The Sound of Things- Unmonumental

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'The Sound of Things: Unmonumental Audio' show earlier this year

Note: “Unmonumental” has been extended to April 9, 2008 with selected works presented exclusively on Floor 2.

“Unmonumental” is an exhibition about fragmented forms, torn pictures and clashing sounds. Investigating the nature of collage in contemporary art practices, “Unmonumental” also describes the present as an age of crumbling symbols and broken icons. Inspired by the art it presents, “Unmonumental” grows over time like an assemblage. It starts as a survey of recent sculpture, and morphs as layers of images, sounds, and Internet-based art are added in three subsequent parts.

The first exhibition in the cycle, “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century” (December 1, 2007 – March 30, 2008), explores the reemergence of sculptural assemblage. This exhibition focuses on a specific form of contemporary sculpture that juxtaposes disparate elements for suggestive effect. These sculptures display an additive quality that gives them a distinct informality: conversational, provisional, at times even corroded and corrupted, they are un-heroic and manifestly unmonumental.

In the second part of the exhibition, “Collage: The Unmonumental Picture” (January 16, 2008 – March 30, 2008), two-dimensional works by eleven artists take over the museum walls and surround the sculptures. Historically collage tends to appear in times of trauma and social change. The artists in “The Unmonumental Picture” exploit the power of found images to communicate the unease, displacement, and anger peculiar to our times.

The third part, “The Sound of Things: Unmonumental Audio” (February 13, 2008 – March 30, 2008), carries the theme of unmonumentality into the realm of sound. Audio collages by thirteen artists, reflecting diverse techniques including found recording, spoken text, and manipulated noise, will play throughout three of the Museum’s galleries. The compositions are broadcast at three-minute intervals, transforming the experience of “Unmonumental” into one in which sounds and images dramatically mix and overlap.

The final addition to the exhibition, "Montage: Unmonumental Online" (February 15, 2008 – March 30, 2008), occurs on the Web at rhizome.org/montage and introduces works by an international group of artists who use appropriation to create Internet-based assemblages. The artists in “Montage: Unmonumental Online” extend the radical practice of collage to the Internet: using digital images, sounds, and code, they interpret fictions and fantasies found online.

Banner image:
Isa Genzken
Elefant (detail), 2006
Wood, plastic tubes, plastic foils, vertical blinds, plastic toys, artificial flowers, fabric, bubble wrap, lacquer, and spray paint
78 3/4 x 86 1/2 x 39 3/8 in / 200 x 220 x 100 cm
Collection Mari and Peter Shaw
Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Daniel Buchholz, Cologne; David Zwirner, New York; Collection of Peter and Mari Shaw, Philadelphia

Sound artists in show

Vito Acconci (with Sarina Basta and Daniel Perlin)

Vito Acconci (with Sarina Basta and Daniel Perlin)

Born 1940, Bronx, New York/Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

Since his early performances, Vito Acconci has been experimenting with sound. From the whispers and moans of Seedbed (1972) to the most recent architectural projects in which the artist narrates buildings instead of drawing them, Acconci has been combining his own voice with environmental sounds and ambient noises to shape imaginary spaces of desire or to construct new sites for living. Acconci’s work has been widely shown internationally, including one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.

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http://www.acconci.com/

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Nautical Almanac

Nautical Almanac

Nautical Almanac, 1994 - Present
Twig Harper, Born 1976, Eerie, Pennsylvania/Lives and work at Tarantula Hill, Baltimore, Maryland
Carly Ptak, Born 1974, Flint, Michigan/Lives and work at Tarantula Hill, Baltimore, Maryland

Nautical Almanac is an experimental band that was founded in Michigan in 1994. It emerged from a midwestern scene of noise outfits that transformed junk—from alarm clocks to old toys—into homemade instruments. Simultaneously ominous and melodious with complicated, driving rhythms that seem to move in several directions at once, Nautical Almanac, in the words of its other key member Carly Ptak, "encapsulates the paradoxical world we live in." Ptak and Harper live in Baltimore, where they founded and now run Tarantula Hill, a home, performance space and recording studio, out of which their label HereSee is produced.

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Anthony Burdin

Anthony Burdin

Born in Encino, California/Lives and works in California

“Recording” is a crucial word in Anthony Burdin’s personal, and often cryptic, vocabulary. Part heavy metal fan and part bastard child of John Cage, Burdin has been recording himself and his life in an endless numbers of videotapes and music cassettes, which the artist plays and tapes over and over again, often while driving, performing, or working on his clandestine radio station. Burdin was included in Day for Night: Whitney Biennial 2006 and the 4th Berlin Biennale and has had one-person exhibitions at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, and Maccarone Gallery, New York.

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Trisha Donnelly

Trisha Donnelly

Born 1974, San Francisco, California/Lives and works in San Francisco, California

Donnelly was born in 1974 in San Francisco. Over the past seven years, she has worked in, but not necessarily respected, a wide array of mediums, including sound, video, sculpture, drawing, and photography. Her work has been exhibited most recently at the Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York; Air de Paris; the Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; and the Kunsthalle, Zurich. She has participated in the Berlin Biennial (2006), the 54th Carnegie International, as well as the 50th Venice Biennale among other exhibitions. In 2007, her sound work was performed at the Manchester Opera, and in 2008 she will be the subject of a survey exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

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Paul Elliman

Paul Elliman

Born 1961, London, United Kingdom/Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

Paul Elliman is a London-based designer, as well as an author and critic of visual culture who has been on the faculty of the Yale School of Art since 1997. The founder of www.otherschools.com, over the past twenty years Elliman has created a unique discipline that combines research and historical scholarship with practice in typography, graphic design theory, printmaking, and sound work. Elliman often collaborates with individuals in diverse fields ranging from architecture and engineering to cycling. More recently, his has created aural works that juxtapose the voices that announce the stops of subways and metros internationally or collage the different voices of individual artists to create one coherent answering machine message. Elliman’s work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, London, and is part of collections of the British Council at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York. He is the author of four books, and his articles appear regularly in IDEA Magazine, Eye, and dot dot dot.

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Andy Graydon

Andy Graydon

Born 1971, Maui, Hawaii/Lives and works in New York City, New York

Graydon's sound and installation work explores the interstitial spaces between site and displacement, presence and deferral. In his recent work, Graydon is interested in creating what he calls "science fiction ecologies" by engaging with the speculative and transformational qualities within an environment. In 2007, Graydon's CD At Bay was released on Winds Measure Recordings, and Room Works, a solo exhibition, was presented at the Portland Art Center. “Untitled (Ground),” a new series of projected light, sound, and photography will be presented at LMAKprojects in New York in 2008.

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Language Removal Services

Language Removal Services

Language Removal Services, Born 1999, Hollywood, California
Chris Kubick, Born 1970, Detroit, Michigan
Douglas Fleishcutt, Born 1942, Hollywood, California
Polly Serial, Born 1910, Galveston, Texas

Chris Kubick is an artist, composer and sound designer who works under a variety of pseudonyms, including Language Removal Services, an institute and laboratory founded by one Dr. Raymond Chronic that may or may not exist solely as the Web site www.languageremoval.com. Kubick frequently collaborates with Anne Walsh, and together they have created ARCHIVE, whose best-known project, entitled Art After Death consists of interviews with artists who have died conducted through spirit mediums. Together their work has appeared in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Royal College of Art, London. Kubick has been heard on public radio in the U.S., Canada and Great Britain.

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Ulrike Müller

Ulrike Müller

Born 1971, Austria/Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

Ulrike Müller is a Vienna-born, New York-based artist who, for the past ten years has created a feminist, theoretical, and frankly activist body of work that situates art making as means to (en)action. Müller is deeply involved with both language and body as vehicles of human expression. Through her conscious manipulation of both, she goads viewers to critically examine the motives, as well as the very means, of communication between the artist and the spectator, the speaker and the listener. Since 2005, Müller has been the co-editor of the queer feminist journal LTTR. “New York Times” has previously been exhibited, most recently, as an installation at Orchard, New York. For The Sound of Things it has been re-mastered for single-channel listening.

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Keith Obadike

Keith Obadike

Born 1973, Nashville, Tennessee/Lives and works in New York

Mendi and Keith Obadike make art, music,and literature. Recent projects include Big House / Disclosure, a two hundred hour sound installation/ house song commissioned by Northwestern University. Their work in progress includes Four Electric Ghosts, an opera-masquerade based on the video game Pac Man and the novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

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Pauline Oliveros

other glorious ones

• Pawel Althamer
• Ei Arakawa
• Micol Assaël
• Fikret Atay
• Roger Ballen
• Huma Bhaba
• Berlinde De Bruyckere
• Maurizio Cattelan
• William Christenberry
• Roberto Cuoghi
• Bill Daniel
• Nathalie Djurberg
• Reverend Howard Finster
• Nancy Graves
• Susan Hefuna
• Werner Herzog
• Jeffrey Inaba
• Lauren Kelley
• Robert Kusmirowski
• Zoe Leonard
• Klara Liden
• Erik van Lieshout
• Michael Patterson-Carver
• Diego Perrone
• Ayman Ramadan
• Jan Rothuizen
• Thomas Schütte
• Dana Schutz
• Tino Sehgal
• Michael Stickrod
• August Strindberg
• Eugene Von Bruenchenhein
• Tarek Zaki
• Arthur Zmijewski