16,000 square feet of rectangular windowless space, darkly lit, with a James Bond era flotation/sensory-deprivation chamber in the middle, surrounded by a small crowd of people. This was the opening of Marian Spore’s summer party last night and the flotation vessel was in fact Thom Kubli‘s FLOAT! THINKTANK 21 (commissioned by EMPAC).
Marian Spore has been a bit mysterious to me. I knew a bit about their process, cumulatively acquiring works over time with the agreement that at some point in the future they will all be sold as a collection. I didn’t realize they took their name from an artist in the 1930′s who thought she could communicate with dead artists and married the creator of the gigantic warehouse-y complex (Industry City) that the space is now located in.
As Sally pointed out, the sheer amount of space allowed each piece so much extra air to breathe, a luxury unheard of in New York (or pretty much anywhere). It was almost a bit disorienting but the amount of attention it allowed the individual works felt right, leaving me with the feeling that most presentations were going to seem crowded from now on.
Andy Graydon’s Untitled (fault) came from a nice premise: field recordings taken from crowd noise at an opening of 19th century photography at the Met then transfered onto an acetate record but obfuscated through repeated playback in the space as the needle cut into the record completely reconfiguring it as a sounding object, leaving finally just a kind of white noise, a palimpsest of lost clarity. I do wish there were a longer arc of comprehensibility in his piece, from the original sound source to the white noise, as the area in the middle of that spectrum is the most interesting.
Most of the other 5 or so pieces dealt with temporal impact made manifest in their own way, all deserving of their space and time, with a really lovely group of attendees on a mild July night out in the middle of Nowhere, Brooklyn.
