Homage to David Tudor at Venet Foundation
Peppered with large-scale sculptures, the sprawling property of French artist and collector Bernar Venet additionally comprises a gallery house to host summer time exhibitions. Having beforehand featured Minimalists and Conceptual artists like Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner and Fred Sandback, Venet this yr showcases a collective work by avant-garde composer David Tudor, artist Jackie Matisse (Henri’s granddaughter), and filmmaker Molly Davies. (Bafflingly, the exhibition is billed to Tudor solely.) Sea Tails, 1983, is a billowing set up of Matisse’s handpainted kites, scrappy and hung in harlequin strips to a curtainlike impact. Complementing this are Davies’ languid movies, monitoring the motion of Matisse’s kites in Bahamian water—so blue as to look chlorinated—in opposition to Tudor’s thalassic thrum.
Within the catalogue to Matisse’s 2013 exhibition Jeux d’espace, artwork historian Julie Martin particulars how each Matisse and Tudor—long-standing collaborators who met by John Cage—gravitated towards discovered objects: he “digital elements and devices he may use, and abuse,” she “materials and plastics in lots of colours, styles and sizes.” They first mixed their pursuits professionally for the decade-long endeavor Island Eye Island Ear, 1974–83, an formidable collaboration with Fujiko Nakaya that sought to show a complete island right into a musical instrument_. _Sea Tails hinges on the extra localized phenomenon of how ocean currents may stir a kite right into a malleable choreography. Throughout an eight-day multiple-dive shoot in Nassau, Davies took a Jacques Cousteau-style method to movie submerged sailcloth and filter paper kites, which playfully multiplied underwater like faculties of aquatic creatures. Tudor, a procurer of creative audio sources (for example, radio frequencies from motion-sensitive burglar alarms), right here produced a submarine soundtrack utilizing microphones sealed in baby-food jars crammed with mineral oil. The extracted rating, looped on three synchronized movies performed throughout six screens, provides a palpating Poseidon murmur, formulated from aqueous flux and maritime climate.
— Sarah Moroz
