Monthly Archive for December, 2011

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Composers as Gardeners

Published on December 4, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Brian Eno for Edge…

About the time when I first started making records, I was also starting to become aware of a new sort of organizing principle in music.  I think like many people, I had assumed that music was produced, or created in the way that you imagine symphony composers make music, which is by having a complete idea in their head in every detail and then somehow writing out ways by which other people could reproduce that.  In the same way as one imagines an architect working.  You know, designing the building, in all its details, and then having that constructed.

In the mid-’60s, there started to appear some music that really wasn’t like that at all.  And in fact, it was about the time I started making music, and I found that I was making music in this same rather unusual new way.  So that the music I was listening to then in particular, in relation to this point, was Terry Riley’s “In C” and Steve Reich’s famous tape pieces, “It’s Gonna Rain” and “Come Out.”  And various other pieces as well. More…

Interlopers on the Skyline

Published on December 3, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Carol Vogel at The New York Times…

Sitting in his studio here, a converted warehouse north of King’s Cross, on a recent chilly morning, the artist Antony Gormley was talking about the sensation he was hoping to cause with “Event Horizon,” his first public art project in New York. It had been conceived as a shocker: from next Friday through Aug. 15, 31 naked men — or rather 31 slightly different sculptures of the same naked man, Mr. Gormley himself — will be perched on rooftops, standing on the grounds of Madison Square Park and dotting the sidewalks around the Flatiron district.

“When I did it in London” — in 2007 these same figures could be found on bridges, buildings and streets along the South Bank of the Thames River — “the reaction was quite remarkable,” he said. “People would stop. They would notice one; they would immediately stop somebody else on the street, pointing to the thing. Then gatherings of people would result, and quite quickly they would register their environment in a way they hadn’t before.” More…

It’s Payback Time

Published on December 2, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Jerry Saltz at New York Art…

Imagine it’s 1981. You’re an artist, in love with art, smitten with art history. You’re also a woman, with almost no mentors to look to; art history just isn’t that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country, a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language. Merely the act of creating art while female, in this atmosphere, was insurrectionary. How to love art without killing yourself or acquiescing to the rules of the game? How to get around, burrow under, enter, or blow up those apparently impervious walls? The late painter Elizabeth Murray rightly observed, “Seeing historically belongs to the guys … The greatest part about being a woman … is that I’m not really a part of [that art history]. I can do whatever I want.”

Sherrie Levine’s tightly controlled, academically stringent, sometimes stultifying survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art shows how one artist from this generation cross-examined art history, reveled in it, and smashed it against the windshield of her anger. Levine’s subtle Swiftian thrashing of and love affair with the patriarchal canon are everywhere in this show. Her strategy was simple and not entirely novel. More…

The Failure Addict

Published on December 1, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Rob Horning at The New Inquiry…

It takes a special kind of self-absorption to believe that your failures will fascinate — a need to be loved not for your talents but despite them. John Phillips, founder of the Mamas and the Papas — the 1960s quartet that rode a string of deceptively sunny-seeming radio hits to become icons of hippie hedonism — exemplified this species of celebrity narcissism. Gifted but irretrievably dissolute, Phillips had always seemed more interested in romanticizing failure and squandering talent than applying his ample supply of it with any consistency. Even in his chart-ruling heyday, he seemed perversely, persistently drawn to themes of disappointment, betrayal, and regret (albeit cleverly masked by resplendent harmonies and catchy melodies). The Mamas and the Papas’ hits are preoccupied with ennui, broken relationships, and futile fantasies of escape: California dreaming on such a winter’s day.

The first Mamas and the Papas album, If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (1966) went to the top of Billboard’s album chart and spawned several hits, including “Monday, Monday” and “California Dreamin’,” which have become durable folk standards. And already, on the group’s second album, rushed out later that year to capitalize on the band’s momentum, Phillips was exuberantly singing, “I can’t wait to let you down.” More…