3.12.25 — Silent Music
To pick up from last time on winter at SculptureCenter, the years that gave birth to sound art and text art also brought an uncanny silence. Strange perhaps, but hardly a contradiction.
Painting was losing authority, abstract or representational, and something had to take its place—not more stories about saints, sinners, or the artists themselves, but Minimalism. And if industrial materials could invade the gallery, why not something barely seen or heard? Where Minimalism boasted of art as object, subject to gravity, sound art was in the air. Now ASMA and Tony Chrenka bring their own silent music, but the stories and the objects are back as well.
ASMA may sound like a coughing fit, but it is much the familiar mix of ice-cold sculpture and sound. The collective (Matias Armendaris and Hanya Beliá from Mexico) calls the marvelous basement tunnels an “ideal space for music,” but the only sound this winter was of water, drip by drip. You had to listen carefully if you were to subject yourself to the water torture, through February 3. It also dared you to connect three distinct sections and motifs. One comes straight out of Minimalism, light sculpture—not in neon, but in older sources of light. The artists direct them through glass.
What looks like a bulb has a hand-made geometry, and what looks like a lens is just a glass disk. And the lack of focus continues into work that sticks more closely still to Minimalism’s industrial sheen. What light there is reflects off relief elements on polished spheres, like disco balls where dancing is prohibited. A third basement tunnel brings anything but dancers at that. Female dolls the size of small children lie on shelves or on the floor, seemingly unable to rise. One has at her feet a furry black creature like a wildly overfed rat.
One last space, for video, may or may not unify the three. It treats the basement as a source of images or abstraction. The dolls themselves aspire to the sexual charge of work by Laurie Simmons, but the point seems to be the music and the silence. Both continued upstairs, through December 22, in a side gallery that most recently held Bastien Gachet, but it is not out to give you the creeps. It takes Minimalism and music seriously. It makes up for a lack of poignancy with a bit of clarity, trickery, and paint.
Chrenka covers the walls at eye level with thin paired verticals, one brown and one white, each with a slight lateral twist. You may take them for twigs. I could swear that I had seen this strategy before, but its familiarity is deceptive. Julianne Swartz, for one, has herself both leaned wood against the wall and created sound art. Chrenka, in turn, has not salvaged branches but rather guitar necks, cutting away the frets. I smell a rat.
The cuts leave only bumps at left and right, which the artist reinforces by painting over them. The paint also helps them adhere to the walls, and it reinforces the silence. The slats broaden at top, like actual guitar necks waiting for someone to tune the strings. You cannot finger these fingerboards, but the white of the walls looks all the more compelling for that. So where is the promised music, and just where is that “ideal space”? Maybe the dolls are too world-weary to listen or to sing.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.