 |
| Terry Adkins, Muffled Drums (detail), 2003-13, eleven found bass drums, mufflers, steel, 30' 3" x 3' 1/2" x 1' 7". |
Terry Adkins and George Lewis in Conversation
It’s still
unusual to play an artwork, no matter
how many interactive screens or relational games we’ve encountered. But playing
the piece is often the first thing that happens in the practices of Terry
Adkins and George Lewis – each of whom breached the borders between the visual
arts and music, and each of whom came of age in the 1970s and ‘80s ferment of
post-bop and cyborgs, identity politics and institutional critique. Artforum invited the vanguard,
multidisciplinary artist Adkins – whose work features in the Whitney Biennial
in New York this month – to talk with renowned composer and computer-music
pioneer Lewis about performance, improvisation, history, race, and sensation.
Tragically, Adkins passed away, at the age of sixty, as this issue was going to
press. We hope that the conversation that follows might also serve as an
unexpected valedictory of sorts, pointing toward the rich possibilities that
Adkins’s work has opened up – and will continue to open for years to come.
Quotes
from conversation:
“The Mars rover is my model of what I want to
make as an interactive artist – an improvising machine that you set down on the
surface of a hostile planet, where it makes its own way.”
-- George Lewis
“I try to make sculpture that is as ephemeral
and transient as music is.”
--Terry Adkins
“What your practice shows is the extent to which
sound is abstract, functional, and socially embedded, all at once. You can see
the tradition, and then you can hear it.”
– George Lewis
“In your work, there’s a certain amount of
surrender and a certain amount of anonymity: the will to let go, the will to
allow possibilities to somehow take care of themselves, a kind of anonymous
authorship where you just supply the matrix for possibility and remove
yourself.”
--Terry Adkins
No comments:
Post a Comment