7 things I saw in Lisboa, 22/06-26/06.
Pencil & grid / Nasreen Mohamedi
Foam / Jorge Barbi
Space / Galeria Ze Dos Bois
Gesture / Manuel Mota & Margarida Garcia
Wordplay / Art & Language
09 Jun 10
stro' phe' nome is a series of graphics produced using a gestural interface. A study of unseen architecture. The work is published as stdio.006.
Piotr Kamler & Bernard Parmegiani, Une Mission Ephemere (1993)
Minimal paths, pneumatics / Frei Otto
Cantenary Bifurcations / Thomas Wong
Artesanal Voronoi / Seven Six Five
Complex City / Lee Jang Sub
Three 3 / Kat Masback
Vector Fields / Biothing
Paris with H, 8/04-12/04
drawings / Claude Parent
horizons / Jan Dibbets
volumes / Charles-Édouard Jeanneret
cubes / Sol LeWitt
Philip Beesley's talk on living architectures, one of several highlights of mine at Sonic Acts XIII, along with J.P. Sonntag's low frequency standing waves and BJ Nilsen's multi-channel storm in a church.
Supersurface A1-A21 is a series of abstract graphical works produced as a study into volume, rhythm and surface; a kind of visual thinking. The generative graphics are composed of a field of lines subject to deformations through the placement of attractors at different points in space. They're partly based on the reaction-diffusion dynamics evident in morphogenesis.
More info and the complete web gallery available via stdio.
1
There are things
We live among 'and to see them
Is to know ourselves'.
Occurrence, a part
Of an infinite series,
The sad marvels;
Of this was told
A tale of our wickedness,
It is not our wickedness.
2
So spoke of the existence of things,
An unmanageable pantheon
Absolute, but they say
Arid.
A city of the corporations
Glassed
In dreams
And images —
And the pure joy
Of the mineral fact
Tho it is impenetrable
As the world, if it is matter,
Is impenetrable.
George Oppen, Of Being Numerous (NCP)
George Oppen was a poet of matter. Of stuff itself. Dealing in the opacity of things, the impenetrability of materials, the tangible complexity of the world.
Omission as an expression of the unresolved. The conflicts to be admitted in objects.
Gripped by the need for words to constitute a precise, faithful depiction of the world (as lived experience). But the poet's will to imbue that world with a unique sensibility. Tensors producing taut constructions.
A realist-existentialist. A soldier in the second World War, a mechanic, a furniture maker in Mexico. A Communist Party activist.
Oppen took decades to follow up his first collection of poems, Discrete Series. Critic Hugh Kenner once remarked, "it took him 25 years to write the next poem".
Of all so-called Objectivists (Reznikoff, Zukofsky, Rakosi et al), it's Oppen's dedication to clarity, his unashamed empiricism, open preoccupation with aesthetics itself, that has stayed with me over the years.
As with Mompou's piano works, Oppen's spare constructions are instantly recognisable as his own by their consistent clarity of form.
One time Oppen asked of another poet, "how can you write a word like 'angel'?". He was, above all, committed to an empirical honesty in language. The poet needing to earn the right to words through a careful first-hand analysis of the world.
Dedicated to the meticulous crafting of an economical language designed to capture the intractability of real-world things as considered in and of themselves.
At the borders of non-discursive knowledge; the impulse to restore to things a concept-independence through conscious acts of seeing is as direct a claim to poetry as I can think of.
At the moment I'm wondering how to begin. Here's how other people begin.
I start all my plays by naming my characters a, b and c.
When I start a piece, I create a sound bank; I include new sounds, never used before, that might fit my intention and reworked old sounds. I listen to them and create detailed inventories... For example, for De Natura Sonorum, I made lists of sounds classified by shape, subject, colour, etc, according to the TOM (Treaty of Musical Objects) typology.
When I begin a story I know it's set to go. I always begin with the first and last lines. That never changes. Some writers work on a story to see where it will go, what will happen to the characters, but I always know everything about the story before I begin writing it.
Generally I set out with a rather naive attitude because I never really know when my work is actually started. It is not that I think it is difficult - I know what has to be done - but somehow I have to start and then realize: "This will turn into something. We can build upon this" But I could never begin by saying "This is really good - this is the way to do it". I have to put things into motion and then start working.
If you want to renew something you must show that you can do what has been done. You can't begin by innovation. You can't begin by free verse for example. You should attempt a sonnet, or any other set stanza, and then go on to the new things.
The level of detail and craft is something that’s inscribed within the original design concept. And so when I begin to draw, I know what kind of detailing I want the building to have.
There was a desire to start again after the end of a certain idea of Europe, which corresponded to my life, or to my intellectual trajectory. Is there a possible start point that might allow us to begin again? As far as cinema goes, it hasn't been found and one wonders whether it's possible since we don't appear to be capable of speaking or filming differently. It's more like an end for the moment.
I begin by improvising, but when I see that money is running out, I shoot whatever stage we have arrived at.
As a working basis I often deliberately start from wrong assumptions, in order to be able to open new spaces.
John Whitney, Matrix III (1972), Music by Terry Riley
Jorinde Voigt, whose rule-based, hand-drawn systems art I've been a fan of ever since Julian introduced me a few months back. Her work shows an interest in stochasticity, networks, complexity and the visualisation of musical structure.
The Rest is Silence is a project published as a booklet by Jeff Kinkle and Emanuel Almborg. As Jeff explains over at Dossier,
In the late 1970s a group of people living in the borough of Hackney in East London began building a structure on a derelict lot in their neighborhood and continued building until this January. The story of the project’s origins are shrouded in mystery. What is known is that because the residents couldn’t decide on what they wanted to build, they made three rules. The first was that not only would they build without any plan or blueprint, they would not discuss the direction of the project at all. Second, when they were on the building site, no one was allowed to speak. Third, the building would never be completed in that anyone at any point could decide to take it in a new direction. So the structure was built for thirty years until last autumn when the council sold the land to a developer who tore it down in January.
The book is published by andperseand. You can pick it up at Artwords on Rivington St.
Listening a lot to Federico Mompou's piano pieces of late, thinking about what it means to play an instrument 'naturally'. His work manages to combine spontaneity with simple melodic and rhythmic motifs to produce something of lyrical beauty. Try Music Callada (Quiet Music) or the single piece, Pajaro Triste (Sad Bird). I'd recommend Stephen Hough's interpretations as a starting point. Here's a spotify playlist, if you like that sort of thing.
I was first exposed to the Catalan pianist in an intermission to Chris Marker's film, The Last Bolshevik (a film about "the tragedy of a pure communist in a world of would-be communists"1). Marker shows us a cat (presumably one of his), lying around on one of his keyboards at his home studio, listening to a piece of haunting, melancholic piano music. Sparse chords are sustained to form a naive melody that just hangs in the air, accelerating and decelerating effortlessly. This goes on for four minutes.
Mompou's music, subtle yet deceptively straight forward, hardly impresses itself on the world. It's miniature rather than minimal, willfully naive rather than merely simple, delicate rather than crassly emotional. The clarity of purpose and economy of means is breath-taking. The work is a labour of poetry.
His oeuvre has a remarkable continuity to it, with no attempts at a forced evolution or disruption of compositional method. The pieces are intimate and direct, almost immediately recognisable as Mompou; the sparsely populated melodic lines of unresolved chords with distinct contours are his own, the compositions exquisite, resolute in their sheer smallness.
He was likened to Debussy (see something like Charmes V as to why), but such a comparison is unfairly reductionist; he constructed his own miniature sound world in which every note was an essential detail. Known for his humility, Mompou never knowingly attracted attention to himself during his lifetime.
I composed only for myself. I hate bravura music, the big things. I am a simple person. 2
- Federico Mompou, architect of quiet worlds, 1893-1987
[1] Viktor Dyomin
[2] Federico Mompou: Catalonian Composer Magnifico (pdf)
Grid Index by Carsten Nicolai is a truly excellent visual investigation of 2D planes. Comes with vector files for every tiling/grid in the book.
Mortal Engine, sound by Ben Frost (found via Matt Pyke).
Once I was beset by anxiety. I couldn't tell right from left or orient myself. I could have cried out with terror at being lost. But I pushed the fear away by studying the sky, determining where the moon would come out, where the sun would appear in the morning. I saw myself in relation to the stars. I began weeping and knew I was alright. That is the way I make use of geometry. The miracle is that I am able to do it by geometry.
Marie Darrieussecq, Dans la maison de Louise
Best photography book I've picked up this year: Takashi Homma's large format New Waves. I've never known a book that transported me like this one.
Felix was nice enough to play Vasco & I a bunch of compositions on his sound machines at Gasworks. He says they're going to tour the world as a support act on the next Plaid tour. He says he's building lots more; machines with "blades" and wind instruments. Incredible.
Jan (Microstoria, Mouse on Mars) created an artificial listening site at the Cubitt Gallery in Angel, known simply as the 'noise room'. You could sit and listen to 8 hours of sound created especially for the 5.1 sound system. The full program includes folks like Keith Fullerton Whitman, Kevin Blechdom, Lee Ranaldo and David Grubbs. I visited it yesterday (final day) and it was pretty great.
I'm hoping the full program will be published in some kind of format too.
Butoh 'weakened body' performance from Tatsumi Hijikata.
Last night the Tate Modern screened works of early computer art for free in the Turbine Hall. It was a great setting and a superb screening, which included work by Lilian Schwartz and Denys Irving (full listing here). Amongst them was Two Space by Larry Cuba. I can't find it online but the excerpt above gives you a feeling for Cuba's work. All the pieces were a tribute to the use of technological constraints as a creative driving force. I'm hoping more of this early work is published on DVD format at some point.
'Tropisms' is the latest Cacao release. It contains the first two tropisms in a series which will be released in parts. The tropisms are sonic versions of Nathalie Sarraute's interpretation of the term, exemplified in her literary work of the same name (more). You can download the artwork & release in full.
No synthesizers were used.
Hieronymous Bosch, Center panel, 'The Garden of Earthly Delights', circa 1504
Worth seeing in in the context of the entire triptych and with the shutters closed. Bosch has consistently fascinated me for a decade now (I've been lucky enough to see originals of his in Venice and Madrid), and I finally got round to picking up a great publication on Bosch's life & work.
Bernd and Hilla Becher constructed a typology of industrial buildings in post-war Germany. It's an amazing body of work. They are the most productive collaborating couple i can think of. Lovegrove says, "industrial design is the art of the 21st Century", and the engineer in me, the one that correlates beauty and function, is tempted to agree. It's the same part of me, however, that fondly recalls the smell and thick layers of white powder inside ammonia chemical plants. Go figure.