Meredith Danluck: Andrew Kreps Gallery.Two arty scientists served as inspirations for this exhibition. One, Robert Moog, designed electronic music synthesizers Recalling Times Past Looking very much like the original portable device of the early 1970s, this 21st century transformation of the Minimoog Voyager Signature Edition synthesizer was introduced in 2002. (Image courtesy of Moog Music Inc., www.moogmusic.com) and uttered the words that served as an epigraph for the show: "Musical instruments provide the most efficient and refined interface between man and machine of anything we know." The other, Buckminster Fuller, was a multidisciplinary inventor and practical philosopher best known for developing the light, strong, and cost-efficient geodesic dome geodesic dome (jē'ədĕs`ĭk, –dē`sĭk), structure that roughly approximates a hemisphere. Popular in recent years as economical, easily erected buildings, geodesic domes are geometrically determined from a model and may be constructed from limited materials.. A formal geometry--fundamental to both the geodesic dome and the mathematically generated sound waves of the analog synthesizer--underlies Meredith Danluck's array of objects, which worked together so beautifully it was hard to imagine any one element succeeding on its own. Toward Thee Infinite Beat (all works 2003), which takes its name from a Psychic TV album, was a large MDF sculpture at the center of the gallery that approximated an exploded section of a geodesic dome. On the walls, three "Energy Paintings" recalled Expressionism expressionism, term used to describe works of art and literature in which the representation of reality is distorted to communicate an inner vision. The expressionist transforms nature rather than imitates it. In ArtIn painting and the graphic arts, certain movements such as the Brücke (1905), Blaue Reiter (1911), and new objectivity (1920s) are described as expressionist.">Abstract Expressionism abstract expressionism, movement of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the mid-1940s and attained singular prominence in American art in the following decade; also called action painting and the New York school. It was the first important school in American painting to declare its independence from European styles and to influence the development of art abroad. Arshile Gorky first gave impetus to the movement.--specifically the angular lines of Hans Hofmann--with their grayscale palette and slashing brushstrokes. Rogue Rogue, a Moog Rogue synthesizer (the economy version of Moog's Prodigy) internally reconfigured so that players had to unlearn any previous keyboard knowledge to make music, was sitting ready for experimentation on the gallery floor. Finally, Circle Machine, which takes its title from a midcentury analog waveform generator, is a video montage of musicians and breakdancers and played on a small monitor virtually at floor level. Fuller and Moog were Americans of a particular era and ethos, symbols of their country's postwar reverence for technology while intellectually engaged with the fallout of European modernism (for Fuller, the International Style International style, in architectureInternational style, in architecture, the phase of the modern movement that emerged in Europe and the United States during the 1920s. The term was first used by Philip Johnson in connection with a 1932 architectural exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.; for Moog, Varese Varese (värā`zā), city (1991 pop. 85,687), capital of Varese prov., Lombardy, N Italy, near the Swiss border. Situated in the Alpine foothills, near several Italian lakes, it is a popular tourist center. Manufactures include silk, machinery, plastics, and leather goods., Stockhausen, and Xenakis). Both were artists (one an architect, one a musician) and scientists, driven toward practical applications for their inventions. And both moved relatively freely between mainstream culture and advanced, technology-based aesthetics.Danluck herself is multidisciplinary. She's made art, clothes, and music and performs as a DJ. In this exhibition, she threaded together a particular set of American ideas: our characteristic discomfort with art, which does not generally demonstrate its practicality, and our fetishism 1. worship of fetishes. 2. a paraphilia marked by recurrent sexual urges for and fantasies of using fetishes, usually articles of women's clothing, for sexual arousal or orgasm. transvestic fetishism of technological "know-how." Unraveling the Rogue, dismantling the geodesic dome, and slashing her way through late-modernist abstraction, Danluck paid tribute to Moog's and Fuller's projects while admiringly taking them apart. She also made a case for how, in America, science has often been a fitting, even indispensable, ally of art.--MS
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion