Photo by Danita Jo
Photo by Danita Jo
Photo by Danita Jo
Photo by Danita Jo
Some lovey-dovey quotes from our favorite contemporary creators to get you through Valentine’s Day. Feel free to filch for extra points with the art lover in your life.
“The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime’s loves.” —Diane Ackerman
“Love is the greatest refreshment in life.” —Pablo Picasso
“The best love is not-to-think-about-it love.”
Andy Warhol
Whenever you make love to someone, there should be three people involved – you, the other person, and the devil.”
Robert Mapplethorpe
I told the students [at Yale] we were going to talk about love – I meant love in the sense of devotions to one’s work – and about half the students got really pissed off.
Kiki Smith
Photo by Stephen Poff.
It is perhaps impossible to track the importance of the innovations produced at the Institute for the Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM), an unmatched meeting center of science, technology, music, and art linked to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Founded in 1977 by Pierre Boulez at the request of President Georges Pompidou, the list of composers who have created work in residence at IRCAM reads as a literal who’s who of contemporary music, from Georg Friedrich Haas to Frank Zappa.
By 1988 IRCAM had developed and released the software MAX, which processes interactions between computer and performer in real time, relying on programs written in a unique object-oriented coding language. Today, MAX has become the common language for creating interactive performance software. Other fascinating programs created at the institute include Orchidèe, a computer-aided orchestration tool. The program receives a given target sound, which could be anything from a human voice to a jackhammer, and, after analyzing the sound, presents possible ways to imitate the sonic event within the parameters of acoustic instruments. The work Speakings, by British composer Jonathan Harvey in collaboration with IRCAM technicians, uses Orchidèe to develop orchestrations that mimic human communication. In the words of the composer, “I wanted to bring together orchestral music and human speech. It is as if the orchestra is learning to speak, like a baby with its mother, or like first man, or like listening to a highly expressive language we don’t understand. The rhythms and emotional tones of speech are formed by semantics, but even more they are formed by feelings – in that respect they approach song.” This unique blend of the mastery of expressive musical technique and emerging technology is the hallmark of every work created at IRCAM—technological innovation is only bound by the imagination of the composers.
Harvey is one of the composers whose work is to be explored at the ICA in two incredible concerts featuring the JACK Quartet and Sound Icon, presented following IRCAM’s weeklong residency at the Boston University Center for New Music. On April 29 the JACK Quartet will perform Harvey’s 4th Quartet, which, like all the works on these programs, was written in residence at IRCAM in collaboration with the institute’s technologists. The work implements the IRCAM software SPAT, which allows for the control of the spacialization of sounds within an auditory space. The program receives information via live instruments or electronic signals and processes them in real time into a loudspeaker system. This allows extraordinary spatial sonic effects to be produced by live acoustic instruments. As Harvey says of the work, “Using IRCAM’s SPAT program (with the help of Gilbert Nouno), it is possible to locate the sounds at any distance, at any point. This point can then be moved, like a living presence; the sound acquires an attribute closer to life, but unseen. When this movement is regular, like the repetitions of dance steps, for instance, the ‘presence’ begins to take on a character, a personality (though still invisible).” Audio excerpts can be heard here.
Sharing the program with Harvey is the work of Israeli-born composer Chaya Czernowin, currently Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard University. Her work HIDDEN uses live technology to give the sense that the musical material is submerged, beneath expression. It was written for the JACK Quartet during a shared IRCAM residency. A sample can be heard on the composer’s website. As she recommends, “Listen with headphones, quite loudly.”
The ICA’s two-day program kicks off on April 28 with one of Boston’s premiere contemporary music ensembles, Sound Icon, performing electroacoustic works by some of the original masters of the genre: Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, and Beat Furrer. Boulez’s work Anthemes II receives its title from the combining of the French ‘themes’ with the English ‘anthems’ and is an adaptation for violin and live electronic manipulation of an earlier Boulez work for solo violin. Murail’s work, Les E’Sprit de Dunes, takes much of its sound material from Tibet, including vocal chanting, ritualistic trumpet sounds, and overtone singing. Dedicated to the memory of Salvador Dalí and Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi, the work features the stunningly complex method of “hybridization” that involves creating a new timbre by crossing the spectral makeup of one sound with another; at one point even fusing the timbre of live instruments with the sound of tearing paper. In the words of British composer and scholar Julian Anderson, “This range of techniques builds not only the entire electronic part but also supplies all the pitch-material on the instruments, Murail as insistent as ever on the necessity of linking timbre and harmony to the extent that one can scarcely tell them apart.” (Audio sample). The program will also feature the electroacoustic works Gaspra and Aria by Swiss-born composer and conductor Beat Furrer.
These two concerts offer a chance to honor the late IRCAM founder Pierre Boulez, who died in January at the age of 90s, with a rare glimpse into the astonishing creative and technological innovations that have come from IRCAM recently. The institute has stood at the forefront of innovation since its inception and has guided new trends at the intersection of music and technology. The innovations at IRCAM have allowed composers to prove computer-based technologies as organic and valid as tools for creation as acoustic instruments are. Furthermore, Sound Icon, expertly conducted by Jeffery Means, and the JACK Quartet, one of the foremost contemporary music ensembles, are some of the best-suited ensembles in the nation to perform this groundbreaking music.
Photo by Maria Baranova
a canary torsi, Court/Garden. Photo by Maria Baranova.
a canary torsi, Court/Garden. Photo by Maria Baranova.
a canary torsi, Court/Garden. Photo by Maria Baranova.
Brooklyn Choreographer Yanira Castro on how the spectacles of the 17th century and today have inspired her work Court/Garden
In April, the ICA presents Brooklyn-based choreographer Yanira Castro and her company a canary torsi in Court/Garden, a “spectacle in three acts” that transports the 17th-century French court to our modern time and space. We spoke with Castro about spectacle, Beyoncé, the role of the audience, and the work’s progression from monarchy to binary democracy to self-organization.
You write that Court/Garden takes as its inspiration the spectacles of Louis XIV’s court, the spectatorship of the proscenium stage, and the presentation of live video feeds as cultural, social and political frames of experience. Where are today’s spectacles?
Oh, Beyoncé. Just cutting right to the chase, it’s probably most obvious in pop culture. I’m sure you’ve seen photographs on social media where famous rappers are paralleled with monarchs. [[Ed. note: Here are some examples Castro cites.]] They’re wearing contemporary clothing, but the way they dress and present themselves recalls the 17th century. There’s Beyoncé’s “bow-down bitches,” Kanye West’s “I am a god.” All of this language is baroque, monarchical. That’s spectacle to me.
Where I started was a very formal question about how dance performances came to be presented in proscenium environments when the body is so much more fully experienced up close, or in the round. My research took me to the beginnings of ballet and therefore to Louis XIV. I became obsessed with him, and I kept thinking, this reminds me of the fashion runway, of famous hip-hop artists, of Trump.
Do you generally eschew proscenium stages?
It’s not so much that I don’t work on stages, but that I’m interested in creating a very specific environment for each work that addresses the needs of that piece. Most often those turn out not to be prosceniums.
With this piece, we studied the spaces in which Louis XIV would present his spectacles – often gardens or the halls of Versailles. These were not theaters, though a lot of interesting theatrical machines were brought in to make these spaces fantastical.
Louis XIV was a famous dancer himself. There was a very important dance called the Ballet de la Nuit, in which he rose, at dawn, as the sun. That’s why he’s known as the Sun King. The dance was spectacular, and a symbol of his future as King. He was 14. He loved dance and supposedly, early in his reign, rehearsed every day, sometimes at midnight. The whole French court performed for itself and took dance classes with their dance masters. It was an important part of how the court functioned.
Later on Louis started a ballet school, and eventually a professional space was created where the nobility was no longer performing for itself but was paying artists to come and dance for them. That’s a pretty radical shift in one person’s lifetime.
Does Court/Garden change significantly when you move it from place to place?
It’s radically different. The first place we performed it was St. Mark’s Church, which is a very simple Protestant church, really beautiful, all white. In that space we wanted to make really clear perspectives, so we brought in these mirrored panels (which we’ll bring to the ICA also) to create a forced perspective as the dance progresses. At the time of Louis XIV they would create these panels that they would bring into rooms to create these forced perspectives, with the King of course always being at the apex.
We also performed it at Federal Hall, which is right across from the New York Stock Exchange; it’s where George Washington was inaugurated as president, and it was the first seat of the republic. That was a marble-floored rotunda, pillared, and amazingly ornate. It didn’t need or want the panels; it needed a very different treatment to make the dance come alive within it. So instead we brought in an army of “cupids” dressed in white who created the perspective through shapes they took on in their bodies.
At the ICA, we’re thinking about how we can investigate those orange seats in a visual way. How to make them stand out or glow? It’s also a high vertical space, and in my dream of dreams there would be a jumbo screen hanging from the ceiling. That’s not going to happen, but there’s so much that can happen in that room that reimagines the piece in a contemporary way.
The piece takes as a source the traditional canary dance. What is the history there?
The Canary was a baroque dance that was very popular throughout Europe. The Spanish saw people dancing in the Canary Islands and were so enamored that they created their own version (or appropriation) and called it the Canary. We don’t know what they originally saw or the dance they created. The first record we have is an Italian version from the 17th century that we learned for Court/Garden from Catherine Turocy of the New York Baroque Dance Company. We also learned the 18th-century French version, and they’re very different from each other.
The baroque world is very symmetrical, so there’s a man and a woman and they face one another, and it’s a call and response that’s completely in time. The steps are very much to the beat of the canary music, and everything’s very pronounced. It’s a very difficult dance – we spent over a month learning it and still didn’t feel we’d mastered it.
But this would have been performed by the nobility?
It would have been performed by the court, for one another. These people must have been taking classes all the time to be able to do these dances in a way that’s at all masterful. It was obviously really important to them: how you dress, how you dance, how you present yourself when speaking to others, there’s a lot of code in being a member of the court. We read about people who were laughed out of the court because they messed up a dance.
You’ve said you wanted to make a 21st-century canary. How did you do that? How is the movement or visual language different?
In the entire first act of Court/Garden there are no steps that aren’t technically part of the Canary. We did not fabricate anything “new.” But we took it off beat, and we completely reorganized it in a random pattern so that the steps didn’t necessarily flow; over time, the dancers made those transitions smooth. When baroque practitioners have seen the work, they tell me they see the influence, but it also looks “other”. And for contemporary dancers, there’s a feeling of otherness without it sitting in a particular century. That’s what I wanted to achieve, this feeling that you’re looking at something quite odd in its historical placement.
You really did a lot of research. What were some of your most influential resources?
I started with this question about the proscenium, and the book Listening in Paris [by James H. Johnson] was the first place I went to that talked about these spaces. The book is about music, but back then you couldn’t separate music from the ballet. It talks about the moment when the proscenium becomes what we consider the proscenium: the fourth wall, the audience is in darkness and still, the performers under light. This was partially because the music was changing. After the revolution it was becoming more story oriented, so you had to listen in order to be able to follow. Before that it was more spectacle driven. The performances may have been connected by a theme, but it wasn’t something you had to watch beginning to end; people often came at intermission.
There was also the revolution itself. Beforehand only people of a certain status were in these spaces, and the king would literally decide who sat in each seat. The closer you got to him, the more important he thought you were. What we now call the orchestra didn’t have any seats; it was one giant pit basically for the soldiers. Those spaces were completely lit, and the show was just as much about the audience.
This book was important to me in thinking about how the audience was going to be in these spaces, how we were going to seat them, how they were going to walk in, all these questions that I had about how the audience was present in the space.
You basically cast the audience as the court.
The basic principle is that they are treated as the court, so when they enter, they go through what we call a modern calling. Back then, someone would call out your name – Duke and Duchess of SuchandSuch – as you entered the room. We created a contemporary version. In the performance environment there’s a video screen, and the images of people as they arrive are presented to the audience that is already there, so that people can see who is arriving. In my work I’m invested in the presence of the audience; I always try to think of ways that the audience are casted as part of the production. Each piece handles that differently, and while studying Louis XIV, it became clear that the audience was the court.
It’s interesting that you use video and screens to create a kind of public place when so much of our “public” appearance now is online.
I’m always asking myself, where are the connections between the physical body and media environment? How do they coexist? How can they inform one another? You should be present to see this dance. It is a live experience, but there are elements that are on the screen and give you a different feeling that’s also inherently emotional. Those are the things that I’m interested in moving into the future. These spaces we know so well as contemporary people, how do they bleed into our past? I can’t watch a hip-hop video anymore without thinking, “this is right out of the 17th century!” We do carry the history with us. It’s everywhere.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Diane Simpson, Vee, 1999, steel, wool, birch, pine, and enamel, 12 x 30 x 11 inches. Photo by Charles Mayer
Installation view, Diane Simpson, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2015. Photo by Charles Mayer
Diane Simpson, Formal Wear, 1998, Polyester, poplar, and cotton, 47 x 50 x 7 inches. Courtesy the artist, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, and JTT, New York. © 2015 Diane Simpson
Diane Simpson, Muff, 1998, Faux fur, fleece, and mahogany, 49 x 28 x 13 inches. Collection of Joel Wachs. © 2015 Diane Simpson
Diane Simpson, Samurai 6, 1982, MDF and enamel, 59 1/2 x 61 x 31 inches. Courtesy the artist, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, and JTT, New York.
© 2015 Diane Simpson
Artist Diane Simpson gets her due.
“Diane Simpson show at ICA is superb,” reads the headline for the Boston Globe review of Simpson’s first major museum solo show, currently on view at the ICA.
Two years ago, the artist had her first New York solo show in 33 years at the Lower East Side gallery JTT, featuring “crisp, rigorous, body-scale sculptures” (New York Times). In 2010, a retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center surveyed 40 works produced over 30 years. Diane Simpson has been enjoying a kind of renaissance: while she’s shown steadily throughout the Midwest since the 1970s, the Chicago-based artist recently admitted to Artforum that she’s amazed by the wider attention her work is currently receiving.
Now 80, Simpson attended School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in the 1950s but had her first child just shy of finishing her final quarter. She returned ten years later, when the youngest of her three children entered first grade, to complete her bachelor’s degree.
Using her bedroom as a studio (she and her husband “slept on a hide-a-bed for six years,” she told curator Dan Byers in an interview in the exhibition catalogue), Simpson had been making art all along, and in her 40s she went back to the SAIC to pursue an MFA. “When I first went back to grad school I started making large drawings on graph paper, primarily of tools and mechanical objects,” as well as collagraph prints of boxlike forms, Simpson says. She turned to sculpture when an advisor suggested she try to build one of the drawings.
“The objects I was drawing were very dimensional due to a system of perspective I devised myself,” Simpson explains—a system reminiscent of early non-Western perspective that involves denoting volume via parallel 45-degree angles, rather than the two- or three-point perspective most commonly employed since the time of the Renaissance. “I never gave it a name, but I think ‘axonometric’ might be the system whose description broadly fits what I had been practicing for many years —and thought I had invented,” she says.
With no training in sculpture, Simpson has often invented her own methods for constructing her work, and she says sometimes her unorthodox solutions contribute important aesthetic details, such as the cords that hold together architectural elements in works such as Amish Bonnet and Court Lady.
“One of the unique aspects of Diane’s work is the relationship between the drawings and the sculptures, and in how she fabricates them so precisely and beautifully to mimic the angles that are in the drawings,” says Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator. “The physical objects are hard to read—they almost look impossible—even though they’re so physically present and so carefully made. You’re at once sure you’re in the room with something that’s physical and affecting you, and at the same time, it almost feels like an image of itself.”
As much praise as Simpson is currently receiving—the Boston Globe celebrates her “stunning” and “beautiful” work for its craftsmanship, its sensuality, its interplay between media, its significance—Byers believes the artist has not yet received her due. “This show is a great start. But there’s more incredible work in the attic that hasn’t been seen in 30 years,” he says.
Hear Diane Simpson speak about her work in conversation with Dan Byers, Mannion Family Chief Curator, on March 3.