Art as a Musicular Principle

Curated by Craig Leonard

Artists: Wallace Berman, Wolfgang Müller, Morgane Tschiember, Cary Loren, Leif Brush, and Craig Leonard.

June 4 - July 17, 2012

Wallace Berman, as chronicled by his son Tosh in Blastitude #13, was as fastidious about his choice of music by which to work (John Coltraine, The Kinks, Roxy Music,...) as he was with the artwork on which he labored. Berman's alluring verifax collages frequently mirror his musical attraction with their repeated inclusion of transistor radios hosting miscellaneous surface images ranging from the everyday to the arcane, while often transmitting Hebrew letters that mystically conjure Cabbalistic significance. Berman's "visualization of sound" is the inspiration for the grouping of works in "Art as a Musicular Principle" -- a titular resounding of the 1975 exhibition "Art as a Muscular Principle" in which Berman took part (as well as a adjectival prank bound to confuse search engines!).

"Art as a Musicular Principle" includes: Cary Loren's raw and vibrant spray paintings that mimic the subterranean-pop sensibility and improvisational chaos of his legendary band Destroy All Monsters; Wolfgang Müller's renderings of the extinct "Hawaii-Krausschwanz" which are part of his larger "Séance Vocibus Avium", an audio-visual collection representing extinct bird species; Morgane Tschiember's sculptural installation "The Shortest Way to Sleepness", a sculptural evocation of Levene and Wobble's post-punk instrumentalism; my own "A Colour-Coding of Partch's Ptolemy Keyboard based on his Chromolodeon I"; and screenshots and link to the retro-radical website of the woefully uncelebrated sound artist Leif Brush.