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 produced a
multidisciplinary oeuvre through “Intermedia art”. Combining
minimalist music, conceptual art, structuralist cinema,
systematic or political art, Niblock strives to transform our
perception and experience of time.
Admittedly one of the greatest experimental composers of our
time, Phill Niblock initiates his career as a photographer. Born
in 1933 in Anderson - Indiana, a jazz aficionado, he settles in
New York in 1958. Niblock starts photography in 1960 and for
four years specialises in portraits of jazz musicians such as
Charles Mingus, Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington, whom he
follows frequently to recording sessions and concerts. In the
mid-60s, he shifts from photography to film, and encouraged by
Elaine Summers, choreographer and founder of the “Experimental
Intermedia”, he starts realising films for dancers and
choreographers at the Judson Church Theater, including Yvonne
Rainer, Meredith Monk or Lucinda Childs. From 1968 on, Phill
Niblock focuses 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. He pursues his film projects
independently, including his monumental piece, The Movement of
People Working, a series of films lasting over 25 hours,
realised between 1973 and 1991, in which the repetitive nature
of work movements acts as a direct echo to his minimalist
musical compositions.
Since the mid-60s, his analogue photographic work explores New
York’s architecture and urban planning. The sequencing and
layout 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 SoHo Broadway district (1988).
Starting in 1966, Phill Niblock engages in a reflexion about the
projection of moving images through a series of films and
slideshows. Produced between 1966 and 1969, Six Films, a series
of short films with sound realised with 16mm film, heralds his
experimental method through portraits of artists and musicians
such as Sun Ra and Max Neuhaus. His obsession for and
celebration of the individual is again at the heart of his
series of videos entitled Anecdotes from Childhood. Realised
between 1985 and 1992, this series explores the notion of memory
and the expression of a personal history through intimate
portraits.
Starting in 1968, the artist begins to experiment a combination
of his visual productions with his musical scores in order to
create architectural and environmental compositions with sound.
The Environments series, recreated here by the artist for the
first time since it was last shown in 1972, extracts through
images the reality of several environments, all the while
generating a dense and intense temporary environment of
projected images, music and movement throughout the museum
space.
Presented for the first time in its entirety, re-edited and
remastered by the artist for the retrospective, the series of
films The Movement of People Working portray human labour in its
most elementary form. Filmed on 16mm colour film, and later on
video, in locations including Peru, Mexico, Hungary, Hong Kong,
the Arctic, Brazil, Lesotho, Portugal, Sumatra, China and Japan
– with more than 25 hours of film footage, The Movement of
People Working focuses on work as a choreography of movements
and gestures, 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 I was
doing music performances with live dancers, and it was too
cumbersome and expensive to tour with so many people. So I
started doing those films that I could project when performing».
These films are accompanied by the whole corpus of Niblock’s
slowly evolving, harmonically minimalist music, realised between
1968 and 2011. The sound level of these compositions offers a
visceral experience of the long drones and inhabits the ringing,
beating overtones. These scores, presented in the exhibition as
photostats realized for his personal exhibition at London’s ICA
in 1982, are the composer’s mixing instructions and are not used
by the musician during the performance. While moving through
space, he plays with the recorded material, sometimes creating
tonalities that coincide with the recording or, on the contrary,
that produce dissonances. The result is a constant movement of
beat, rhythm and pulsation, as well as changing and continuous
harmonics during his own motion through space. 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 of new juxtapositions of
sound and image.
The Movement of People Working offers a strong social and
political comment, as highlighted by the title and represented
by the closeness with the workers. In this, the series of film
echoes the work of several filmmakers including Jean Luc Godard
or Chris Marker who as from 1967 gave workers the cameras and
informed them of cinematic techniques so that they could
actually make their own films. In a fascinating turn of events,
rather than doing fictional or pure documentary film, some
workers formed the Groupes Medvekine and decided to film
themselves working.
This retrospective was first shown in Lausanne Switzerland in
2013, co-produced by the Musée de l’Elysée and the Centre
Circuit for Contemporary Art - Lausanne, and was curated by
Mathieu Copeland.