TINY GEMS

Starting this September, The Institute of Contemporary Art here in Philadelphia began hosting “The Accompanists,” a music/sound performance series in collaboration with Christian Marclay’s “Ensemble” exhibition (Tiny Gems previously featured Nadine’s thoughts on the current ICA exhibitions – “I Hate Surprises“). I attended the final two “Accompanists” performances, by Alan Licht and Marina Rosenfeld, respectively. This also allowed me to experience exactly the things that I like and dislike about “sound art” – also respectively.

Rosenfeld’s idiosyncratic brand of turntablism – created, in her own words, by “her own custom acetate records (‘dub plates’), which are imprinted with original, fragmentary sound created in the studio to be remixed, manipulated, and otherwise transformed live” – lent her performance at the ICA an almost narrative feeling, like an unfinished score of some lost epic film; she pieced the music together from snatches of voices, sci-fi noises and orchestral swells, timed to coincide with the sounds from the pieces in “Ensemble.” Each change in her music managed to sound incredibly thought out and completely improvised.

Alan Licht’s performance, on the other hand, left me cold (not to mention suffering from an instant headache). There was no piece of the sounds he produced that I could grab on to, or connect to the sounds from the other pieces in the room. I left the ICA wishing I had heard something that felt more driven or motivated – not directionless noise I was meant to accept because of its placement in a major museum.

The temptation with a medium so self-consciously “contemporary” and “experimental” as a sound performance is to forget that in order for such art to be experienced, someone has to want to sit and listen it – that time is required for a time-based medium. Contemporary film and video artists also tend to lose this distinction. The best noise bands (and, I’d venture to say, Marina Rosenfeld) have learned this fact – that performing does often require a real performance.

Anyway, it was nice to see a woman so thoroughly kick a man’s ass in the “sound art” boys club.