Exceeding the Object: Notes on Reverberations Five performances presented at SculptureCenter December 15, 2012

Is it possible for light, sound, or bodies in motion to become objects? And in what ways can objects be an open-ended proposition addressing space, time, and memory? These are the key ontological questions of Reverberations, a series of In Practice program per-formances spread out over five hours on December 15th, 2012. Each of the four new works presented progressed slowly and methodically, and required sustained viewership.

Exploring the physicality of light and sound, Paul Clipson and Joshua Churchill com-bined 8mm film projection with live musical accompaniment. Using bass tones within SculptureCenter’s subterranean architecture, Churchill created a literal reverberation chamber against Clipson’s abstract light collages—layered patterns found in urban set-tings. Woody Sullender, meanwhile, positioned a range of props around a side gallery, including folding chairs and plinths found on-site and long sheets of reflective black mylar. Onto these, transducers were attached, turning the materials into sound sources that vibrated with the artist’s electronic tones. Moving around the space and shifting materials at will, he created a kind of quotidian symphony of objects until he finally unspooled a long thread of film into viewers’ hands, snaking through and outside of the space. They held the film, waiting for the artist’s next move, which humorously never came.

Treating the gendered body itself as the object of inquiry, R. E. H. Gordon presented a series of sculptural tableaux, in which writers and other artists engaged in a succession of poses. Leaning against walls, bending over, and standing on concrete plinths, a slow sequence of interlocking arms and limbs put an emphasis not just on the body, but on whose body and what kind of body.

Tasked to utilize SculptureCenter’s main gallery, Yve Laris Cohen and Park McArthur perhaps most dramatically challenged the parameters of performance, employing a pre-existing gantry crane with monumental aplomb. Attaching two long, black duvetyne curtains from the gantry’s wheels, the fabric draped 25 feet to the floor and was nearly as wide as the cavernous hall. For an hour, McArthur operated this industrial relic from her wheelchair, moving it back and forth down the length of the space while spectators watched from two center-facing rows of chairs. The alien whirring of the machinery—both

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in real-time and in a prerecorded track playing simultaneously—echoed throughout the museum before giving way to a Giselle score by Adolphe Adams. Only visible to viewers as she passed, McArthur traveled in tandem with the gantry’s sweeping motion while Laris Cohen, employing a railing like a ballet bar, stretched unassumingly on the catwalk far above the audience before walking off. McArthur remained seated, and viewers were left to determine the ending for themselves, as the climax of the duo’s repetitive, nearly unre-markable event seemed remarkably anticlimactic, making ambiguous the lines between action and non-action, beginning and end. Cracking open such issues surrounding performance, it doesn’t take but a small step to get from object to objecthood, a loaded and oft-cited historical term if there ever was one. Famously coined more than forty years ago by Michael Fried in a polemic against minimalist art, “Art and Objecthood,” it pops up again and again and nonethe-less remains relevant here; not so dissimilar to the way minimalist sculpture tended to implicate not just its own form but its nearly performative context—the contingencies of where it was, why it was there, and who was viewing it—the artists in Reverberations pointed not to a static definition of the object but rather to one that is constantly in flux. The space of a work—and in the case of performance, the space of production—became a key inquiry. They proved that, more than the sum of its parts, site-specificity is a veri-table Pandora’s box of tangled relations between art and spectator, subject and identity, body and space—all of which Reverberations tackled with the slightest and most unas-suming of gestures. —David Everitt Howe

Performance view of Park McArthur and Yve Laris Cohen, Reverberations, 2012. © SculptureCenter (Photo: Megan Mantia)

The newly commissioned performances in Reverberations were created for SculptureCenter’s 2012-2013 In Practice program, and curated by Assistant Curator Kristen Chappa.

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