Phyllis Baldino. The Unknown Series, 1994–96 (detail); mixed media. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Matt Grubb.

In the exhibition’s newsprint handout, Franklin Street Works’s creative director Terri C. Smith writes about two divergent connotations of the term cut-up: it implies both works of art made by extracting and reconfiguring source materials to produce something new as well as a mischievous prankster that disrupts order, promoting confusion by upsetting social hierarchies. While each of the works on view exhibits these qualities to varying degrees, the Brooklyn-based artist Phyllis Baldino is a cut-up par excellence. In her video piece, The Unknown Series (1994–96), Baldino implicates a medley of mundane objects in a wry investigation of their possible uses and uselessness. “Americans will sell you anything, even if they do not know what it is,” explains Baldino of the thrift-store trinkets she bought and then redefined through her interventions.[1] The Unknown Series features thirty objects, each filmed for no more than sixty seconds, during which time Baldino de- and re-constructs each with the utmost intentionality. The resulting objects, given descriptive titles such as Shaving Cream Thing, Straw Thing, Mayo Thing, and Green Velour Pads Thing, embody puckish mutations of their original functions.

Lorraine O’Grady. Cutting Out the New York Times, Just the Two of Us, 1977/2010; Toner ink on adhesive paper; Courtesy of the Artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York. Photo: Matt Grubb.

What Baldino does with found objects, the British artist Vicki Bennett does with sound. Under the moniker People Like Us, Bennett overlays countless sound clips from experimental and popular music, film, and radio, conflating multiple bits of audio into condensed compositions such as Welcome Abroad (2011) and Don’t Think Right, It’s All Twice (2006–13). In addition to producing a schizophrenic amalgamation of sonic culture from the past half-century, the sound works demonstrate the human mind’s remarkable ability to find order in pandemonium. Bennett’s expertly edited mash-ups never become indiscernible to the point of being pure noise. Instead, they prompt an aural gestalt that is both familiar and uncanny. Working in the inverse of Bennett’s cultural consolidation, the New York–based Lorraine O’Grady’s textual collages reveal the artist’s perspective through redaction. For Cutting Out The New York Times (1977/2015), O’Grady reticulates snippets of the newspaper into Dadaist poems. The portion of the series exhibited at Franklin Street Works features text from twenty-six consecutive Sunday papers in 1977; O’Grady would “smoosh the cut scraps around on the floor until a poem appeared.”[2] From news headlines and advertising slogans, O’Grady constructs narratives that fluctuate between effervescent lyricism and ominous cultural insights. Take, for example, the excerpts, “Just the two of us./Then There Were Two./A Rich and Happy Life/The Endless Movie Film,” and “Finding the one you love…is finding yourself/Come out, come out, wherever you are.” For O’Grady, randomness was a way to extricate herself from the “irrational Western culture [she] felt inundated by.”[3]

Cut-Up, 2016; installation view, Franklin Street Works, Stamford. CT. Courtesy of Franklin Street Works. Photo: Matt Grubb.

In a world of seemingly endless irrational phenomena, to respond negatively—to say no—can seem like second nature. Many contemporary art institutions seem burdened by a need to define what things are or are not instead of what they could be. The survey show remains a popular solution for pursuing diversity—or at least the appearance of it. Beyond the all-star roster in Cut-Up, one of the exhibition’s greatest achievements is presenting a survey that evades the failures of most institutional overviews, such as wall text that expects brain-dead viewers who need overbearing guidance through the works, or sloppy curatorial decisions that produce more incongruities than enlightening insights. Instead, Cut-Up succeeds by demonstrating the thorough consideration of each element—such as the integration of the People Like Us sound pieces at tables within the adjacent café, or the impressive installation of many audio and video works that avoids sonic conflicts—and the care enacted by the curator and gallery. Furthermore, by viewing complex social issues with humor and gaiety, the show provides a refreshing reprieve from the often heavy-handed messages propagated by art-world institutions. With well-crafted, affirmative gestures, each artwork in Cut-Up proclaims a much needed yes.

Cut-Up: Contemporary Collage and Cut-Up Histories through a Feminist Lens is on view at Franklin Street Works, Stamford, CT, through April 3, 2016.

[1] Phyllis Baldino quoted in Katie Vida, “Cut-Up: Contemporary Collage and Cut-Up Histories Through a Feminist Lens,” gallery handout, Franklin Street Works, https://franklinstreetworksdocuments.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/cut-up_newsprint_to-print_v2.pdf.

[2] “About the Exhibition, Lorraine O’Grady, May 28–June 27, 2015,” Alexander Gray Associates, http://www.alexandergray.com/exhibitions/2015-05-28_lorraine-oand39grady/.

[3] Ibid.

Marina Rosenfeld and Ben Vida. New Ear Festival, 2016 (performance still); sound performance. Courtesy of Fridman Gallery.

Forgoing any sensational visual effects, Rosenfeld and Vida stood behind two industrial tables, equipped with a modest array of electronic devices and illuminated by comfortably dim lighting. Despite their similarly minimalist setups, each performer interacted with her or his materials with distinctly different approaches. Rosenfeld, who used a pair of turntables, a mixer, and a stack of vinyl records, danced around like Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia. Her movements evoked the cartoon mouse’s theatrical gesturing and delight at realizing he could make the objects and elements do his bidding—though she didn’t meet a disastrous end. Vida, meanwhile, bent with concentration over his mixer and modular synthesizer as he adjusted knobs amid an eruption of wires.

Most people take for granted the complex processes that allow for human sensory perception—at least until we encounter something out of the norm. The reason stems from the extreme impracticality of, for example, performing a step-by-step analysis of what it means to hear something, every time a sound is heard. But it can be equally detrimental to ignore the complex series of biological events that must occur for a human to function. When we take for granted our bodies, we take for granted our humanity. Unlike sight, which is active only during waking and open-eyed states, we cannot shut our ears.[1] Indeed, even in a space devoid of sound, we still hear ourselves. The artist and composer John Cage demonstrated this in the 1940s with his infamous visit to an anechoic chamber—a room designed to completely absorb any sounds—in which he heard two tones: the hums of his circulatory system and nervous system. Because vision is typically considered the dominant sense, hearing continues to be greatly misunderstood. In an essay on hearing, the theorist Jonathan Sterne summarizes: “The simple act of hearing implies a medium for sound, a body with ears to hear, a frame of mind to do the same, and a dynamic relation between hearer and heard that allows for the possibility of mutual effects.”[2]

Marina Rosenfeld and Ben Vida. New Ear Festival, 2016 (performance still); sound performance. Courtesy of Fridman Gallery.

During Rosenfeld and Vida’s sonorous interaction, I sat and wondered about my relationship with them and their performance. The sounds they created ranged from the organic and intelligible—bits of human speech and instrumental music—to the otherworldly yet oddly familiar. Rosenfeld produced sounds that mimicked the comforting crackle of a low-burning fire by amplifying the sound of the records’ scratched and dusty surfaces. By manipulating one record, she generated a low, oscillating croak, like that of a laughing toad. Even if they began as recognizable, each sonic progression would disintegrate into abstraction, eliminating any illusion that the sounds originated from anything but the performers. When I closed my eyes, I was not transported to another site, world, or time. Instead, I was firmly rooted in the present. The experience was similar to that of listening to and watching someone do a celebrity impression. For example, no matter how expertly an impressionist presents the voice of Katharine Hepburn, I will never be fooled into thinking that she has suddenly turned into the late actress. And yet I recognize the voice, which makes Hepburn seem present, provoking a rupture between reality and my expectations. Unlike a celebrity impressionist, Rosenfeld and Vida created impressions of originary phenomena; both esoteric and mundane, the sounds fluctuated between representation and negation of the known. Through this uncertainty, the performers asked the audience to consider what it means to sit in a room and listen to strange sounds—eliciting a consideration of a component of what it means to be human.

Marina Rosenfeld and Ben Vida performed at Fridman Gallery on January 6, 2016.

[1] For the purposes of this review, I am considering the part of the human population with functioning auditory and visual perception.

[2] Jonathan Sterne, “Hearing,” Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Duke University, 2015), 65.

Alvin Lucier. Bird and Person Dyning, 1975 (performance still); Drawing Center, New York; September 11, 2015; Alvin Lucier, performer. Courtesy of the Drawing Center. Photo: Craig Howarth.

Our detour through the building’s underbelly forced us to pass through several architectural environments before reaching our final destination upstairs. The journey was one of cumulative perception, as opposed to the immediacy of directly crossing a threshold between two spaces. As a result, aspects of the Drawing Center’s interior became elements of the evening’s sound performances. The disruption of the expected gallery visit nudged us out of perfunctory interaction; we began the evening in a state of heightened awareness.

One of Lucier’s greatest skills as an artist is his ability to reveal the preternatural qualities of sound that go largely unnoticed in everyday life. He does this not through elaborate manipulation but through immersion and simple repetition. In No Ideas But In Things: The Composer Alvin Lucier (2012), a documentary by Viola Rusche and Hauke Harder, Lucier explains: “When you let something happen and don’t make big changes, you start to hear the acoustic phenomena.” Tapper, written for and performed by the violinist Conrad Harris, embodies the descriptive potential of a prolonged perception of acoustic events. In the performance, Harris repeatedly tapped the violin body with the butt end of the bow. This banal act was transformed into a complex articulation of the instrument’s structure, the room’s architecture, and our bodies within it. The first thing I heard was the attack of the bow’s metal screw against the violin’s lower bout, which made an unsurprising metal-on-wood sound. A revelation occurred after a few minutes, when I began to distinguish the nuanced reverberations and sonic reflections that fluctuated as Harris slowly turned 180 degrees: Suddenly, high-pitched pings were added to the mix of oscillating echoes. After about fifteen minutes, the repeated sounds became disconnected from the corresponding actions; my understanding of what it means to strike one object with another lost its significance, and instead I perceived the sonic mapping of the space through the sounds reflecting from bodies, objects, and walls.

Alvin Lucier. Tapper, 2004 (performance still); Drawing Center, New York; September 11, 2015; Conrad Harris, performer. Courtesy of the Drawing Center. Photo: Chris Bradley.

During each of the four Lucier compositions that I have experienced in person—the three performed at the Drawing Center and his 1970 piece, I Am Sitting in a Room—I lost track of time. The performances’ combination of extended durations—the works are at least fifteen minutes long—and repetitive sounds made apparent my brain’s inability to solidify the radical impermanence of durational work into a stable memory. However, the result was not chaos but an uncanny sonic experience and portrayal of space. While performing Bird and Person Dyning, Lucier spent approximately thirty minutes walking about twenty-five feet toward two loudspeakers emitting the looping chirp of an electronic bird call. Lucier wore binaural microphones in his ears, which, as Lucier explains in an artist statement, “realistically reproduce sounds as one hears them, as they deflect around the head and in the folds of the ears.”[1] He used the microphones to track the effect of his movements through the space on the amplified twitters, shifting the bird sounds from one speaker to the other. With small movements of his head, he controlled the feedback that sometimes occurred between the speakers and microphones in his ears. The most remarkable sonic manifestation was when the acoustical mixture of the bird calls and speaker feedback generated a heterodyne effect, a phenomenon that created phantom twitterings that seemed to originate inside my head and swirl around it like a localized tornado of sound.[2] At first, the experience was extremely unsettling—some frequencies caused involuntary spasmodic cringes and chills—but I was surprised how quickly I adjusted to the auditory anomalies. I stopped trying to make sense of what was happening and surrendered to the experience.

On the most basic level, Bird and Person Dyning involves the looping bird sounds and undulating feedback, but with Lucier’s intervention, it became a singular experience that challenged my notions of perception. I felt as though the sounds existed in my head alone, disconnected from the other audience members packed into the gallery, though logically I knew this wasn’t the case. Furthermore, not only were other people having similar experiences, we also collectively affected the auditory expression conducted by Lucier. Through his utilization of sound waves to describe the invisible energy surrounding and embodied by us, Lucier revealed the physical state in which we all exist: an interconnected mass of autonomous bodies subjectively perceiving collective experience.

Alvin Lucier performed at the Drawing Center in New York on September 11, 2015.

[1] From the Drawing Center event program. See also a 2006 performance program from the University of Virginia: http://www.virginia.edu/music/archives/pressrelease/06-07/programs/lucier091506.pdf.

[2] “‘Dyning’ is Lucier’s abbreviated version of ‘heterodyning,’ a term introduced in the early days of radio transmission. It describes the phenomenon that if two waves are mixed (in a nonlinear medium), two extra signals are created with the sum and difference in frequency. This phenomenon can also occur when sound waves reach our ear, with the exception that in the ear mainly ‘difference tones’ are produced.” See “Bird and Person Dyning (1975),” No Ideas But In Things: The Composer Alvin Lucier, film website: http://www.alvin-lucier-film.com/bird.html.

John Berger and David Levi Strauss, 2009. Photo: Yves Berger.

Amelia Rina: Can you talk about your relationship with teaching writing and your own education as a writer?

David Levi Strauss: The Art Writing program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York is really modeled after the Poetics program at the New College of California, San Francisco, in the 1980s. It was built around the teachings of the poet Robert Duncan and the other poets that gathered around him, including Diane di Prima, David Meltzer, Michael Palmer, and Duncan McNaughton. It was pointedly not a creative-writing program, but a program in poetics, the study of how things are made. The poets who taught there intended to give us an intellectual base that we could build on for the rest of our lives and to give us sources we could continue to draw on as we built our own network of sources. I think that’s probably even more important today. We now live in the Golden Age of Search, where a vast amount of material is accessible, so the need to develop ways to make distinctions among these disparate sources is crucial.[1]

AR: Something that seems integral to the SVA department’s mission is that it isn’t in the business of “discourse production.” Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? And if it’s not in the business of discourse production, what is it in the business of?

DLS: I don’t know when the term discourse production was first used, but I think it was imported from cognitive neuroscience. To me, it always sounded like a needless bureaucratization of writing and thinking. Our approach is very different from this. We look at writing as a way of thinking—and a way to live, actually—and, at the same time, as a craft.

AR: Well, what I was thinking of is a distinction that Vilém Flusser makes in his text Post-History. He writes about the difference between discourse and dialogue. Flusser writes that discourse is like a pyramid scheme where information is disseminated from one point, but the information only goes in one direction. Dialogue, on the other hand, is more like a roundtable discussion with an exchange that allows for new information to be produced and added to the broader conversation.

DLS: Right, that sounds like writing to me. I mean, writing has always been a way of thinking for me. I never know what I think about something until I write it. And part of that process is the invention of the reader. The writing imagines the reader into existence. So it’s not that you have ideas and then you put them in writing to transmit them to a passive consumer (to “produce discourse”). That’s not the way it works. The process of writing is a way of knowing and making the world—especially writing about art.

The distinction between art writing and other kinds of writing is that we always have an object. I started out as a poet, and I also write fiction. But with critical writing, you have an object that you keep going back to, and it keeps the dialogue grounded. Having an object to return to is a real advantage.

Judgment was always the least interesting part of criticism for me. It’s necessary, and I do it, but it’s not what keeps me in it. What keeps me in it is actually engaging with works of art and trying to produce writing that can dance with them and not do violence to them. And that’s very difficult to do.

Every time I sit down to write something, I really have to make myself up again, so I change as a person with every piece that I write. When you’re writing, you’re making yourself up; you’re making a new person. And that can be painful.

AR: So what motivates you to continue subjecting yourself to such a painful process?

DLS: Writing is painful, but having written is ecstatic, and the ecstasy induces amnesia, so you’re willing to do it all over again. Like falling in love.

AR: Was the dedication to rewriting something that came from your own intuition? Or did you pick it up from your peers?

DLS: No, not from my peers—from my superiors, living and dead. I read dead people.

AR: Were you working with other people for edits?

DLS: Almost never. It was an interactive process affected by my reading of writers who I respected. Writing is a built thing: It has architecture; it has a shape. I was imitating the writers who I looked up to. John Berger was a tremendous one, but there were many others. I imitated Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valéry, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Clarice Lispector, Simone Weil, Heiner Müller, Samuel Beckett…

AR: In a letter you wrote to Irving Sandler and published in the Brooklyn Rail, you wrote, “Criticism is not in crisis. Criticism is crisis.” Do you think our current crisis is critical enough? Have we lost the degree of criticality? Or has it been coddled or forced into submission by the market and media pressure?

DLS: No, I don’t think it’s critical enough. As you know, my writing has always been polemical. If you’re not going to question the status quo, what’s the point of writing criticism? There has always been a part of the art world that wants to diminish or eliminate the role of criticism, and unfortunately that part is currently running the show. But as I said in the letter in the Rail, I think art needs criticism. It needs something outside of itself to have a dialogue with. When that’s not there, we’re in trouble: We’re in a situation where things just get repeated every ten or twenty years, and the only measure of value is price. There’s no ongoing conversation about what we need, who we are, and what’s really changing. In that way, I think criticism is more needed now than ever before.

[1] Strauss coined the phrase “Golden Age of Search” in the introduction to his book Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow: Essays on the Present and Future of Photography (New York: Aperture, 2014), 9.

Evan Calder Williams. T-1 (2015) (video still); two screen projection. Courtesy of the Artist.

To call the performance an essay is both fair and unfair. Or, perhaps more importantly, it questions the history and potential future of a form so familiar to the literate world. If we consider the origin of the word essay, from the late-16th-century essai, meaning a trial or attempt, then T-1 was a live attempt. The spirit of experimentation and uncertainty associated with attempts and trials exemplifies the nature of Calder Williams’ performance; though the presentation was highly considered and intentional, it escaped the safety and finitude of sentences strung together on a page. Instead, T-1 opened itself up to an unexplored method of conveying information, becoming an expedition in search of new visual and sonic languages.

Throughout the performance, plump, white, slightly out-of-focus words faded in and out on the screen to the audience’s left. The transitions happened so slowly, and the window of legibility—when the new phrase was sufficiently visible and the old phrase sufficiently faded—was so brief that it prompted dizziness, as I snapped my head back and forth, trying to follow the unraveling narrative on the left while keeping up with the more rapid narrative on the right. On this right-hand screen, videos and images played in secession or were layered, accompanied by audio clips and Calder Williams’ voice as sonic elements, all punctuated by numbers delineating sections of varying duration.

Evan Calder Williams. T-1 (2015) (video still); two screen projection. Courtesy of the Artist.

With a tone that ranged from dark humor to ominous prophecy, Calder Williams led his audience down a circuitous path toward his elusive thesis. T-1 made connections between lab rats that had their eyes removed for behaviorism experiments, shipboard slaves who were blinded as a method of control, a ghost ship crewed by cannibalistic rats, and the essay’s namesake, T-1, an enormous Arctic island of ice classified as top secret by the U.S. Air Force that went mysteriously missing for several months. In addition to the main narrative, Calder Williams also entwined a series of quasi-tangential information and images, such as appropriated black-and-white film footage and a first-person perspective of a roller-coaster ride that seemed to hurl the viewer around and caused a sensation of physical disorientation. In another section of the performance, a video of tall cornstalks looming over the camera made a pun of the homophones maze and maize. Later, first-person, multiscreen video games portrayed search-and-rescue scenarios through labyrinthine, submarine interiors. With each reference—I mention only a fraction of all included—Calder Williams managed to wrangle the chaotically varied subjects, always linking them to the main narrative.

Evan Calder Williams. T-1 (2015) (video still); two screen projection. Courtesy of the Artist.

I can’t imagine a way that T-1 could exist as a solely text-based essay; the use of any single medium would suffocate the sensory pleasure produced by the performance’s fluctuation and expansion. Instead, Calder Williams rejected literary constraints and allowed disparate pieces of information to enter a conversation, making it possible for new meanings to arise. The durational nature of the performance further challenges the essay’s static presentation of information that can be reread, cross-referenced, and confirmed; my understanding of T-1 relies on my memory of the experience. As a result, Calder Williams’ work requires both our dogged attention and our acceptance of the radical impermanence of the present. If we can embrace these contradicting states, hovering between the known and the hazy cloud of probability, then perhaps we can break away from a world of binary definitions. We can venture into the unknown—not to conquer but to learn from it.

Evan Calder Williams: T-1 was performed at Artists Space in New York City on July 21, 2015.

[1] T-1 is the first presentation of Evan Calder Williams’ 2015 residency at Issue Project Room.

Jenny Holzer. SURVIVAL SERIES: IF YOU AREN’T POLITICAL YOUR PERSONAL LIFE SHOULD BE EXEMPLARY, 1998; cast bronze; 5.1 x 10 in. © Jenny Holzer. Courtesy ofArtist Rights Society (ARS), Cheim & Read, New York, and Lisa Cooley, New York.

The title of the show comes from an anecdote about the Italian chef Massimo Bottura and his sous-chef Takahiko Kondo, who, in one fateful moment, dropped a lemon tart as it was leaving the kitchen to be served. While the terrified Kondo recalls wanting to end his life then and there, Bottura saw in the wrecked dessert a chance for innovation. The tart inspired Bottura to create the now-famous dish (named “Oops, I Dropped the Lemon Tart”), in which the components are scattered across a plate, intentionally disarrayed. In an interview about the event, Kondo reflects that, “in life, to move forward, you learn from mistakes.”[1]

The lessons we are supposed to learn from our mistakes are not always as recognizable as Kondo’s, and the failures in this exhibition aren’t always easily spotted. The press release explains that the show is not meant to celebrate failure but rather to highlight the ways in which it permeates all aspects of being. Taking this statement as a directive, I found myself determining each work a failure or not based on what I would like to believe was informed judgment but was probably more intuition. My examination quickly became tangled, with contradictory trains of thought: If I deem a work a failure, then is it a success within the parameters of the exhibition? Conversely, if a work did not seem enough of a failure, then would it be a success? Can an artwork ever be an absolute failure or success? Needless to say, instead of defining the works on a scale ranging from failure to success, considering the show in this way revealed the arbitrary characteristics by which we qualify something as a failure or not.

I Dropped the Lemon Tart, 2015; installation view, Lisa Cooley, New York. Courtesy of Lisa Cooley, New York.

The exhibition includes a diverse group of works by Josef Bauer, Gene Beery, Leon Benn, Vern Blosum, Todd Bourret, Mathew Cerletty, Gelitin, Jenny Holzer, Ray Johnson, Sean Landers, Mernet Larsen, Scott Reeder, David Shrigley, Emily Mae Smith, Ben Vida, Yonatan Vinitsky, and Amy Yao. But the works by Holzer, Landers, and Shrigley stood out as the most successful illustrations of failure. Jenny Holzer’s cast-bronze plaque, IF YOU AREN’T POLITICAL YOUR PERSONAL LIFE SHOULD BE EXEMPLARY (1998), which features the same text as the title, acts as a poignant reminder of the ways in which many people fail to rise above complacency in their everyday lives. The plaque insists that it is not enough to simply allow life to pass us by; we must actively work to better the world.

Sean Landers. To Whom it May Concern, 1991; ink on paper; 5 leaves, each 11 x 8 1/2 in.; overall 11 1/2 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Lisa Cooley, New York.

Contrasting Holzer’s typically punchy aphorism, Sean Landers’ To Whom it May Concern (1991) is a significantly more lengthy and self-reflective work, offering a description of Landers’ personal failure to pay back his student loans. The piece consists of a bill from the Massachusetts Higher Education Assistance Corporation and Landers’ four-page, handwritten response, explaining he wants nothing more than to pay back the loans—as it would confirm his success as an artist—and the reasons why it is not possible for him to do so, confirming his continued status as a failure.

There are many beautiful and profound messages in the show, but David Shrigley’s drawing, Untitled (Shit) (2011), is undeniably the most affective and relatable, largely because of its simplicity. A circle containing the word SHIT sits in the middle of the paper, surrounded by radiating concentric circles, as though it were a pebble dropped into water. The piece summons the immediate, sinking feeling most people have experienced, to varying degrees, after dropping the toast buttered-side down, or realizing that a mistake will cost thousands of dollars to fix, and everything in between.

David Shrigley. Untitled (Shit), 2011; ink on paper; 17 x 11 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Lisa Cooley, New York.

I Dropped the Lemon Tart demonstrates a particular type of curatorial organization, one that employs a single idea to connect otherwise disparate works. Though it is a popular tactic, it often fails: The concept described in the press release is often more interesting than the installed works. The Lisa Cooley exhibition, however, achieves equilibrium between the meaningless and the overly didactic. It allowed me to ruminate on the positive possibilities of failure, something I previously considered to be wholly negative. In that way, it is a success.

I Dropped the Lemon Tart is on view at Lisa Cooley through August 21, 2015.

[1] Boardwalk Pictures and City Room Creative, “Massimo Battura” episode, Chef’s Table, distributed by Netflix, 2015.

With the exception of a small community of daredevils, most people try to avoid disasters. There are, of course, various degrees of risk associated with everything we do that drive our precautions as well as the insurance industry. In general, the act of experiencing art has a very low physical risk factor; insurance companies do not cover the potential emotional or psychological risks of art viewing. In Calculus of Negligence at Room East, Sean Raspet negates the safety of art through a carefully constructed environment with an elevated level of potential risk, which Marte Eknæs then counteracts by implementing safety measures. The two artists’ collaboration creates a scenario that challenges the ways people—and insurance policies—respond to situations with unusual and unpredictable variables.

Marte Eknæs and Sean Raspet. Calculus of Negligence, 2015; installation view, Room East, New York. Courtesy of Room East.

There is not much to see in the upper and lower rooms and connecting stairwell that contain the exhibition. Or, rather, there is not much we are able to see. Calculus of Negligence features fourteen works by the two artists: eleven objects and three works that are, for all intents and purposes, imperceptible. The objects provided by Eknæs include a ventilation system connecting the two rooms, nylon-brush safety strips, anti-slip tape, and a motion-activated trashcan. Raspet’s contributions include four tanks of commercial-grade compressed air, exposed wires, and an insurance policy bought by the gallery specifically for the exhibition. Raspet transforms the space with the contents of the tanks, which contain Praxair ExtendaPak EX 49 (used to preserve fruits and vegetables in packaging and storage), MediPure Air USP (medical-grade breathable air), Zero Air (used for the standard calibration of testing equipment and Environmental Protection Agency compliance), and Oxygen-18 Isotope (a breathable air used for tracking cellular and body metabolism in medical diagnostics and scientific research). The tanks release their contents into the gallery at predetermined flow rates throughout the exhibition. Through his modification of the gallery’s air supply, Raspet calls attention to the many ways in which the chemical industry affects something as essential and banal as the air we breathe. Eknæs both emphasizes and negates Raspet’s intervention with her works Ventilation I and Ventilation II (both 2015), for which the gallery installed a ventilation shaft between the two rooms to disperse the gasses released by Raspet’s tanks. To further complicate the assumption of safety, or lack thereof, Eknæs installed Ventilation IV (2015), a ceiling-mounted ventilation screen that doesn’t connect to anything.

Marte Eknæs and Sean Raspet. Calculus of Negligence, 2015; installation view, Room East, New York. Courtesy of Room East.

The tanks also pose the risk of physical harm, as demonstrated in the upper room by Raspet’s Adjustment Residue (Accident Impact Trace) (2015), which consists of a hexagonal dent in the wall that is the result of a metal nut accidentally flying off of one of the gas tanks. What would be a headache for most other artists was a welcome, serendipitous occurrence for Raspet. He required the gallery to buy an additional insurance policy to cover his slight variations of the “calculus of negligence,” which is the phrase used by the insurance company to determine the probability of accident and liability based on the probability of accident (P), the burden of precautions (B), the gravity of loss (L), and the economically efficient outcome (c.).[1] Through his minor alterations, Raspet highlights the seemingly absurd nuances of the legal contracts that control so much of our lives. While challenging the limits of the insurance policy, he considered: How much more does it cost to leave an electrical cabinet door open? When can an accident be deemed an act of god?

Sean Raspet. Layer Adjustment (Accident Probability Adjustment), 2015; alterations made to the physical location to increase the probability of an accident while remaining within the scope of existing insurance coverage (May 5–June 21, 2015). Courtesy of Room East.

The radical unknowability of the future makes many people uncomfortable, so we try to be as prepared as possible. But through these preparations, we create restrictions on what can be discovered. An early definition of the word catastrophe is a “reversal of what is expected”; from the Greek katastrophē, “an overturning, a sudden end,” the term catastrophe was not associated with disaster until the mid-1800s.[2] Continuing the line of thought drawn by the critic and theorist Vilém Flusser—that catastrophes cannot be foreseen—catastrophes also cannot be intentionally created. Despite this limitation, it is possible to design a system from which a catastrophe might erupt. Together, Eknæs and Raspet produced a potentially catastrophic situation: an environment that denies expectations and encompasses visitors with invisible interferences. As a result, the heightened unpredictability of Calculus of Negligence forces visitors out of their expectations of the future—which are assumptions based on the past—and into a true experience of the miraculous present.

Marte Eknæs and Sean Raspet: Calculus of Negligence is on view at Room East through June 21, 2015.

[1] See the insurance company’s diagram of the calculus of negligence:

[2] Online Etymology Dictionary, entry for catastrophe, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=catastrophe.

William Larson. Untitled, c. 1969–78; electro-carbon print; 11 x 8 ½ in. © William Larson. Courtesy of Gitterman Gallery.

Strongly influenced by László Moholy-Nagy and Constructivist collages from the early 20th century, Larson treats both image and text as decontextualized signs. While their original denotations cannot be ignored—body parts, plants, clouds, and lettering remain recognizable—the combination of these references in the untitled compositions become a garbled visual language that speaks as if in tongues to our cultural understanding of what images signify. In one print, negatives of faces become floating black masks while the majority of a nude male torso and legs hang from the top edge, and a man with a black bar over his eyes is positioned at the bottom edge next to a corner of clouds. Scraps of words form uneven horizons; the legible sections read, “documented medical evidence indicates that’s exactly what,” “Noo,” “see,” and “does.” A viewer’s natural impulse to decode these fractured messages echoes the sensation of trying to recall a disintegrating memory; it feels like there must be a relationship between the elements, but the points are too far apart to make any real connection.

William Larson. Untitled, 1973; electro-carbon print; 11 x 8 ½ in. © William Larson. Courtesy of Gitterman Gallery.

Larson writes that he instinctually wanted to remove the DEX 1 machine’s cover to explore the possibilities of the electronics inside. In his experimentation, he began composing images in clear plastic sleeves, which he then transmitted via the DEX 1’s drum scanner and optical printer. Interfering with this process, which kept the image in motion during the six-minute transmission, allowed him to manipulate the images while they were being read and written by the machine. Larson altered the electrical voltage output during the thermal printing, stretching out whatever information was being rendered, and even inserted crumpled pieces of paper that were compressed, creating a marbled pattern. Larson’s integration of sound is the apex of his mischievous exploitation of the DEX 1’s capabilities. Because the teleprinting process translates all information into binary electronic code, Larson could speak or play music into a telephone connected to the machine, and the sonic signal would layer with the photographic collage. The resulting visualization of sound generates rows of linear static that vary in density. In some places, where Larson fiddled with the voltage output, the lines escape their taught horizontality and loosen into waves that undulate across the picture plane.

William Larson. Untitled, 1971; electro-carbon print; 11 x 8 ½ in. © William Larson. Courtesy of Gitterman Gallery.

The series’ title, Fireflies, refers to the sparks that occur when the DEX 1’s stylus burns images into the carbon paper, but this description does not do the works justice. The literal association between the luminescent insects and the flickering stylus can be expanded to create a metaphorical correlation with the characteristics of Larson’s visual language—a scintillating illumination of information in which the viewer endeavors to find narrative but always fails. Instead of reification, Larson opts for obfuscation, weaving foggy voids into the compositions. Each mark made on the carbon paper is indeed the result of a mechanical firefly, but collectively they are also insights into Larson’s investigation of the nature of representation.

William Larson: Fireflies is on view at Gitterman Gallery through July 2, 2015.

—Charles Baudelaire, Le Voyage (1861)[1]

Despite the seemingly endless portrayal in the media of increased violence around the world, statistical analysis suggests that, as a species, humans have become less violent.[2] I wonder, however, if, instead of moving toward more peaceful tendencies, we have just gotten better at killing. The advancements in military weaponry in the past century cannot be overstated; several of the world’s superpowers, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia, are leaving behind conventional ground forces in favor of robotics and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), or drones.[3] Since the 2001 Al-Qaeda terrorist attack on the United States, the US government has used drones to find and kill militants linked to the terrorist group, primarily in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan, though the success of these missions remains inconclusive.

Jonathan Zawada, Street View / Road to Mecha, 2013; screen shot, Brooklyn, NY. Photo: Amelia Rina

The US government asserts that drones allow for unprecedented sophistication and accuracy: “It’s this surgical precision, the ability, with laser-like focus, to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an Al-Qaeda terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it.”[4] Drone, the recent documentary directed by Tonje Hessen Schei, presents a powerful contradiction to the US government’s support of drone warfare. Through interviews with former military and government officials, Pakistani citizens, as well as human-rights activists, journalists, and writers, the film illuminates the devastation occurring abroad.

Drone, 2015, film poster; digital. 1:18:40. Courtesy of Flimmer Film 2014.

The documentary opens with sound bites of people lauding the efficacy of using drones, followed by the voice of Brandon Bryant, a former drone operator in the US Air Force: “I didn’t really understand what it meant to kill at first. It was horrible.”[5] Bryant continues, describing the operating centers as rooms lit by little more than the glow of the computer monitors, on which they watched pixilated people living thousands of miles away. “We are the ultimate voyeurs, the ultimate Peeping Toms. No one’s gonna catch us. And we’re getting orders to take these people’s lives.” Though Drone presents information highlighting the benefits of using drones—precision, accuracy, and increased time for analysis—the film makes clear the traumatic psychological effect drone warfare has on operators, as well as the tragic effects it has on civilians in strike zones. Interviews with drone-strike survivors in the Waziristan region of northern Pakistan—an area that reportedly receives several drone strikes on some days—paint a devastating picture. A young man describes how he used to enjoy blue skies, but now he fears them and favors cloudy weather because drones cannot fly in overcast skies. The Pakistani citizens express a feeling of helplessness: their loved ones are murdered but no one is accountable. Drone follows the efforts to bring justice to innocent civilians through the lawsuits filed by Shahzad Akbar—a cofounder, legal director, and trustee of the Foundation for Human Rights—and the human-rights activist group Reprieve against the CIA and the Pakistani government.

Drone, 2015 (film still); digital. 1:18:40. Courtesy of Flimmer Film 2014. Photo: Lucian Muntean.

In addition to citing several issues surrounding the US government’s lack of transparency regarding documentation of drone usage, Drone also raises the point that no warfare technology remains proprietary. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, insists, “There’s never been any technology of warfare that isn’t ultimately adopted by your enemy or enemies…Shall I say it’s only a matter of time until we have a drone over New York City, looking down on Manhattan, and it isn’t ours?” In addition, a stateside manufacturer featured in the film has a tenuous grasp on ethics. Andy von Flotow, founder of Insitu, one of the original drone producers, exhibits a sinister nonchalance; whistling around his workshop, Flotow justifies the brutality of war with a “boys will be boys” attitude. Whether or not Flotow is correct that a destructive impulse lies in the hearts of all young men, the US military makes a concerted effort to encourage such a drive toward violence through its involvement with the video-game industry, by investing in games and recruiting gamers.[6]

Drone, 2015 (film still); digital. 1:18:40. Courtesy of Flimmer Film 2014. Photo: Noor Behram.

Drone also interviews Michael Haas, a former drone operator, who was recruited as an eager nineteen-year-old. Haas recalls, “I thought it was the coolest damn thing in the world…‘I get to play video games all day!’ And then the reality hits you, that you may have to kill somebody.” The psychological distance enhanced by the machine allows the operators to behave in a detached manner, without sympathy for their targets: “They’re not people, they’re terrorists” says Haas.

Jonathan Zawada, Street View / Road to Mecha, 2013; screen shot, Jamé Mosque of Isfahan, Esfahan, Afghanistan. Photo: Amelia Rina

Through his online project, Street View / Road to Mecha (2013), the Los Angeles–based artist Jonathan Zawada collapses the sympathetic distance experienced by video gamers and drone operators alike. To experience this work, I spent an hour wandering around my neighborhood in Brooklyn, using the interface Zawada created, which superimposes the first-person cockpit view from various combat games onto Google Street View. As a MechWarrior, I clicked through streets and pointed a grenade launcher at my apartment building. The immediate psychological affect was chilling. Instead of interacting with a fictional, anonymous world of a video game, I encountered people I see on the streets every day. The violence implied by my mechanical point of view became palpably ominous to me. Zawada’s choice of MechWarrior—a giant, humanoid battle vehicle—mimics the unusual perspective of the Street View cameras. The civilians captured by Google’s cameras are almost the same as those recorded by drone surveillance: they are people going about their lives, not necessarily aware that they are being watched. The main difference is that, if you are in Pakistan, this invisible watching eye might kill you.

Drone, 2015(film still); digital. 1:18:40. Courtesy of Flimmer Film 2014. Photo: Steven Moore.

Toward the end of Drone, the filmmakers document one of the projects facilitated by Reprieve: members of the activist group print giant banners featuring the faces of children killed by drones and mount them to the rooftops of buildings, to confront the drone operators with the faces of the innocent civilian lives taken by the strikes. This act of humanizing the anonymous and pixilated bodies far below the unmanned aircrafts is a reminder of the highly imbalanced state of war. The United States military certainly has lessened its number of killed soldiers through the use of robotics and unmanned aircraft, but its drones are not fighting other drones. Allowing for—and even encouraging—the operators’ psychological detachment from the civilian casualties, deeming them collateral damage, cannot remain acceptable. Instead of distancing ourselves further, we need to work toward sympathy—and even empathy—and realize the consequences of treating the world like a video game.

[1] Charles Baudelaire, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire, New York: Grove, 1974.

[2] Ben Schiller, “Despite What Seems Like A Lot Of Violence, The World Is Actually Getting Safer Every Day,” Co.Exist, March 13, 2014, accessed April 3, 2015, http://www.fastcoexist.com/3027220/despite-what-seems-like-a-lot-of-violence-the-world-is-actually-getting-safer-every-day.

[3] Simon Rogers, “Drones by Country: Who Has All the UAVs?” Guardian, August 3, 2012, accessed April 2, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/aug/03/drone-stocks-by-country.

[4] John O. Brannon, “The Ethics and Efficacy of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy,”Wilson Center, Washington, DC, April 30, 2012, accessed April 3, 2015, http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/the-efficacy-and-ethics-us-counterterrorism-strategy.

[5] Unless otherwise cited, all quotes are from the film.

[6] Hamza Shaban, “Playing War: How the Military Uses Video Games,” Atlantic, October 10, 2013, accessed March 21, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/playing-war-how-the-military-uses-video-games/280486/.

Amanda Turner Pohan. The Signals Are Caressing Us, 2015; installation view, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn. Courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery.

The room smelled only faintly fragrant when I entered, so I guided my nose as far into the jug of eau d’orgasme as possible without my lips touching the bottle’s mouth—an act that felt as indecent as it did satisfying. Each inhalation offered a different bouquet: citrusy, then acerbic, then sweetly floral. With the work Orgasmic Exhalation Device for Body Spray #11 (2014), Pohan captures her private expressions of sexual pleasure, condenses them, and reintroduces them into a public space, taking aim at the age-old repression of women’s sexuality. Though more people speak out against this condition today, women are still expected to possess sexual desire only to please men and to preen themselves for this purpose (for example, with odorless or perfumed, hairless bodies). Pohan asserts ownership of her body and its interactions with others, a kind of ownership that few women enjoy.

Amanda Turner Pohan. Orgasmic Exhalation Form #01, 2014; CNC-routed foam and resin; 72 x 14 x 13 in. Photo: Amelia Rina.

In today’s digital age, we must vigilantly protect not only our bodies but also our minds and actions as they are incorporated into globally distributed data. Pohan utilizes digital communication and programming to illustrate the mostly invisible traces we leave as we navigate virtual space while trying to connect with other humans. In Notes from the Google Doc (2014), the most literal and surprisingly poetic of these works in the show, Pohan displays the jumbled conversation of four lovers from a shared Google Doc. Though the gallery’s press release reveals that the text was generated by people using a computer, the sentiments read more like a glitchy computer trying to seduce a human than humans in dialogue with each other. As a result, the awkwardly sexy suggestions reveal the mutable boundaries between a human and a central processing unit.

Amanda Turner Pohan. The Signals Are Caressing Us, 2015; installation view, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn. Courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery.

Amanda Turner Pohan. Notes from the Google Doc, 2014; vinyl lettering; dimensions variable. Courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery.

Orgasmic Exhalation Form #01, a human-size white-resin sculpture, lies on the floor of the gallery. With this work, the artist further muddles the cycle of biological information translated into digital information. The form’s recumbent posture echoes the familiar odalisques rendered in art-historical paintings and referenced in contemporary commercial and art images. Pohan’s version, however, turns the sexualized female pose sterile through the object’s multifaceted, stark, synthetic material. This elicits an uncertain reaction; I recognize a humanoid shape while I perceive the barrier of otherness. The sculpture’s design, like the perfume, is based on Pohan’s orgasmic breaths: She uploaded her CO₂ emission data to 3D-modeling software and printed it with a computer-numerical-control (CNC) router. Pohan’s process offers a new representation for a human experience that is normally hidden.

Amanda Turner Pohan. Orgasmic Exhalation Device for Body Spray #11, 2014 (detail); perfume, glass jug; 27 x 15 x 15 in. Courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery.

Pohan’s previous series also translate biological data into digital data and then into an entirely different state. She turned light into a scented essential oil and the evaporation of water from a plant into sound that was played back to the plant in real time. The Signals Are Caressing Us continues her questioning of the relationships between our sensing bodies and our environments. In response to a persistently obfuscated human–digital–natural interface, Pohan denies our expectations to experience data in familiar ways. The resulting information disorients the viewer and demands a heightened sensory awareness.

Amanda Turner Pohan: The Signals Are Caressing Us is on view at A.I.R. Gallery through February 1, 2015.

Tomer Sapir. Research for the Full Crypto-Taxidermical Index, 2010-14; cement, salt, wax, fibers of Ceiba insignis, latex, plastic, pigment, vitrine; dimensions variable (detail). Courtesy of apexart.

Curator Avi Lubin presents The Hidden Passengers much like an exhibition of scientific artifacts, albeit with something a little off. The more time a viewer spends with the works, the more evident their strange incongruities become. In Tomer Sapir’s Research for the Full Crypto-Taxidermical Index (2010–2014), a glowing surface illuminates what appear to be pods, bits of fungal fluff, parts of creatures, and other bio-matter, all of which on closer inspection reveal themselves to be made of materials such as wax, salt, latex, cement, and plant fibers. Sapir’s untitled piece (2012), a more menacing sculpture hanging on the back wall, resembles either a giant pair of blackened lungs—the sort seen in an anti-smoking ad—or something from the movie Alien, while Roxy Paine’s Cloud Specimen (Cloud/Fungus) (2009), a globular, gray object of epoxy, thermoset polymer, oil, and lacquer suspended in a bell jar, offers a more whimsical take on collecting.

The show complicates the inclination to trust information presented with scientific authority, allowing for a fantastical sense of possibility. Guido van der Werve’s film, Nummer Zeven (The Clouds Are More Beautiful from Above) (2006), however, documents the thwarted expectations of children whose daydreams raise the work of explorers of earth and space to unrealistic heights. The film opens with a shot of the night sky as the narrator recounts a story about a wish he made on stars as a child, one made over and over but that never came true. We then see the narrator place a small meteorite into the nose of a human-sized rocket and haul the rocket to a field, where he prepares it for launch—presumably to manufacture a new opportunity to make his wish. The drawn-out scenes build a sense of excitement for the anticipated rocket launch, but the film ends in an explosion of disappointment.

Guido van der Werve. Nummer Zeven (The Clouds Are More Beautiful from Above), 2006; video projection still; 8:48. Courtesy of apexart.

Requiring varying levels of suspended disbelief, many works in The Hidden Passengers treat the conventionally “unscientific” areas of the world as capable of yielding significant factual data. For example, Mark Dion’s Sampling Unseen London (2006), a series of sketches commissioned by the Natural History Museum in London, systematically charts spaces that would typically be considered irrelevant in biological studies, such as the director of the museum’s house and a “grassy median at Heathrow airport.” Through acts such as this, these artists raise the question of what warrants objective analysis, and what happens when we treat the infinite creativity of our imaginations and the measurable world as equally valid.

The Hidden Passengers is on view at apexart through July 26, 2014.

Stay in Love, 2014; installation view. Courtesy of the Artists, Lisa Cooley, and Laurel Gitlen, New York. Photo: Cary Whittier.

Featuring the works of both well-established and up-and-coming artists, from local and international spheres, and connecting the east and west sides of Norfolk Street in Manhattan, the exhibition bridges both space and time. The individual installations, however, do not feel particularly integrated with each other. Lisa Cooley’s almost entirely monochromatic installation creates a necessary visual coherence that fuses the broad gaps in the enigmatic pieces. Laurel Gitlen uses a similar method, but with predominantly bright, colorful, playful works. With no text beyond the press release to connect the twenty-three artists and pieces that span almost fifty years, the works fluctuate in and out of recognizability, aided by a variety of contextualizing tactics.

Standing in Lisa Cooley’s main gallery, three vitrines containing 296 vintage studio photographs of infants and young children erupt symbolically with the inclusion of the title The Hidden Mother (2006–2013). Suddenly the children are no longer the points of interest. Instead, the focus shifts to the scratched-out faces behind them, the figures draped in fabric or standing just out of the frame, holding them. The veiled mothers restrain and comfort their offspring, rendering the images violent and tender at the same time. The collection transcends the vernacular lens of the photographs by bringing the relationship between mother and child into question.

Linda Fregni Nagler. Hidden Mother, 2006-2013; vintage photographs; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist, Galleria Monica de Cardenas, Milan, Lisa Cooley, and Laurel Gitlen, New York. Photo: Cary Whittier.

The centerpiece of Roman Opalka’s mixed-media work, I–Infinity (1965), addresses the viewer in a similarly elusive way. The large, downy-gray canvas hums with the numbers between 3,578,534 and 3,695,782, neatly painted in cycling gradations of white. To the left, white headphones stream Opalka’s voice reciting the numbers as he painted them. To the right, two black-and-white portraits of the artist bookend the time spent on this installment of his project, illustrating the duration through the unmistakable aging of his features. Starting in 1965, he dedicated his life to systematically painting the numbers 1–infinity. Like trying to understand the universe by counting the stars, Opalka’s synecdochic mania both documents time and emphasizes its oppression.

Roman Opalka. I-Infinity, 1965; acrylic on canvas, photographs, tape; painting: 77 1/8 x 53 1/8 in; photographs: 12 x 9 1/5 in. Courtesy of a private collector, Lisa Cooley, and Laurel Gitlen, New York. Photo: Cary Whittier.

Hanging on the back wall at Laurel Gitlen, Claude Viallat’s large painting Sans Titre N°57 (1997) represents decades of investigation. By repetitively using rows of shapes ranging from jelly beans to Sour Patch Kids in both form and color, Viallat sought to escape from compositional worries and concentrate solely on color relationships. The resulting unstretched canvases playfully draw the eye into a space that will not sit still, using the contrasting blues and canary yellows to flatten and expand depth of field simultaneously.

Whether through vast typologies, countless studies of a single object, name, or place, or the pursuit of personally thanking every sanitation worker in New York City, the artists in Stay in Love leave no question of their dedication to their subjects. Despite the myriad methods, when considered as a whole, the exhibition illustrates not just the tendency toward obsession, but the desire to feel connected to something, whatever it may be.

Stay in Love will be on view at Laurel Gitlen and Lisa Cooley through February 2, 2014.

Janet Cardiff. The Forty Part Motet, 2001; installation view, Fuentidueña Chapel at The Cloisters museum and gardens. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Wilson Santiago.

For the 11-minute score, Cardiff reworked the Tudor-era composition Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui (In No Other Is My Hope) (1573) by Thomas Tallis. The piece, originally intended for recital in churches and cathedrals, logically suits the religious iconography of The Cloisters, while also mirroring the compound’s collaged nature. Constructed in reference to no singular structure, the Cloisters function as an ensemble of many historical precedents. In the Fuentidueña Chapel, Catalan frescos of the Virgin and Child as well as the Adoration of the Magi cover the walls, and a life-size wooden crucifix hangs at the foot of the 12-century apse. The installation of The Forty Part Motet bridges both centuries and geographic borders.

Normally, a crowded exhibition space would be an irritating obstacle, but in the context of Cardiff’s work, the attendees play a very different role. The installation consists of 40 speakers placed in an amoeba-shaped circuit around the chapel, following the contours of the walls, each speaker emitting the voice of a single choral singer. Though I was aware of the echoing notes’ disembodiment, the recording’s fidelity made me continuously scan the room and look at the other visitors, trying to catch the source of the sounds. This deceptive trompe l’oreille effect filled the open mouths scattered around the crowd with the bass, baritones, tenors, altos, and sopranos ringing in my ears. To release my mind from its hunt for the absent singers, I closed my eyes. The chapel’s walls fell away and the space swelled into a limitless expanse filled with harmonies reverberating around me. Cardiff gifts her audience with the unique experience of listening to a choir while surrounded by its members, remarking that she wanted “the audience to be able to experience a piece of music from the viewpoint of the singers.” The voices fade in and out of audibility, morphing the space with their sonorous undulations. Because the installation is completely immersive, I understand how people could find the experience spiritually illuminating.

Janet Cardiff. The Forty Part Motet, 2001; installation view, Fuentidueña Chapel at The Cloisters museum and gardens. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Wilson Santiago.

Despite the work’s obvious relationship to the religious architecture, Cardiff previously installed The Forty Part Motet in places with varying degrees of holiness, including Rideau Chapel National Gallery, Canada; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and even Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès, Tokyo. Cardiff’s inclusive attitude toward her choice of exhibition locations for The Forty Part Motet questions what constitutes a sacred space. Depending on the individual, it could be within a cathedral, inside the walls of a gallery or museum, or even in nature. While in the Fuentidueña Chapel, I could not help but think of my journey through the park on the way to The Cloisters. And on my way back to the subway, lingering to stand among the trees as the mid-afternoon light illuminated each tiny gem hanging from the deciduous branches, rivaling the most elaborate frescos or gold-leafed idols, my mind echoed with polyphony of The Forty Part Motet.

The Forty Part Motet is on view in the Fuentidueña Chapel of The Cloisters through December 8, 2013.

G.U.T. Feeling, installation view, Highlight Gallery. Courtesy of Highlight Gallery

Amelia Sechman: The collages in your most recent series, G.U.T. (Grand Unification Theory) Feeling, seem like an intuitive visual cataloging system. Where do the connections come from?

Eric William Carroll: A combination of theory and experience. Since the project is attempting to communicate something purely via photographs, I rely on visual similarities to make connections. But beneath the surface I’m trying to establish deeper connections.

AS: Were there any particularly extraordinary moments when you realized the connections between two things that previously seemed unrelated?

EWC: It wasn’t really a “moment,” but I had the gradual realization that everything is connected and that it’s only a matter of degree or perspective that separates something from everything else.

AS: What is it about these visual echoes and rhythms that compels you to bring them together?

EWC: Part of it is wanting to understand the world on a basic scientific level. The other part is that, image-wise, we’re seeing a huge variety of photographs appear together in the same container for the first time—by that I mean Google’s image search, Tumblr, Flickr, etc. Bringing seemingly random images together on the screen creates new connections. New photographic synapses are being formed. And also, I have a firm belief that everything is related and some things are more closely bound together than others (see fig. 3.4 and 4.2).

Fig. 3.4

Figure. 4.2

AS: Those diagrams seem to represent humankind’s impulse to reduce vastly different quantities into digestible, bite-size pieces. How does this processing of the infinitely huge and infinitesimally small factor into your work?

EWC: Well, that’s what photography does. It flattens, compresses, and objectifies. It’s up to me and the viewer to unpack that information and put it back together in a way that makes sense (or non-sense).

AS: Is your process of making connections inductive or deductive?

EWC: Yes.

G.U.T. Feeling, installation view, Highlight Gallery. Courtesy of Highlight Gallery

AS: Do you think mysticism plays a part in the relationships drawn between the variables?

EWC: Mysticism as opposed to…science? I’m trying to treat all theories on a level playing field, but I find myself more on the “mainstream” science side of things. But yes, mysticism plays a part—it is a great source for titles. I’ve already decided to call my next show The Electric Record of Universal Consciousness. A lot of what we take for mysticism is simply last year’s science. Today’s dark matter is yesterday’s “aether.”

AS: By mysticism I mean your interest in pseudo or fringe sciences and their interpretations of the world. I remember several of the theories you discovered in your research had fantastic explanations for the way things are.

EWC: Yes, absolutely. These “alternative” theories, even if they have no basis, are still visually rich and full of analogies and metaphor that, as an artist, are ripe for the picking. Some of these people are making some of the most amazing sculptures, but they don’t see what they do in that light. It’s not quite folk art—it’s folk science.

G.U.T. Feeling, installation view, Highlight Gallery. Courtesy of Highlight Gallery

AS: The collages combine both good and bad science in different ways; what role does truth play?

EWC: Utilizing the spirit of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, I can only speak of truth as it relates to me. The collages are 100 percent honest. Some are 110 percent. But like I said before—part of me really does want to understand how the world works, but I don’t want my understanding to ever get in the way of surprise.

AS: Is there an answer you’re searching for in your examination of the universe?

EWC: Absolutely not. It’s about the ride not the destination.

AS: Have you discovered anything that made you feel insignificant or aggrandized?

EWC: Every time I’ve asked a legitimate scientist to help clarify or explain a concept for me, I felt absolutely humbled. But I also feel a kinship—not only through my own teaching experience (explaining F-stops to freshmen at 8 a.m., I might as well be explaining quantum field theory) but also in our shared desire to understand the world and explain it in a language that we both struggle with and love. For some people it’s physics; for me it is photography.

Eric William Carroll studio view

AS: Would you rather be run over by a steamroller or a thousand motorcycles?

EWC: Are the motorcycles all coming at once?

AS: It would probably have to be no more than two at a time, as your body isn’t much longer than two motorcycles side by side.

EWC: I would happily take on five hundred pairs of motorcycles than one steamroller.

G.U.T. Feeling is on view at Highlight Gallery through August 17, 2013.