CatSynth

Two weeks ago I participated in a two-day opening with visual artist Yong Han and performance artist Jacqueline Loundsbury Live Worms Gallery in San Francisco. Together, we created an experience combining sculpture and two-dimensional artwork with music and performance art.

The overall show was anchored by Yong Han’s sculptures, paintings and drawings. The sculptures, which range widely in size, use a combination of metal, ceramic, beeswax and other materials. The two dimensional pieces were a combination of ink drawings and paint.

[Image courtesy of Yong Han.]

There are elements that are common in his work across media, including graceful geometric curves and lines with organic shapes and patterns seamlessly integrated. Indeed, some of the two-dimensional works appear to the shadows of his sculptures.

What particularly works for me in these pieces, whether two dimensional or three dimensional, is their simplicity. The lines and curves form repeating patterns and leave empty spaces; and the areas of color are simple and well-deliniated as well. Many of the pieces have a very delicate feel to them, but some of the more recent ones are very densely packed and suggest strength.

The basic structural theme of thin metal and curving lines carried over from the visual art to the performance aspects of the event, providing a level of continuity between the two. The first night featured Jacqueline Loundsbury in an improvised performance piece called re:BOUND where she wrapped her body in steel wire bindings. Large rolls of steel wire were placed around the performance space where she stood and visitors were encouraged to participate by taking pieces of wire and wrapping them around her bare body. Throughout this performance, she was quite exposed and accepted the risks of not knowing what participants might do – something taken to much more dangerous extreme by some of the early performance artists in the 1970s. Indeed, the resulting “wrapping” was less of a cocoon and more an overwhelming array of adornments, such as headgear and other decorative elements, some sexually charged. And the whole amalgamation of wire seemed quite heavy and uncomfortable. But she successfully completed the performance and the resulting embodied artwork fit well with the existing sculptural pieces. After extricating herself from the wire, some of the pieces themselves became independent elements (along with the unused wire) for the presentation on the next day.

The second evening featured my live improvised electronic music in the space with the artwork and a video projection of Loundsbury’s performance from the previous night. For the set, I used several iPad apps including Animoog, Bebot and iMS-20, along with the Dave Smith Evolver and a couple of newly acquired analog synthesizer modules, the Wiard Anti-Oscillator from Malekko Heavy Industry and the E350 Morphing Terrarium from Synthesis Technology. Overall, I intended the sounds to reflect the wire theme that was present in the sculptures, drawings and the performance, with sounds that were metallic, continuously curving, or otherwise reflecting of the other elements. You can see a short clip below of the video projection and the music-gear setup in action.

re: BOUND, with Yong Han, Jacqueline Loundsbury and Amar Chaudhary from CatSynth on Vimeo.

The improved music continued for the whole evening, about four hours in all, with breaks for selections from my CD Aquatic.

A decent number of people came through the show over the duration, a combination of people who knew advance from announcements as well as some who wandered in from the surrounding North Beach neighborhood and enjoyed the experience. I am glad I was able to participate, and look forward to working with both artists again in the future.

There have been numerous events this year marking the 50th anniversary of the Fluxus, including two exhibitions that I visited while I was in New York last month.

Fluxus was first named by George Maciunas in 1961, and involved a small network of artists in the United States, Europe and Japan who were already exploring some of the new movement’s ideas. Fluxus art generally involved event scores, or series of text or visual instructions that could be used by other artists to perform the works in the manner of a musical score, and the combination of instructional pieces into “Fluxkits” or “Fluxboxes”, collections of printed cards, games and ideas packed into boxes. Although much of this art was meant to be performed live at Fluxus events that ranged from formal concerts to spontaneous street performances and happenings – Fluxus events “could be performed by anyone, anywhere, at any time” – it also created durable works in the form of films, musical instruments, sculptures, and the Fluxkits themselves.

These ideas are not unique to the formal Fluxus moment of the 1960s and 1970s. Certainly, many of the ideas were present in Dada several decades earlier, as well as John Cage’s experiments with nondeterminacy in the 1950s. And the elements of Fluxus and its precedents are deeply embedded in contemporary art – the DIY sensibilities are present in many of the exhibitions I attend around San Francisco, for example. As such, the exhibitions are at least as much a historical snapshot of a particular time as they are examples of a particular artistic style and practice.

Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962–1978 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), presents works from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, which was acquired by the museum in 2008. It was one of the largest collections of its kind and contains over 8,000 artworks and artifacts, including Maciunas’ 1963 Fluxus Manifesto.

[Fluxus Manifesto. 1963. Offset. Edited, designed, and produced by George Maciunas. 8 3/16 x 5 11/16″ (20.8 x 14.5 cm). The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008.  Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. (Click image to enlarge.)]

The manifesto itself contains many of the elements associated with Fluxus, the “do-it-yourself” appearance with combinations of found material, personal notes (typed or handwritten), and declarations of spontaneous activity and a break with the traditional media and practices of art.

The duality of an object being at once instructions for a spontaneous artistic expression and itself a work of art appeared throughout the exhibition. This can be seen in the event scores as well as the flux kits.

[Fluxkit. 1965-66, Fluxus Edition announced 1964. Vinyl-covered attaché case containing objects in various mediums. Assembled by George Maciunas. 11 x 44 x 28″ (27.9 x 111.8 x 71.1 cm). The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008.  Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.]

FluxKit 1965-6 is at once a practical and portable collection of objects for generating performances. But the individual pieces, such as the cards with their lettering and geometric shapes, and even the arrangement of the elements into the kit box itself, are quite elegant pieces of design. In particular, the cards seem to embody both the do-it-yourself aesthetic and the prevalent tenets of industrial modernist design in the 1960s.

The score for Yoriaki Matsudaira’s Co-Action for Cello and Piano is at once a recognizable extension of traditional music notation and a visual piece with great deal of symmetry and geometry. I have not had a chance yet to try out the piano part myself, but will do so at some point.

[Yoriaki Matsudaira. Co-Action for Cello and Piano I. 1963, Fluxus Edition announced 1963. (Click image to enlarge.)]

The scores of John Cage fit naturally into this context as well, and were included in some of the displays in the exhibition (indeed, it seems like I always encounter at least one Cage piece during every MoMA visit). How closely Cage was involved in any of the Fluxus productions is unclear. He was however a major inspiration for the movement, and several of the prominent artists including George Brecht and Dick Higgins attended his classes

Perhaps the most intriguing of all the pieces were the instruments in Joe Jones’ Mechanical Flux Orchestra.

[Joe Jones. Mechanical Flux Orchestra. c. 1966, Fluxus Edition announced 1966.]

Each of these instruments, such as the Mechanical Violin and Mechanical Bells incorporate electrical motors and strikers that allow them to be self playing. Although these instruments were created in 1966, they still look contemporary with many of the electromechanical musical installations created today, although the electronic elements have improved. Similarly, Metal Zitar #4 has a striking minimalist appearance that could be part of a contemporary installation.

The contributions of Nam Jun Paik to the exhibition also explored the musicality of Fluxus, including it in his “essay” The Monthly Review of the University for Avant-Garde Hinduism! (Postmusic). In this piece, typewritten bits of the text are scattered at odd angles with the same DIY aesthetic as Maciunas’ manifesto and begins with the words “I am tired of renewing the form of music. – serial or aleatoric, graphic or five lines, instrumental or bellcanto, screaming or action, tape or live …”. Yet the art for which he is most known, his beautiful analog video compositions, are quite musical, and indeed he was quite directly influenced by Cage and Stockhausen to produce this body of work.

I primarily know Paik and his video art external to any experience with Fluxus. The same can be said for Yoko Ono, who was not formally a member of the group around Maciunas but was a friend and he admired and promoted her work. Her piece Eyeblink (Fluxfilm no. 9) was part of the Silverman collection and included in the exhibition.

It’s hard not to notice the way the term “Fluxus” and the prefix “Flux-” permeate so much of the work and any attempt to discuss it. Fluxus spawned, Fluxscores, Fluxkits, Fluxboxes, Fluxfilms (as in the previous piece by Yoko Ono), and even Fluxshops.

[Willem de Ridder. European Mail-order Warehouse/Fluxshop. Winter 1964-65. Photo: Wim van der Linden/MAI. The Museum of Modern Art. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.]

Willem de Ridder’s European Mail-order Warehouse/Fluxshop from the winter of 1964-1965 contains a jumbled array of Fluxus editions and kits. A reproduction of the Fluxshop by Jon Hendricks and Larry Miller was featured in the exhibition.

[Jon Hendricks and Larry Miller.  Construction of European Mail-Order Warehouse/Fluxshop, 1984.  (Click image to enlarge.)]

As much as any piece of the exhibition, it is a snapshot back into the time that this art was originally made.

The exhibition will remain on display through January 16, 2012.

A concurrent exhibition Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life at the NYU Grey Art Gallery presented still more original works and artifacts, this time arranged as a series of “essential themes of human existence”, including “Happiness”, “Health”, “Who am I?” and “Freedom”.

The arrangement around the themes rather than chronology, medium or artist, gave the presentation a rich multi-media feel. For example, below we see a variety of works for “Happiness”, including a film by Yoko Ono, her conceptual object piece A Box of Smile in the cabinet, as well as others including Nye Ffarrabas’ rather prescient Rx: Stress Formula, a pill bottle with capsules with photocopied bits of paper.

[Yoko Ono, A Box of Smile, 1971/1984 ReFlux Edition,plastic box inscribed in gold: "a box of smile y.o. '71."Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College: AcquisitionsFund; GM.989.12.5.]

The wry sense of humor permeates much of the work in the exhibition, such as Ben Vautier’s glass bottle with a handwritten label “God” affixed to its side as answer to the question “God?” The arrangement by themes and the particular selections of pieces bring out this quality more than in the presentation at the MoMA, even though many of the same artists and types of work were featured.

Artists central to Fluxus, including Maciunas and Brecht, were well represented here. In contrast to the musical scores, some of Brecht’s event scores were quite minimalist, with the most extreme example being Exit which consists only of the single-word instruction “exit” and was featured (again with a bit of dry humor) under the theme of “Death?”

I did also get to see one of Nam Jun Paik’s pieces for modified television set, Zen for TV, which consists of a simple linear pattern crossing the middle of the screen with little or no change.

Paik’s process of modifying television sets to produce new analog video art is a direct forerunner of the circuit bending that many of us in the electronic-music community do today.

In addition to this exhibition, the gallery featured both historic and more contemporary works created at NYU and the Downtown art scene in the show Fluxus at NYU: Before and Beyond. On display were more scores from John Cage as well as a rather large score by Earl Browne. Numerous posters, books and photographs rounded out this presentation of work that, like the original Fluxus group, pushed the boundaries of their media. I regret that I wasn’t around a couple of weeks early when Larry Miller presented a special gallery tour in conjunction with Performa 11, but I am glad I got to see both exhibitions at the Grey Art Gallery before they closed on December 3.

Both exhibitions described above were quite inspiring, and it is interesting to note how much both the concepts of Fluxus and some of the artifacts intersect with my own music and performance work several decades later. I expect to have at least as strong an influence on the new work I am planning for next year. It also opens up an idea of whether or not this website can serve as a source for a piece inspired by Fluxus? Any and all ideas are welcome.

The evening began at Electric Works for readings from the art issue of The Believer.

We spent a few minutes browsing the gallery at Electric Works, which featured work by Paul Madonna. His large-scale pieces included text that seemed only slightly related to the images, which often featured cartoon creatures, commercial art, and little “alien-monster” finger puppets similar to the ones I keep in my office at work.

Michelle Tea presented a reading from her piece about the fifth marriage ceremony of two “sexy performance artists” as an unauthorized event at the 2009 Venice Beinnale. Her descriptions of their costumes were quite detailed and her deadpan delivery of some their odd statements was amusing.The readings Jeff Chang and Michael Paul Mason seemed more like paper presentations at an academic conference, although I was quite intrigued by Mason’s piece on the disappearance of Ford Beckman, a highly successful minimalist artist who somehow went from the inner circles of the art world to working at a Krispy Kreme Donuts in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The examples of Beckman’s work shown in the presentation suggested the sparse geometry and simple patterns of minimalist work, but also a weathered quality that brings out the underlying materials.

The highlight of the evening was the presentation by Eames Demetrios. Demetrios. He is the grandson of the designers Charles and Ray Eames, a filmmaker, and also the Geographer-at-Large for Kcymaerxthaere, “a parallel universe that shares, to some degree, our physical planet.” After chiding the audience on their woeful state of knowledge of Kcymaerxthaere, he presented some examples of how the history and mythology intersect with our physical world, and his work to recognize significant intersections with commemorative plaques. My favorite observation was the many roads named in honor of Earl Frontage. The presentation concluded with a rousing group rendition of “Kymaerica, Sambamba Dier” sung to the tune of America the Beautiful.

After a brief stop for refreshments, it was off to The Makeout Room for the Snowball Pond Orchestra performing Piece to Celebrate the Proximity of Pearl Harbor Day and the Death of John Lennon, the first conducted composition by kingtone (aka Lucio Menegon). (Some readers my recognize Lucio as the host of the Ivy Room experimental-improv series.) “The piece is a a surround sound minimalist-meets-mayhem piece to celebrate the proximity of two events that managed to wake people out of their collective stupor for a moment or two.”

The first two sections appeared to focus more on Pearl Harbor and the last two more on John Lennon. The opening section featured the guitars, as described above. Later on, much darker guitar and string sounds were set against snare drums that sounded at once militaristic and like a clip from a rock solo, followed by long sustained guitar unisons and complex chords. The music gradually took on more of a rock feel as the narrative moved from Pearl Harbor to John Lennon, with quotations from “Helter Skelter” (from the White Album) towards the end.

You can read more about the performance, and see photos and a video clip at the kingtone website.

Last Friday, I attended the opening exhibition of the Marina Abramović Institute here in San Francisco. The exhibition, entitled Degeneration / Regeneration, featured several live performance pieces and videos, and included an introductory talk eponymous founder, Marina Abramović.

Abramović was a pioneering performance artist in the 1970s; I first encountered her work when briefly studying artistic collaboration in conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s. (This was the same time that I discovered Gilbert and George.) In her introduction, she was particularly concerned with how contemporary audiences experience “long-duration performance art”, preferably with concentration and without distractions such as conversation or “Blackberries.” As a demonstration, she instructed us on how to walk into the first exhibition space, a very slow and deliberate sequence of “lift, stretch, land and move” repeated the entire way of the lecture area up the stairs to the first exhibition hall. For someone who tends to walk rather fast, this can be difficult.

In terms of the pieces themselves, a few stood out in particular. Jennifer Locke was busy in a glass-enclosed space, painting it entirely black. She was herself covered entirely in a black suit as well.

With her were cans of paint, standard commercial painting equipment, and several large containers of Elmer’s glue. It was not exactly clear what the glue was for. We came back a few times to see her “progress” and eventually she had the room completely painted black. At this time, she proceeded to remove her suit and pick up one of the containers of glue. It was then we all realized what the glue was for, as she poured one container after another over her body. I did not stick around to see how this situation resolved itself (no pun intended).

I did like Mattias Ericsson’s pair of pieces. Maybe everything is grey after all covered a kitchen area of the building with black-and-white photographic prints, some of which were displayed openly, and others (particularly tiny 1×1 inch prints) neatly placed in closed boxes or behind cupboards. One could open these spaces and peruse the images, which appeared to chronicle very personal and intimate moments. Readers can get a sense of the images via interactive version. One starts to feel a bit voyeuristic going through them. Ericsson also present a video entitled 1630 photographs, in which he described his photographic process and his vision for his work.

Another featured live performance by Michael Ryan Noble invited audience members to participate by placing clay on his body, an act that is both sculptural and symbolic of burial. Many audience members did participate, and a participants sculpted elaborate clay objects to place on him, such as a dorsal fin.

Overall, it is an exhibition that does push one comfort’s zone (especially the glue). I am often left wondering whether performance art is closer to the visual arts than it is to music and theater, or something entirely different. I find myself wanting to treat it more like visual art, which seems to go against what Abramović stated at the start of the evening.

Before the start of the ICMC Conference today, I spent the weekend exploring a bit of New Orleans. Zip of course came along for the ride and photo ops.

In this first article of several, we make the obligatory trip to the French Quarter. This area largely survived the devastation last year and was quick to reopen as the “adult Disneyland” that people associate with New Orleans. Just outside the quarter on Canal Street, damaged downtown buildings being repaired and closed businesses are a common sight – a little eerie in spots. but inside things have the appearance of being back to normal. The bars and restaurants are mostly open, music and neon lights are everywhere. Tourists are in abundance (perhaps not as many as before, I have no way to gauge this), and there were plenty of people and vendors around the major sites, such as Jackson square and the cathedral(?) of St. Louis:

Churches are fine, but there are also monuments a plenty to one of the town’s real religions: jazz. Here Zip poses with famed jazz clarinetist Pete Fountain:

We also took in some live jazz at the New Orleans Jazz national park in the French Market along the rivier:

The famed architecture of the quarter is exactly as one would expect:

Again, most places seem to have weathered the storm or been repaired quickly, and many that are not hotels or business are up for sale as condos. There are still plenty of signs of the last year’s events, such as ubiquitous blue dog, here decked out for Mardi Gras (or pretty much any day here, it seems):

A few pleasant breaks from the stereotypical tourist fare could be found in some of the small specialty shops sprinkled throughout the neighborhood, including a rather intruiging shop dealing in occult products, including “black cat fur.” No cats were harmed in the collection of this fur, one hopes… Also some craft stores, a modern art gallery that didn’t give in to insipid tourist tastes, and a cool little shop that used the mason’s “Pyramonster” as it’s logo.

Another welcome addition to the day was a performance art troupe Wild Animus, who performed part of their piece on the riverfront near Jackson Square:

Apparently, the artists responsible are part of a San Francisco art collective, go figure. Several performers were handing out free DVDs, which I have yet to review, but I am curious about this work.

There was a particularly surreal moment as a wedding processing, complete with Dixieland-style band crossed paths with Wild Animus. I have a little bit of that on a video, which I will post as soon as I get a chance.

Having had enough of the French Quarter, I went in search of what is apparently one of post-hurricane New Orlean’s best kept secrets: where to get tour passes for the bus system. After several attempts, I finally found a tourist info agent who pointed me in the direction of a kiosk in one of the shopping centers, but when I got there I was met only with a sign that said “Back 30 minutes after the hour.” I believe it was about 2:45 at this time. A little annoyed, I headed back to Canal Street anyway to catch a streetcar (and pay full fare) towards the city park, where the city’s main art museum and sculpture garden is located. Of course, the streetcar would be out of order when I got there, and the busses running in its place were nowhere to be seen. The changes of making it out to the park before the garden closed to visitors at 4pm seemed pretty slim. But instead of stewing in my frustration, I headed with Zip back into the quarter for a more local kind of stew and a local brew:

This is definitely following the traveler’s rule “When in Rome…” In addition to gumbo, we sampled some of the ever popular oysters, cooked in this case:

And with this, the first of many tasty meals and refreshing beverages to come (too many?), we conclude this part of the story.

Be nice or leave.