Art

Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise

I will be once again participating in the annual Matthew Sperry Festival performance at the Luggage Store Gallery this coming Thursday. In addition to the tag-team trio shift (similar to last year’s event) we will be performing Cornelius Cardew’s piece Treatise, which is based on a rather monumental graphical score. As in most graphical score pieces, performers freely interpret the images. Below you can see an realization by Shawn Feeney that uses simple electronic sounds to realize an animated version of the score. I find it quite interesting as a visual+audio work

Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise – Realization from Shawn Feeney on Vimeo.

I suspect given the size and scope of our ensemble, our interpretation will be somewhat different.

An interesting discussion of Treatise (with a link to a flash animation) can be found here.

I <3 SF (I Love SF), Driftwood Salon

The show I <3 SF (where “<3” is the the common emoticon for heart that may or may not appear properly in this print) is closing today at Driftwood Salon, but we take a little time today to look back on my visit to the opening of the show. It would have hard to not attend a show that features on the compact but diverse city we call home. It was scheduled to coincide with the 155th anniversary of the founding of the City and County of San Francisco on June 11, 1856, and features several artists’ interpretations of life in the city as a general concept but details and subject matter unique to San Francisco. There are street scenes, architectural details, references to cultural history, and some that are simply “tributes”.

The “centerpiece” of the exhibition was a large painted cardboard origami piece by Joe Spear with the show title “I <3 SF” emblazoned on the side, about where the US emblem might go on a fighter jet.


[Joe Spear’s metal origami in foreground. Rebecca Kerlin in background.]

On the wall behind the origami one can see several pieces by Rebecca Kerlin, whose works featuring the highways and other infrastructure of our region and my own neighborhood in particular have often been featured on this site. The three selections on the wall are from her “Constructions” series, with the large “Underpass Under Construction in Blue” pieces and the smaller “Underpass Under Construction in Orange” depicting the freeway approaching the Bay Bridge over 4th Street.


[Detail of Rebecca Kerlin’s Underpass Under Construction in Orange.]

Driftwood Salon is itself in an interesting location on a side street in SOMA near the Central Freeway, so it seems appropriate that Kerlin’s work has been featured in multiple shows here.

Jun Han Kim’s pieces, including the photorealistic A View of Sunset, SF #4 also take on the literal sights and neighborhoods of the city.


[Jun Han Kim]

Here we see the edge of the quieter and often grayer Sunset District from the Great Highway on the Pacific coast. It is an interesting part of the city that feels quite distant from the downtown. It was placed in the exhibition next to a very contrasting painting by Mei-Ying Dell’Aquila.


[Mei-Ying Dell’Aquila.]

Here we see a more surreal image of the downtown financial district, with a figure who is at once the Statue of Liberty, a cartoon superhero and a fashionably dressed urban denizen crossing the street.

Two very different pieces by Greg PNUT Galinsky reference music and architecture of the city without specific locations.


[Greg PNUT Galinsky]

This first piece suggests jazz and brings to mind the frequent jam sessions around the city – but the image also has a very iconic and industrial quality with its sparse clean lines. The clean black lines are used quite differently in this piece which is painted on glass. The reference to the city here is a bit less clear, though the use of weathered wood in the frame reflects the older architecture in the city and a recent trend in local art.


[Greg PNUT Galinsky]

The direct reference in these pieces by Lady Millard are also a bit more obscure, except for the title “Fog City”.


[Lady Millard.]

But they do pay homage to street art, and to the cartoon-like elements that seem be part of international urban art and culture. Such images could be at home in a gallery in large cities in Asia as there are in San Francisco, and perhaps represent the city’s place in a larger “Pacific urban” cultural landscape.

Indeed, part of what made this exhibition interesting is that the collection of different views on the city reflect my own interests in infrastrcture, urban landscape, music, fashion, etc – but each taken in more specialized ways by the individual artists.

The exhibition will remain on display for today (July 9) at Driftwood Salon (39 Isis Street) with a closing reception this evening.

Doug Rickard: A New American Picture (Stephen Wirtz Gallery)

Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture series at Stephen Wirtz Gallery is a “snapshot” of both technology and society at a particular moment in time. More and more of our landscape is being captured in online images and connected to the rest of the world. At the same time, more of our communities are falling behind economically and socially and seem distant from the technology that makes them more visible than ever.

[39.259736, Baltimore, MD. 2008. Image courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery.]

Most readers are undoubtedly familiar with Google Street View. It’s the feature on on Google Maps where you drop the little stick figure guy onto the map and get an immersive street-level view of the location. Some readers may have also seen the Google vehicles with their roof-mounted vehicles on the street taking new pictures for this ongoing project (I have seen them on several occasions). Both the product and process can seem a bit voyeuristic at times as one sees people going about their daily lives in these images. As such, it brings to mind the recent EXPOSED exhibition at SFMOMA (which closed in April), which focused surveillance, voyeurism, and the presence of both unintended subjects and witnesses in photography.

[#39.937119, Camden, NJ. 2009.  Image courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery.]

For this project, Rickard, who is perhaps best known for his website American Suburb X, has poured over thousands of locations from Google Street View from around the United States, focusing primarily on the decaying edges of cities and rural communities. The cities featured are among those hit hardest by natural disasters, foreclosures, unemployment and other challenges.  Large cities, such as Detroit, Chicago and New Orleans are represented, as are smaller towns such as West-Helena, Arkansas.  This was clearly a massive undertaking – even if one focuses on specific neighborhoods of specific towns and cities, that is a lot of data and imagery to cover.  It can be in a way compared to covering the real life distances and capturing particular frames and angles and daily life continued unabated. There are echoes of Walker Evans and other noted photographers who documented cross-sections of American life, but the technological mediation, particularly with its implications of distance and anonymity, is very contemporary. Rickard acts as a real photographer in a virtual world, re-photographing the images from the computer screen.

[#29.942566, New Orleans, LA. 2008. Image courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery.]

In the gallery setting, the images which are most often seen in miniature on computers and smartphones are displayed in large format (some as large as 44 inches wide). The low resolution artifacts from the stitching algorithms used to piece together the source photos make the technology apparent. It looks like Google probably rolled out higher-resolution source images during the course of this project, as some seem to be of significantly higher quality. But the grainy and imperfect quality remains and provides an interesting contrast between imaging and data technology and the aging streets and buildings of these communities. There are interesting visual elements, such as brightly colored buildings against muted textures, which may be exaggerated by the cameras and image-processing techniques, but may also reflect the real scenes.

[#83.016417, Detroit, MI. 2009.  Image courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery.]

Not surprisingly given my own photographic work, I was drawn to many of these images with their decaying urban landscape – for example, the straight lines and gritty texture in #39.259736, Baltimore, MD. 2008, or the patches of color, texture and text in #83.016417, Detroit, MI. 2009. However, the composition and intention here is very different. These images are not meant to be pretty. And the inclusion of people to the scenes does make them a bit jarring. Google does automatically blur the faces of all the people, but one still cannot dismiss their presence.  And thus we have to consider what it is like to live along these streets, not just visit them. There is also the interesting question of people becoming unwitting elements of one of the largest image databases and 3D virtual environments, and then through Rickard’s process of deliberate selection find themselves on the walls of a gallery.

[#42.418064, Detroit, MI. 2009. Image courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery.]

The exhibition will continue at Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco through June 11.

No Fooling, We Mean It! – McLoughlin Gallery

“No Fooling, We Mean It!” at The McLoughlin Gallery is a show that is simultaneously playful and serious. The cavernous space of the gallery plays host to several large-scale works by sculptors David Middlebrook, Jeff Schomberg and Doug Thielscher. Each of the sculptors has a different focus, Schomberg on metal, Thielscher on stone, and Middlebrook on mixed materials. But all three present very serious well-constructed and polished piece (“no fooling”) with a sense of humor and fun (“fooling”).  Additionally, all three are local artists, working and residing in the extended Bay Area.

The overall presentation has a sparseness, with lots of empty space and exposure of the gallery’s bare concrete walls that make it easy to focus on a single piece at any given moment. Even the larger stone works are not crowded and blend with structure of the space. I was most immediately drawn to Schomberg’s metal work, and in particular his pair of geometric wall pieces, Hinged and Unhinged.

[Jeff Schomberg, Hinged (2009).  Found metal objects in steel frame.  Image courtesy of McLoughlin Gallery.]

[Jeff Schomberg, Uninged (2009).  Found metal objects in found frame assemblage.  Image courtesy of McLoughlin Gallery. Click to enlarge.]

The rectangular frames serve as a boundary between the space of the gallery and the empty space within the pieces. Inside, each object is given room to be seen separately, such as the large circle in Unhinged or the intricate thin metal lines in both pieces that remind of my street maps. Indeed, the combination of geometric elements and metal coincide with my own focus on urban landscape and infrastructure. (See the similar elements in yesterday’s Wordless Wednesday post.) The circular elements seem particularly prominent in contrast to the mostly straight-line shapes of the found-metal components. Still other objects manage to retain their original functional shape and industrial history from before they became art. His mixed-media piece Trumbull takes the industrial theme one step further. An old rusted fuse box has been combined with a video of a fireplace and reassembled into a new piece of machinery. It is futuristic, in that delightful dystopian sort of way, even as it looks back on earlier electrical technology.

[Jeff Schomberg, Trumbull (2011).  Fuse box with video.  Image courtesy of McLoughlin Gallery.  Click image to enlarge.]

These pieces, however, do stand apart within the overall exhibit. If there is one theme that cuts across all of the artists, it is “human-like forms that really aren’t human.” Among Schomberg’s metal sculptures are a series of small human-like figures with heads shaped like pipes or other pieces of hardware – probably the most humorous of his offerings. David Middlebrook’s assemblages have an organic look about them and some such as King of Things seem like they could get up and walk around. Think of Terry Gilliam’s cartoons or some of the creatures from the 1970s animated film Fantastic Planet.

[David Middlebrook, King of Things (2010).  Bronze, aluminum, Indian gibble, cast expoxy.  Image courtesy of McLoughlin Gallery.  Click image to enlarge.]

The bronze box that serves as the base for the large stone egg in Middlebrook’s Carbon was an interesting touch. Doug Thielsher’s stone sculptures are the most directly figurative, but even here the figures are quite distorted, as in the two marble heads of The Ninth Circle that melt into one another. Thielsher’s sculptures were most noticeable for their use of the gallery space. From a distance, they seem like well-placed classical sculpture in a traditional art museum – and indeed they all draw from biblical or mythological themes. Up close, one sees the more surreal and humorous nature. Again, the one that most resonated for me was the most geometric. In Cain #3, the detached hand is almost lost underneath the large white cube and the black dot.  Similarly, the hand seems to disappear into the large black cube of Cain #1.

[Doug Thielscher, Cain #3 (2006).  Carrara and Belgian black marble.  Image courtesy of McLoughlin Gallery. ]

The exhibit opened, appropriately, on April 1, and will remain on display though May 21. For more information about the exhibition and visiting, visit the gallery’s website.

Cordelia, Theatre of Yugen

Cordelia is a Noh adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear presented by Theatre of Yugen at NOHspace. The play is a combination of old and new. It draws its structure and performance elements from the tradition of Noh and its source text from Shakespeare, both centuries old. But the actual text by Erik Ehn, music by Suki O’Kane and production directed by Jubilith Moore are wholly contemporary. They draw heavily from the traditional sources, but are in no way limited by them. Enh’s text is a rearrangement of lines from the original Shakespeare but focused on the point of view of Cordelia (King Lear’s youngest daughter) minimized to fit within the constraints of Noh. Polly Moller performs on standard concert and bass flutes and a bagpipe chanter, but expertly invokes the attacks, pitch bends and timbral shifts of traditional Japanese music. Sheila Berotti plays the tradition role of the chorus, but as a single voice with a shruti box (a drone instrument usually found in Indian classical music). The main element of the set, a bridge that folds into to descending segments, seems very contemporary and industrial – but it is in fact an adaptation of the traditional hashigakari from Noh theater.

In the first act, Cordelia (played by Moore) appears as a member of a royal court and recounts her refusal to flatter her father, the king, with words, which leads to her being disowned and exiled. In the second act, she returns in the form of a warrior, reflecting her return to England at the end of the play in an attempt to save her father that ultimately ends tragically. In the interlude, we meet the Fool (played by Lluis Valls), who both recites lines from the original play and provides a synopsis of the story. He serves as a comic counterpoint, and as a practical guide for those either unfamiliar with the original King Lear or new to structure of Noh theater. (One particularly fun moment was when he relates the marriages of Cordelia’s sisters, he pauses with a slight look and sound of disgust for the rather creepy Duke of Cornwall.)


[Click to enlarge.]

Overall the elements of the performance, the music, the set design, the text, the movement all have a very minimalist quality. There is a lot of empty space in the slow and deliberate movements of Moore as Cordelia and chanting of the text. Similarly, the music is very sparse. The flute lines are composed from small sets of notes that explore timbre, dynamics and abrupt rhythmic changes. The silence between the flute, text and motion is occasionally punctuated by loud hits on the snare drum (performed by Anna Wray). The space left me ample opportunity to escape from the narrative of the play and instead focus on specific details, such as qualities of the flute performance, the text on wall of the set, the occasional harmonic swells of the shruti box, or details of the lighting.

The main exception to the overall minimalism was the costume design by Risa Dye. Cordelia’s two costumes are both quite elaborate. They combine the multiple layers often found in Noh costumes with rather ornate and highly textured elements reminiscent of Elizabethan England (at least as seen in paintings from the time). The costume of the Fool was something else again, a hooded suit covered entirely in text (taken from another play by Ehn). It helped to emphasize the character of the Fool as a “word artist”, and also contribute to his more frenetic character in contrast to the rest of the performance.

The words were also present on the wall of the set (designed by Joshua McDermott). The wall was inspired by memorial walls, in particular from the genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s. Phases from Ehn’s plays were used in place of names. In addition to its direct meaning, the wall evoked for me a sense of urban space with graffiti, which is central in my own visual work.

It is interesting to reflect on how easily the minimalist and non-linear elements of Noh seem to translate into a contemporary work of art, and also provide opportunity for reflection and meditation. At the same time, the structure provides enough space for contemporary visual and musical elements to poke through. As such, it provides some ideas and inspiration for future work.

Cordelia continues with additional performances at Theatre of Yugen tonight (May 5) through Saturday May 7.

[All photos in this article courtesy of Theatre of Yugen.]

CCRMA Modulations at SOMArts

A few weeks I go, I attended CCRMA Modulations 2011, an evening of live electronic music and sound installations by CCRMA (the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford) and special guests at SOMArts in San Francisco. The event was an eight-hour marathon, though I only stayed for about half the time, seeing many of the installations and most of the live-music performances.

The first part of the evening featured sound sculptures from Trimpin and his students at CCRMA. This particular project, the “Boom Boom Record Player” by Jiffer Harriman stuck with me.

The output from the record player is used to drive the electromechanical instruments on the right. I thought the instruments were well crafted – but I thought it was particularly fitting to have a classic Earth Wind and Fire LP on the record player.


[Click image to enlarge.]

Trimpin’s offering featured coin-operated robotic percussion where the drums included just about every model of Apple notebook computer going back to an early PowerBook (and even earlier as I think I espied an Apple IIc).


[Click image to enlarge.]

The live-music portion of the evening with Tweet Dreams by Luke Dahl and Carr Wilkerson. Audience members with Twitter access were encouraged to live-tweet messages to a specific hashtag #modulations. The messages were then analyzed in real time and the data used to affect the music. As I was planning to live tweet from this event anyway via iPhone, I was ready to participate. Of course, inviting audience participation like this is a risky proposition for the artists, as one cannot control what people may say. I will freely admit I can be a bit snarky at times and it came out in some of my tweets. The music was relatively benign, with very harmonic runs of notes – and I exhorted them to “give me something harsh and noisy”. Inspired by another participant, I also quoted lines from the infamous “More Cowbell!” skit from Saturday Night Live, much to the delight of some in the audience. The main changes in the music seemed to be in density, rhythm and some melodic structure, but all within boundaries that kept the sound relatively harmonic and “pleasant.” I would have personally liked to see (as I suggested via Twitter), more complex music, with some noisy elements and more dramatic changes. But the interaction with the music and and the audience was a lot of fun.

The next piece, Sferic by Katharine Hawthorne, featured dance and electronics. It was described as “using radio and movement improvisation to explore the body as an antenna.” The dancers, dressed in black outfits with painted patterns, began the movement to a stream of radio static. The motions were relatively minimalist, and sometimes seemed strained. Gestures included outstretched arms and fingers pointing, with Hawthorne walking slowly as her dance partner Luke Taylor ran more quickly. Rich, harmonic music entered from the rear channels of the hall, and dancers moved to being flat on the ground. The static noise returned, but more crackly with other radio-tuning sounds, then it became a low rumble. The dancers seemed to be trying very hard to get up. Then they started pointing. The music became more anxious, with low percussive elements. The dance became more energetic and active as the piece came to a close.

This was followed by Fernando Lopez-Lezcano performing Dinosaur Skin (Piel de Dinosaurio) a piece for multi-channel sound diffusion, an analog synthesizer and custom computer software. The centerpiece was a custom analog synthesizer “El Dinosaur” that Lopez-Lezcano build from scratch in 1981.

The instrument is monophonic (but like most analog synthesizers, a very rich monophonic), multiplied for the purposes of the performance by audio processing in external software and hardware. The music started very subtly, with sounds like galloping in the distance. The sounds grew high in pitch, then descended and moved across the room – the sense of space in the multichannel presentation was quite strong. More lines of sound emerged, with extreme variations in the pitch, low and high. The timbre, continually changing, grew more liquidy over time, with more complex motion and rotation of elements in the sound space. Then it became more dry and machine like. There was an exceptionally loud burst of sound followed by a series of loud whistles on top of low buzzing. The sounds slowed down and became more percussive (I was reminded as I often am with sounds like this of Stockhausen’s Kontakte (II)). Then another series of harsher whistles and bursts of sound. One sound in particular started the resonant quite strongly in the room. Overall, the sound became steady but inharmonic – the timbre becoming more filtered and “analog-like”.

The final performance in this section of the evening featured Wobbly (aka Jon Leidecker) as a guest artist presenting More Animals, a “hybrid electronic / concrete work” that combined manipulated field records of animals with synthesized sounds. As a result, the piece was filled with sounds that either were actual animals or reminiscent of animal sounds freely mixed. The piece opened with pizzicato glissandi on strings, which became more wailing and plaintive over time. I heard sounds that either were whales and cats, or models of whales and cats. Behind this sounds, pure sine tones emerged and then watery synthesized tones. A series of granular sounds emerged, some of which reminded me of human moaning. The eerie and watery soundscape that grew from these elements was rich and immersive. After a while, there was a sudden abrupt change followed by violent ripping sounds, followed by more natural elements, such as water and bird whistles. These natural elements were blended with AM modulation which sounded a bit like a helicopter. Another abrupt change led to more animal sounds with eerie howling and wind, a strange resonant forest. Gradually the sound moved from natural to more technological with “sci fi” elements, such as descending electrical noises. Another sudden change brought a rhythmic percussion pattern, slow and steady, a latin “3+2+2” with electronic flourishes. Then it stopped, and restarted and grew, with previous elements from the piece becoming part of the rhythm.

After an intermission, the seats were cleared from the hall and the music resumed in a more techno dance-club style and atmosphere, with beat-based electronic music and visuals. Guest artists Sutekh and Nate Boyce opened with Bands of Noise in Four Directions & All Combinations (after Sol LeWitt). Glitchy bursts of noise resounded from the speakers while the screens showed mesmerizing geometric animations that did indeed remind me a bit of Sol LeWitt (you can see some examples of his work in previous posts).

Later in the evening Luke Dahl returned for a solo electronic set. It began calmly with minor chords processed through rhythmic delays, backed by very urban poster-like graphics. Behind this rhythmic motif, filtered percussion and bass sounds emerged, coalescing into a steady house pattern, with stable harmony and undulating filtered timbres. At times the music seemed to reach back beyond house and invoke late 1970s and early 1980s disco elements. Just at it was easy to get lost listening to Wobbly’s environmentally-inspired soundscapes, I was able to become immersed in the rhythms and timbres of this particular style. The graphics showed close-ups of analog synthesizers – I am pretty sure at least some of the images were of a Minimoog. I did find out that these images were independent of the musical performance, and thus we were not looking at instruments being used. I liked hearing Luke’s set in the context of the pieces earlier in the evening, the transition from the multi-channel soundscapes to the glitchy noise and to the house-music and dance elements.

I was unfortunately not able to stay for the remaining sets. But overall it was a good and very full evening of music and technology.