synthesizers, portativo organ, harpsichord, electric guitar, trumpet, double bass, percussion, invented instruments
performance installation
with Black is the Color, to accompany Everything is Dada exhibit at Yale University Art Gallery
Yale University Art Gallery
New Haven, CT
PROGRAM NOTE
In With Hidden Noise, a work designed for the exhibition Everything Is Dada at the Yale University Art Gallery, musicians scattered throughout the galleries communicate solely through sound. Together they build textures—warm ambient sound, noise, and silence—that serve as a sonic architecture through which visitors move.
Conceived as a structured improvisation, the piece makes use of acoustic, electronic, and invented instruments. The Gallery is its physical and aural playground, and the works of art on view offer conceptual, aesthetic, and political points of resonance. The piece reconsiders the meaning of Dada through encounters with composers John Cage and Robert Ashley, and Swiss artist Jean Tinguely’s Neo-Dada work Homage to New York (1960), a sound-producing sculpture that self-destructed in its only performance. With Hidden Noise highlights the fragile authority of precise meaning, embraces non-meaning, and examines the decentered, scattered subject.
The piece is named after one of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. To make the original With Hidden Noise (1916), Duchamp placed a roll of nautical twine between two brass plates. He asked Walter Arensberg, his friend and patron, to place an unknown object inside the roll, and then clamped the plates shut with four long screws. The hidden object—the identity of which Duchamp asked Arensberg to never reveal, and which remains unknown—makes an inscrutable rattling sound.
The performance lasts approximately one hour. The audience is invited to roam freely through the galleries in the exhibition.