Thursday, 11:50am
22 August 2013
See and hear
Sounding the Body Electric: Experiments in Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1957–1984
Calvert 22, Calvert Avenue, London E2 7JP
If you have an interest in the intersection of sound and visual culture
and you’re anywhere near London before next Sunday, I strongly recommend a visit to the Calvert 22 gallery in Shoreditch, writes John L. Walters.
The gallery is showing an extraordinary assembly of audiovisual tricks and treats from behind the former ‘Iron Curtain’. Curated by David Crowley and Daniel Muzyczuk, ‘Sounding the Body Electric’ was first seen and heard at the Museum Sztuki in Łódź (Poland) last summer.
A photograph of 5x, an ‘audio visual performance’, at Foksal gallery, Warsaw.
Top: Milan Knížák, Destroyed Music, 1963-1979.
For anyone familiar with the graphic scores and diagrammatic experiments of Cage, Crumb, Cardew and Stockhausen, the show greatly extends our understanding of the parallel waves of audiovisual experimentation that exploded worldwide in the postwar era. Eastern European composers and artists made work of surprising audacity and freedom despite enormous political and economic restraints.
Bogusław Schaeffer, PR – I VIII, 1972.
Film installation Vine taken at Calvert 22.
The exhibition’s many highlights included animations (by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Dóra Maurer and many others), graphic scores (Bogusław Schaeffer) and broken, repurposed vinyl (Milan Knížák) that anticipates Christian Marclay by a generation. There’s also early work by the notorious Komar & Melamid and a 2012 performance of the politically brave Just Transistor Radios originally created by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Szábolcs Esztényi in Polish in 1970, at one of the colder moments of the Cold War.
Katalin Ladik, Selected Folk Poems.
Komar & Melamid, Music Code-Passport, 1976. Courtesy of Vitaly Komar.
There will be an extensive review of ‘Sounding the Body Electric’ by Mark Sinker in the forthcoming Eye 86. Let’s hope that this stimulating exhibition tours elsewhere – north, south, west or east.
Frames from Kalah, a film by Dóra Maurer, András Klausz and Zoltán Jeney, 1980.
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