[Reader-list] TONITE - Artist Dialog - Columbia University, Carol Becker

[Paul D. Miller]

Hey you all - I want to extend an invitation to the list to come to the third artist dialog during my gallery show - it's with Carol Becker, Dean of Columbia University's School of the Arts. We have had an excellent response to the show, and there have been many people from a wide range of backgrounds coming to check out the show. I have a large gallery show. It's at Robert Miller Gallery, and it's about Antarctica through the prism of landscape composition. I'd
like to invite you all over to check out the show. We're having artist dialogs about environmental issues and
contemporary art and electronic music. So far the dialogs have been with
Laura Kuhn (Director of John Cage's estate), Peter Halley, and upcoming are
Grammy award winning composers Carter Burwell (he did the score for "No
Country for Old Men" and Paul Cantelone (Julian Schnabel's sound track
composer, and who also works with Oliver Stone - he did the score to Stone's
recent film "W"). The show opened on Jan 8, 2009. There will be
artist/composer dialogs every Thursday of January around my show. The
trailer for the project is at:
www.djspooky.com/art/terra_nova.php

 I hope eyou can make it to one of the artist dialogs.
- Hide quoted text -

in peace,
Paul

So far: the dialogs are as follows:
Gallery show opens on Jan 8, 2009


Then: Every Thursday of January 6-8pm
Sound + Image: Composers in dialog about contemporary art and composition
"Meet The Composer" is media sponsor for the events.

Sound + Image

Laura Kuhn - Director of the John Cage Trust Foundation is in dialog with me
on Jan 10

Peter Halley - Chair of Yale University's Art Department for Painting is in
dialog with me on Jan 15

Carol Becker - Dean of Columbia University's School of The Arts is in dialog
with me on Jan 22

Paul Cantalone (Oliver Stone's sound track composer - did the score for W),
Carter Burwell (soundtrack composer for No Country for Old Men), and Ronen
Givony (curator, Wordless Music Festival), are in dialog with me on Jan 29


Here's the press release for the project:

North/South

Robert Miller Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition of the
work of Paul Miller. In 2008 Miller went to Antarctica to shoot a film about
the sound of ice, and ended up creating an installation out of the journey.
For Robert Miller Gallery, Paul Miller recasts the epic detritus of the art
and other cultural worlds as skillfully handled archival video samplings,
digital prints, and drawings, calling into question the value of
appropriation and the status of the copy. Finding inspiration in historic
documents and films like James F. Cook's infamous 1912 film "The Truth about
the Pole" (a false narrative made by the "explorer" using the North Pole as
a film studio, Cook tried to portray himself in a documentary he
self-financed as the true discoverer of the North Pole), and rare images of
Admiral Byrd's 1939 voyage to the South Pole, Miller explores the range of
"truth" in modern portrayals of the explorer's path. In 2007-2008 Miller
spent four weeks in Antarctica re-tracing several explorers' journeys and
with his "North/South" show at Robert Miller gallery, he reconstructs a
collage of their journals and ephemera in multiple contexts. Using materials
as diverse as John Cage's 1938 "Imaginary Landscape #1" as an inspiration
(it was the first composition written for turntables) Miller looks at how
documents and archival materials influence perception of history and the
search for the explorer's goal of defining new frontiers. In "North/South"
he deftly recontextualizes the rhetorical tropes of music notation and
graphic design to mine the intersection of public and personal.

A deejay and writer, Miller maps his ongoing relationship with the past,
present, and future of music, using record collections, musical taxonomies,
and play-lists as impetus for portraits and cultural critiques to blur the
lines between how composers create and artists design work based on a
seamless dialog between "sampling" and originality. This exhibition of new
work will incorporate digital prints, works on paper, and a video
installation to define a sonic landscape/timeline that begins around the
turn of the first millennium and projects centuries ahead into the future
for concepts such as "A Manifesto for a People's Republic of Antarctica."
Drawing on a history of music's ups and downs in terms of mountains and
valleys, water and above all, ice, Miller expands on the tradition of
landscape portraiture, creating a topography of music spanning across every
wall of the gallery. North/South is comprised of four sections: 1) Notations
– a contemporary response to John Cage, 2) Appropriation of O, a
collaboration with artist Ann Hamilton, 3) Rodchenko, Revisited – an
exploration of Miller's graphic design of prints for a fictional revolution
in Antarctica, and 4) North/South – a video installation juxtaposing Admiral
Byrd and James F. Cook's respective voyages to the South and North Poles,
with historical documents of other famous and infamous voyages to Antarctica
and the Arctic. Miller translates the possibilities of music's futures into
graphic terms of an almost science-fictional account in images of a
revolution in Antarctica. His backward and forward glance, though, embraces
its own subjective account, bringing Miller's own thoughts on history (and
its representation) to the forefront. His "People's Republic of Antarctica"
does not attempt to be a definitive narrative on music's relationship to
revolution, but instead one that exists at the interface of his personal
vision and that of a shared popular culture.

Miller's video installation is an acoustic portrait of Antarctica's
relationship to the "Great Game" of national interests in claiming the
wilderness of the South Pole. Miller's composed score for the video
materials is based on gamelan shadow theater, and electronic music's ability
to re-define geography's relationship to "authenticity" – natural sounds
versus their reconstruction in digital media are motifs for the composition
that accompanies the installation. While using sound within installations
has a tradition in contemporary art, Miller conflates its use within a
fine-art context with other ways in which music reaches the public. Miller
postulates that you are your own archive. His composition "Terra Nova" was
written while he was in Antarctica for 4 weeks, and it offers an extended
trip through Miller's sound art palette.

Paul Miller was born in 1970 in New York. In 2004, his exhibition Rebirth of
a Nation, a remix of D.W. Griffith's infamous "Birth of a Nation" was
installed as "Path is Prologue" where it premiered at the Paula Cooper
Gallery, and then traveled as a live multi-media opera to over fifty widely
acclaimed venues, such as the Herod Atticus Theater at the base of the
Acropolis and the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. His works have been
performed at locations as diverse as the Tate Modern and The Guggenheim and
he has had numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including
solo shows at the Annina Nosei Gallery and he has also curated group
exhibits at Jeffrey Deitch gallery. In addition, Miller has been included in
the 1997 and 2002 Whitney Biennial, the 2004 Venice Biennial of
Architecture, and 2007 Venice Biennial's "Africa Pavilion." In 2004 he
published a critically acclaimed and award winning book "Rhythm Science"
about the relationship of graphic design and contemporary music, and in
2008, he edited an anthology of writings on sound art, digital media, and
contemporary composition entitled "Sound Unbound" (both, MIT Press),
featuring Pierre Boulez, Steve Reich, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Brian Eno, Moby,
Chuck D, Saul Williams, Jonathan Lethem, Daphne Keller (Senior Legal Counsel
to Google) and many others. In addition to his art works, he tours the world
constantly as Dj Spooky - a very "in-demand" world famous dj. He currently
lives and works in New York.

Terra Nova, the composition based on Miller's journey to Antarctica will be
premiering in NY as a headlining event of Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next
Wave Festival 2009, and will tour opera houses for the next several years.


The Robert Miller Gallery
524 W26th Street
New York New York, 10001

Tel: 1 212 366 4774
Fax: 1 212 366 4454
Email: rmg at robertmillergallery.com

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday Through Saturday, 10am to 6pm