Panel debate: Art, Music, Performance

This event was held at the Collective Gallery in Edinburgh on Friday August 10 2007.


David Ryan and Kirsten Norrie are both artists and both musicians, Sally O'Reilly is a critic and curator of performance events and all three write for Art Monthly. They discussed the crossovers between music, performance and other art forms and tried to address some of problems of definition that arise as a result. They tackled the common questions about interdisciplinarity such as how do you critique or react to a work which combines more than one art form? How context affects the work - when music is played within an art context and vice versa? What difference can the audience make if the work is 'participatory', 'interactive', or 'transactive'?

Read articles from Art Monthly pertinent to this discussion by clicking on the links below.

David Ryan on Phil Niblock
Anybody familiar with the name of Phill Niblock would probably characterise his work by two essential elements: first, the sound of long sonorous drones producing rich overtones, and second: it is seriously loud! A third characteristic that should also spring to mind is that it usually combines a visual element, as Niblock has been a prolific filmmaker since the mid 60s. While he remains a resolutely 'intermedia' artist, this has, in effect, caused problems for the reception of his work. Histories of Minimalism have never quite known what to do with him, and similarly any subsequent histories of new media have probably, wrongly, seen him as a composer first and foremost.
Read the article

National Review of Live Art
Kirsten Norrie reports.
The subjective and metaphoric readings of the works selected for discussion here highlight a compelling relation ship between contemporary art action and its 'other' (witness, audience, viewer) where the 'other' necessarily constitutes a working part of the performance. This may mean a structure or framework of specific preoccupations that we bring to the space and perform ourselves, both in witnessing and in writing about the work. It is in this that all of these works enabled a sense of the transformative - fixed, witnessed and abandoned by the significant other of 'audience'. The NRLA ... provided a unique and elastic experience whereby practitioner and witness melded, one transforming into the other as the acts became visible. As Mansholt said to her audience: 'let me forgive those who never saw you.'
Read the report

Radio Radio
Sally O'Reilly on art for the radio
Art on the radio may sound a bit like 'a good face for radio' or radio ventriloquism, but, of course, sound and language are as malleable as paint and can run the gamut within any parameters. Some pieces ape existing radio formats, with British inclusions tending towards parodies of pre-recorded programmes and those of the Americans listing towards the more itinerant, live transmissions such as phone-ins.
Read the article

Pop/Art

Art offers pop music a stamp of legitimacy, pop music offers art a whisper of cult status argues Mark Prince:
According to Raymond Pettibon, you should not assume from the album covers and flyers, which he designed for LA punk bands in the 70s, that the music can tell you much about the art or vice versa: 'It's a knee-jerk response to the company I happen to keep. It just shows the obsession that society has with rock culture, nowhere more so than in art.' Exhibitions, such as 'Sonic Process' at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, map correspondences between the two, positioning them at convenient ends of an axis that supposedly enriches both.
Read the article

David Ryan on Max Neuhaus
It was not long after these recordings that Neuhaus turned his back on performing altogether; firstly through 'lecture demonstrations' simply entitled Listen, and later exploring sound installations of specifically constructed timbres relating to place. Both of these later developments reflect Neuhaus's rejection of the constraints and formalities of the concert hall and the inevitable restrictions these bring to bear on working directly with sound as an almost sculptural entity.
Read the review

Live and Kicking
Extremist, self-indulgent and uncool it may be but live art also offers new possibilities for politically engaged art argues Sally O'Reilly.
Read the feature

Rock/Art
Martin Patrick considers the relationship between artists such as Chris Burden and Iggy Pop and the aesthetics of early 70s performance art.
Read the feature

Dead Funny
Sally O'Reilly looks at comedy in contemporary art - with particular reference to the work of Simon Munnery, Paul McCarthy, Hendrik Pedersen and Bjarne Melgaard:
Comedy audiences disgruntled at not being made to laugh or the misplaced laughter at the death of Tommy Cooper remind one of the anthropologist Mary Douglas's well-worn definition of dirt as 'matter out of place'. It is a nice lick of language that comedy could be thought of as the new dirty pictures.
Read the feature

ABOUT THE PANELLISTS

David Ryan is a visual artist and writer who is also actively involved in contemporary music. He is the author of Talking Painting: Dialogues with 12 Contemporary Abstract Artists. He has also organised, and performed in, a great many performances of new music and mixed media collaborabations. Past performances include Danish Radio, 1997, Huddersfield International Contemporary Music Festival, 2001, 2002. He has worked with the ensemble Apartment House as well as composers Christian Wolff and Earle Brown, and has also performed at New Music Marathon, Northwestern University, Chicago 2002, the Barbican Art Centre - (Cage Uncaged), 2004, The Freedom of the City improvisation festival, 2003. He is Director of Dal Niente Projects which presents neglected modernist and contemporary experimental works.

Sally O'Reilly is a critic and writer, contributing regularly to many publications, including Art Monthly, Frieze, Spike and Time Out. She is co-editor of Implicasphere and has written numerous catalogues essays for emerging and established artists at international venues. She also devises and produces performative events, both individually and in collaboration. She was artist in residence at Camden Art Centre (February 2006), co-producer of the performance programme for Whitstable Biennale 2006, co-writer, producer and performer of Brown Mountain Cabaret at the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club (October 2006) and is currently working on a performance weekend, '990 General history of other areas', for Beacon Art project 07.

Kirsten Norrie is a live artist, musician and writer who has made solo and group works internationally including the UK, Greenland, Arizona, Vietnam, Spain and Germany. She is part of a performance group 'The Wolf in Winter' who create lo-tech poetic works. She has recently completed a Wellcome Trust Sciart Award of live acts based on the mass of six internal organs drawing on their cultural, political and mythopoeic weight. As part of the musical project, Lugosi's Ghost, Norrie supported The Fall in July at the Carlington Academy, Islington. She is currently working on a novel 'Prisoner's Cinema' based on death row prisoner, Howard Neal.