Phill Niblock in the Czech Republic - Experimental-Intermedia

20 Nov 2015


      Here is notice of a special thing, a re-visit to a retrospective whichoriginated in Lausanne
Switzerland in 2013, with a press  release
Phill
Brno CZ - Phill Niblock retrospective  November 24 2015 - January24 2016, Brno House of Arts Museum, or, Dum Panu z Kunstatu, Galerie G99, Dominikánská 9,  produced and curated by JozefCseres and Mathieu Copeland 
http://www.dumumeni.cz/en/vystava/exhibition_programme_of_the_brno_house_of_...     --  Works from 1961 until the present
with a concert on November 23 in the Planetarium http://virtualni.hvezdarna.cz/   http://www.hisvoice.cz/cz/articles/detail/2775  (in Czech language, but with somepictures)
Nov 27 - rAdioCUSTICA PremEdition - Czech Radio   ladislav.zelezny@rozhlas.cz   A radio premier of a new guitar piece by PhillNiblock, for David First, titled "First Out"; broadcast on the 27th andalso available online
And a few other things until the end of theyear:
Dec 5 - Rio de Janeiro, Brasil - The NovasFrequencias Festival- Dec 1 to 8, Phill Niblock and Thomas Ankersmit on Dec 5    novasfrequencias.com
Phill Niblock at Roulette for Six Hours of Music andFilm on December 21, from 5pm to 11pm - the Winter Solstice (Roulette Intermedium,Inc, 509 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, New York 11217, www.roulette.org)
December 27, 9pm - Phill Niblock DVD presentation,a new DVD on the VonArchives label (Italy): T H I R, a film from 1971/72, ofmaterials from nature, and alternate musics, with notes by Abigail Nelson andJuan Carlos Kase; Carlos Casas, the producer, will be present
At Experimental Intermedia, 224 Centre Street, NYNY
A bit of press:
"Workin’ for a title"
Phill Niblock – a Retrospective
Dům pánů z Kunštátu, Brno - CZ
25 11 2015 - 24 01 2016
Curated by Mathieu Copeland and Jozef Cseres
For over 50 years, Phill Niblock has produceda multidisciplinary oeuvre through “Intermedia art”. Combining minimalistmusic, conceptual art, structuralist cinema, systematic or political art,Niblock strives to transform our perception and experience of time.
Admittedly one of the greatest experimentalcomposers of our time, Phill Niblock initiates his career as a photographer.Born in 1933 in Anderson - Indiana, a jazz aficionado, he settles in New Yorkin 1958. Niblock starts photography in 1960 and for four years specialises inportraits of jazz musicians such as Charles Mingus, Billy Strayhorn and DukeEllington, whom he follows frequently to recording sessions and concerts. Inthe mid-60s, he shifts from photography to film, and encouraged by ElaineSummers, choreographer and founder of the “Experimental Intermedia”, he startsrealising films for dancers and choreographers at the Judson Church Theater, includingYvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk or Lucinda Childs. From 1968 on, Phill Niblockfocuses on music and composes his first pieces, which – according to the artist– must be listened to at loud volume in order to explore their overtones. Hepursues his film projects independently, including his monumental piece, The Movement of People Working, aseries of films lasting over 25 hours, realised between 1973 and 1991, in whichthe repetitive nature of work movements acts as a direct echo to his minimalistmusical compositions.
Since the mid-60s, his analogue photographicwork explores New York’s architecture and urban planning. The sequencing andlayout of his images offer a mapping of the location and object photographed,such as abandoned buildings on Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island) (1966),the areas fallen into disuse in South Bronx (1979) or the facades of SoHoBroadway district (1988). Starting in 1966, Phill Niblock engages in areflexion about the projection of moving images through a series of films andslideshows. Produced between 1966 and 1969, Six Films, a series of short films with sound realised with 16mmfilm, heralds his experimental method through portraits of artists andmusicians such as Sun Ra and Max Neuhaus. His obsession for and celebration ofthe individual is again at the heart of his series of videos entitled Anecdotes from Childhood. Realisedbetween 1985 and 1992, this series explores the notion of memory and theexpression of a personal history through intimate portraits.
Starting in 1968, the artist begins toexperiment a combination of his visual productions with his musical scores inorder to create architectural and environmental compositions with sound. The Environments series, recreated hereby the artist for the first time since it was last shown in 1972, extractsthrough images the reality of several environments, all the while generating adense and intense temporary environment of projected images, music and movementthroughout the museum space.
Presented for the first time in its entirety,re-edited and remastered by the artist for the retrospective, the series offilms The Movement of People Working portrayhuman labour in its most elementary form. Filmed on 16mm colour film, and lateron video, in locations including Peru, Mexico, Hungary, Hong Kong, the Arctic,Brazil, Lesotho, Portugal, Sumatra, China and Japan – with more than 25 hoursof film footage, The Movement ofPeople Working focuses on work as a choreography of movements andgestures, dignifying the mechanical yet natural repetition of labourers’actions. Phill Niblock said of these that The Movement of People Working «came out of necessity because Iwas doing music performances with live dancers, and it was too cumbersome andexpensive to tour with so many people. So I started doing those films that Icould project when performing».
These films are accompanied by the wholecorpus of Niblock’s slowly evolving, harmonically minimalist music, realisedbetween 1968 and 2011. The sound level of these compositions offers a visceralexperience of the long drones and inhabits the ringing, beating overtones.These scores, presented in the exhibition as photostats realized for hispersonal exhibition at London’s ICA in 1982, are the composer’s mixinginstructions and are not used by the musician during the performance. Whilemoving through space, he plays with the recorded material, sometimes creatingtonalities that coincide with the recording or, on the contrary, that producedissonances. The result is a constant movement of beat, rhythm and pulsation,as well as changing and continuous harmonics during his own motion throughspace. The layering of tones echoes the repetitions of the workers’ actions;the evolution of the films on each screen (changing throughout the day),combined with a program that randomly plays back different music pieces,results in a constant renewal of forms, continuously offering an exhibition ofnew juxtapositions of sound and image.
The Movement ofPeople Working offers a strong social and political comment, ashighlighted by the title and represented by the closeness with the workers. Inthis, the series of film echoes the work of several filmmakers including JeanLuc Godard or Chris Marker who as from 1967 gave workers the cameras andinformed them of cinematic techniques so that they could actually make theirown films. In a fascinating turn of events, rather than doing fictional or puredocumentary film, some workers formed the Groupes Medvekine and decided to filmthemselves working.
This retrospective was first shown in LausanneSwitzerland in 2013, co-produced by the Musée de l’Elysée and the CentreCircuit for Contemporary Art - Lausanne, and was curated by Mathieu Copeland.