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A.W.O.W. February 1 - March 15, 2008 |
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Mining the music/art crossover a la Christian Marklay or Sean Duffy is becoming more widespread. It may be because there always been an unspoken bond between sound and image that is inescapable; perhaps it is also because the era of the turntable is so recently over and refuses to die. This current theme in contemporary art merges sculpture, sound, and electronics with myriad devices and conventional forms. Any obsolete items from our ‘crude’ pre-chip industrial/electronic past are fair game, becoming barbed comments on the present state of limitless miniaturization. A.V.O.W., an excellent survey at the Painted Bride of art driven by bygone electronics, presented the opportunity for all present at the opening (including Mayor Nutter) to dig the noise and wonder what makes this art tick. All the component artists picked slightly different media for expression via amps, volts, ohms, or watts and the resulting sound-bleed from the pieces combined to form an overall melded statement. Upstairs, Justin Marshall’s short appropriations from Hollywood bypassed copyright law (just barely) by collaging extremely brief clips from films -- mostly cheesy -- on a themed basis. We follow manic mash-ups of cinematic screams, phone answering, don’t-go-down-into-the-basements, and a hilarious explosion sequence. Anyone with a mind for trivia is on high alert; I spotted action scenes from The A-Team and Terminator. Does this piece remind us how spectacle can be ageless and plays havoc with a linear view of history? The guts-out approach of Max Lawrence – the artist was tinkering “live” – took up much of the balcony space with wires, electrical devices and debris of all kinds. Strewn everywhere were tools and the sundry items a tinkerer needs in an old/new world exhibition/studio, which is essentially a scatter piece. Accompanying the mess was a house-beat which drowned out his competitors (at the opening) until Jeremy Boyle’s drum “machine” sprung loudly to life downstairs. Boyle’s programmed drum-kit was a musical cyborg of sorts (have I mentioned Terminator already?) that launched into a Lust for Life-type beat at intervals. Talk about performance art! The beat sounded oddly natural, not mechanical at all, and was played with some drummer-like force. It was a little spooky, and it put me to thinking of no-man bands: I saw a clever one-man band recently at Market East Station. This guy played guitar and drum simultaneously with both feet supplying bass and tom-tom. To play hi-hat cymbals he duct taped a drumstick to his thigh. Low tech is best when we try and emulate machines! Back downstairs, another of Max Lawrence’s sound sculptures emitted localized sound through little speakers in its face, and went for the obvious primitive connection where visual and audio come together through circuitry. Huong Ngo did a bit of mapping and took a more conceptual look at information. She tracked people with her own last name via an antiquated system, the postal service! (Who’s stalking you?) Pablo Colapinto’s sound/video piece was a mostly black and white animated computer graphic with background music supplied by The Lucky Dragons. The piece reads as tactile, which is something computer graphics aren’t designed for. Some of these self-generating qualities are drawn from groundbreaking video work of yore -- remember the video camera being turned to face the monitor, with the resulting visual feedback going on forever via electronic loop? Since computers and web technology often function interactively and without human contact, this return to techniques of healthy self-examination is hopeful. The fact that we continue to graft humanist characteristics into our own ”programming,” can only be a worthy pursuit. It may be wishful thinking, but isn’t the imaginative quest for a genuine historical interface something artists have always done? This sort of approach may lead to a discovery of where, exactly, we went wrong. Back to InLiquid's Commentary section index © 2008James Rosenthal and InLiquid.com |
