celebrate cage 2002

«John Cage and I are involved in a process of work and activity, not in a series of finished objects. It keeps one on one's toes, and jumps the mind as well as the body» - Merce Cunningham

 

Emanuel Pimenta - transversal flute

William Anastasi - art process

Dove Bradshaw - art process

Peter Zummo - trombone

Denardo Coleman - percussion

Joseph Baptista - bass

Jo Locandro - synthesizers

Richard Mauro - strange instruments
 
 
  Ten years ago, in 1992, John Cage died. Now, a group of musicians and artists, some of them close friends of Cage, decided to make an unexpected celebration. Next November the 21st, Thursday, at 8 PM, Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, William Anastasi, Dove Bradshaw, Peter Zummo, Dernardo Coleman, Joseph Baptista and Richard Mauro will make a concert and simultaneously an artwork at the Gary Tatintsian Contemporary Art Gallery, as a homage to John Cage. Nothing was prepared in advance. «It will be a surprise, even to us. No intention, no order of value. One does not know what the other will do» - says Emanuel Pimenta who was, like William Anastasi and Dove Bradshaw, a friend of the composer. And, as he said to William Anastasi, «John Cage would be very happy to be with us in this evening». The Contemporary Art Gallery Gary Tatintsian is at 508 West 26 Street #214.

Gary Tatintsian Contemporary Art Gallery | 508 West 26 Street #214 | New York City
phone. 212 6330110 | fax. 212 6330110 | email: joseph@tatintsian.com

2002 . november 21 . thursday . 8 PM . New York City

For more information, please, contact:
Gary Tatintsian Gallery
Phone. 212 6330110
Fax. 212 6330110
Email: joseph@tatintsian.com

About the participants:

Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, is a composer of contemporary music. He is also architect and urban planner. He won the Destaque Prize in 1977 by the Brazilian ABM Institution; the APCA Prize in 1986 by the Art Critics Association of Sao Paulo; and the Lac Maggiore Prize in 1994 by the Regional Government of Lombardia, the International Association of Art Critics, the Unesco and the Council of Europe, in Locarno, Switzerland. In 1993 the Unesco, in Paris, selected his works as one of the most representative intermedia researchers of the world. He is member of the SACD - Societè des Autheurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques in Paris. He is an active member of the New York Academy of Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC. He is also member and advisor for the AIVAC - Association Internationale pour la Video dans les Arts et la Culture, in Locarno and Lausanne; and founding member of the International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry - ISIS Symmetry, with main offices in Budapest. On music, he studied with Hans Joachim Koellreutter (pupil of Paul Hindemith, Marcel Moyse), Conrado Silva (Karlheinz Stockhausen), Demetrio Lima (French School for transversal flute) and Holger Czukai (Karlheinz Stockhausen) among others. As Architect he took part in various workshops and master classes with Kenzo Tange, Oscar Niemeyer, Yona Friedman, Peter Cook (Archigram) and Charles Moore among others. He collaborated with John Cage, for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, from 1986 until his disappearance in 1992. He remains commissioned composer for Merce Cunningham, in New York, since then. His musical compositions have been played by important musicians like David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi, Maurizio Barbetti, John Tilbury, Martha Mooke, John DS Adams, Michael Pugliese and the Manhattan Quartet among others. His compositions had been performed in several theatres all over the world, like the City Center Theatre and The Kitchen in New York, the Shinjuku Bunka Center in Tokyo or the Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art. He is Editorial Director of the art and culture magazine RISK Arte Oggi, in Milan, Italy, since 1992. He is member of the jury of the BES Fellowship - Experimental Intermedia Foundation of New York, Luso American Foundation and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation - since 1995. In the early 80s Emanuel Pimenta coined the concept "virtual architecture", later largely used. In the end of the 70s, he begun the development of a new graphical musical notation inside virtual environments, using computer graphics. Mr. Pimenta has been invited, as professor and lecturer, by several institutions, like the Universities of New York, Lisbon, Lausanne, Tsukuba, Sao Paulo, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Monte Verita Foundation in Switzerland and the Technion Institute in Haifa, Israel among others. His works are included in the Universalis Encyclopaedia (Britannica), in the Sloninsky Baker's Music Dictionary (Berkeley) as well as in the All Music Guide - The Expert's Guide to the Best Cds. He has his works, cd-roms (3), audio cds (10), books (7) and papers published in England, the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Italy and Spain. Articles on his works have been published in different newspapers and magazines, like the New York Times, Le Monde, Le Parisien, O Estado de Sao Paulo and O Globo among others. He develops his compositions of contemporary music using Virtual Reality and Cyberspace technologies. He also has been curator for several institutions like the Biennial Foundation of Sao Paulo, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the ExperimentaDesign Foundation and the Belem Cultural Center in Lisbon among others. Please see http://www.asa-art.com/edmp.html

 

William Anastasi is one of the founders of the Conceptual Art "not merely as an exponent of this kind of art but historically as one of the very inventors of the idiom itself in the 1960's "(Richard Milazzo). Citing the weight carried by the precedence of Duchamp's 'Three Standard Stoppages' and other chance derived work, he began a series of Blind Drawings in 1963, which lead to unsighted Subway Drawings in 1968, begun as an extension of his Pocket Drawings from the same period. In the late 70's he reinvestigated the Subway Drawings riding to and from daily chess games with John Cage. Sitting with a pencil in each hand and a drawing board on his lap, his elbows at an angle of 90 degrees, his shoulders away from the back rest, Anastasi was operating as a seismograph, allowing the rhythm of the moving train - its starts, stops and turns, accelerations and decelerations, to be transformed into lines on paper. This signifies not only the internalization of chance in a work but furthermore the phenomenological process:..."it is an art object that expresses the physicality of its making." (Pamela Lee) Anastasi demonstrates his concerns and reflections with the act of not seeing. In an 1990 interview about Anastasi's modus operandi vis a vis Surrealism's Automatism John Cage made a clear distinction:"It's not psychological; it's physical." Anastasi surrenders to a random process, allowing deeper or more intricate structures to surface. The results are mysterious and highly subtle drawings, exposing another order, a timeless noncausal scenario of universal physiological conditions. Since the 60s he has presenting his works world-wide in some of the most prestigious galleries and permanent museum collections. In addition to exhibitions around the United States, he has shown extensively in Europe and Great Britain, as well as in Japan and Korea. He was appointed artistic advisor for the Merce Cunningham Company in 1984. He has had two retrospective exhibitions: the first at The Levy Galleries of The Moore College of Art in Philadelphia in 1995; the second at The Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen in 2001. In 1977 John Cage was the "narrator" in William Anastasi's theater piece "You Are" presented at The Clocktower in New York City. John Cage and William Anastasi played chess virtually every day for fifteen years. Since the 60s he has presenting his works all over the world in some of the most prestigious galleries and museums. Among the galleries that had made exhibitions in the last forty years there are the Dwan Gallery, in New York City; the Whiterspoon Gallery, in Greensboro; the Washington Square Gallery, in New York City; the PS1 Mus., the Hetzler and Keller Gallery in Stuttgart, Germany; the Whytney Museum; the Kunstmuseum of Dusseldorf; the Bess Culter Gallery; the Stalke Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark; the Scott Hanson Gallery; the Sandra Gering Gallery, in New York; the Krister Fahl Gallery in Stockholm; the Sorbonne University in Paris; the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia; the Pier Gallery in Scotland; the Moore Collection and Design in Philadelphia; the Anders Tomberg Gallery in Sweden; the Hubert Winter Gallery in Vienna, Austria; the Museum of Judaica in Philadelphia; the Specta Gallery in Copenhagen; the S65 Gallery in Belgium; the Gary Tatintsian Gallery in New York; the Art Agents Gallery in Hamburg, Germany; the Niels Borch Jensen Gallery in Berlin; the Nikolaj Contemporary Art Gallery in Copenhagen; the Hubert Winter Gallery in Viena, Austria; the Thomas Rehbein Gallery in Cologne, Germany. He is also represented in permanent collections of several museums in the most diverse countries, like the Neuberger Museum of New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York, Brooklyn; the Museum of Art of Philadelphia; the Museum of Art of Phoenix; the Getty Collection in Santa Monica, California; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art of New York - MOMA; the Harvard University Art Museum; the Contemporary Art Museum of Honolulu; the Modern Art Museum of Stockholm; the Whitney Museum; the Jewish Museum in New York; the Statensmuseum for Kunst in Copenhagen; the Contemporary Art Museum of Malmo in Sweden; the Guggenheim Museum of New York; the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston; the Ludwig Koln Museum of Cologne, Germany; and the Baltimore Museum of Art among others. He has also being lecturer invited by numerous institutions all over the world.

 

Dove Bradshaw is widely known as a pioneer, beginning in 1969, of indeterminacy in sculpture, painting, performance and film. Her sculptures, designed to change in weather, are seen in numerous outdoor museum parks and gardens in the United States and Europe. John Cage selected her along with Mary Jean Kenton and Marsha Skinner to accompany him in his 1991 Carnegie International presentation for which he scored the daily hanging of the works. She was represented in Cage's similarly scored Rolywholyover Circus, 1993-5, which consisted of his selection of Twentieth Century works traveling across the United States, and to Mito Tower, Mito, Japan. Appointed in 1984 as Artistic Advisor for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, she designed sets, costumes and lighting for many of the company's stage and television productions. She accompanied the score of Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta on Cunningham's "Fabrications" in 1987 (revived this year for the 50th Lincoln Center Anniversary Celebration of Merce Cunningham and his Company) with the design and lighting. A retrospective will be exhibited at Baruch College, City University of New York, in 2003 to coincide with a monograph publication beginning in 1969-03, with a text by Thomas McEvilley, Mark Batty Publisher, LLC, New York. John Cage in conversation with Thomas McEvilley provided the text for a publication by Sandra Gering Gallery, New York, 1969-1993, which has been republished by McEvilley in Sculpture in the Age of Doubt, Allworth Press, 1999 and will be included in this monograph. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the major museums both here as well as in Europe. In addition to exhibitions around the United States, she has shown in Korea, Japan and Europe.

 

Peter Zummo has been composing since 1967 and has performed his works for solo trombone and ensemble worldwide. His work has been associated with the contemporary classical tradition, in combination with or juxtaposition to the minimal, jazz, world music, and so-called art-rock styles. He has pioneered new approaches to, and uses for, extended instrumental technique on the trombone and also uses valved brass, dijeridu, synthesizers and other electronics and his voice in performance. His many compositions for ensemble build on original melody and melodic fragments, and generate interactive situations in which musicians explore the boundaries of common and extended practice, without, however, having to act arbitrarily.

 

It has been more than 25 years since a young Denardo Coleman began playing drums and recording with his father Ornette Coleman. Since that time Denardo Coleman has gone on to record and eventually produce many of Ornette's records. In 1966 at the age of 10 years old, Denardo along with Ornette and Charlie Haden on bass, recorded the award winning album "The Empty foxhole" for Blue Note. The album was met with much critical acclaim along with a fair amount of skepticism. Why would Ornette have someone so young playing with him? Of course this was mot the first time that Ornette had experienced controversy. As it turns out, Denardo had been practicing with his father for several years before Ornette felt he was ready. Their natural communication was evident on that first recording. During this time Denardo recorded twice more with Ornette including "Ornette At 12" (Impulse 1968) and "Crisis" (Impulse 1969). As well as being the drummer, Denardo has accepted the further responsibility of being Ornette's producer and manager. During the 1990's Denardo and Ornette launched the Harmolodic Record label, which was distributed worldwide by Polygram. Included among the artists released was by poet and Denardo's mother Jayne Cortez. Jayne is one of America's pre-eminent contemporary poets. Together they have collaborated on 5 recordings (Bola Press) since 1980 and continue to forge new ground in the world of music and the spoken word. Currently Denardo has opened Harmolodic Studios the only world class recording studio in Harlem, U.S.A.

 

Jo Locandro is a composer and pianist. He studied with Cecil Taylor and played with many of the New York avant garde jazz musicians during the 70's
loft scene era. In recent years has been dedicated to studying harmolodic theory with Ornette Coleman.

 

Richard Mauro is an artist and musician who has lived between China, Europe and the United States.