NEW YORK, NY.- In the late 1960s and 1970s, the best place to hear new music was often not a concert hall but an art gallery. Back then, while Carnegie Hall and the still-new Lincoln Center played it safe uptown, minimalist composer Steve Reich was presenting his rhythmic, exacting compositions down at the Park Place Gallery, led by Paula Cooper. You could hear Philip Glass’ “Music in 12 Parts” at Leo Castelli Gallery, and Meredith Monk’s a cappella ululations at the Walker Art Center. Composers and artists collaborated with ease — La Monte Young wrote compositions for sculptor Robert Morris; Glass assisted Richard Serra in the creation of his early splashes of lead — and the very distinction between new art and new music could be hazy: fluxus artists Nam June Paik, George Maciunas, Allan Kaprow and Yoko Ono were all trained in music composition.
New York still has some independent institutions where music and art commingle, including the ambitious Brooklyn nonprofit Blank Forms. But on the whole, contemporary art seems a little afraid of ambitious new music; the performer who makes it into the museum these days is more likely to be a DJ or a pop star such as Solange, who uses the prestige of the white cube as essentially an Instagram-optimized backdrop. (As to the epochal catastrophe of “Björk,” at the Museum of Modern Art in 2015, we are going to pass without comment.) A few institutions with roots in that 1970s moment have maintained the interdisciplinary flame. Last month, the Rothko Chapel in Houston (born 1971) invited composer Tyshawn Sorey to present a major new work in its crepuscular galleries, as Morton Feldman had done 50 years before.
And here in New York City, the Dia Art Foundation, which has regularly made space for composers such asYoung and Max Neuhaus in its minimal and conceptual canon, has turned its Manhattan galleries over to Camille Norment, an Oslo-based American composer, musician and artist. This is the second exhibition at Dia’s reopened Chelsea galleries since the long-delayed reopening, and it fills two adjacent galleries with sonic installations: one austere and one intricate, one high-pitched and one low-toned. Both make use of feedback and resonance effects, and treat music as both sonic and physical phenomena. Both are rigorous yet accessible, and both may leave you hungry to see the artist in concert.
The better of Norment’s two new works — both are untitled; the show is called “Plexus” — is in the first gallery, which contains a monumental brass structure in two parts, standing alone in the empty space. The lower part is an inverted bell, a little below human adult height, with a gently flared lip like a calla lily’s. Suspended just above the bell aperture is a second, elongated brass form that looks like a liquid frozen in mid-drip. The only other objects in the room are four long microphones pointed at the sculpture, which produce sonic feedback from the brass instrument, soft, sustained and sublime. The instrument is therefore less a bell than a singing bowl, its tones gently, continuously distorted by spectators’ (or listeners’) motions.
The ringing produced by this hieratic brass sculpture has both a plastic and a sonic component — a point Norment underscores by listing the media used in this installation as “brass, sine waves, autonomous feedback system, and archival radio static.” In other words, she is using periodic sound (that is, sine waves) as both a sculptural material that she can mold, as a sculptor shapes metal or stone, and also a spontaneously produced phenomenon of the brass and the microphones, similar to the tones of a trumpet or saxophone.
The room is a sculptural installation as well as an active musical instrument, and after a few minutes, its resonant keening takes on an Apollonian dignity. As for the last element, the recorded radio static, I could only hear it faintly when I got close to the brass bell. It provides a bit of a beat, but it seems an extraneous addition, especially after reading an explanatory text on Dia’s website that reveals the source of the static to be from ’60s and ’70s “community reporting and documentation of social and environmental struggles.” I’m not sure that explicit political source material was needed. Because all on its own, Norment’s ringing and vibrating sound system lets us experience a fragile interdependence of bodies and environments. In here, we are at once creators, listeners and corrupters of an ecology of sound.
The second gallery is much busier. Norment has filled it with dozens of planks of wood — of “responsibly sourced wood,” Dia informs us, with a whiff of Whole Foods solicitude. They reach from the floor to the ceiling, and their chocolate-brown tones come close to matching the gallery’s rib-vaulted roof. Embedded in the planks are speakers, which play looped recordings of a droning choir, whose low bass notes contrast with the higher-frequency sound of the bell room. You can sit or lie down on the planks, and feel the singing travel through your thighs and buttocks when the chorus crescendos. But the use of recordings, the somewhat milky ah-ah-ah-ahs of the singers, and the maritime overtones of the planks make this installation more like an illustration of a musical ecology. What makes the brass work more exciting is that it constitutes one, out of sound and space.
Norment was born in 1970 near Washington, D.C., but since 2005, she has lived in Oslo — the Norwegian capital that last decade emerged as one of Europe’s most fecund art centers. (A lot of the new ferment comes from its excellent art school, the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, where Norment is a senior faculty member.) Her sonic installations often make use of the natural frequencies of materials, objects and even whole buildings, including at the 2015 Venice Biennale, where she used microphones and other transducers to turn the Nordic pavilion into a constant broadcaster of tones.
She also leads an ensemble, the Camille Norment Trio, featuring electric guitar, Norwegian fiddle and her own instrument, the glass armonica, invented by Benjamin Franklin in the 1760s, which consists of blown glass discs arrayed on a spindle that produce ethereal tones when rubbed. In the late-18th and early-19th centuries, the glass armonica was an instrument associated with divinity and also horror: Donizetti used it for the original orchestrations of the mad scene in “Lucia di Lammermoor.”
Her engagement with feedback and resonant frequencies continues an exploration that Reich undertook by swinging microphones in front of speakers for his “Pendulum Music,” or that Jimi Hendrix produced in the space between guitar and amp. And it’s an engagement that dovetails quite naturally with the minimalist, process-oriented and environmental artists that Dia exalts up in Beacon. One of the values of this show may be to get artists and art audiences to think a little harder about what’s in our headphones as we strut through Chelsea or sulk on the train. Spend some time listening to the frequencies of her brass bell, and a clean distinction between the sonic and the sculptural — between music and art — starts to dissipate into air.
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'Camille Norment: Plexus'Through January. Dia Chelsea, 537 W. 22nd St., Manhattan; 845-231-0811; diaart.org.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
