Does art make what you eat taste better? As part of its community outreach, on March 30 the Warehouse Gallery hosted students from Seymour Elementary School and Fowler High School to meet with sound artists Stephen Vitiello and Andrew Deutsch. “Sound Scores: Paper, Wood, Stone and Glass” officially opened later that week. But while sound and video installations still seem inaccessible to some art patrons, Deutsch finds young people a natural, even easier audience.
“We are all born into a synesthetic world,” said Deutsch, 41, by phone earlier this week from Hornell in the Southern Tier, where he teaches sound and video art at Alfred University. “All the senses are connected to one point in our brains when we’re born, so everything happens at once. They start separating at about six months. Smell is the first to separate, then probably taste and hearing. Seeing is last! Not everybody separates fully. So it’s very natural, and we say music has a ‘rough shape’ or that a high pitch is ‘bright.’ Now some people are trying to get that capacity to come back.”
Vitiello, 45, is an electronic musician and media artist who teaches kinetic imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University. Last Friday, speaking from Richmond by phone, Vitiello recalled the Seymour and Fowler students.
“Andrew introduced themes and I would talk about the technology. I recorded the third graders and I showed the high school students some free programs they can download. You know, they wrote us these beautiful thank-you notes and every single one of them mentioned the juice and cookies they had.”
Vitiello and Deutsch first met in 1993 and have collaborated since 1999 by visiting each other’s campuses for projects and exchanging sound files for their CDs. For their first joint gallery exhibition, they came a week early to set up. Syracuse University’s contemporary art curator, Anja Chavez, based in the Warehouse Gallery, first invited Vitiello to exhibit at her previous position, Wellesley College’s Davis Museum.
“When she got to Syracuse she asked me again and I thought of Andrew,” he continued. “He is really talented, we hadn’t done this yet, and he lives close. We each arrived with materials and a willingness to experiment. We played off each other and the space. Andrew and I really trust each other and Anja trusted us. She was open to our daily moods and sensory changes. Not every curator is.”
Vitiello and Deutsch provided each other with a series of musical scores to perform, emphasizing the visual nature of notation.
The resulting show comprises DVD and audio recordings, digital video, photographs and drawings, and sculptures of rock arrangements and found objects, ceramic fragments, glass and wooden constructions. Each considers the visual art to be a musical score that a musician might play. Deutsch said the scores Vitiello gave him were “really challenging.”
“Mostly I do music that is very dense and fast,” Deutsch explained. “Stephen gave me scores that were the opposite. But I did the same – I wanted him to use these light meters he hadn’t been using. He didn’t for the show, either, but since then he has again.”
Immediately inside the gallery’s front door is Vitiello’s striking series of black and white landscape photos and abstract drawing that merges water reeds and notes.
“I was just starting to create graphic scores,” he said. “I documented my field recordings with photos. I was by a pond in Maine, waiting to record the loons calling. I sat there for hours looking at this little cluster of reeds in the water and wow! It actually looks like music.”
Sound art isn’t new, says Deutsch. “It really goes back to the Futurists in the early 20th century, people like the composer and painter Luigi Russolo in Milan. Or the German experimental filmmaker Walter Ruttmann, who was making sound collages in the 1920s and 30s. Luciano Berio was very liberating when he said that music is anything you listen to with the intention of listening to music. And now because of quantum physics artists are more aware that sound is any vibration that moves through any substance.”
Vitiello says, “The audience for sound art is up. Since the 80’s and video installations, it’s gotten bigger. Sound has the ability to effect you emotionally and you feel first. Its meaning is more open than visual art’s. Many sound artists deal with paranoia and discomfort but I don’t so much. I get more invitations than I can handle.”
“Sound Scores: Paper, Wood, Stone and Glass,” by Stephen Vitiello and Andrew Deutsch, runs to June 6, noon to 6 PM Tuesday – Saturday, at the Warehouse Gallery, 350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse, 315.443.6450. The gallery guide for the Vitiello-Deutsch show is available at thewarehousegallery.org.
On Wed., June 3 at 8:00 PM, the Warehouse Gallery partners with Redhouse Arts Center, across the street at the corner of S. West St., where the Sound Scores exhibition culminates on with a live concert by Olaf Bender (aka byetone) and Carsten Nicolai (aka alva noto), two founders in 1996 of the German electronic music label Raster-Noton. Concert tickets at 425.0405 or theredhouse.org. Nancy covers the arts. Reach her at nancykeeferhodes@gmail.com.
This article appears on page 12 of the Syracuse City Eagle print edition on May 7, 2009.
From page 1, City Eagle May 7, 2009:
Sound designer Jane Tattersall at SYRFILM
From the start, the Syracuse International Film Festival has highlighted sound and music in film. Screening of classic silent films like this year's "Ben-Hur" (1925), with J.C. Sanford's commissioned piece perfomed live by the CNY Jazz Orchestra, is an annual signature event. This year's forum on sound and music in film presented "Appaloosa" composer Jeff Beal and Canadian sound designer/editor Jane Tattersall. Tattersall, who also served as a festival judge, has worked on 121 films. These include Fernando Meirelles' "Blindness," Showtime's series "The Tudors," Guy Madden's "My Winnipeg," Sarah Polley's "Away from Her," Istzván Szabó's "Sunshine" and "Being Julia," Robert De Niro's "The Good Shepherd," and David Cronenberg's "Naked Lunch." Tattersall Sound in Toronto is one of Canada's largest sound studios. She talked with Nancy Keefe Rhodes about sound design in movies and Canadian film's ties with the US. Go to cnylink.com and click Entertainment to read more.
