For this episode of Lisson… ON AIR, I am playing the 2017 record called Dream Maker by Hans Berg. Hans Berg is a Swedish musician, producer and composer who since 2004 has also collaborated with Nathalie Djuberg. 

Lisson presents… ON AIR is written and made by Hana Noorali. 

Track list:

1. In Dreams:

This was made for Nathalie and Hans’ first outdoor sculpture project in Wanås Konst Sculpture Park in Sweden in 2016. Titled “In Dreams” the work consisted of a soundscape and a reflective surface with hypnagogic sculpture atop, installed on the ground of a park which was surrounded by woodland trees.

Birds wearing excessive make-up and smoking cigarettes from their bottoms, pink and blue acorns who are wearing crinkled under-ware, bananas wrapped in bows and florescent caterpillars all of which are simulacrums, characters that are bizarre and subversive substitutes for what you might come across in a park are included in the installation.

These anthropomorphised animals, fruits and vegetation combine together with sound to create an immersive installation that surreally mimics its environment. An insurgent context manifests within which the viewer questions their understanding of reality.

2.The Secret Garden:

This track was made to accompany a large-scale installation which was first shown at ACCA in Melbourne in 2015. The work consists of neon lights and sculptures which are controlled and activated by the music and by the viewers’ movement within the installation. The space is filled with giant flower heads, enormous leaves, golden acorns, chequered florescent cushions, melting ice creams and neon curls all of which are presided over by a clay-mation shaman rabbit. 

These psychedelic animals, objects and sounds are part of a fictional landscape titled “The Secret Garden” created by Nathalie Djuberg and Hans Berg. The viewer is propelled into a mysterious and ultra-sensory world, an existential and hallucinatory void that is intended to mirror or draw out the infinite possibilities of the audience’s subconscious. 

The work was also shown at 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai (M21), 2016 and at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) in February 2016. 

3. Neon:

“Neon” was made for an installation that was never realised. Both Hans Berg and Nathalie Djuberg had wanted to make a work within which lights were controlled by music, “The Secret Garden” was made but “Neon” for now only exists as an audio track. 

4. Gas, Solid, Liquid:

This song was made for a special edition of Parkett Magazine  in 2012, that featured an article on Natalie Djurberg and Hans Berg.

Hans Berg | Dream Maker

This episode of Lisson...ON AIR focuses on the life and work Dom Sylvester Houédard, with contributions from Nicola Simpson, Charles Very, Nicholas Logsdail and Matt O’Dell.

Widely recognised as one of the leading theorists and outstanding international practitioners of concrete poetry, Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924–1992) is firmly rooted in Lisson Gallery’s early history, with his first solo exhibition held at the gallery during its inaugural year in 1967. A practicing Benedictine priest and noted theologian, Houédard, also known by his initials ‘dsh’ or ‘the Dom,’ wrote extensively on new approaches to art, spirituality and philosophy, and collaborated with artists such as Gustav Metzger, Yoko Ono and John Cage.

Nicola Simpson is a curator and researcher at Norwich University of the Arts, researching ‘right mind-minding: the transmission and practice of zen and vajrayana buddhist method practices in the poemobjects of dsh 1963–75’. Recent curatorial projects on Dom Sylvester Houédard include: ‘Performing No Thingness, dsh, Ken Cox and Li Yuan-chia’, East Gallery, NUA, (2016), ‘The Cosmic Typewriter, The Life & Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard’, at The South London Gallery, (2012), ‘The Yoga of Concrete’, The Gallery, NUA,(2010). She is editor of Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter: The Life and Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard (Occasional Papers, 2012), Dom Sylvester Houédard (Ridinghouse, 2017).

Charles Verey has been working on a biography of Dom Sylvester Houédard since 2005. Between 1966–69 Verey organised exhibitions with Dom Sylvester, John Furnival and Ken Cox at Arlington Mill in Gloucestershire. He has contributed to Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter (ed., Nicola Simpson, 2012) Dom Sylvester Houédard (ed., Andrew Hunt & Nicola Simpson, Ridinghouse, 2017) and co-editor of ‘The Kiss’: ten talks by Dom Sylvester to Beshara students, 1986– 1991 (ed., Jane Clark and Charles Verey, Beshara Publications, Autumn 2018) including a full biographical preface.

Nicholas Logsdail is the founder of Lisson Gallery, one of the most influential international contemporary art galleries in the world. The gallery celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2017 with a major group exhibition, ‘Everything at Once’, staged at Store Studios in partnership with The Vinyl Factory, as well as with a comprehensive book, entitled ARTIST | WORK | LISSON, documenting more than 500 exhibitions since 1967, the year in which the gallery also staged its first shows of Dom Sylvester Houédard.

Matt O’dell is Lisson Gallery’s archivist and an artist. 

Lisson...ON AIR is written and presented by Hana Noorali.

Image © Clay Perry, England & Co

Dom Sylvester Houédard

Flat Time house located at 210 Bellenden Road, Peckham, London is the former studio and home of John Latham (1921-2006) a pioneer of British conceptual art, who, through painting, sculpture, performances, assemblages, films, installation and extensive writings, fuelled controversy and continues to influence artists today. 

Latham transformed 210 Bellenden Road into a ‘living sculpture’ in 2003, naming it Flat Time House (FTHo) after his theory of Flat Time. A giant cantilevered book emerges through the glass facade of the building and onto the street. Inside, Latham designated specific rooms with anthropomorphic attributes of the living body, with the intention of communicating to visitors that Flat Time House exists as a living sculpture to be navigated as both a physical and metaphorical entity. 

Until his death in 2006, Latham opened his door to anyone interested in thinking and talking about art. In 2008, the Latham family opened Flat Time House to the public as a gallery, an artist’s residency and centre for alternative learning that is currently under the direction of Gareth Bell-Jones. Flat Time house operates as a discursive space to explore John Latham’s practice, his theoretical ideas and their continued relevance today. 

Gareth Bell-Jones (b. 1982) is the curator/director of Flat Time House. After graduating from the MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the RCA in 2010 he worked as curator for Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, for four and a half years. There he curated residencies, exhibitions, retreats, events, publications and an annual music festival with artists such as Ed Atkins, Michael Dean, Gustav Metzger, Elizabeth Price, Keren Cytter and Cally Spooner. From 2010-14 he was a regular visiting tutor to the RCA, Curating Contemporary Art Department. Previously he was curator of Tricycle Gallery, London from 2007-09. He has recently written catalogue texts for artists including Laure Prouvost, Marlie Mul, Barbara Visser and Agata Madejska.

Lisson...ON AIR is written and presented by Hana Noorali

Lisson Gallery

Flat Time House

Horwitz was born in 1932 and died in 2013, and lived and worked in Los Angeles. She studied graphic design in the early 1950s at Art Center College of Design and Fine Art at California State University, Northridge, in the early 1960s. In 1972 Horwitz received a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, studying alongside John Baldessari and Allan Kaprow, participating in some of Kaprow’s ‘Happenings’, as well as creating her own performances.

In 1968, Horwitz submitted a proposal called Suspension of Vertical Beams Moving in Space to LACMA's ‘Art and Technology’ exhibition. The proposal was for a sculpture with eight moving beams, suspended in the air by magnetism and lit at varying intensities. The sculpture was never realised – the project, in the end, included work by only 67 male artists. Yet the attempt to graphically describe the movement of the beams with the rules and systems of eight that Horwitz developed for the proposal became the foundation for numerous bodies of work, including the Sonakinatography series, comprised of drawings, performances and musical compositions. In a 1976 article published in Flash Art, Horwitz described the system by saying “I have created a visual philosophy by working with deductive logic, I had a need to control and compose time as I had controlled and composed two-dimensional drawings and paintings. To do this, I chose a graph as the basis for the visual description of time...Using this graph, I made compositions that depicted rhythm visually.”

Sonakinatography is discussed in detail in this episode that takes the form of a conversation between Channa Horwitz’s daughter Ellen Davis and Lisson Gallery’s Ossian Ward in advance of an exhibition of her work in London, titled 'Rules of the Game'.

Former Ford Foundation scholarship student at the School of American Ballet in NYC and dancer with the Stuttgart Ballet Company, Ellen Davis has been teaching classical ballet internationally for over 40 years. She has also been the artistic director of numerous ballet and performing arts academies. In 1977 Ellen founded “Yoga of Ballet”, classical ballet taught with a mindful, living yoga approach that can be extended to all of life.

Ellen is the daughter of the late conceptual artist Channa Horwitz, and is the archivist and manager of her estate. As a long time collaborator with Horwitz she continues to choreograph, direct and oversee performances in conjunction with her mother’s work. Ellen created the text and sound track of Horwitz’s seminal work “At the Tone," which Horwitz published. “At the tone the time will be .... one moment past the point of seeing anything other than now”.

Ellen offers living yoga coaching and is an avid photographer. She writes about the creative process, living the timeless in time and new paradigm teaching and learning approaches.

Lisson...ON AIR is written and presented by Hana Noorali

Channa Horwitz

In this episode, of Lisson ON AIR Art & Language (Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden) talk with Lisson Gallery’s Hana Noorali and Ossian Ward about its  40-year collaboration with the Red Krayola, a proto-punk band founded in Houston by Mayo Thompson. They discuss the largely improvised performances, the themes that went into these recordings – covering everything from conceptual art and activism to politics and philosophical thought – as well as how the first songs were written in residency at Robert Rauschenberg’s studio on Captiva Island, Florida, but only after Michael was detained by the CIA for carrying sensitive communist propaganda.

Combining text from these tracts, as well as from their Index 01, exhibited at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, Art & Language provided the lyrics that were sung or chanted by, among others, Michael Baldwin, Ian Burn, Kathryn Bigelow, Charles Harrison, Pauline Harrison, Sandra Harrison, Christine Kozlov, Lynn Lemaster, Philip Pilkington, Mel Ramsden and Mayo Thompson. Having released many albums with Red Krayola since 1976, Art & Language continue to develop this extension of their practice in advance of a performance in New York this September.

Track List:

The Red Krayola with Art & Language, Gross and Conspicuous Error #8, 1976
Art & Language, Mayo Thompson, Jesse Chamberlain
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJ7XwawZOc


The Red Crayola with Art & Language, Keep All Your Friends from Kangaroo?, 1981
Art & Language, Allen Ravenstine, Ben Annesley, Gina Birch, Lora Logic, Mayo Thompson, Epic Soundtracks
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_Ga7COGUn0

The Red Crayola with Art & Language, Portrait of V.I Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock, pt.1&2 from Kangaroo?, 1981
Art & Language, Allen Ravenstine, Ben Annesley, Gina Birch, Lora Logic, Mayo Thompson, Epic Soundtracks
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzlW3q1g9gY

The Red Crayola with Art & Language, Sighs Trapped by Liars, from Sighs Trapped by Liars, 2007 
Art & Language, Elisa Randazzo, Sandy Yang-singers, Tom Watson,  Mayo Thompson, Jim O'Rourke, Noel Kupersmith, John McEntire-drums
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrbXylij9k

The Red Krayola with Art & Language from Gross & Conspicuous Errors, 1976
Art & Language, Kathryn Bigelow, Mayo Thompson, Jesse Chamberlain
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6cnevh5bPc

The Red Krayola with Art & Language from Gross & Conspicuous Errors, 1976
Art & Language, Kathryn Bigelow, Mayo Thompson, Jesse Chamberlain
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwT892J7STs

Art & Language, Postscript To SDS' Infiltration, Music-Language: Corrected Slogans, 176
Art & Language, Jesse Chamberlain, Mayo Thompson, Colin Bateman, Thomas Duffy, Wieslaw Woszczyk, Sandra Harrison, Pauline Harrison, and Lynn Lemaster.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH0_WE_kkp0

The Red Krayola with Art & Language from Gross & Conspicuous Errors, 1976
Art & Language, Mayo Thompson, Jesse Chamberlain
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwT892J7STs

Lisson...ON AIR is written and presented by Hana Noorali

Art & Language and The Red Krayola

Lisson...  ON AIR, is a series of podcasts that will mostly be recorded from the gallery's London location. Episodes will include readings, music and engagement with the gallery's extensive archive, as well as contributions from Lisson Gallery artists. 

www.lissongallery.com

Popular tracks tagged #lissononair