Photo: Film still of Lis Rhodes, Dresden Dynamo, 1971-72, 16mm, color, sound, 5 mins.
From May 22 to June 13, 2015, the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program presents S/N, curated by the ISP’s 2014–15 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows Alex Fleming, Anya Komar, and Blair Murphy. The exhibition takes place at The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, New York. S/N, an abbreviation for signal-to-noise ratio, refers to the relation between a message and the background noise emanating from the materials and environments it traverses. An exhibition of diverse practices including video, performance, conceptual writing, and music, S/N examines the material complexities of sound as a force that both allows and frustrates communication. While the works on view employ various media, they all interrogate the historical and political contexts of audibility: how, where, and when something can be heard.
S/N features works by Sonia Boyce and Ain Bailey, Cammisa Buerhaus, James Coleman, Manon de Boer, Joan La Barbara, Tracie Morris, Vanessa Place, Steve Reinke, Lis Rhodes, SCRAAATCH, Masha Tupitsyn, Ultra-red, Galina Ustvolskaya, and Jackie Wang. The exhibition hours are Tuesday through Friday, 12 to 6 pm, and Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm. Admission is free. The opening reception will take place on Friday, May 22, from 5 to 8 pm. The opening will include a performance of Galina Ustvolskaya’s Piano Sonata No. 6 performed by Cheryl Seltzer of Continuum Ensemble, which will take place promptly at 6 pm in The Kitchen theater.
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Galina Ustvolskaya: Piano Sonata No. 6 performed by Cheryl Seltzer of Continuum Ensemble
The Kitchen theater, 512 West 19th Street
Friday, May 22, 6 pm
Seating is limited and will be first-come, first-served
Composed in 1988, Piano Sonata No. 6 is one of Galina Ustvolskaya’s most challenging compositions. The score consists largely of tone clusters and demands the performer aggressively strike the instrument, thereby speaking to the turbulence and violence at the end of the Soviet era.
Winner of the prestigious Siemens international prize for distinguished service to music and four ASCAP/Chamber Music America Awards for Adventuresome Programming, New York-based CONTINUUM — directed by Cheryl Seltzer and Joel Sachs — is now in its 43rd season.
After a CONTINUUM concert the New York Times wrote, “Simply put, there is no musical organization in New York that produces more intellectually enticing or more viscerally satisfying programs than Continuum… Year after year, its explorations in 20th-century repertory prove to be not only unusual and unexpected but also important and enduring… This ensemble has a long history of acting in behalf of composers whom others discover years or decades later.”
CONTINUUM‘s name embodies the philosophy that new music and old form an unbroken tradition. Aiming to expand the audience for recent music, it has performed throughout the United States, including appearances at the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress, at colleges and community series throughout the United States and Puerto Rico, in 25 tours to Europe, ten to Asia, and five to Latin America. In 2008 Continuum made its sixth visit to Mongolia‘s Roaring Hooves festival, and in recent seasons has appeared at festivals in Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Georgia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
CBS-TV, educational television, National Public Radio, the Voice of America, and European networks have broadcast CONTINUUM events. CONTINUUM has made 17 portrait recordings for diverse labels. Its concert programs embrace the entire range of music from 20th-century classics such as Ives, Joplin and Webern, to today’s composers from all over the world.
Ultra-red: Introduction to Collective Listening
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street
Saturday, May 23
12–3 pm
Sound collective Ultra-red will lead a sound walk and workshop based on its work Protocols for the Wojnarowicz Object, or What Is the Sound of Building Up and Tearing Down? (2012). Participants will gather at The Kitchen at 12 pm for a short introduction, followed by a sound walk down the west side of Manhattan. After the sound walk, participants will return to The Kitchen for a discussion of their experiences during the walk.
SCRAAATCH: SCRAAATCH No. 9
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street
Friday, June 5
4–6 pm
SCRAAATCH performs SCRAAATCH No. 9, part of a series of collaborative performance works. Combining live sound processing and performative notation, the duo develops an intricate physical and aural choreography, exploring the difficulties of mediated communication and exchange.
Avital Ronell, Vanessa Place, Kyoo Lee: Last—Words?
Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street
Saturday, June 6
6:30–8:30 pm
What does it mean to speak of one’s own death? And how does one hear what is spoken? Avital Ronell, professor of German, Comparative Literature, and English at NYU, will address the death penalty and the recorded speech of executed prisoners. Artist and criminal defense attorney Vanessa Place will perform Botched Execution (2015), an extension of her Last Words (2014–ongoing). Included in the exhibition, Last Words is a recording of the artist’s voice reading the last statements of inmates executed in Texas since 1982. Kyoo Lee, philosopher, theorist, and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, will respond and moderate the conversation.
Jay Sanders and Charles Bernstein in Conversation
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street
Thursday, June 11
6–8 pm
Whitney curator Jay Sanders and poet Charles Bernstein will discuss their work in, on, and around sound, performance, installation, dance, poetry, theater, poetics, curating, editing, essay writing, and teaching. They will also reflect on their previous collaboration curating the 2001 exhibition Poetry Plastique at the Marianne Boesky Gallery.
This exhibition is a collaboration between the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and The Kitchen. Curatorial Participants of the ISP are designated as Helena Rubinstein Fellows in recognition of the long standing support of the Helena Rubinstein Foundation. Support for the Independent Study Program is provided by Margaret Morgan and Wesley Phoa, The Capital Group Charitable Foundation, The New York Community Trust, and the Whitney Contemporaries through their annual Art Party Benefit. Endowment support is provided by Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo, the Dorothea L. Leonhardt Fund of the Communities Foundation of Texas, the Dorothea L. Leonhardt Foundation and the Helena Rubinstein Foundation.
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