Marina Rosenfeld + Kusum + LoVid
Curated by Caleb Kelly
Marina Rosenfeld
Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and artist based in New York City. Her work has deployed both musical and visual media, including a noted series of performance works; sound installation; video; photography and hybrid forms drawing on these. While still a student, in 1994 she created the Sheer Frost Orchestra, a musical performance realized by 17 women on floor-bound electric guitars, deploying nail-polish bottles as sensitive and magical sound-producing implements. Other large-scale works include the performances Emotional Orchestra (Deitch Projects, New York, Tate Modern, London), WHITE LINES (Wien Modern, British School at Rome, Taktlos Bern, Weld/Stockholm and others), and 2008’s Teenage Lontano, a work for 34-voice teenaged choir and suspended speaker installation. Teenage Lontano, Rosenfeld’s “cover version” of Gyorgy Ligeti’s orchestral work Lontano of 1967, was premiered in the vast Drill Hall space of the Park Avenue Armory in New York as part of the Whitney Biennial 2008. “Watching this piece, I felt the opening of a portal between a failed utopian past and the possibility that the more real present is already something to love. I was transported.” (New York Magazine, 2008). The work had its European premiere in Amsterdam in June 2009 as a co-production of the Holland Festival and Stedelijk Museum.
Rosenfeld also performs frequently in the US and Europe as an improviser, playing a distinctive combination of turntables and her own dub plates, for which she composes original music; these records are later remixed, manipulated, and otherwise transformed in live performance, sometimes by other turntablists as well as herself. Rosenfeld’s collaborators have included Ikue Mori, Christian Marclay, George Lewis, Kaffe Matthews, Nels Cline, Zeena Parkins, Lee Ranaldo, Martin Tétreault, Philip Jeck, Kim Gordon, Christof Kurzmann, Alan Licht, Dieb 13, Raz Mesinai, Anthony Coleman, and many others.
Rosenfeld’s work has appeared in a wide variety of contexts including two Whitney Biennials (2002 and 2008); Creative Time’s project for the World Financial Center site after September 11; survey exhibitions such as “Bitstreams” (Whitney Museum), “Her Noise” (Electra), “Music / Video” (Bronx Museum & Strassbourg Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain), “Electronic Music Archive” (Kunsthalle St. Gallen), and “New Sounds New York” (The Kitchen); and major festivals in North America and Europe including Wein Modern, Donaueschingen, the Holland Festival, Ars Electronica, Musikprotokoll, Pro Musica Nova, Maerz Musik, Mutek, Electronic Music Foundation/Ear to the Earth, and Los Angeles’ CEIAT festival, among others. Rosenfeld has also performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; with the art-band “Text of Light”; with Sonic Youth during their “Good-bye Twentieth Century” tour; and was part of the London Musicians Collective’s “Turntable Hell” project.
Kusum
LoVid
LoVid is an interdisciplinary artist duo composed of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus. Our work includes live video installations, sculptures, digital prints, patchworks, media projects, performances, and video recordings. We combine many opposing elements in our work, contrasting hard electronics with soft patchworks, analog and digital, or handmade and machine produced objects. This multidirectional approach is also reflected in the content of our work: romantic and aggressive, wireless and wire-full. We are interested in the ways in which the human body and mind observe, process, and respond to both natural and technological environments, and in the preservation of data, signals, and memory.
Theoretial: Cracked Media The Sound of Malfunction with Caleb Kelly
Caleb Kelly
Caleb Kelly is an academic, event producer and curator from New Zealand who lives and works in Sydney, Australia. His first book was published by MIT Press in October 2009 and is entitled Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction. The book looks at the deliberate use of cracked and broken everyday playback technologies for the creation of music and art.
Caleb has been producing experimental sound events since 2000, including impermanent.audio (http://impermanent.info) and the Australian experimental music festival What is Music? Musicians who have performed at his events include: Tony Conrad (USA), Merzbow (JP), Bernard Parmegiani (FR), Haino Keiji (JP) Akio Suzuki (JP), kk null (JP), Ami Yoshida (JP), Atau Tanaka (JP/FR), Haco (JP), Taku Sugimoto (JP), Kaffe Mathews (UK), Kim Cascone (USA), Toshimaru Nakamura (JP), Jojo Hiroshige (JP), Phil Dadson (NZ), Tetuzi Akiyama (JP), Rosy Parlane (NZ), Aki Onda (JP), Francisco Lopez (SP), Chris Abrahams, and Oren Ambarchi.
Caleb has also curated numerous sound exhibitions, run the year long sound in gallery space project PELT, and written on the sound arts for numerous publications.
Caleb is a lecturer in contemporary art theory at the Sydney College of the Arts, at the University of Sydney.
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Cracked Media
The Sound of Malfunction
Caleb Kelly <http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/author/default.asp?aid=36840>
From the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked, and broke audio media technologies to produce novel sounds and performances. Artists and musicians, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yasunao Tone, and Oval, pulled apart both playback devices (phonographs and compact disc players) and the recorded media (vinyl records and compact discs) to create an extended sound palette. In Cracked Media, Caleb Kelly explores how the deliberate utilization of the normally undesirable (a crack, a break) has become the site of productive creation. Cracked media, Kelly writes, slides across disciplines, through music, sound, and noise. Cracked media encompasses everything from Cage’s silences and indeterminacies, to Paik’s often humorous tape works, to the cold and clean sounds of digital glitch in the work of Tone and Oval. Kelly offers a detailed historical account of these practices, arguing that they can be read as precursors to contemporary new media.
Kelly looks at the nature of recording technology and the music industry in relation to the crack and the break, and discusses the various manifestations of noise, concluding that neither theories of recording nor theories of noise offer an adequate framework for understanding cracked media. Connecting the historical avant-garde to modern-day turntablism, and predigital destructive techniques to the digital ticks, pops, and clicks of the glitch, Kelly proposes new media theorizations of cracked media that focus on materiality and the everyday.
“Caleb Kelly’s Cracked Media is a welcome addition to the growing body of critical writing on the role of sound in the history of modern and postmodern art. It helpfully extends Douglas Kahn’s monumental Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts by focusing on a powerful strain of contemporary sonic art: the creative mis-use of audio playback technologies. As Kelly ably theorizes it, the ‘crack’ is a productive break that articulates past and future, archaeology and innovation, analog and digital. Hence, this book combines an exhaustive survey and taxonomy of recent experiments with turntables and CD technology (Oval, Christian Marclay, Yasunao Tone, etc.) with a detailed genealogy of these practices that traces them back to earlier moments of sonic experimentation (Futurism, Fluxus, John Cage, etc.). Informed, but not overloaded, by theoretical accounts of phonography and digital media, Kelly helpfully sorts out what is at issue in cracked sound and places this at the center of contemporary debates about art and technology.”
—Christoph Cox, Professor of Philosophy, Hampshire College, co-editor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music “Finally, a deep, scholarly accounting of the aesthetics of failure. Props to Caleb Kelly for laying bare the various histories of ‘malfunction’ as a compositional device. This book should be required reading for anyone working in electronic music today.”
—Kim Cascone, Composer and Writer “For those of us who witnessed and accompanied the advent of the laptop music scene in the late 1990s, this book situates the movement within broader contexts of sound exploration in the 20th century. While theories of the everyday have been applied to music listening, they have not been used to discuss music creation. Kelly shows how the mechanisms of consumer music culture led to new directions in artistic creation. What we see is how the creative act in the age of mechanical reproduction becomes a music of cracked reproduction, and ultimately an art of manual mechanical deconstruction.”
—Atau Tanaka, Artist, Director of Culture Lab Newcastle
Littoral: Gregg Bordowitz
For one year, every day, from August 2007 to June 2008, Gregg Bordowitz wrote questions, one line after the other. On May 2nd, the author will read aloud all the collected questions recently published by Printed Matter in a book titled Volition—
- Consisting entirely of questions, Volition is 142 pages of active, mind-bending engagement with the reader, who is led down paths of inquiry involving art, meaning, philosophy, choice, happiness, and identity. Bordowitz organizes his questions into lists, paragraphs, and stanzas, which are themselves organized into five chapters: Questions, Topics, Aesthetics, Beliefs, and Morals. The resulting text is something like a spiritual guide crossed with an epic poem crossed with a transcription of the meandering thoughts of a philosophic insomniac, kept awake by such questions as “How can I touch creation as a principle without reproach?” and “How does gratitude unfold from virtue?” *
Suspending any responsibility to answers, Volition presents all the ways questions approach their objects—seducing, beseeching, mocking, taking, giving, shining, withdrawing. Reading his questions aloud over the course of an afternoon, Bordowitz will exhaust the will to know through a kind of public liquidation.
Starting at 2PM and continuing (with breaks) until approximately 7PM, the performance will be segmented into four sections. Food, beer, wine and tea will be served.
2:00 PM Welcome
2:15PM—3:00PM
Book I: Questions
Book II: Topics
3:15PM—3:45PM
Book III: Aesthetics
4:00PM—4:30PM
Book IV: Beliefs
4:45PM—6:45PM
Book V: Morals
Appendix: On Why
* Volition is published and distributed by Printed Matter; description taken from catalog
http://printedmatter.org 195 10th Avenue New York, NY 10011 (212) 925-0325
Gregg Bordowitz (Born August 14, 1964, Brooklyn, N.Y.} is a writer, film and video maker and teacher. A collection of his essays, titled The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003, was published by MIT Press in the fall of 2004. For this collection, Bordowitz received the 2006 Frank Jewitt Mather Award from the College Art Association. Recently, his writings have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Fence, Casco, and Texte Zur Kunst. A long poem titled Admissions was included in the book Considering Forgiveness, edited by Aleksandra Wagner and Carin Cuoni (Vera List Center, 2009). His most recent book consisting entirely of questions, titled Volition, was published by Printed Matter (2009). His films, including Habit (2001), The Suicide (1996), A Cloud In Trousers (1995), and Fast Trip Long Drop (1993) have been widely shown in festivals, museums, movie theaters and broadcast internationally. In addition, he has received a Rockefeller Intercultural Arts Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, among other grants and awards. Bordowitz is Chair of the Film, Video, and New Media Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he is on the faculty of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
Littoral: MUSIC OF THE HEMISPHERES
MUSIC OF THE HEMISPHERES
The idea for –MUSIC OF THE HEMISPHERES—originates in the work of neuro-philosopher Dan Lloyd, Thomas C. Brownell Professor of Philosophy and a faculty member of the Neuroscience program at Trinity College, Connecticut. Dr. Lloyd’s research focuses on taking patterns found in brain activity and converting them into musical score. These scores are not biofeedback or music cognition experiments, but rather extracting the ‘architecture of consciousness,’ as it occurs in the brain, and assigning its varying components musical tones. The result is musical scores meant to reflect brain activity itself. Through this, Lloyd found that recognizable musical structures emerge, and he thus formulated a theory that consciousness operates within a musical structure – or rather, that music is an expressive interpretation of how our brains work.
The “music” generated through Lloyd’s project seems oddly familiar, and is surprisingly harmonious and musical. Now, should this theory be proven, the philosophical implications are both joyous and endless. The idea that we are, in fact, music – or that music is, in fact, truly human: a reflection or interpretation of the human mind.
The event will serve as both an exhibition and an experiment. Elisa Da Prato, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker who had initiated the event and is currently working on a film concerning this theme, will be pairing Dan Lloyd with different ensembles/musicians who will be assigned with the task of interpreting the scores that are the result of his studies. The event will be divided into three parts: a screening of a short film about Lloyd’s experiments that would spell out the context for the experiment; the staging of these scores as interpreted by the musicians; and a discussion concerning both the aesthetics and the musical validity of the aforementioned scores. The panel is shaping to include Lloyd, a neuroscientist, a music theorist, and the musicians assigned to the task.
Da Prato states that her goal is to create a discussion about the emotional and biological necessity of music itself. She wishes to assimilate Lloyd’s theory to the scientific/philosophical equivalent of Woody Allen’s joke concluding his film Annie Hall: “we need the eggs.” The idea being that, for some reason, we need to both express and experience people in musical form. Almost a scientific case for joy.
Hans Grüsel’s Krankenkabinet + Occasional Detroit (O-D) The Best In ABSTRAKT ENT
Hans Grüsel’s Krankenkabinet
Hans Grüsel’s Krankenkabinet is an ever-changing woodgrain diorama of dark forest characters. Started in 1999 in San Francisco, California, by Hans Grüsel, the ensemble uses electronics, concrète recording, and acoustic instruments to explore the lost Teutonic rites of the past while stumbling into the failure of the future.
Hans Grusel’s “sound” might best be described as the sounds of a Bavarian music box designed by an artist who had been bonked on the head with a brass cuckoo clock chime and left in a dark room for three years with only the music of Scriabin, Wagner, and Prokofiev mixed with off-speed 1960s sci-fi soundtracks and folkloric anthems pumping through the slightly clogged vents. HGKK audio combines numerous divergent elements—rigid structures and sweeping washes of plucky improvisation; classic violin sounds twisting in a mobius strip of clashing yet beautiful sounds and tones; flitting marches and delicate traipsing at the bottom of the sea—to create dense and blissful audio rainstorms.
There are very few bands who truly baffle. Who confuse and confound, both musically and conceptually. Sure, plenty of bands are weird, or strange, or hard to describe, some might even be described as fucked up or damaged, but very very few truly baffle. Hans Grusel’s Krankenkabinet is most definitely one of those bafflingly confusional elite. . . Hans Grusel and his Krankenkabinet create a bizarre cacophony of sound, theatrical, dramatic, noisy for sure, but weirdly melodic and playful and more than anything, confounding.
Occasional Detroit
My NAME IS Towondo”Beyababa”Clayborn I am a part of the abstrakt hip-hop duo Occasional Detroit (O-D) THE BEST IN ABSTRAKT ENT..
We are an abstrakt hip-hop duo CONSISTING OF MYSELF Towondo’Beyababa’Clayborn”
AND DEMETRISA L. ANDERSON
we will kill it on may 1st the best in ABSTRAKT ENT.
It is not an understatement. We like too show what it feels like in our own words, on how it feels after recovering from taking a piss under scrutiny. So, that is A SYNOPSIS ON how we roll.
Come see us (O-D) THE BEST IN ABSTRAKT ENT..(LAWRENCE) LET US KNOW IF YOU NEED MORE INFO WE WILL PROUDLY SEND IT.
Theoretical: David Joselit in Conversation with Jutta Koether
Jutta Koether and David Joselit will stage a dialogue about painting. How do paintings slip from subjects to objects, and back again, never staying secure in either position. Why and how have paintings become performative? In the era of digital networks is the outmoded practice of applying pigment on canvas, linen, or wood, our best hope for understanding digital space?
David Joselit
David Joselit worked as a curator at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston from 1983-1989 where he co-organized several exhibitions including “DISSENT: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston,” (1985) “Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture” (1986) and “The British Edge” (1987). After receiving his Ph.D. in Art History from Harvard in 1995, he began teaching in the Department of Art History and Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies at University of California, Irvine, where he taught until 2003. He is currently Carnegie Professor of the History of Art at Yale where he served as Department Chair from 2006-2009. Joselit is author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (MIT Press, 1998), American Art Since 1945 (Thames and Hudson, World of Art Series, 2003), and Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT Press, 2007). He is and editor of the journal OCTOBER and writes regularly on contemporary art and culture.
Jutta Koether
Jutta Koether is one of the central figures in contemporary painting. Yet she is more than just a painter. She is also a performance artist, musician, writer and theoretician. . Her role as an artist was long reduced to being regarded as a feminist response to a specific scene of the late 1980s in Cologne, Germany. With her translucent color fields, the gestural brush stroke, drawings of female bodies and the lyrical appropriation of poetry and art history, she frequently seems to assume positions in contrast to artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke and Albert Oehlen. As critic and editor of the music and pop culture magazine Spex and as performance artist and musician, however, Koether did not fit the typical image of the art scene of that time. Since the start of her artistic career Jutta Koether has sought to make expansion her program. At the same time, it has always been important to her not to take an unequivocal role as an artist, but always to work from several positions.
Since coming to New York in the 1990s, she moves in an expanded field of experiment and improvisation, literature and theory in the New York scene. Cooperation with musicians like Tom Verlaine (Television) or Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth) often provides her with more important inspiration than the work of other visual artists. It is specifically through these apparent detours and alternative forms of energy that she has created a kind of free space for herself, which enables a reevaluation of the medium of painting and its potential that is so urgently needed in today’s situation.
Theoretical: Liam Gillick in conversation with Seth Kim-Cohen
Theoretical is a new critical discourse series at ISSUE Project Room curated in collaboration with Brandon W. Joseph (Columbia University), David Grubbs (Brooklyn College), and Seth Kim-Cohen (Yale University). Through monthly talks, panels, and classes, this series seeks to actively engage artists, writers, and audiences in examining and discussing key issues in contemporary aesthetic theory, media, urban space and politics.
On January 7, we invite you to join ISSUE Project Room for Theoretical: Liam Gillick in conversation with Seth Kim-Cohen presented by the Institute for Doctoral Studies
Thursday, January 7, 2010, 6 PM
Admission is free
Part of IDSVA’s Symposium: Art, Ethnicity, and Globalization
Artist Liam Gillick is one of the most important artists of the 21st century. He was chosen to represent Germany at the 2009 Venice Biennale. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago is currently presenting his mid-career retrospective, “Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario.” Gillick’s writings have been published in Proxemics: Selected Writings, 1988 – 2006 (JRP Ringier/Les Presses Du Réel, 2006) and sixteen critics and theorists have weighed in on Gillick’s work in Meaning Liam Gillick (MIT, 2009).
Kenneth Goldsmith sings Roland Barthes with live String Quartet
A live String Quartet (Mari Kimura, Dana Lyn, violins; Jessica Pavone, viola; Egil Rostad, cello) will perform Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and improvisations in the style of Anton Webern while Kenneth Goldsmith sings text by Roland Barthes.
Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of nine books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which is the basis for an opera, “Trans-Warhol,” premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, “sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith” premiered at the British Library in 2007. Kenneth Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He has been awarded the The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship at Princeton University for 2010. A book of critical essays, Uncreative Writing, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
Tony Conrad and Branden W Joseph: a reading, discussion and performance
ISSUE Project Room is pleased to present:
Tony Conrad and Brandon W Joseph in a reading and discussion followed by a performance by Tony Conrad.
Branden W. Joseph is Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He is the author of Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (MIT Press 2003), Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works (ed. Christopher Eamon; Northwestern University Press/Steidl, 2005) and, most recently, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone Books, 2008). His writings have also appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Art Journal, Critical Inquiry, October, Texte zur Kunst, Parkett, and Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, as well as in such catalogues as CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (2002), X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s (2003), andRobert Rauschenberg: Combines (2005). He is also a founding editor of Grey Room, a journal of architecture, art, media, and politics, published quarterly by MIT Press since 2000.
(CANCELLED) David Grubbs with Michael Evans and Patrick McCarthy and in conversation with Branden W Joseph
photo by mirabelle lagache
DAVID GRUBBS WITH MICHAEL EVANS AND PATRICK McCARTHY
JUNE 3
David Grubbs will present two pieces: “Hybrid Song Box” and “Onrushing Cloud.” “Hybrid Song Box” is Grubbs’s soundtrack music for Angela Bulloch’s sculptural installation “Hybrid Song Box.4,” which was included in the Guggenheim Museum’s recent exhibition Theanyspacewhatever. For tonight’s performance, Grubbs will be joined by Michael Evans (drums, electronics) and Patrick McCarthy (electric guitar), who performed “Hybrid Song Box” during the Guggenheim’s 24-hour event that marked the close of Theanyspacewhatever. “Hybrid Song Box” is a 30-minute piece that alternates between a section that in successive iterations is increasingly scuffed or degraded and a section that throbs, purrs, and gives off a slow stroboscopic effect. This latter section is the soundtrack at its most Bulloch-like. “Onrushing Cloud” developed from his recent performance and recording with Andrea Belfi and Stefano Pilia.
DAVID GRUBBS has released ten full-length solo albums and appeared on more than 100 commercially-released recordings. In 2000, his album The Spectrum Between was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times. He was a founding member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, Squirrel Bait, and the Wingdale Community Singers, and has participated in the Red Krayola since 1993. His ongoing collaborations include projects with Susan Howe, Anthony McCall, and Angela Bulloch. He is a 2005-6 grant recipient in Music/Sound from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Grubbs is Assistant Professor in the Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College, CUNY, and director of their graduate programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA). He has been called one of two “Best Teachers for an Indie-Rocker to Admire” in the Village Voice and “le plus Français des Américains” in Libération.
Branden W. Joseph received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1999. His first book, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde, examined all aspects of the artist’s development from 1951 to 1971 — including painting, sculpture, “Combines,” and performance — from a theoretical perspective drawing from Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille. Joseph’s further work on Rauschenberg has appeared in journals from October magazine to the Journal of Art History(Stockholm), as well as in the Robert Rauschenberg: Combinesretrospective catalogue (LACMA, 2005). Joseph’s area of specialization is post-War American and European art, focusing particularly on those individuals and practices that cross medium and disciplinary boundaries between visual art, music, and film. Present in the book on Rauschenberg, these concerns have been explored further in the books: Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works (Northwestern/Steidl, 2005) andBeyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone Books, 2008). Joseph’s writings have also appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Art Journal, October, Critical Inquiry, Texte zur Kunst, and Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, as well as in such catalogues asCTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother(MIT Press, 2002), X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s (Walther König, 2003), and Angela Bulloch: Prime Numbers(Walther König, 2006). Joseph is also a founding editor of Grey Room, a scholarly and theoretical journal of architecture, art, media, and politics published quarterly by MIT Press since the fall of 2000. To date Grey Room has featured work by such prominent historians and theorists as Yve-Alain Bois, Judith Butler, Georges Canguilhem, Hubert Damisch, Friedrich Kittler, Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Paul Virilio, and Samuel Weber.
Exact Change 20th Anniversary
With Joan La Barbara, Loren Connors, Alan Licht, Till by Turning, Alex Waterman, Barbara Epler, James Hoff, Kenneth Goldsmith, Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang responding to and reading the work of Joseph Cornell, Franz Kafka, Morton Feldman, Stefan Thermerson, Leonora Carrington, Unica Zurn and John Cage.
Exact Change publishes books of experimental literature with an emphasis on Surrealism, Dada, Pataphysics, and other nineteenth and twentieth century avant-garde art movements.
The press was founded in 1989 by Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang, known outside publishing as musicians from the bands Damon & Naomi, and Galaxie 500.
Exact Change authors include Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, John Cage, Leonora Carrington, Giorgio de Chirico, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dalí, Morton Feldman, Alice James, Alfred Jarry, Franz Kafka, Lautréamont, Chris Marker, Gérard de Nerval, Fernando Pessoa, Raymond Roussel, Philippe Soupault, Gertrude Stein, Stefan Themerson, Denton Welch, and Unica Zürn.
Many Exact Change titles were originally published by larger houses, especially in the 1960s, but had more recently been left out of print; some were previously published in the U.K. but not in North America; others are new publications initiated by Exact Change. But in all cases these are books that we believe should be kept available always. We think of our list as a looking-glass version of the Penguin Classics or the Library of America, drawn from works that are equally important but have in general been neglected in the U.S.
Exact Change books are distributed to the trade by D.A.P., and direct via the website www.exactchange.com.
Joan La Barbara’s career as a composer/performer/soundartist explores the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument expanding traditional boundaries in developing a unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques: multiphonics, circular singing, ululation and glottal clicks that have become her “signature sounds”. Creating works for multiple voices, chamber ensembles, music theater, orchestra and interactive technology, her awards in the U.S. and Europe include the 2008 Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center; 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition; DAAD Artist-in-Residency in Berlin and 7 National Endowment for the Arts fellowships: Music Composition, Opera/Music Theatre, Inter-Arts, Recording (2), Solo Recitalist and Visual Arts; ISCM International Jury Award; Akustische International Competition Award; Aaron Copland Fund for Music; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Collaboration Award of NY Coalition of Professional Women in the Arts and Media; Meet The Composer and ASCAP Awards. Numerous commissions for concert, theatre and radioworks, including: “in the dreamtime” and “Klangbild Köln” for WestDeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne; “Dragons on the Wall”, a music score commissioned by Mary Flagler Cary Trust and “Calligraphy II/Shadows” for voice and Chinese instruments, both for Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company; choral work “to hear the wind roar” for Gregg Smith Singers, I Cantori and the Center for Contemporary Arts/Santa Fe,; “Events in the Elsewhere” from “The Misfortune of the Immortals”, funded by Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace; “Awakenings” for chamber ensemble, from the University of Iowa Center for New Music; “l’albero dalle foglie azzurre” (tree of blue leaves) for solo oboe and tape, commissioned by The Saint Louis Symphony, and “A Trail of Indeterminate Light” for cellist who sings. “73 Poems”, her collaborative work with text artist Kenneth Goldsmith, was included in “The American Century Part II: SoundWorks” at The Whitney Museum of American Art. “Messa di Voce”, an interactive media work, in collaboration with Jaap Blonk, Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman, premiered at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria on September 7, 2003 and was awarded Honorary Mention in the 2004 Prix Ars Electronica. Live Music for Dance commissions include “Landscape over Zero” (2004-05 for Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company), “Fleeting Thoughts” (2005-06 for Jane Comfort & Company), and “Desert Myths/Isle of Dunes”(premiered at NJPAC April 29, 2006 featuring Ne(x)tworks and Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company). “Atmos” for flute and sonic atmosphere, commissioned by Meet The Composer/NYSFM, premiered March 2008 at Symphony Space, performed by Margaret Lancaster; recording will be released on New World Records in 2009. In 2007-08, La Barbara received a NYSCA Music Composition award to compose a new spoken word opera, “An American Rendition”, in collaboration with choreographer/theater artist Jane Comfort, which premiered September 2008 at Duke Theatre, NYC. La Barbara is currently composing a new opera. Joan La Barbara will be responding to Joseph Cornell’s Dreams.
Guitarist Loren Connors was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1949. Best known as a composer and improviser, Connors has issued over 50 guitar records on his own imprints (Daggett, St. Joan, Black Label) since the late 1970s and over two dozen on other labels across the globe. He has recorded under the names Guitar Roberts, Loren Mattei, Loren MazzaCane Connors and other variations. Connors’ singular adpation of the blues is a distinct personal vision combining the Delta bottleneck sound and the ancestral blues voice (appearing as distortion, baying hounds or multi-tracked guitar), with hauntingly unexpected sounds. Outside of Connors’ three decades of solo work, he has collaborated with Suzanne Langille, Jim O’Rourke, Darin Gray, Alan Licht, Christina Carter, Keiji Haino, San Agustin, Jandek and many others, as well as leading the group Haunted House. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Loren Connors will be responding to Franz Kafka’s Blue Octave Notebook.
Over the past two decades, guitarist Alan Licht has worked with a veritable whoʼs who of the experimental world, from free jazz legends (Rashied Ali, Derek Bailey) and electronica wizards (Fennesz, Jim OʼRourke) to turntable masters (DJ Spooky, Christian Marclay) and veteran Downtown New York composers (John Zorn, Rhys Chatham). Licht is also renown in the indie rock scene as a bandleader (Run On, Love Child) and supporting player to cult legends like Tom Verlaine, Arthur Lee, Arto Lindsay, and Jandek. He has released five albums of compositions for tape and solo guitar, and his sound and video installations have been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe. Licht has collaborated on film and video performances with Charles Atlas and Andrew Lampert. He has written extensively about the arts for the WIRE, Modern Painters, Art Review,
Film Coment, Sight & Sound, Premiere, Purple, Village Voice, New York Sun, Time Out New York, and other publications. His book, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Media, the first extensive survey of the genre in English, was published by Rizzoli in fall 2007. Alan Licht will be responding to Album Exact Change.
Alex Waterman is a founding member of the Plus Minus Ensemble, based in Brussels and London, specializing in avant-garde and experimental music. In New York he performs with the Either/Or Ensemble. Alex has worked with musicians such as Robert Ashley, Richard Barrett, Helmut Lachenmann, Keith Rowe, Marina Rosenfeld, Anthony Coleman, Elliot Sharp, Ned Rothenberg, Gerry Hemingway, David Watson, Chris Mann, Alison Knowles, Thomas Meadowcroft, and Michael Finnissy. He has performed as guest musician with numerous ensembles, including Trio Event (Berlin), Champs d’Action-Antwerp, Q-O2-Brussels, and Magpie Music and Dance Company. Waterman has made music for numerous European ballet and modern dance companies including Freiburg Ballett/Pretty Ugly, Scapino Ballet, Nederland Dans Theater III, and others. As a curator he has organized events at Les Bains:Connective in Brussels, OT301 in Amsterdam, Miguel Abreu Gallery and The Kitchen. His duo projects with the dancer Michael Schumacher have toured in Switzerland, Italy, Holland, the Opera of Monaco and most recently in all 5 boroughs of New York in a Joyce Theater production in association with the City Parks Foundation in July of 2008. In 2007 Alex curated two exhibitions in New York, one on experimental music and poetics: Agapê (June 2-July 28th, 2007) at Miguel Abreu Gallery; and the other on graphic notation, Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music (September 7-October 20, 2007) at The Kitchen in Chelsea. Alex is presently working on his PhD in musicology at NYU as well as writing a book about the composer Robert Ashley with the designer and writer Will Holder. Alex participated in Dexter Sinister’s residency at the Armory for the 2008 Whitney Biennial writing a new work based upon Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Alex Waterman and Beatrice Gibson’s film, A Necessary Music, narrated by Robert Ashley and with original music by Waterman, premiered at the Whitney Museum ISP show and will be shown in galleries and museums in the US and Europe this fall. Alex Waterman will be responding to Stephan Themerson’s Cardinal Polatuo.
Till by Turning is the collective effort of Amy Cimini, Erica Dicker, Emily ManzoSarah Biber, and Katherine Young. Working as performers, educators, improvisers, scholars, composers, and song-writers — Till by Turning performs new chamber music by established and emerging artists and develops creative educational programs. Til by Turning will be responding to Morton Feldman’s Give my Regards to Eighth Street.
Barbara Epler grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and she started working at New Directions in 1984, after graduating from college. She became the Editor-in-Chief in 1996, a Director in 2000, and in 2009 the Publisher. Still independent, New Directions was started in 1936 by James Laughlin, and was recently described by Richard Eder in The New York Times as “long struggling and long astonishing” (though she sometimes remembers that as “long suffering…”). Laughlin was the first in the USA to publish Nabokov, Borges, Lorca, Montale, Celine, Dylan Thomas, Neruda, Mishima, Tennessee Williams, Sartre and many other now classic world authors; he also built a poetry list around the then avant-garde poets Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Paz, Oppen, Olson, and Duncan, and continued with Creeley, Levertov, Snyder, Ferlinghetti, and Corso, who all embody an experimental tradition which is carried on these days by Michael Palmer, Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Forrest Gander, Kamau Brathwaite, and many others. Laughlin accepted Pound’s notion that truly new writing could take 20 years to catch on, which allows for a great deal of editorial latitude, and Epler focuses on finding new fiction, and New Directions has been lucky to be the first American publisher of new great writers like W.G. Sebald, Roberto Bolano, Laszlo Krasznahorkhai, Cesar Aira, and Victor Pelevin. She has also been a contributing editor for Grand Street magazine and a judge for the PEN/Nelson Algren Fiction Award, the N.Y.U. Emerging Writers Award, and the PEN Translation Fund Awards. Barbara Epler will be reading from Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet.
Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called “some of the m
ost exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry” by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera, “Trans-Warhol,” that premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, “sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith” premiered at the British Library in 2007. Kenneth Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He has been awarded the The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University for 2009-10 and received the Qwartz Electronic Music Award in Paris in 2009. A book of critical essays, “Uncreative Writing,” is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Kenneth Goldsmith will be reading selections of John Cage’s Compositions in Retrospect.
James Hoff is an artist living in New York City. He is the co-founder and editor of Primary Information, a non-profit publisher devoted to printing artists’ books and multiples by artists both young and old. He was the co-editor of 0 To 9: The Complete Magazine 1967 – 1969 (Ugly Duckling Presse) and the editor of Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse), winner of the William Carlos Williams Book of the Year Award. With Primary Information he has edited publications and multiples by John Cage, the Art Workers’ Coalition, DISBAND, Robert Filliou, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, Dieter Roth, Seth Siegelaub, and Emmett Williams, among many others. He is the recent author of Topten (No Input Books) and co-author of Endless Nameless (No Input Books). Primary Information was formed in 2006 by Miriam Katzeff and James Hoff to foster intergenerational dialogue through the publication of artists’ books and writing by artists—emerging, mid-career, and established. Our period of focus is from the early sixties to the present, with an emphasis on the conceptual practice begun in the mid Sixties and the strategy of using publications as an extension of this practice. Primary Information has recently released a CD anthologizing the late 70s/early 80s feminist music and performance collective DISBAND. Upcoming publications include an anthology of Dan Graham’s writings on music, a facsimile edition of Avalanche Magazine, and source book/anthology of the feminist magazine Eau de Cologne. For more information, please see www.primaryinformation.org. James Hoff will be reading from Unica Zurn’s Dark Spring.
Grey Room with Ulrike Müller and Emma Hedditch, Petit Mal and XXX Macarena
GREY ROOM PRESENTS:
XXX Macarena started to form at 4:30 pm on June 3, 2006 when Karin Schneider invited Jutta Koether and John Miller to take part in her performance Sabotage at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City. Schneider had been included in group show called Grey Flags. She set smoke machines and instructed Koether and Miller to start playing when the entire space filled with smoke. Since then the two have performed at art venues such as NBK in Berlin, Forde Galerie in Geneva and Artists’ Space in New York. MFC-Michèle Didier & Les Presses du Réel have recently published the CD Selling Short, a recording their NBK performance. Last February Mike Kelley and Tony Conrad joined Koether and Miller for a performance at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery. This will be their third performance with Conrad.
John Miller was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1954 and currently lives and works in New York and Berlin. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977 and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1979. He is currently an Associate Professor Barnard College’s Art History Department. While at RISD, he played bass in a band that included J.D. King who went on to form the proto-Sonic Youth band, the Coachmen. At CalArts, he played in Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler’s band, the Poetics. The Kunsthalle Zurich will have a retrospective of Miller’s work that will open August 29.
Petit Mal (Benedict Seymour & Melanie Gilligan)
Petit Mal are Melanie Gilligan and Benedict Seymour, an artist and writer respectively, who first started to publicly release music as part of the Antifamily collective in London. The duo have been described as practicing a kind of electro-pop fusion of Chris and Cosey and Alain Robbe-Grillet, with Gilligan’s icily melancholic vocals and Seymour’s synths and piano staking out an unironic reinvention of post-punk and electro sounds. Their single “Crisis in the Credit System” failed to penetrate the charts, but is, as far as they know, the only song to predict the current collapse of capitalism as we have unfortunately known it. (Dusted Magazine)
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, A Naked Woman Riding a Spiral Graphic of Some Kind, 2009
Emma Hedditch & Ulrike Müller with Nancy Brooks Brody, Zoe Leonard, and Megan Palaima
Emma Hedditch and Ulrike Müller will use the inventory list of the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ expansive T-shirt collection as the material for a collaborative reading performance (names of participants to be announced).
To wear a T-shirt for others to read. To get the message, or ask for it’s meaning. A communication, to communicate with strangers. A signal, sent out, a call, with or without intention. To embrace the confessional. To make and be made by it. To embody and intend ones desires, politics, and alliances. Declarative. Encounters in your face, so many bodies, women, lesbians. A move towards tensions? An attraction and a question. An archive, a collection, a list. Dense absence. To reintroduce the body, our bodies, and feel both difference and affinity. To voice a relationship. How to talk about contentious feminist histories without leveling them into all-one, all-the-same? To talk about a movement, and be a movement. Be moved. What are you trying to tell me, what do I think you are trying to tell me?
Emma Hedditch
Emma Hedditch is an artist living in New York whilst participating in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Recent performances include When I Do This, Can You Feel Something? as part of If I Can’t Dance… Frascati Theater, Amsterdam, March 2009 and We Are The Signs And The Signal atWorking Documents, La Virreina, Barcelona November 2008.
Ulrike Müller
Ulrike Müller is an artist living and working in New York and Vienna, Austria. She has worked with the queer feminist collective LTTR, is the editor of Work the Room. A Handbook on Performance Strategies (OE/b_books, 2006) and currently serves as visiting faculty at VCFA (Vermont College of Fine Arts).
GREY ROOM
Grey Room brings together scholarly and theoretical articles from the fields of architecture, art, media, and politics to forge a cross-disciplinary discourse uniquely relevant to contemporary concerns.
Publishing some of the most interesting and original work within these disciplines, Grey Room has positioned itself at the forefront of the most current asthetic and critical debates. Featuring articles, translations, interviews, dossiers, and academic exchanges, Grey Room’s emphasis on aesthic practice and historical and theoretical discourse appeals to a wide range of readers, including architects, artists, scholars, students, and critics.
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/grey
