Lazarus: a Bible Story by Joseph Nechvatal (1986) ~ part of Willoughby Sharp’s Downtown New York video show tape transferred by XFR Collective in 2023 from VHS
My review of the AI-theme art show ~ We don’t want to live in a Universe, We want to live in a Pluriverse! ~ at Galerie Priska Pasquer Paris has dropped at Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art here: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/live-in-a-pluriverse-/5960
Delighted to have strong representation of my early-2000s non-binary computer-robotic paintings in the fourth edition of Digital Art (pp.178-179), the important art history book written by Christiane Paul Images: (1) open book text with vOluptuary drOid décOlletage (2002) 168×305″ computer-robotic assisted acrylic on canvas & birth Of the viractual (2001) 70×70” computer-robotic assisted acrylic on canvas, courtesy Galerie Richard, Paris ~ both paintings were first shown at my 2002 vOluptuary: an algorithmic hermaphornology show at UCU in NYC (image 2) vOluptuary drOid décOlletage (2002) (image 3) birth Of the viractual (2001)
TEXT by Christiane Paul: “The term post-digital and its related practices and discourse started to slowly emerge only from the mid-2000s onwards. Some artists had already been exploring the ways in which digital technologies offered new conceptual and technical ways of shaping painting, drawing, and sculpture at an earlier point. Artist Joseph Nechvatal’s (b. 1951) ‘computer-robotic assisted’ paintings, for example, are created by means of a virus-like program that performs a degradation and transformation of the image. After digitally composing and manipulating image elements, most notably through the transformations induced by the virus, Nechvatal transfers his files over the Internet to a remote computer-driven robotic painting machine, which executes the painting. The artist himself is not involved in the process of painting itself, which ultimately takes place as an act of ‘telepresence’. In paintings such as vOluptuary drOid décOlletage (2001) and the birth Of the viractual (2001), parts of the (intimate) human body are intermixed with flower or fruit ornaments into a virally created collage. The hybrid image suggests an androgyny that Nechvatal traces to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which depict transmutation as a universal principle driving the nature of the world. Nechvatal’s paintings strive to create an interface between the biological and technological, the viral, virtual, and actual or ‘viractual’, as the artist refers to it.” (p. 178)
A video documenting the entire Centre Pompidou March 8th XS: The Opera Opus: An Operatic Transvaluation of No Wave Aesthetics by Joseph Nechvatal and Rhys Chatham event ~ organized by Nicolas Ballet ~ has been published online at the Centre Pompidou website HERE.
Works screened during the March 8th session:
-Karole Armitage, Rhys Chatham, Vertige, 1979, 2 min 23 s (excerpt).
-Karole Armitage, Rhys Chatham, Drastic-Classicism, 1981, 1 min 40 s (excerpt)
-Rhys Chatham, Drastic Classical Music for Electric Instruments, 1981, 1 min (excerpt)
-Joseph Nechvatal, When Things Get Rough on Easy Street, 1982, 2 min 34 s. À partir d’un extrait de Guitar Trio (1977) composed by Rhys Chatham (drums : David Linton, guitars : Nina Canal, Rhys Chatham and Joe Dizney, mix : Peter Gordon)
-Joseph Nechvatal, ExStasis Ovid, 1983, 2 min 29 s. The soundtrack is from an excerpt from Babbling Tongues of Metamorphoses (1986), which Joseph Nechvatal composed from a recording of the reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by American actress and opera singer Jane Lawrence Smith
-Joseph Nechvatal, Viral Venture, 2009, 6 min 19 s (excerpt). Animation with Rhys Chatham (music) and Stéphane Sikora (application development)
This event, moderated by curator Nicolas Ballet, discussed the eight part No Wave art music performance series, XS: The Opera Opus, created by Nechvatal and Chatham between 1984 and 1986 and explored the various sources of creation that led to the development of this multi-disciplinary No Wave scene. Its sets were consistently created by Nechvatal by projecting 35 mm cross-faded slides of his drawings onto the stage. Its final and most complete 90-minute realization were three nights of performance called XS: The Opera Opus that took place April 10, 11, 12 in 1986 at The Boston Shakespeare Theater. It consisted of three soprano singers, four trumpets, six electric guitars. bass, drums with dance choreography by Yves Musard. Nechvatal made the XS costumes from fabric printed with his drawings at The Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia.
“The figure-ground relationships of the costumed figures and background sets of XS are complex in their visual cacophony but subtly unified. Thus complementing the musical compositional style of Mr. Chatham. Like the sound of his multiple electric guitar compositions, the look of XS can remain interestingly hypnotic over an extended period of time by not overly dictating visual specificities. As such, XS explores the visualization approach to art in opposition to the dominant reductive mode. […] The look of XS breaks down the given popular signs of the time in order to liquidate their meanings so as to address the spiritual conditions of contemporary life, the excessiveness of contemporary electronics, nuclear weapon overload, and the proliferation of ideological information. But XS is not fundamentally literary. It is primarily about conceptual linkage; as a seamless flow of intuitive imagery dreams of a technological and ideological reality that blends over-ripeness with minimal concision. In XS, Mr. Chatham’s music is the primary dramatic element and the scenery the text. Performed dramatic action is subordinated to internal rumination because XS turns culture inward; away from the bourgeois world and its standards to a more personnel, private and extra-ordinary world. That is why XS depicts no human confrontation, no satire, no attack. The normal world is merely dissolved into a beatific vision of ecstatic peace through the melting together of figure-ground oppositions.”
~from Nechvatal’s XS: The Opera Opus original program notes
If this gets you in the No Wave mood ~ the 1 hour February 9th dublab No Wave music radio show I curated in support of the Pompidou show has been archived HERE. I also choose music for, and am interviewed on, the radio show Krachwald #26: No Wave Time Warp now online HERE.
Biographies:
Joseph Nechvatal (born in Chicago) is an American transdisciplinary artist currently living in Paris who creates virus-modeled artificial life paintings, animations, and sound works. Themes he has addressed in his art include the apocalyptic, excess, the viral, gender fluidity, and computer-robotics. His sound art cassette Selected Sound Works and vinyl double LP The Viral Tempest has recently been released on the music label Pentiments. Nechvatal also writes art theory, criticism and poetry. His theory/history book Immersion Into Noise received a second publication in 2022 and his second book of poetry Styling Sagaciousness: Oh Great No! was published by punctum books also in 2022, a year in which he exhibited new paintings at Galerie Richard in Paris in a solo exhibition called Turning the Viral Tempest.
Rhys Chatham is a composer and multi-instrumentalist from Manhattan, currently living in Paris, who fused avant-garde minimalism with the electric crunch of punk rock. Chatham’s instrumentation ranges from the seminal composition composed in 1977 entitled Guitar Trio for 3 electric guitars, electric bass and drums, to the epoch evening-length work for 100 electric guitars, An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, composed in 1989… all the way to Chatham’s recent composition for 200 electric guitars, A Crimson Grail, last performed in Birmingham, UK at Town Hall in 2014, to the Sydney Festival in 2018 with a new piece for 100 electric guitars, A Secret Rose. Chatham is currently touring as a solo performer, and in duo with guitarist David Fenech; a recording will be released in April 2023 on Klang Galerie (Vienna).
XS exemplification of XS the No Wave Opera (1984-1986) by Rhys Chatham and Joseph Nechvatal ~ made for and included in the No Wave show Who You Staring At: Culture visuelle de la scène no wave des années 1970 et 1980 at Centre Pompidou in Paris 2023
Hyper-Noise Aesthetics 