The reason: there is much to urgently discuss, not just about music and sound, but about their place and function in the new world that is rapidly taking shape. We will focus and expand upon our discourse program, which usually lies alongside the music program, as a space for dialogue, thinking and knowledge in 2020 it will become the main focus of the festival. Unsound 2020: Intermission- our 18th edition - will be a festival where the sound of music largely gives way to the sound of speaking and listening. The extremity of the situation requires a radical, meaningful and creative response, in terms both practical - according to the changing situation - and speculative. Even if they do, we have no desire to book and announce artists in the usual way. Nobody knows yet if any sizable music events will take place in the autumn, or what form they might take. The word therefore embodies multiple, and somehow contradictory, forces. Meaning a break in a performance or production, here it also refers to the rupture caused by COVID-19, a period starkly separating before from after. The nose takes up 21 feet.The theme for Unsound 2020 is Intermission. In Los Angeles (where the artist lives and works), at the Hammer Museum, Piero Golia carved from foam a one-to-one replica of George Washington’s nose from the face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a colossal unfinished 60-foot-tall sculpture by Gutzon Borglum and son of four popular American presidents’ busts made between 19. If every action matters and grace remains in every part, the remnants become relics, each mark and part a gesture enshrined in an object. We stand diminished by the influence of bureaucracies and brands we need others, their touch-relationships that are ours and real and not so mediated that they’re lost in a distant factory. But things still matter though, because people (and their bodies) still matter. Conceptualism largely rejected materiality for what Lucy Lippard called “the dematerialization of the art object.” They traded skill and form for ideas, systems, and stories, in many cases dispensing with objects altogether. Some artists do everything to avoid this, but they only serve to transfer their right to grant authenticity to intermediaries. Marketeers’ and the connoisseur experts’ imprimatur of veracity for an art object tracks nicely with the same search for authenticity in the relic trade. Somehow being handled (or at least explicitly authored) by the artist still matters. I’m not surprised that one of the great debates around art of the last century and a half or so relates to the human hand: whether it matters, when and if it should be seen. But perhaps something is lost in these abstract ideals. Meaning didn’t need to be so literal after the Renaissance: Craft, skill, vision, interpretation, and innovation could be honored and gain importance and even holiness without religion. One certainly did not cause the other, but they relate. The market still limps along (the body parts of saints are readily found on eBay), but then again so do the religions that venerate them.Ĭorrelation is not causality, but the ascendancy of art tracks more or less with the diminishment of relics. Though still around to be sure, it sunk after Martin Luther and, especially, John Calvin condemned the practice. The Protestant Reformation broke the back of the religious relic trade.
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