2011 June

In Contact

June 28, 2011 | by Alan Berman | Category: Performance | Leave a Comment

Undone: androgyne, gender and humanism Choreography and Direction: Stephanie Nugent Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica, June 10-12, 2011 Los Angeles choreographer Stephanie Nugent presented new versions of several works in a three-day run at Highways Performance Space earlier this month. The Nugent Dance company—four women and four men—performed three varied, athletic, fresh, and valuable original works. Southern California dancers are perhaps most familiar with Nugent, a member of the dance faculty at CalArts, through her Hourglass concerts, during which audience members are invited to participate in the hour-long improvisational performance with a live music ensemble. Nugent’s compositions are informed by the history ... [Read more]

Tagged: Alan Berman, Contact Improvisation, Dance in Los Angeles, Hourglass Concerts, Nugent Dance, stephanie nugent

Point A to Point A – Interview Part Four: il sé interiore

June 27, 2011 | by Aram Yardumian | Category: Music | Leave a Comment

The Music of Giancarlo Toniutti A four part serial conversation between TQ's Aram Yardumian and Italian electronic musician Giancarlo Toniutti. This in-depth discussion is focused on Toniutti’s composition techniques, theoretical underpinnings and the role of language in the arts. Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview Introduction Part One: Prolegomenon Part Two: Universal Structures Part Three: Authorship Aram Yardumian - Although your music is tightly composed and a cerebral experience—almost without limits—for the listener, I don’t find myself thinking it is bereft of emotion. Is emotional content a byproduct or part of the articulative structure, or something else? Giancarlo Toniutti - I think we should ... [Read more]

Tagged: andrew chalk, Aram Yardumian, Epigenetics, Giancarlo Toniutti, Italian electronic music, Tahta Tarla, Tienalauami

Point A to Point A – Interview Part Three: Authorship

June 26, 2011 | by Aram Yardumian | Category: Music | Leave a Comment

The Music of Giancarlo Toniutti A four part serial conversation between TQ's Aram Yardumian and Italian electronic musician Giancarlo Toniutti. This in-depth discussion is focused on Toniutti’s composition techniques, theoretical underpinnings and the role of language in the arts. Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview Introduction Part One: Prolegomenon Part Two: Universal Structures Part Four: il sé interiore Aram Yardumian - What is the relationship between your album “Epigènesi” and epigenetics, if anything? Epigenetics is of course a most fascinating subject, but I failed to see how it was part of the concept of the album, if in fact it was. Giancarlo Toniutti - Epigènesi (Italian for epigenesis) has ... [Read more]

Tagged: andrew chalk, Anthropology, Aram Yardumian, Epigenetics, Giancarlo Toniutti, Italian electronic music, La Mutazione, Metánárkosis, Rene thom, Tahta Tarla, Warkswood

Point A to Point A – Interview Part Two: Universal Structures

June 25, 2011 | by Aram Yardumian | Category: Music | Leave a Comment

The Music of Giancarlo Toniutti A four part serial conversation between TQ's Aram Yardumian and Italian electronic musician Giancarlo Toniutti. This in-depth discussion is focused on Toniutti’s composition techniques, theoretical underpinnings and the role of language in the arts. Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview Introduction Part One: Prolegomenon Part Three: Authorship Part Four: il sé interiore Aram Yardumian - Throughout your entire career, there seems to be a search for common or fundamental dynamics in the human psyche. More recently you come to this as pre-cultural habitus. But to trace this to the source, surely there must be some recourse to symbols as C.G. Jung describes them. Giancarlo Toniutti ... [Read more]

Tagged: Anthropology, Aram Yardumian, Émile Benveniste, Giancarlo Toniutti, Italian electronic music, Rene thom, Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, Topology

Point A to Point A – Interview Part One: Prolegomenon

June 24, 2011 | by Aram Yardumian | Category: Music | Leave a Comment

The Music of Giancarlo Toniutti A four part serial conversation between TQ's Aram Yardumian and Italian electronic musician Giancarlo Toniutti. This in-depth discussion is focused on Toniutti’s composition techniques, theoretical underpinnings and the role of language in the arts. Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview Introduction Part Two: Universal Structures Part Three: Authorship Part Four: il sé interiore The following interview with Giancarlo Toniutti was conducted in June 2011 in hopes of providing some context through which his sound art may be introduced and appreciated. As with all permanent works of art, continued engagement yields continued reward. Aram Yardumian - First, regardless of how I may have ... [Read more]

Tagged: Anthropology, Aram Yardumian, Epigenetics, Giancarlo Toniutti, Italian electronic music, La Mutazione, Metánárkosis, Rene thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, The Tree

Point A to Point A – Introduction

June 21, 2011 | by Aram Yardumian | Category: Music | Leave a Comment

The Music of Giancarlo Toniutti A four part serial conversation with TQ's Aram Yardumian and Italian electronic musician Giancarlo Toniutti. This in-depth discussion is focused on Toniutti's composition techniques, theoretical underpinnings and the role of language in the arts. Serial Four-Part Interview Part One: Prolegomenon Part Two: Universal Structures Part Three: Authorship Part Four: il sé interiore Introduction Essay by Aram Yardumian Giancarlo Toniutti began conducting sonic experiments in late 1977 with his friend Tiziano Dominighini in a glassworks owned by Dominighini’s father. With the various tools, machines, surfaces, and sheets of glass, as well as a few traditional instruments, they began making “not ... [Read more]

Tagged: andrew chalk, Anthropology, Aram Yardumian, Broken Flag, Field Recording, Giancarlo Toniutti, Italian electronic music, La Mutazione, Maurizio Bianchi, Nekrose, Topology

Solar Glyphs

June 17, 2011 | by Lorraine Davis | Category: Photography | Leave a Comment

Chris McCaw's Sunburn Series Every ancient culture has a sun legend: Neolithic petroglyphs depict solar barges carrying the sun across the sky while the Egyptian, Greek, Vedic, Nordic, Chinese, Japanese, North and South American Indian cultures had sun deities and sun myths, representing the sun as a source of both life and death. Modern man knows that our sun, a yellow dwarf star, is about five billion years old. It is 92.5 million miles away and travelling at 186 thousand miles per second , its light takes approximately 8.2 minutes to reach earth. The sun’s photosphere -from the Greek word for light=photo and sphaira=ball, is a constant fusion of hydrogen and helium, which produces our sunlight. Please click on the image to ... [Read more]

Tagged: celestiacelestial lorel, Chris McCaw, Lorraine Davis, Modern Photography, solarization, Sun Myths, Sunburn Series

The Stark Fist of Removal

June 13, 2011 | by Rita Valencia | Category: Art | Leave a Comment

Rem Koolhaas' CRONOCAOS at New Museum, Lower East Side, Manhattan– Architecture is monstrous in the way in which each choice leads to the reduction of possibility. —Rem Koolhaas May 2011: New York City is at its greige gritty best. It is springtime and the promise of a rain is unfulfilled as storm clouds scutter uselessly across a blue sky. In the lower East Side, where the New Museum now occupies its splendid SANAA designed building of stacked white boxes, the word CRONOCAOS is lettered in white Helvetica Medium on a chrome yellow awning on the museum's homely neighbor, the site of a former wholesale business. The Helvetica poses as a kind of institutional graffiti, jaunty and cool in a "made ya look" way. The signage of the ... [Read more]

Tagged: CRONOCAOS, Historic Preservation, New Museum, OMA, Rem Koolhaas, Rita Valencia

Steve Earle and the Blood Knot of Social Control

June 9, 2011 | by Guy Zimmerman | Category: Music | 5 Comments

Goodbye I have not always been a big Country-Western fan, but someone posted a clip of Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris performing Earle’s Goodbye on Facebook a few months back, and it's been haunting me ever since. Goodbye is hill people music, a Scots-Irish ballad that aims for an ideal economy of expression in which hard-won truths and lessons learned are delivered without adornment. Earle is singing about the ravages of heroin addiction, how a woman left him and he didn’t even notice. “I can’t remember/if we said goodbye,” is the simple refrain. It’s a line that reverberates endlessly against itself in ways that convey us to the heart of our own vulnerability. The reason Earle didn’t notice is that he was too high at the ... [Read more]

Tagged: Addiction, Guy Zimmerman, recovery, Scotch-Irish, Scots_Irish in America, Steve Earle

Inventing Awareness

June 5, 2011 | by Alan Berman | Category: Performance | Leave a Comment

50Collective, ARC (A Room to Create), Pasadena and The Sweat Spot, Silver Lake, May 11-13, 2011 The improvisational dance ensemble known as 50Collective appeared in southern California earlier this month at several intimate venues, including Pasadena’s ARC studio and The Sweat Spot in Silver Lake. 50Collective was born in a 2010 workshop led by Venezuelan dancer/choreographer David Zambrano; eleven of the 50 original participants in that workshop are on this North American tour, demonstrating masterful spontaneous movement and supreme alertness as they conduct workshops and present hour-long performances. This reviewer participated in the Wednesday night workshop at ARC, and the numbers were just right: every member of the ... [Read more]

Tagged: 50Collective, Alan Berman, Dance in Los Angeles, David Zambrano, Simone Forti

Immensities and Infinities

June 1, 2011 | by Tom Wudl | Category: Art | Leave a Comment

Further Specimens from the Flowerbank World, Tom Wudl, L.A. Louver Gallery, June 2 through July 9 2011 – Immensities and Infinities: Further Specimens from the Flowerbank World is the artist Tom Wudl's continuing investigation of the Avatamasaka Sutra (or Flower Ornament Sutra), a revered scripture of Huayan Buddhism. Earlier works by Wudl inspired by the sutra were first exhibited at L.A. Louver in Specimens from the Flowerbank World, November-December 2009. Read here the Artforum review by Annie Buckley. There was a time when the world was small and man knew his place in it....Today, space is expanding beyond the reaches of the imagination....we inhabit immensities and infinities that also inhabit us. I have attempted to ... [Read more]

Tagged: Avatamsaka Sutra, Flower Ornament Sutra, Immensities and Infinities, LA Louver, Los Angeles Artist, Specimens from the Flowerbank World, Tom Wudl