," a film about Chesnutt, will be on view from 12-5, Saturday, June 9th. (Photo by Jem Cohen)

If you’re in the New England area on June 8th, 9th, or 10th, you’ll want to check out the Thing in the Spring art and music festival in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Gwarlingo is proud to be the media sponsor for this event. The festival is organized by musician Eric Gagne (Death to Tyrants and Red-Winged Blackbird) and artist Mary Goldthwaite.

Here’s a rundown of some of the art, film, and music you can see at the festival along with some of my personal favorites. And if you can’t make the event, I encourage you to check out the work of some of these artists online.

The Films of Jem Cohen

From 12-5 p.m. on Saturday, June 9th festival-goers will have a rare chance to view a selection of films by MacDowell Colony fellow Jem Cohen.

Jem is one of the finest  filmmakers working today–a truly original artist using film as a solo medium to create cinematic collages and haunting meditations on memory and place. Along with Peter Hutton and Bill Morrison, Cohen is one of only a handful of contemporary filmmakers pushing the boundaries of lo-fi film in an era that’s increasingly obsessed with digital. Forget your preconceived notions about traditional movie making. Cohen is a rarity even in the independent film world. Cohen’s films, like those of Hutton and Morrison, are works of art–soulful, provocative, anti-commercial, mysterious, unconventional, and beautifully imperfect.

When I look at Jem’s work, I’m reminded of wabi-sabi, a Japanese aesthetic that finds beauty in things imperfect, impermanent, unconventional, and incomplete. In the wabi-sabi system, beauty can be cajoled from ugliness and quality lies in the inconspicuous, overlooked details. In contrast to modernism, wabi-sabi values the one-of-a-kind over the mass produced, darkness over brightness, the “crude” over the slick, and nature over technology. If this isn’t a perfect description of Jem Cohen’s work, then I don’t know what is.

Jem Cohen, "Kings Theater." (Photo courtesy thislongcentury.com)

Cohen's films remind me that we have a choice about how we spend our time. We can seek out those things that are mysterious, unknown, and provocative, or we can allow ourselves to be consumed by the commercialism that repeatedly barrages us in our culture. (A still from Cohen's film "Little Flags")

Cohen, like his high-school friend and collaborator Ian MacKaye (from Fugazi and The Evens), favors a more direct exchange between artist and audience, one that values connection and authenticity more than a vapid commercial transaction. It is this DIY, punk ethos you’ll see at work in Cohen’s highly acclaimed film Instrument, a film about the band Fugazi that took 10 years to complete.

“Punk is what we made it, and what we make it,” Cohen writes in the liner notes to Instrument. “This sense of punk is something that does not go in or out of style: it has to do with making your own way, in whatever field you find yourself in, outside of what the mainstream dictates, and for reasons other than the sell. That is a meaning that Fugazi and I learned from some of the same sources and it is, I hope, the engine that drives my own work as a filmmaker.”

For Cohen, this DIY philosophy means working with cheaper formats like Super 8, video, and 16mm, even as the rest of the film world embraces digital. “It was constantly carrying a Super 8 camera that enabled me to become a filmmaker,” Jem says. “Super 8 was like the 7-inch single or the home 4-track of the film world…The small format freed me up. Shooting everything around me became a way of life.”

The filmmaker has worked with an array of original musical artists through the years–Patti Smith, R.E.M., The Ex, Gil Shaham, Elliott Smith, Cat Power, Sparklehorse, and the late Vic Chesnutt, who committed suicide on Christmas day in 2009. Jem produced Chesnutt’s remarkable 2007 album North Star Deserter.

Jem says his “production” was mostly about picking songs and musicians and bringing them together in the studio.” It was a way of getting at some things; a discussion about death and life, really,” Cohen writes in the book Signal Fires. “It’s not something most people are willing to to attend to. Vic does. He’s a brave, beautiful fellow, and I knew the musicians I brought him together with would enter that discussion and carry it forwards with grace and abandon. As I said in the liner notes, ‘I thought it might get heavy. It did.’”

Jem Cohen, "Tree at Drive-Thru." Brooklyn, 2009 (Photo courtesy of the NY Times Lens Blog)

Jem Cohen, "Fruit Stands." Brooklyn, 2012 (Photo courtesy of the NY Times Lens Blog)

Having grown up in a town not far from Athens, Georgia, the music of both R.E.M. and Chesnutt holds a special power for me, not unlike the work of another great Georgia artist, Flannery O’Connor. (I’ve always thought of Chesnutt as O’Connor’s musical equivalent.) I remember those early days when R.E.M. was touring the South in their blue van, reportedly living on a $2-a-day food allowance. The band was a refreshing, raw musical alternative in the throes of the synthesizer-soaked 80s. If you’re the right age, you may remember the original short films Cohen created to accompany R.E.M. tracks like “Nightswimming” and “Talk about the Passion,” both of which will be on view at The Thing in the Spring.

It’s important to note that these films were artistic collaborations in every sense of the word–short films intended to stand alone, and not commercial music videos created as advertisements for MTV. “The union of music and moving images is terribly important to me,” Jem explains, “and somewhere along the line, it got hijacked.” Fugazi and I “had our disagreements, but I never had to re-do anything because someone didn’t like someone’s haircut or the label wanted to see some scantily clad back-up singers or some poor musician couldn’t lip-sync ‘properly.’”

Both Cohen and MacKaye have found a way to pursue their artwork outside the commercial machine. Here is Cohen describing the relationship between art and politics:

“I just shoot things that I see: places that are changing, scenes from car windows or motels, portraits of friends, of people on the street, of musicians making music. By the same token, I believe that when Fugazi plays, that is what it is all about: playing music. Politics and big thoughts and their relationship with the ‘music world’ are entwined but secondary, and thankfully so. There is still a lot of confusion about this. It came as something of a revelation to me that Fugazi’s standard $5 ticket price didn’t just represent a reaction against the $20 or $30 or $40 Rock Show. It had as much or more to do with the band’s insistence on playing whatever they wanted to play how and whenever they wanted to play it, with no obligation to provide spectacle entertainment or even bow to audience demand. This freedom to go where they want with their music is at the heart of every logistical decision they make. In other words, and this is where most of the critics get it wrong, the music isn’t just about politics, and to a certain degree, the politics are about the music.”

"It came as something of a revelation to me that Fugazi's standard $5 ticket price didn't just represent a reaction against the $20 or $30 or $40 Rock Show. It had as much or more to do with the band's insistence on playing whatever they wanted to play, how and whenever they wanted to play it, with no obligation to provide spectacle entertainment or even bow to audience demand. This freedom to go where they want with their music is at the heart of every logistical decision they make." (Fugazi by Jem Cohen)

For the Thing in the Spring, we've assembled a first-rate collection of Jem's music-related films, as well as his portrait of the acclaimed sculptor Anne Truitt. The short film, titled "Working," was shown at Truitt's retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and is a thought-provoking look at both color and the creative process.

Cohen’s work is finally attracting the widespread critical acclaim it deserves. The filmmaker has received the prestigious Independent Spirit Award, as well as grants from the Guggenheim, Creative Capital, Rockefeller and Alpert Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and other organizations. His films have been broadcast in Europe by the BBC and ZDF/ARTE, and in the U.S. by the Sundance Channel and PBS. They’re also in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney, and Melbourne’s Screen Gallery. In 2009 a bilingual publication titled Signal Fires: The Cinema of Jem Cohen was published by Gobierno de Navarra.

For the Thing in the Spring, we’ve assembled a first-rate collection of Jem’s music-related films, as well as his portrait of the acclaimed sculptor Anne Truitt. The short film, titled Working, was shown at Truitt’s retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and is a thought-provoking look at both color and the creative process.

Such an extensive screening of Cohen’s work is an exceptional event, not only because these films are too rarely seen, but also because the spirit in which they were created is so seldom in evidence in the film world.

Cohen’s films remind me that we have a choice about how we spend our time. We can seek out those things that are mysterious, unknown, and provocative, or we can allow ourselves to be consumed by the commercialism that repeatedly barrages us in our culture. To choose to spend time with Jem’s work is to choose an alternative. Once you’ve seen the original, haunting films of Jem Cohen, you’re unlikely to forget them.

Jem Cohen beside a marquis for his film "Benjamin Smoke" (Photo courtesy lightindustry.org)

The Films of Jem Cohen: Schedule

Saturday, June 9th, 12-5 p.m.

This free, special screening at the Peterborough Historical Society is part of The MacDowell Colony’s community outreach program and was made possible with the support of both Jem Cohen and MacDowell.

(Note: Start times are approximate)

12:00 p.m. Instrument featuring Fugazi (115 minutes)

2:00 p.m. Cat Power Live (5 minutes)

2:05 p.m. Long for the City featuring Patti Smith (10 minutes)

2:15 p.m. Building a Broken Mousetrap featuring The Ex (62 minutes)

3:20 p.m. Nice Evening, Transmission Down featuring Sparklehorse (11 min)

3:30 p.m. Anecdotal Evidence featuring Vic Chesnutt (12 minutes)

3:45 p.m. Anne Truitt, Working (13 minutes)

4:00 p.m. Jem Cohen: Music Works (60 minutes total)

R.E.M.-”Nightswimming,” “Country Feedback,” and “E-Bow the Letter” (with Patti Smith)

Gil Shaham and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra-Vivaldi’s “Winter” from The Four Seasons

Direct Effect-”Away”-PSA Announcement

Lucky Three featuring Elliott Smith

Jonathan Richman (from the Modern Lovers)-I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar

Miracle Legion-”You’re the One”

R.E.M.-”Talk about the Passion” and “Belong” (live)

Mystic-Messiaen’s “Vocalise” from Concert for Four featuring Myung-Whun Chung and the Bastille Orchestra

The Thing in the Spring Music Line-up

This year’s festival includes a wonderfully diverse range of music. I highly recommend purchasing a $35 weekend pass, which is good for all music concerts (except for the late-night Saturday show at Harlow’s, which is $5 at the door). Town Hall concerts are $18 in advance and $22 at the door, so $35 is a bargain. There are only 100 weekend passes available though, and they’re going fast. You can purchase weekend passes and advance tickets here. Get one before they’re gone!

While the Seacoast band Mmoss veers toward the psychedelic end of the spectrum, Brooklyn-based Woods is lo-fi, reverb-laden folk rock. (Mmoss cover photo courtesy daykampmusic.com)

Friday, June 8

Woods . Mmoss . Daniel Higgs

On Friday, June 8th the jangly, upbeat sounds of Woods and Mmoss will kick off the festival at the Peterborough Town Hall. Also performing is Daniel Higgs, an off-beat, hillbilly mystic partial to Eastern drones, stream-of-consciousness lyrics, and unconventional instruments like the Jews harp. The former lead singer of the band Lungfish, Higgs is known for his hypnotic style and onstage shenanigans. The fact that Higgs had the audacity to record an album of 17 instrumental, Jews harp improvisations tells you everything you need to know about the artist’s musical approach.

While the band Mmoss veers toward the psychedelic end of the spectrum, Brooklyn-based Woods is lo-fi, reverb-laden folk rock. Woods sounds more like sun-soaked California than Brooklyn to me (think The Byrds meets the Velvet Underground with a dash of Neil Young thrown in). Jeremy Earl’s quivering falsetto makes this band stand out. Woods’ latest release, Sun and Shade, may be their strongest work to date. You can preview the album right here (or if you’re reading this in an email, click to here to listen to samples and view all videos)

After the show, cross the street to Harlow’s Pub for a free after-party djed by musician Austin Wright.

Doors open at 7 p.m. at the Town Hall. You can purchase tickets for the Friday night show here or save money with a weekend pass.

Steve Albini, producer of both Nirvana and the Pixies, is a Nina Nastasia fan and engineered her first two records. Famed BBC DJ John Peel described Nastasia's debut album "Dogs" as "astonishing." It's immediacy and rawness are striking, and the tone of Nastasia's voice pitch-perfect.

Saturday, June 9

Nina Nastasia . Brown Bird . P.G. Six

I’m eagerly anticipating Saturday night’s concert at the Town Hall, which features Brown Bird, P.G. Six, and New York City based singer-songwriter Nina Nastasia.

I’ve enjoyed Nastasia’s delicate voice and intimate songwriting for over a decade and look forward to seeing her on stage for the first time. While her style might be considered country or folk, her off-kilter songwriting and band, which includes instruments like cello, viola, and bowed saw, add an urbane twist to her music. Her haunting sound relies on an understated simplicity. Steve Albini, producer of both Nirvana and the Pixies, is a Nastasia fan and engineered her first two records, and famed BBC DJ John Peel described Nastasia’s debut album Dogs as “astonishing.”  It’s immediacy and rawness are striking, and the tone of Nastasia’s voice pitch-perfect. Her follow-up, The Blackened Air, with its visceral, elegant tales of rural life, has been in heavy rotation on my iPod for years now, but her newest records also hold their own against these two early gems.

P.G. Six is one of the monikers used by Patrick Gubler, a New York singer and guitar player whose debut solo album, Parlor Tricks and Porch Favorites, was released in 2001 by the Amish label to much critical acclaim. As a multi-instrumentalist, he worked in the group Tower Recordings, which released albums on the Siltbreeze and Audible Hiss labels. They were cult icons of the downtown New York scene during the ’90s, with performances that included British folk revival styles meeting Sun Ra-inspired jamming, to all-out noise and improvisation. In August of 2011, Drag City released P.G. Six’s sophomore effort for the label, the very electric, full band effort Starry Mind. Their style might be described as Grateful Dead meets Fairpoint Convention.

The Americana band will pair nicely with Nastasia and P.G. Six. “A cantankerous and drafty two-man ship stationed in Providence, RI, Brown Bird plays original, traditional American music in the best sense possible,” says Professor Charles Booth. “It is music that comes from a context but is not afraid of the context: a living root with a view towards the leaves.” The band warmly layers guitar, banjo, cello, violin, double bass, and more in their their latest full-length effort, Salt for Salt.

The band’s latest release was recorded live to tape in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Booth says the record is the first “to capture the intense energy of the duo’s live show, surging in waves that often swell into high-spirited, foot-stomping madness…[Dave] Lamb and his partner Morgan Eve Swain write simply, and the record is eerily sparse at times – a tambourine, a bass drum and the cello often the sole accompaniment to Lamb’s…cracked, wood-smoke voice…But Brown Bird also know too much to be pure romantics; Lamb’s continual reference to ships clearly come from his years spent working at the shipyard in Warren, RI, just as their arrangements well only from a deep knowledge of the American folk tradition.”

Doors open at 6:30 p.m. at the Peterborough Town Hall. You can purchase tickets for the Saturday night show here or save money with a weekend pass. After the concert, you can cross the street to Harlow’s Pub, where Mail the Horse and Coke Weed will be performing. The Harlow’s concert starts at 10 p.m. and tickets are $5 at the door.

Dave Lamb and his partner Morgan Eve Swain, known as the band Brown Bird, write simply, and their latest record is "eerily sparse at times - a tambourine, a bass drum and the cello often the sole accompaniment to Lamb's...cracked, wood-smoke voice."

Sunday, June 10

Death to Tyrants . Klessa

The music wraps up on Sunday with an afternoon concert at The Peterborough Historical Society’s Bass Hall.

Many years ago, friends and I crammed into Eric Gagne’s small apartment to listen to New Paltz band L’Hiver jam on their toy instruments. Their light, upbeat sound was enchanting and made the perfect living room concert, so I was excited when Eric informed me that the members of L’Hiver have reformed as the group Klessa. Xylophone, clarinet, and accordion are just a few of the instruments you’ll hear on Sunday afternoon. Klessa’s sound is sprawling, loose, and somewhat unkempt, but what the band may lack in taughtness, they more than make up for with their authenticity and exuberance. These musicians are having fun, and the pleasure is infectious. This is music both you and your kids can enjoy.

Fans of progressive punk band Death to Tyrants will want to be sure to catch Sunday’s concert. Eric Gagne, Randy Patrick, Ben Rogers, Paul Gagne, and Ian Logan haven’t played together since 2006, so this reunion concert will be a treat for fans.

Death to Tyrants and Klessa can be seen at The Peterborough Historical Society at 2 p.m. on Sunday, June 10th. Tickets are $7. You can purchase advance tickets for the show here or purchase a weekend pass.

There will also be free outdoor performances throughout the weekend by Tongue Oven, David Kontak, Rock Flint Contemporary Ensemble, Ouroboros, and more!

These ceramic creations by artist Megan Bogonovich are one of the many highlights at the *broke arts fair.

*Broke the Affordable Arts Fair

From 10-4 on Saturday be sure to stop by *broke at the Town Hall in Peterborough, where more than 50 artists will be selling work for under $50. *Broke is a welcome relief from the traditional, tired craft fairs held in basements and church halls all over New England. The work here is more cutting edge than you’re used to seeing at regional fairs, and you’ll find established artists, as well as younger, emerging artists, who have been selected from a wide-range of applicants.

I’ve been attending *broke for several years now and always leave with something unique in my bag. You’ll find everything from letterpress books, terrariums, handmade jewelery, ceramics, photography, collage, handmade retro-aprons (from Sarah Taylor), and much, much more. Artist Mary Goldthwaite-Gagne is the organizing force behind *broke. The quality of the work only seems to improve each year, and the event has become a much-anticipated, regional favorite.

One of the *broke artists I’ve been following with interest is Megan Bogonovich, who turns the familiar cliches of ceramics into unique, whimsical sculptures. I’m particularly fond of her all-white, clay pieces of animals. It’s the perfect blending of medium, humor, and charm. Her work pokes fun at kitsch, while somehow managing to transcend it.

Megan Bogonovich's ceramics are the perfect blending of medium, humor, and charm. Her work pokes fun at kitsch, while somehow managing to transcend it.

Megan Bogonovich's humorous cake toppers have become so popular that she has created her own Etsy shop.

Some of the other work that caught my eye while perusing the line-up include Miss Olivia Kennett‘s striking collages, the handmade work of textile artist and garden designer Emily Drury, Mary Remington’s handmade china cups, and Lillian Helen Graham‘s vintage tin jewelry. Also, for the first time, the Western New York Book Arts Center will be selling letterpress posters and small press poetry books at *broke.

Garden designer and textile artist Emily Drury will have one-of-a-kind terrariums for sale at *broke.

Drury's plant-dyed yarn will also be available.

For the first time, the Western New York Book Arts Center will be selling letterpress cards, posters, and small press poetry books at *broke.

Cards by the Western New York Book Arts Center. The press is based in Buffalo.

A 3-color print of the Buffalo Central Terminal, an art deco masterpiece that was built in 1929. This print is #7 in WNYBAC's series of architecture prints.

*Broke also features these unique collages by Miss Olivia Kennett.

A collage by Miss Olivia Kennett

An untitled collage by Miss Olivia Kennett

Artist Lillian Helen Graham re-purposes found materials in her work. This necklace is made from an English tea tin.

These earrings designed by Lillian Helen Graham are made from an old candy tin.

Handmade cups by artist Mary Remington

Cups by Mary Remington

Admission to *broke is free. Stop by the affordable arts fair at the Peterborough Town Hall, eat lunch in town, and check out Jem Cohen’s films next door at the Historical Society while you’re in the neighborhood. *Broke ends at 4 p.m., but Jem Cohen’s films will be on view until 5 p.m.

New Work by Artist Luke Ramsey

Luke Ramsey, "Idea Man," Ink on paper.

Artist Luke Ramsey was last in Peterborough in 2005 for a residency at The MacDowell Colony. In a collaboration between Thing in the Spring and the MacDowell Colony’s community outreach program, Luke is returning to Peterborough with a large drawing he’s created especially for the event.

“I’ve completed a series of 33 large heads, with a focus on their eyes,” Ramsey told me over email. “I gave myself eye strain from a previous mural project, and my eyes were messed up for a week. They are fortunately back to normal now. This piece is about my gratitude for vision. It’s also a nod to the diversity that comes together with the Thing in the Spring Festival.”

"Public art to me is more responsibility to an audience," Ramsey explained. "Personal is a responsibility to myself. I love public art because it's an opportunity to communicate a message. Personal works lends itself more to exploration."

"Read for Rest" by Luke Ramsey

Luke has collaborated with over 100 different artists to date and exhibits internationally.  In 2010 he completed a giant outdoor mural with Josh Holinaty on the John Howard Society building in Edmonton, Canada, 2010. The mural recently won an award of excellence from The City of Edmonton. “Public art to me is more responsibility to an audience,” Ramsey explained. “Personal is a responsibility to myself. I love public art because it’s an opportunity to communicate a message. Personal works lends itself more to exploration.”

Ramsey is also one of the founders of Islands Fold, an artist residency located on Pender Island, B.C, Canada. “It started out as a free of charge artist residency on Pender Island that has hosted 30 artists so far,” said Luke. “It was inspired by a MacDowell residency I had in 2005, and also a way to bring together my love of art and my wife Angela’a love for health and nutrition. We took a break from offering the residencies. This summer we are starting a new chapter for Islands Fold called ‘Part Time Hermit.’ It’ll be a cozy studio in the woods that is available as an artist’s get away.”

Luke Ramsey, "Compatibles."

Cartoon Cereal Party & Farm Breakfast

Ruth and Dan Holmes of Sunnyfield Farm have been providing the Monadnock region with a quality selection of grass fed meat, raw milk, eggs, vegetables, and more for many years now. Ruth and Dan believe that their sustainable approach to farming improves community health and connection. Sunnyfield cares for its plants and animals with three inseparable commitments: 1) to improve food value; 2) to insure a healthy and humane life for the animals; and 3) to constantly improve the health of the land and soil.

Farmers Ruth and Dan Holmes (on left) with Silas Holmes and his wife Abby run Sunnyfield Farm in Peterborough, New Hampshire. On Sunday, June 10th Sunnyfield, The Thing in the Spring and Harlow's Pub are offering a full, farm breakfast made with fresh local ingredients for just $12.

The Thing in the Spring festival is all about community, about getting friends, families, and neighbors off their couches and enjoying conversation, good food, and camaraderie. So call some friends or grab the kids and stop by Harlow’s Pub between 9-1 on Sunday, June 10th. $12 will buy you a full, farm breakfast made with the freshest, local ingredients from Sunnyfield Farm. For $5 you (or the kids) can purchase an all-you-can-eat cereal bowl with your choice of farm fresh milk, whole milk, skim, or soy. Cartoons will be showing on the big screen, so come support your local farmer and bring the whole family along for the fun.

The Peterborough Picture Show

During the festival keep your eyes peeled for Rachelle Beaudoin and Steve Roberge’s red bus. They’ll be doing an improvisational slideshow in their VW. Look for the red bus around town. To learn more about Beaudoin’s multi-media artwork, you can visit her website.

For More Information

To purchase a weekend pass to the music concerts, individual concert tickets, or to learn more, visit The Thing in the Spring website. You can also follow the festival on its Facebook page.

Gwarlingo is excited to be the media sponsor for the festival. Click here to subscribe to Gwarlingo by RSS or email. It’s free, and your personal information will never be sold or shared. You can also follow Gwarlingo on Twitter and Facebook.

(Photo courtesy whatthecool.com)

The best link in this morning’s Twitter feed came from Christopher Jobson over at Colossal.

Last month the Copenhagen Philharmonic pulled off an audacious stunt—performing Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt on a crowded, moving metro train for unsuspecting passengers. The flash mob was created in collaboration with Radio Klassisk. All music was performed and recorded in the metro.

Peer Gynt is the incidental music to Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play of the same name, written by the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg in 1875. It premiered along with the play on February 24th, 1876 in Norway. Grieg later extracted eight movements to make two four-movement suites. As Erica Jeal explains in the Guardian, Grieg always wanted to write a truly Norwegian opera; he never did, but the incidental music he wrote for Ibsen’s play is the nearest he came. Grieg’s dream of seeing this piece performed out the theater and in the concert hall was never fulfilled in his lifetime.

The below video features the movement “Morning Mood,” which depicts the rising of the sun during Act IV, Scene 4 of Ibsen’s play. In this scene the play’s hero finds himself stranded in the Moroccan desert after his companions have taken his yacht and abandoned him there while he slept.

I love the juxtaposition of this quiet, peaceful piece with the moving metro train and bustling, preoccupied commuters. It’s also poignant to watch the expressions on the passengers faces as they transform from suspicion and discomfort into delight.

It just goes to prove that classical music doesn’t have to contained in concert halls or only enjoyed by an elite few.

Thanks to Christopher Jobson for passing on this link.

Further Listening

While Grieg lovers will undoubtedly have their own favorite Peer Gynt album, this 1998 EMI recording by Sir Thomas Beecham and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra remains a favorite amongst classical music aficionados. The album is part of EMI’s Masters Series and was recorded, mastered, or re-mastered at the internationally renowned Abbey Road Studios in London.

Jazz lovers might also be interested in Duke Ellington’s interpretation of Peer Gynt, which was recorded in 1960 on his Swinging Suites by Edward E. and Edward G. album. In 1990 the album was rereleased on CD as Three Suites along with Ellington’s reworking of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. Earlier this year a remastered version of Ellington’s Peer Gynt was released along with Strayhorn’s Suite Thursday.

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Artist Mary Goldthwaite-Gagne studies "Capturing Resonance," a piece made of chain-link fencing on view at the deCordova Museum. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

On my recent visit to the deCordova Museum, one of the artworks I found most compelling was “Capturing Resonance” by sculptor Soo Sunny Park and composer Spencer Topel.

Park, who was born in Seoul, Korea, currently lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, where she is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College. The sculptor is best known for turning quotidian building materials like insulation and dry wall into sublime, experiential installations. For “Capturing Resonance,” Park has transformed the unconventionally-shaped Window Gallery of the deCordova into a multi-sensory environment using chain-link fencing.

Depending on the time of day, rainbow hued shadows fill the Window Gallery, shifting from crisp representations of the structure to abstract color washes. (Photo by Peter Harris courtesy the de Cordova Museum)

Soo Sunny Park is best known for turning quotidian building materials like insulation and dry wall into sublime, experiential installations. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

When artists like Park re-purpose common materials, I find the technique is most effective when the everyday object becomes enmeshed in the final piece and doesn't advertise its cleverness in an overt, obnoxious way. The subtlety of Park's piece only adds to its drama. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

By inserting thousands of iridescent acrylic Plexiglas squares into chain link cells, Park has created a sprawling, undulating form that transmits, reflects, and refracts both the natural and artificial light into the gallery. (Photo by Peter Harris courtesy the de Cordova Museum)

When artists like Park re-purpose common materials, I find the technique is most effective when the everyday object becomes enmeshed in the final piece and doesn’t advertise its cleverness in an overt, obnoxious way. The subtlety of Park’s piece only adds to its drama. Only careful observers will recognize the fencing material, and I suspect some visitors never notice it at all.

By inserting thousands of iridescent acrylic Plexiglas squares into chain link cells, Park has created a sprawling, undulating form that transmits, reflects, and refracts both the natural and artificial light into the gallery. The Plexi and chain link fence units appear as biomorphic forms, overwhelming the field of vision of each visitor as they enter the gallery.

Depending on the time of day, rainbow hued shadows fill the space, shifting from crisp representations of the structure to abstract color washes with the path of the sun. Hanging from the third floor ceiling, “Capturing Resonance” is well-designed for the space–it is visible from outside the museum and is a welcoming presence when passing through the museum’s stairwell.

Hanging from the third floor ceiling, "Capturing Resonance" is well-designed for the space--it is visible from outside the museum and is a welcoming presence when passing through the museum's stairwell. (Photo by Peter Harris courtesy the de Cordova Museum)

Layering an audio dimension onto "Capturing Resonance," Spencer Topel blends whispering chords, soft tonal washes, and elongated instrumental sounds into a continuous, continually changing composition. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

When approaching the museum at night, "Capturing Resonance" can be seen hovering above Steve Lambert's "Capitalism Works For Me! True/False," which is part of the deCordova Biennial. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

Only careful observers will recognize the fencing material, and I suspect some visitors never notice it at all. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

Layering an audio dimension onto “Capturing Resonance,” Spencer Topel blends whispering chords, soft tonal washes, and elongated instrumental sounds into a continuous, continually changing composition. As I walked through the space, motion sensors in the installation responded by activating different sounds that varied in both intensity and frequency. Depending on the number of people in the space, the sounds increased or decreased accordingly.

“Capturing Resonance” is part of the ongoing PLATFORM series at the deCordova, which invites emerging and mid-career artists to create a work in response to the museum’s indoor or outdoor space.

I found “Capturing Resonance” a memorable experience, both sonically and visually. If you’re planning to catch the deCordova Biennial before it closes on April 22nd, be sure to spend some time in the Window Gallery exploring this fascinating installation. For directions, hours, and more information about the museum, please visit the deCordova website.

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