Another collaborative effort sent three wild and crazy guys out to Rancho Sherman S. Sherman. Sherm is kind enough to let me
abuse his property and sometimes his friendship when I've concocted dubious plans in the guise of art. This time Daniel McGrath proposed the audio/video project that set the course for action.
I come at it through the ideas of John Cage, namely related to his "small sounds" lexicon. It's not that the sounds of this project were microscopic but that Cage made it possible for the most "insignificant" of sounds (namely silence) to be placed amongst the most rigid and time tested structures of western audio composition. By making 'all sound' a viable and thus potent carrier of meaning, Cage brings everything we hear and think we hear to the forefront of conceptual materials. So the question that interests me is: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" The question is then about perception and Cage was perhaps the first artist to point out the nature of perception as it is linked to memory.
For this project we set out to make sure that our memory serves us correct...that a tree does indeed make a sound.
Now in the words of Daniel McGrath:
Basically it's about teh philosophical absence of sound if it is not pecieved. It's connected (in this context) to the idea that if there's an opening at a gallery and no one goes to see it, does it exist a a show? What then is an exhibition?
There was a sex pistols concert in Manchester that 30 people saw, most of them went on to form new bands. Was that a tree falling? I think Da Vinci said something like this: "Music annihilates itself as soon as it comes into existence." It's the representation of the invisible.
