Anne Guthrie / Virginia Overton / François Bonnet — Sculpture Gardens (Future Audio Graphics)
It’s a sad, hard fact that circulating music by means of physical objects is becoming the exception and not the rule. So, if you’re going to do it, might as well do it right and make it special. Future Audio Graphics makes LPs that bind interdisciplinary collaborations within gatefold LPs. Each combines a text by one artist, images by another and a record of sounds by a third. Ironically on Sculpture Gardens the efforts of writer François Bonnet (aka Kassel Jaeger), sculptor Virginia Overton and sound artist Anne Guthrie cohere into a consideration of impermanence.
Through his efforts to reissue works of electronic music on vinyl, Bonnet, a published author and the artistic director of Groupe de Recherche Musicales in Paris, has had plenty of opportunity to think about how ready-made vinyl objects can concentrate attention upon work, as well as how rapidly records become items to be hunted rather than merely purchased. Even when one fixes one’s work within an object, other peoples’ perceptions of the object and the work cut into it aren’t fixed. Neither is the object’s availability; LPs sooner or later drift into the collector’s realm. Bonnet doesn’t waste words on the peculiar circumstances of vinyl records in his essay, but a reader might think about his efforts to present them while reading his discussion of the relationships between art objects, ready-made objects and time. Time and the changes that accompany its passage are, he suggests, part of the artist’s material. Virginia Overton’s images depict aluminum pans that she installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She used them as containers of small gardens; when the plants died, she flipped them over and used them as sound resonators. Inside one of the museum’s galleries, Overton had placed cast-off pieces of metal and wood, which she repurposed as sculptures. Nothing stays the same, but in change new phenomena emerge.
Anne Guthrie’s portion of the work uses sounds collected from Overton’s exhibits as a starting point. She collected field recordings of the gallery interior, the outdoor area where the gardens were installed, weather, distant machinery and close-up captures of herself moving objects and deploying microphones. The magnified sounds of precise work and plants living and dying, sometimes straight and sometimes processed to draw out particular timbres, loom over distant jets and HVAC units, and into this mix Guthrie weaves the distant parping of her French horn. Across four discrete tracks, one can hear different moments and environments fixed for a moment in one representative configuration, which is now an object that can be bought and displayed and played in other times and places. Guthrie’s decisions and actions use Overton’s work as a starting point to illustrate Bonnet’s words.
