Crossing the Line, an
innovative exhibition featuring original prints and provocative
CD recordings
by prominent artists and art world figures, including Eric Fischl, Daniel
Johnston and Andy Warhol, will open at the June Kelly Gallery on Saturday,
June 21. The works will remain on view through August 1.
Organized by Jeff Gordon, who has
been producing original sound recordings of leading visual artists since the
early 1980s, the exhibition also highlights Connie Beckley, Ivan Karp,
Carter Ratcliff and Path Soong. Beckley, Fischl, Johnston and Soong
contribute prints to the exhibition.
Gordon says that in all but one of
the recordings “the human voice becomes the instrument of insight,
information, humor, poetry and memory.”
Connie Beckley’s recording,
“Mined Out of Time,” is “an alchemist’s spell of memory, distant and near,
old letters, voices and time travel,” Gordon says. Her haunting lithograph
is untitled.
The Eric Fischl recording
was based on a thoughtful conversation with Barbara MacAdam, the well known
art critic and writer, in which he discusses his work, the art world and the
art market. His lithograph, untitled, portrays a couple wading in water.
Daniel Johnston, who is a
songwriter as well as an artist, provides a recorded tribute to art in eight
songs, as well as a conversation about his art. His print is entitled
The Fun Never Stops on The Other Side.
Ivan Karp has been an art
dealer and gallery owner for more than 50 years and has worked with a
pantheon of artists, including Warhol, Jasper Johns and Robert
Rauschenberg. His freewheeling, honest and often funny recording documents
his love for and obsession with art and artists.
Carter Ratcliff, the art
critic and poet, provides a recording, The Big Bad Art Thing & Other
Poems, in which he reads a series of his poems on themes ranging from
art to obsession, love to anxiety, ancient thoughts to contemporary life.
Path Soong has recorded
Hillside Meditation, an original long poem in the Zen spirit in which
her voice is as startlingly minimal and chant-like as her large paintings.
Soong contributes a lithograph also called Hillside Meditation.
Andy Warhol’s recording is
a re-release of a 1996 recording by Gordon entitled uh yes
or no. It is a monotone loop of phrases, repeated endlessly in four
segments of 15 minutes each that Gordon describes as “quintessential
multiples.” The recording, Gordon says, “is a sound painting of enormous
dimension and repeat patterns.”
Gordon has recorded many
well-known visual artists, including Larry Rivers, Francis Bacon, Joseph
Beuys and Hannah Wilke. His 1996 CD release, Two Dialogues,
contained the only known recorded conversation with Jackson Pollock and a
later extensive interview with Lee Krasner.
