Lodged in a spacious apartment in an unassuming 19th-century building on Rome’s busy Piazza Vittoria, the new Sound Art Museum is both a public venue and the realized dream of Dora Stiefelmeier and Mario Pieroni, the founders of Zerynthia, a not-for-profit organization created in 1991 to promote exhibitions and performances in Italy and abroad. Inaugurated Feb. 26, the Sound Art Museum is a project of Zerynthia and its subsidiary, RadioArteMobile (RAM), an internet radio station launched in 2002 to explore–and expand–the territory shared by the visual arts and sound research. The Sound Art Museum’s premiere exhibition is “Inaudita” (meaning both “unheard” and “unprecedented”) and features installations by the Vito Acconci studio, Markus Huemer, Donatella Landi, Stephen Vitiello and Achim Wollscheid. The organizers are Lorenzo Benedetti, an independent curator, Riccardo Giagni, a composer and musicologist, and the artist Cesare Pietroiusti.
Initially funded by grants from the European Union, RAM sponsored an online archive of performances, interviews and other recorded events as well as a traveling archive prior to opening the Sound Art Museum. Already in place in the apartment were metal couches covered with textiles by Vettor Pisani. Bruna Esposito installed a plantlike composition of copper tubing in a bathroom; a sound piece by Annie Ratti issues from the toilet. Mario Airo made a light sculpture for the ceiling in the apartment’s largest room, the chairs are by Franz West, and the long table bearing art books was fabricated by Massimo Bartolini using the apartment’s doors. An enormous bedroom cabinet with mirror appliques by Michelangelo Pistoletto houses CDs by international sound artists along with listening stations for visitors. The selections include works by spoken-word artists such as Eyman, whose Hollywood Babylon is a layering of familiar voices from the movies. Other pieces are more musical, such as Zelada’s Butterflies on a Rainy Day and John Bischoff’s Aperture. From mechanically and electronically produced compositions to the extremes of the human voice, the archive strives to show the range of contributions by contemporary makers of sound art.
Acconci’s contribution to the debut exhibition is a giant Styrofoam shell, like the structure of an ear, whose interior is pasted over with poster-size blueprint renderings of listening environments proposed specifically for the Sound Art Museum. Huemer addresses the intersection of sound and vision with his black box environment filled only with the now old-fashioned clatter of a movie projector. Landi contributes a series of CDs that aurally “map” the different lines of the Paris Metro. Vitiello makes the inaudible “visible” with a half dozen speakers, suspended from wires, which whirl when activated to emit sounds received only by canine ears. Wollscheid’s slight but charming work consists of several microphones bearing red LED lights that cease to glimmer when confronted by a sharp noise such as hands clapping.
Over the entire enterprise presides the spirit of John Cage, who decades ago charted the borders of sound art with such compositions as Silent Prayer (1948) and 4_33_ (1952). Pioneering initiatives in the field include the musical ventures of the Dia Art Foundation during the 1980s; Tellus, the New York audio magazine founded in 1983 by Claudia Gould, Carol Parkinson and Joseph Nechvatal; Berlin’s Gelbe Musik, run by Rene Block; and Maurizio Nannucci’s Florence-based Zona Archives. The online radio station of P.S.1 in New York debuted in 2004. Rome’s Sound Art Museum now adds a stable and welcoming home for this dimension of art.
”Inaudita” remains on view through May.
Further information can be found at www.soundartmuseum.net and www.radioartemobile.it
Underground Cassette Culture Now
Printed Matter presents
Leaderless
Underground Cassette Culture Now
Exhibition on View from May 12 - May 26, 2007
Opening Reception
May 12, 2007, 5-7 PM
Printed Matter, Inc. is pleased to announce an exhibition surveying contemporary American cassette culture.Leaderless: Underground Cassette Culture Nowwill open on May 12 and run through May 26. Printed Matter is located at 195 Tenth Avenue at 22nd Streets.
From bedrooms and dorm rooms, garages and dingy basements, Printed Matter and Heavy Tapes have gathered the leaders of the American underground tape culture movement—a geographically and generationally diverse community centered around the thriving noise, psych, and experimental music scenes. Such an exhibition might lead one to believe that “tapes are back” though the truth is that they never left, having been the chosen medium of this particular community from the late 70s onward. Unlike manufactured CDs or vinyl, tapes are analog, cheap and easily made at home with accessible and rudimentary equipment (i.e. no computers), making them the logical choice for a community that is constantly evolving and producing. Tapes also offer a unique perspective for those who are put off by the ubiquity and harsh aesthetics often associated with CDRs.
For the duration of the exhibition, Printed Matter's back room will be transformed into a cassette shop-with hundreds of titles exhibited and available for purchase. Boom boxes will give audience members the opportunity to sample and explore hundreds of cassettes that will be available. Printed Matter has invited the following five guest curators to present out-of-print cassettes from their collections: Dominick Fernow (Hospital Productions), Chris Freeman (Fusetron), Ken Montgomery (Generator), Barbara Moore (Bound/Unbound), and Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth/Ecstatic Peace). Taken together, these curators have assembled a history that branches through several generations of the visual arts, sound art, and music from the 1970s to the present.
Labels to be featured include 23 Productions (WI), AA (MI), American Tapes (MI), Animal Disguise (MI), Bone Tooth Horn, Callow God (CA), Cherried Out Merch (OR), Chondritic Sound (MI), Drone Disco (OH), Ecstatic Peace (MA), Fag Tapes (MI), Fuckit Tapes (NY), Gods of Tundra (MI), Hanson Records (MI), Heavy Tapes (NY), Hospital Productions (NY), Iatrogenesis (OR), Ides (IL), Friendship Bracelet (MA), Loveless Tapes (NJ), Middle James CO (ON/CA), Monorail Trespassing (CA), Nihilist Productions (IL), Not Not Fun (CA), Psychform (WA), RRRecords (MA), Rundownsun (BC), Since 1972 (NY), Spite (NY), Stammer Tapes (NY), Swampland Noise (CA), Throne Heap (NY), Tone Filth (MN), Trash Ritual (NY), and Troniks (CA), among many others.
To celebrate the launch, experimental tape manipulator G. Lucas Crane vs Non-horse will perform.Leaderless: Underground Cassette Culture Nowcoincides with the No Fun Fest—a four day noise festival that will take place at the Hook in Red Hook, Brooklyn from May 17 – 20th. Now in its fourth year, No Fun Fest features some of the world’s premiere noise musicians and practitioners.
Heavy Tapes was established in 2004 in Brooklyn, NY by musician and teacher Michael Bernstein and musician and visual artist Maya Miller, as an offshoot of the Heavy Conversation label run by the New York band Double Leopards of which they have been a part since 2001. Originally spontaneously created because of ease of access to cassette manufacturers and a desire to release their own solo and duo music, the label has since taken on a life of its own and has spawned a distinctive visual and audio style over the nearly 50 releases in the 3 years of its existence. Combining a fine ear for "out sounds" with a commitment to exposing the deepest noise and sound art underground, Heavy Tapes has since become a stalwart of the non-scene which it proudly participates in. The cassettes have been displayed in an art exhibition in Seattle, featured in an article in Swindle Magazine authored by Tony Rettman, and distributed internationally at record stores, museum shops, internet mailorder stores, and beyond.