Los Angeles – “Talk boldly!” said the musician and composer Julius Eastman in the 1981 prelude to his musical composition, “the holy presence of Joan d'Arc”. In the new Redcat exhibition, Echo world: Julius Eastman and Arthur RussellEastman's daring speech is often only heard in the echoes: between the present and the past, the dead and the living – and, above all, between the main subjects of the exhibition, the longtime friends and musicians Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell. The results are a vibrant polyphony taken from ephemera, recordings and video documentation, a choir that traces the careers of Eastman and Russell as solo artists and collaborators before their premature death in the early 1990s, both complications related to AID.
The exhibition takes place around a video and a 10 -channel sound installation in the center of the room, with three recorded performances of Russell and Eastman: Russell and Phill Nobrock “Terrace of Unintelliligibility” (1985); Andy de Groat and the performance of the dancers who accompanies him with “the holy presence of Joan d'Arc” to the legendary – and always operational – in New York non -profit cooking in 1981; And a cello performance of the previous Eastman piece, mixed and recorded last year. Their steps in the stages of myriads of connections between the pair, even between the compositions that they did not develop together. In “Terrace of Unintelliligibility”, Russell's repetitive and almost indecipherable voices are starting to look like Eastman's “Joan d'Arc”, which features an opera singer who repeats the words “he says” and “she says” until the sentences themselves are as abstract as a cello.
Eastman and Russell are both known for their avant-garde autonomy, but Redcat's exhibition reveals both in conservation and in content, the quantity of their work depended on a large network of social, financial and institutional support ultimately unstable. The central audiovisual installation bleeds through the rest of the exhibition, influenced a more historical and explanatory display ring with the irreducible rocket of music by Russell and Eastman. Among these, a small section devoted to the driving of Eastman in 1978 of the play by Russell “instrumental” in the kitchen stands out. Performance uses the New York Orchestra, a short -term result Complete employment and training law (CETA), a federal program that provided funds and jobs to artists in the public sector. After the abrogation of the act in 1982, and fight against dependence, Eastman died without the penny and without shelter in 1990. Impregnated with this knowledge, Russell, Eastman and the New York performance orchestra feels melancholic, its beats of sporadic beats, its calendars and its horns and horns which form a sporadic cacophony.
Also in the exhibition are countless works of art, compositions and musical scores of other artists: a video work by Justin Leroy appears adjacent to a recording of the 2009 tribute from the electronic musician Julia Holter to Arthur Russell, “You & Me”, and in the play is the play by Devendra. This range of overwhelming works reveals the extent of the influence of Eastman and Russell on a generation of musicians, artists and conservatives – even if they are not alive to see it.
Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell Continue to the Redcat Calarts Theater (631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, California) until May 4. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Phil Insight and Wild Up. He was organized by Katy Dammers with Elizabeth Cline, Talia Heiman, Mark McNeill, Christopher Routree and Julia Ward.
