ANDY PAIKO AND ETHAN ROSE‘s Transference,
currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, is not an
easy one to describe. Imagine the old stage act in which a man stands
before a bunch of half-full wine glasses (a glass harp) and runs his
finger around the rims to make music. Now remove the man. Remove the
water. Remove the hand from the edge of the glass and replace it with a
scrap of wet rag, held to the outside edge, like a needle to a record.
Spread 37 of these glasses, in varying sizes, on the walls, most
jutting out so that their open plane is perpendicular to the floor.
They will be made to spin, the “needle” moving on and off the glass at
irregular intervals, by a motor encased inside a box behind the wall
(to keep its sound from escaping). Without a finger, the glasses still
sing.
What blossomed from a highly involved collaboration, the first
between glass artist Paiko and sound artist Rose, is as much an audio
exhibit as a visual one. The deep, vibrating tones on display are
similar to the wineglass sound or a Buddhist singing bowl, but
smoother. In this automated setup, sounds build slowly, evenly, in
overlapping non-patterns. “Some of the bowls take longer to speak, so
[the computer programs controlling the spinning motors] exert some
control in that, but the order is random,” says Rose.
Through contrasts of transparency and obscurity, antiquated and
modern technology, and performance and recording, Transference plays with the audience. Standing in the gallery, the sounds seem to be
coming from all around. Because of the speed at which glass resonates,
the human ear has a hard time locating its hums. Furthermore, when
ricocheting particles escape the glass as sound, they travel laterally,
like ripples on a pond. (The richest tones are actually heard in the
corners of the room, where the atoms collide.) The result is a
scavenger hunt in full view.
In Transference, Paiko and Rose juxtapose mechanisms that
were supposed to miss each other by more than 100 years—the
antiquated glass harp is operated like a record player and timed by a
computer. Anachronism is as face-front as a horse and buggy trotting
down a highway. Instead of the glasses being centralized and filled
with water for the harpist, they are scattered around the room and
turned sideways to enhance the sound. This is only possible because the
performer is absent from the performance—a recurring theme for
Rose. At his recent Time-Based Art show, he curled back random tines
from music boxes and filled a room with these gap-toothed players,
creating a spur-of-the-moment track by a conductor asleep at the wheel.
To defer agency in Transference, Paiko and Rose did not design
the pitch of the glasses, but tuned them post-production, letting the
material dictate.
Once again, the Museum of Contemporary Craft gets its jollies by
toeing the line between “craft art” and “modern art.” To use a glass
(held sideways) to expel something (notes) rather than hold something,
to use glass as an instrument, to automate the “playing” and remove the
hand, and surrender the performance to random elements—these are
all ways in which Paiko and Rose invert craft norms. But looking at the
pieces on display—unique, detailed, and delicate—there’s no
question that they belong here.