Discover Top Posts Tagged with #broadway 1602

Art - An Electroacoustic Rainforest

Gallerist and curator Anke Kempkes presents ”Rainforest V”, an electroacoustic environment conceived by David Tudor and realized by the group Composers Inside Electronics.

Grown out of a 1973 workshop in Chocorua, New Hampshire, that included David Tudor, John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein, Linda Fisher, Ralph Jones, Martin Kalve, David Tudor, and Bill Viola. it is an evolving installation, sculptures, which function as instrumental loudspeakers each independently produces sound material to display the sculptures’ resonant characteristics.

"The appreciation of Rainforest V depends upon individual exploration. The audience is invited to move freely among the sculptures and explore sounds electronically derived from the resonant characteristics of physical materials.”

For an audiophile this is utopia and for those who are new to Tudors genius, it’s a mouthful. Nonetheless a blissful experience - to say the least.

Anke Kempkes walks us through Rainforest V the intriguing new show at her gallery, Broadway 1602.

(In the photo: Anke Kempkes of Broadway 1602 and Phil Edelstein of Composers Inside Electronics)

Interview with Anke Kempkes by PatrickDuffy

Patrick Duffy: How did thisexhibition find it’s way to Broadway 1602?

Anke Kempkes: We represent the archiveof Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). David Tudor has been a central artist collaborating with the engineers of E.A.T. in his piece “Bandoneon” in 1966 at the today legendary “9 Evenings” at the Armory in NY which was among the most spectacular events E.A.T. organized. Everybody of the NY avant-garde you can think of was at that event, either performing or in the audience!

This was the moment where Tudor moved from major avant-garde music Interpreter (of e.g. famously Cage’s piece “4’33””) to Composer creating his first totally eccentric electronic instruments, which moved on floats through the Armory hall in this intriguing ‘robotic’ way to an extreme noise score that sounds to our ears today like early Industrial. These experiments were the beginnings of “Rainforest”.

I met a year ago John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein who were among the young composers who collaborated in 1973 on the first large-scale installation version of “Rainforest” with Tudor. It was at this point that Tudor “handed the piece over” to the collective process. This group soon prophetically named itself “Composers Inside Electronics (CIE)”.

John and Phil are the remaining original members of this group and they kept the legacy of the piece going over decades. We had the most passionate debates over many meetings about Tudor’s aesthetic principles and the pioneering days of Sonic Art.

Finally it came to this very exiting moment where we actually realized the piece in our space.

(In the Photo: Rose Lord Director Marian Goodman Gallery)

PD: Where there any challenges mounting the work?

AK: The beauty of the piece is its effortless appearance. Tudor called it “self-teaching”. John and Phil ‘“composed” it site-specifically in our space and it looks as if it literally ‘Fell to Earth’ and into the gallery.

It occupies the space magically. There is something very moving about the balance of simplicity and complexity it creates visually and sonically. And it will never look and sound the same again.

The piece changes with every mise-en-scène. Its material aspect is so light that it almost looks like a painting in space.

PD: How do you think this relates to our world now?

I think the piece is extremely relevant today. Its an archetype for so much contemporary practice today. I cannot resist thinking that it anticipates a lot of the sensitivity of Central and Latin American art today, that fascination with the ‘poor’, mundane object composed to a spectrum of sculptural expression that goes from whimsical to eccentric to elegant and sophisticated.

A lot of young artists currently look back to the early experimentations of Sound Art and so we got numerous reactions from the contemporary scene of how “very timely” this presentation is.

PD: What would modern sound engineers say about Tudor’s techniques?

AK: In fact, John and Phil recently started working with a lot of young composers and they are fascinated with Tudor. He was a very enigmatic artist and so his innovations still get discovered now and deeply investigated. The relation of sound and materiality in his work is fascinating on so many levels.

A lot of the ideas in the ‘instruments’ and scores Tudor created anticipated very early what - superficially seen- in technical terms seems a given today, - such as creating sound libraries from where a scores self-generates, while when you go deeper into the philosophy of his work, you find endless stimulation. It made me think again about the ‘politics’ of the avant-garde: they are to be found in the best sense in formalist relational principles such as “Inter-dependence” or “Resonance”. And these ideas can have an even ‘ethical’ dimension…

PD: There is double meaning for “Rainforest” - can you explain the metaphor?

AK: its a fascinating theme. In 1968 Merce Cunningham came up with the title “RainForest” for his seminal choreography in which he also featured Warhol’s “Silver Clouds” as props. David Tudor created the music score for the dance using objects as resonance space and called it also “Rainforest”. This was the next step towards the independent sound installation we show today.

But why “Rainforest” in the midst of NYC’s late 1960s urban asphalt desert? What did it mean? Finally in 1970 Billy Klüver, the charismatic artist engineer and founder of E.A.T. revealed the underpinnings. Using an acid green image of a rainforest as the poster for E.A.T.’s “Projects Outside Art” he wrote:

“The rainforest is made up of thousands of feedback loops of continual activity. Thousands of animals, plants and trees live in the rainforest. Its roots are few and shallow as opposed to the oak tree’s deep roots in the ground. The oak tree takes energy out of the ground and shades the area so that no small bush or flower can grow near it. The main purpose of Experiments in Art and Technology is to develop, through experimentation and experience, fluid organizational forms whose model is that of the rainforest rather than the oak tree.”

So Billy Klüver was thinking of his art milieu in terms of a non-hierarchical ‘ecological system’, and Tudor was thinking of that same “sonic ecology” in his piece “Rainforest.

It was a metaphor for social forms rather than just an aesthetic motif.

PD: This exhibition is something that constantly changes and evolves what parts have changes and stayed the same? Also, where do you see this in the next 30 years?

AK: There is a fascinating archeology of the objects in this installation. Some go back to the very beginnings of the piece in 1970s, like the toilet “Floats” (1973) created by John Driscoll or “Slinky” (1975), a very awkward object created by David Tudor. There is the “Computer Disk” from 1976, a giant object from the earliest days of computer technology, which had the capacity of probably less than 5 MB. Some of these are so entangled with the time they came from that they could not be replaced by anything else. Others are composed of more generic materials in a sense that they could have been made or chosen almost in any moment since 1973. The idea of the piece was and is that an ongoing number of new objects can enter a site-specific installation of “Rainforest”. So the ‘youngest’ piece in our installation is “Cedar Plank” created by Phil Edelstein in 2015.

The sound library has also evolved over decades and that means the sonic possibilities of “Rainforest” are still growing.

John and Phil are in the process to pass the piece on to a younger generation of composers who can continue the legacy and life of the piece. I am certain it will continue to engage and fascinate. Particularly as today’s society is already driving towards new anchor points of embodied experience in the (post)-digital age.

PD: 3 words to describe “Rainforest” to someone who has never seen the work?

AK: Floating, Resonance, Interdependence.

(In the photo: Dr. Kathy Battista - Curator of the E.A.T. retrospective at Museum der Moderne Salzbug)

Words from David Tudor, form interview by John Fullemann on 10/12/85

"My piece, "Rainforest IV", was developed from ideas I had as early as 1965. The basic notion, which is a technical one, was the idea that the loudspeaker should have a voice which was unique and not just an instrument of reproduction, but as an instrument unto itself. an offer came, which didn’t get realized, but I was asked to make a proposal for a park in Washington. The ideas was to have a sounding outdoor sculpture, so my mind began turning around. I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be wonderful if each sculpture sounded completely different from the other and the whole could be run by one machine which could be like a commutator.’ I eventually acquired some devices called audio transducers. They were first developed for the US Navy because they needed a device which could sound above and under the water simultaneously. I went to see the manufacturer of these devices and they gave me several samples. They later produced a commercial version. I had them in 1968 when MC asked me for a dance score and I decided that I would try to do the sounding sculpture on a very small scale. I took these transducers and attached them to very small objects and then programmed them with signals from sound generators. The sound they produced was then picked up by phono cartridges and then sent to a large speaker system. Several different versions of this piece were produced. In 1973 I made “Rainforest IV” where the objects that the sounds are sent through are very large so that they have their own presence in space. I mean, they actually sound locally in the space where they are hanging as well as being supplemented by a loudspeaker system. The idea is that if you send sound through materials, the resonant nodes of the materials are released and those can be picked up by contact microphones or phono cartridges and those have a different kind of sound than the object does when you listen to it very close where it’s hanging. It becomes like a reflection and it makes, I thought, quite a harmonious and beautiful atmosphere, because wherever you move in the room, you have reminiscences of something you have heard at some other point in the space. It’s (can be) a large group piece actually, any number of people can participate in it. It’s important that each person makes their own sculpture, decides how to program it, and performs it themselves. Very little instruction is necessary for the piece. I’ve found it to be almost self-teaching because you discover how to program the devices by seeing what they like to accept. Its been a very rewarding type of activity for me. It’s been done by as large a group as 14 people. So that was how our Rainforest was done.”

RAINFOREST V

CONCEIVED by DAVID TUDOR

REALIZED by COMPOSERS INSIDE ELECTRONICS

OPENING FRIDAY JAN 30, 2014, 6-8 PM

EXHIBITION JAN 31 - MARCH 4

#Art #David Tudor #Rainforest #Broadway 1602 #Gallery #NYC

Paul P., The Homosexual Lovers Throughout the Ages Party, 2014

#Paul P #Paul P.#Stephen Tennant #Broadway 1602 #collage #homosexual lovers throughout the ages party

Paul P. Untitled 2013 Oil on Canvas with Mahogany Artists Frame 59 x 38 x 2 cm

#broadway 1602 #paul p

Xanti Schawinsky at Broadway 1602

#Broadway 1602 #New York #United States #Xanti Schawinsky

Penny Slinger

Who Turns Her Back

1977

Collage mounted on board

40.6 x 45.7 cm

Courtesy of the Artist and Broadway 1602, New York

Learn more about this artist and the gallery that represents her by visiting the Broadway 1602 website.

#Broadway 1602 #art #black frame #frame noir #penny slinger #frieze new york #frieze art fair