pdf: Baldwin Hills – 01/31/2013

I first met Warren Neidich in New York in the mid-1990s and I was thrilled to find out that he’s in LA in a studio near the new Culver City metro station. As usual with Warren, he is working with a variety of media and on multiple ventures at once. He shared a number of projects and the two that captured my imagination were “How do you translate a text that is not a text? How do you perform a score that is not a score?” and a series of sculptures of a destroyed speaker paired with its “pristine” partner playing the sound recording of the other’s destruction. This second series is entitled “The Infinite Replay of One’s Own Self-destruction.” The work is a reaction to Robert Morris’ “Box With the Sound of Its Own Making” (1961). According to Warren, he’s making this work:…

… in light of the new definitions of our post-internet society where production and the artisan craftwork with its requirements of physical repetitive labor has been supplemented by the conditions of communication where the mind’s spirit is preferentially put to work and interacted with. One speaker of a pair of seventies vintage speakers is destroyed with the tools of the studio and this performance is digitally recorded and burned upon an SD card which is inserted into the analogue speaker. One can think here of the loss of a twin sibling or a lover or a partner as well as the death of analogue in the convergence to digital culture.

by: Meg Linton, Published in: Warren Neidich – Baldwin Hills – 01/31/2013, Otis College of Art and Design Blog , June 13, 2013.
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