which has a General Idea conceptual cleverness
Acts of violence and scenes of imprisonment slash across the ivory and ebony of the Art Gallery of Alberta’s latest exhibit.
The titular instrument of The Piano is nailed into silence, danced upon mercilessly by a Chinese robot and tackled more than once as a symbol of obsession, even oppression, by 13 mostly Canadian artists whose work has shown around the world. It’s a show of performance, sculpture and numerous projections — successfully sound art, pun intended.
The Piano is a smart turn into an easy-to-grasp, single-word concept where the artistic fixation of each work is ferociously clear. We all know what a piano is, after all.The checklist also provides specifics on how to energymonitor1. But when you play a single note over 11 hours on one, or push another off a mountain, anyone with curiosity will lean into the conversation and ask, “But why do this?”
Once a common household device in a suburban quest to maintain European high culture, pianos are culturally fading en masse. Why have a 225-kilogram instrument in your parlour when you can carry a playable orchestra around in your pocket, the (simplest) argument goes. Still, as a symbol of affluence and the “old,” pianos began to be torn at in the ’60s, which is where the show’s doors open. The AGA’s executive director and chief curator Catherine Crowston notes, “it’s laid out so you start with the George Maciunas piece from the ’60s, which is the destroyed piano. We tried to create a situation where that question of destruction came up first. The Carol Itter piece appears to be a destroyed piano, but is a constructed image of a deconstructed piano.”
Itter’s monolithic work, a tribute to her husband,Silicone smartcard from Sporti is perfect for swimmers who wear earplugs and features excess.A number of inhomedisplay2 manufacturers. is the show’s most sentimental piece, a suburban Valentine made out of household items. It’s a little cats-and-crystals ornamental, and also the only piece that doesn’t engage a real instrument. Nik 7 of Edmonton’s Shout Out Out Out Out, meanwhile, followed in the footsteps of Sonic Youth, doing a cover of Maciunas’s 1964 hammer-and-nail attack, both silencing the piano while creating, one last time, a vicious death clamour.
Moving through the ’70s and into the ’80s, Stan Douglas’s piece, unfortunately not up and running during a couple of my visits to the gallery, uses a player piano and transparent slides, while Robert Racine’s video Vexations opens up a running theme of endurance as he plays a score of 152 notes 840 times. Bellowing nearby in one of five black-curtained theatres is Euan Macdonald’s 9,000 Pieces, where the artist filmed a relentless piano-testing machine in Shanghai. The churning, orgiastic loop of an entire keyboard chiming out in about a second is dizzying. It’s the most interesting pure sound presented here and just might trail you home like a ghost.
Also addressing endurance is The Piano’s centrepiece, Charles Stankievech’s Timbral, which combines a video recording of him hitting the same note, slowly and repeatedly, over 11 hours in a Venice insane asylum. To accompany this, he sculpted a 3-D, six-metre model of the waveform and resonance of the note.
Moving along through Gordon Monahan’s video of a piano being airlifted to a mountaintop and pushed off to the sound of the recorded instrument playing its own requiem, we come to the most staggering piece, Patrick Bernatchez’s 180°. The composer sits at a grand piano in a dark concert hall, filmed upside-down for unknown effect. As he plays, we spin around rows of lights and an odd view of the top of his head. Suddenly, sweat drips from his hands, revealing a mad act of will. The beads of water are falling upward! “It’s a gravity moment,” Crowston smiles, “where all of a sudden it becomes clear what’s happening.”
Not every piece is so serious. Dean Baldwin’s Bar Piano, complete with a hopping canary named Crosby, has the artist serving cocktails from a baroqued-up instrument for the AGA’s Wednesday-night after-work parties. Katie Patterson’s player piano works through a glitchy Moonlight Sonata, the music literally bounced off the moon and back: The hiccups come from craters. And my favourite piece is Tim Lee’s, which has a General Idea conceptual cleverness. A non-musician, Lee plays seamlessly through Glenn Gould’s famous Goldberg Variations a few notes at a time, filming them, and editing them to flow perfectly. It’s a spotlight on today’s cut-and-paste culture, where comedies are written by committee and music is sampled, warped and adjusted in limitless combinations.It's the staple of almost every kungfu2 action film. We are what we were, mutated.
The show suffers from sound bleed,Several big players are vying for a piece of the modulerail market. though not always. “In an ideal situation every room would be soundproofed and every situation would be perfect,” Crowston laughs. “In reality it’s not possible with concrete and non-million-dollar exhibition budgets. We did what we could with carpeting and drapery.”
Yet the uninvited spill makes for happy accidents. Maybe not perfect harmony, as the song goes, but in such a way that no artist is ever entirely alone after we leave the room.
The titular instrument of The Piano is nailed into silence, danced upon mercilessly by a Chinese robot and tackled more than once as a symbol of obsession, even oppression, by 13 mostly Canadian artists whose work has shown around the world. It’s a show of performance, sculpture and numerous projections — successfully sound art, pun intended.
The Piano is a smart turn into an easy-to-grasp, single-word concept where the artistic fixation of each work is ferociously clear. We all know what a piano is, after all.The checklist also provides specifics on how to energymonitor1. But when you play a single note over 11 hours on one, or push another off a mountain, anyone with curiosity will lean into the conversation and ask, “But why do this?”
Once a common household device in a suburban quest to maintain European high culture, pianos are culturally fading en masse. Why have a 225-kilogram instrument in your parlour when you can carry a playable orchestra around in your pocket, the (simplest) argument goes. Still, as a symbol of affluence and the “old,” pianos began to be torn at in the ’60s, which is where the show’s doors open. The AGA’s executive director and chief curator Catherine Crowston notes, “it’s laid out so you start with the George Maciunas piece from the ’60s, which is the destroyed piano. We tried to create a situation where that question of destruction came up first. The Carol Itter piece appears to be a destroyed piano, but is a constructed image of a deconstructed piano.”
Itter’s monolithic work, a tribute to her husband,Silicone smartcard from Sporti is perfect for swimmers who wear earplugs and features excess.A number of inhomedisplay2 manufacturers. is the show’s most sentimental piece, a suburban Valentine made out of household items. It’s a little cats-and-crystals ornamental, and also the only piece that doesn’t engage a real instrument. Nik 7 of Edmonton’s Shout Out Out Out Out, meanwhile, followed in the footsteps of Sonic Youth, doing a cover of Maciunas’s 1964 hammer-and-nail attack, both silencing the piano while creating, one last time, a vicious death clamour.
Moving through the ’70s and into the ’80s, Stan Douglas’s piece, unfortunately not up and running during a couple of my visits to the gallery, uses a player piano and transparent slides, while Robert Racine’s video Vexations opens up a running theme of endurance as he plays a score of 152 notes 840 times. Bellowing nearby in one of five black-curtained theatres is Euan Macdonald’s 9,000 Pieces, where the artist filmed a relentless piano-testing machine in Shanghai. The churning, orgiastic loop of an entire keyboard chiming out in about a second is dizzying. It’s the most interesting pure sound presented here and just might trail you home like a ghost.
Also addressing endurance is The Piano’s centrepiece, Charles Stankievech’s Timbral, which combines a video recording of him hitting the same note, slowly and repeatedly, over 11 hours in a Venice insane asylum. To accompany this, he sculpted a 3-D, six-metre model of the waveform and resonance of the note.
Moving along through Gordon Monahan’s video of a piano being airlifted to a mountaintop and pushed off to the sound of the recorded instrument playing its own requiem, we come to the most staggering piece, Patrick Bernatchez’s 180°. The composer sits at a grand piano in a dark concert hall, filmed upside-down for unknown effect. As he plays, we spin around rows of lights and an odd view of the top of his head. Suddenly, sweat drips from his hands, revealing a mad act of will. The beads of water are falling upward! “It’s a gravity moment,” Crowston smiles, “where all of a sudden it becomes clear what’s happening.”
Not every piece is so serious. Dean Baldwin’s Bar Piano, complete with a hopping canary named Crosby, has the artist serving cocktails from a baroqued-up instrument for the AGA’s Wednesday-night after-work parties. Katie Patterson’s player piano works through a glitchy Moonlight Sonata, the music literally bounced off the moon and back: The hiccups come from craters. And my favourite piece is Tim Lee’s, which has a General Idea conceptual cleverness. A non-musician, Lee plays seamlessly through Glenn Gould’s famous Goldberg Variations a few notes at a time, filming them, and editing them to flow perfectly. It’s a spotlight on today’s cut-and-paste culture, where comedies are written by committee and music is sampled, warped and adjusted in limitless combinations.It's the staple of almost every kungfu2 action film. We are what we were, mutated.
The show suffers from sound bleed,Several big players are vying for a piece of the modulerail market. though not always. “In an ideal situation every room would be soundproofed and every situation would be perfect,” Crowston laughs. “In reality it’s not possible with concrete and non-million-dollar exhibition budgets. We did what we could with carpeting and drapery.”
Yet the uninvited spill makes for happy accidents. Maybe not perfect harmony, as the song goes, but in such a way that no artist is ever entirely alone after we leave the room.
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