Husband-and-wife duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller create beguiling installations, art objects, and “walks,” audio recordings meant to guide viewers on short journeys through landscapes. The two began collaborating in 1983, and as is indicated by their walks, the couple’s work often activates space through innovative interactions of sound and movement. The two first achieved international recognition for their walks in 1995, a medium Cardiff had been experimenting with beginning in 1991 and that in her words, “changed my thinking about art.”

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The Forty Part Motet (A reworking of “Spem in Alium” by Thomas Tallis 1573), 2001

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“While listening to a concert you are normally seated in front of the choir, in traditional audience position. With this piece I want the audience to be able to experience a piece of music from the viewpoint of the singers. Every performer hears a unique mix of the piece of music. Enabling the audience to move throughout the space allows them to be intimately connected with the voices. It also reveals the piece of music as a changing construct. As well I am interested in how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way and how a viewer may choose a path through this physical yet virtual space.

I placed the speakers around the room in an oval so that the listener would be able to really feel the sculptural construction of the piece by Tallis. You can hear the sound move from one choir to another, jumping back and forth, echoing each other and then experience the overwhelming feeling as the sound waves hit you when all of the singers are singing.”

Forest (for a thousand years), 2012

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“A remarkable thing about Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s utterly captivating sound installation is how it blurs distinctions between site and art. You enter a clearing in the forest, sit down on a wooden stump, and simply listen. Cardiff and Bures Miller’s work incorporates the actual forest into an audio composition emitted from more than thirty speakers. Sometimes there is a near synchronicity of natural and mediated sounds, and it’s tough to discern what is live and what is recorded.”

– description from gregory volk, A Walk in The dOCUMENTA PARK, Art in America, June 15, 2012.

Experiment in F Minor, 2013

On a large table sits a collection of bare speakers of all shapes and sizes. Light sensors are inlaid into the edge of the table and as the viewers move around the room, their shadows cause the various sound and instrumental tracks to fade up and overlap, mingle and fade down. Numerous viewers in the room create a cacophony of musical compositions that vary according to where the audience walks or how many people are in the room. When the space is empty, the table fades to silence.

 

The Infinity Machine, 2015

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“These mysterious, beautiful recordings, which Cardiff and Miller first encountered on a CD intended for meditation and relaxation, are varied and mesmerizing–like movements of a slow, science-fiction-inspired composition. Neptune sounds like crashing surf, Saturn and its rings drone and throb, Uranus chimes like bells, and the music of Earth suggests a forest at night, complete with bird- or insect-like chirps. Reworked as ambisonic recordings in which sounds seem to rotate and tilt and played in random order, they form the score of The Infinity Machine.” – Toby Camps, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Menil Collection

 

Sourced from the Cardiff & Miller Website

 

By the mid-1960s Yoko Ono was an established figure in the underground art scene; she had begun performing musical pieces, presented events with a loosely affiliated group of artists who worked under the name Fluxus, published a book of instructional poems entitled Grapefruit (e.g. “Hammer a nail in the center of a piece of glass. Send a fragment to an arbitrary address.”), and was making films.

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ABOUT BED PEACE 1969 was the year that John & Yoko intensified their long running campaign for World Peace. They approached the task with the same entrepreneurial expertise as an advertising agency selling a brand of soap powder to the masses. John & Yoko’s product however was PEACE, not soft soap, and they were determined to use any slogan, event and gimmick in order to persuade the World to buy it. BED PEACE (directed by Yoko & John and filmed by Nic Knowland) is a document of the Montreal events from 26-31 May 1969, and features John & Yoko in conversation with, amongst others, The World Press, satirist Al Capp, activist Dick Gregory, comedian Tommy Smothers, protesters at Berkeley’s People’s Park, Rabbi Abraham L. Feinberg, quiltmaker Christine Kemp, psychologists Timothy Leary & Rosemary Leary, CFOX DJs Charles P. Rodney Chandler & Roger Scott, producer André Perry, journalist Ritchie York, DJ & Promoter Murray The K, filmmaker Jonas Mekas, publicist Derek Taylor & personal assistant Anthony Fawcett. Featured songs are Plastic Ono Band’s GIVE PEACE A CHANCE & INSTANT KARMA, Yoko’s REMEMBER LOVE & WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND & John’s acoustic version of BECAUSE. “As we said before: WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It)” – yoko

“In these first performances by Ono, the artist sat kneeling on the concert hall stage, wearing her best suit of clothing, with a pair of scissors placed on the floor in front of her. Members of the audience were invited to approach the stage, one at a time, and cut a bit of her clothes off – which they were allowed to keep. The score for Cut Piece appears, along with those for several other works, in a document from January 1966 called Strip Tease Show.”

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Grapefruit, 1964

Glass Hammer, 1967

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Tom Friedman was born in 1965 in Saint Louis, Missouri, USA. He now lives and works in Massachusetts, USA.
Friedman’s approach to understanding the world and its logic has long been expressed through the laborious, painstakingly precise and unexpected methods that he uses. His work is often autobiographical, recreating random elements from his own life and surroundings. To create these sculptures and objects he uses everyday materials including styrofoam, paint, paper, card, clay, wire, plastic, hair and fuzz. He pays obsessive attention to detail in each work, particularly in the replication of personal characteristics.

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Untitled 1990 The artist writes his signature repeatedly for the life of a pen

Untitled 1996 Cardboard box corners

Untitled 1990 Bubblegum

Tom Friedman Untitled 1995 Toothpicks

Untitled 1990 A partially used bar of soap inlaid with a spiral of pubic hair

 

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Edward Ruscha (American, b.1937) was born in Nebraska and moved to Los Angeles in 1956 to study at the Chouinard Art Institute, intending to become a commercial artist. Quickly recognized in the 1960s as an important representative of the thriving Pop Art movement and a successor of the Beat Generation for his collages and text-based pieces, Ruscha’s work was exhibited at the Ferus, Leo Castelli, and Gagosian Galleries.

Ed Ruscha talking about his photo books.

Twentysix Gasoline Stations 1963, 3rd edition 1969

Twentysix Gasoline Stations, a modest publication consisting of black and white photographs with captions, is an iconic artist book. The photographs are of petrol stations, along the highway between Ruscha’s home in Los Angeles and his parent’s house in Oklahoma City.

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Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, 1968

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Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966

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Real Estate Opportunities, 1970