The Eye is not the only Glass that burns the Mind
* 2021 Stock. Language: English * The retrospective Terry Fox: Elemental Gestures, which opened at the Berlin Academy of the Arts in 2015 before being shown in Mons, Wuppertal, and the Kunstmuseum Bern in 2017, clearly demonstrated Fox’s key role in the development of art since the 1970s. It not only revealed him as a pioneer of performance, video art, and sound installation but also presented his experimental exploration of language and space. A symposium held in conjunction with the Bern exhib…
Sounds Like Silence - John Cage - 4’33” – Silence Today
* 2021 Stock. Language: English * The title of this book and the exhibition it documents—Sounds Like Silence—is ambiguous. On the one hand, silence effectively »sounds«—or as Cage put it, »There is no such thing as silence.« On the other hand, sound needs silence in order to be heard. Even if complete silence does not exist, every sound implicitly conveys the notion of silence: there is no presence without absence. The double meaning of Sounds Like Silence therefore touches upon the central issu…
Radio Revolten - 30 Days of Radio Art
* 2021 Stock. Language: English * Leading art institutions such as Tate Modern, the São Paulo Biennial, and Documenta have now recognized that an ongoing artistic use of the airwaves has generated an autonomous genre called radio art. Over the last few decades independent radio stations in North America and Europe have provided crucial support for this art form to develop and flourish. In October 2016 the International Radio Art Festival Radio Revolten, organized by community radio station Corax…
Hearing
* 2021 Stock. Language: English * Robert Morris’ sculptural installation »Hearing« includes an audio recording of a fictitious hearing that is focussed on the aesthetic, political, historical and moral views of a »witness«. The work is taken as a point of departure. Investigations relating to the various issues involved will take works of other artists into consideration. »Hearing« appears today as a piece of literature. Gregor Stemmrich edited and commented »Hearing« by Robert Morris in english…
Escalier du Chant
* 2021 Stock. Language: English, German * How can songs reflect political events? How does a song become a political song? The artist Olaf Nicolai invited eleven international composers to write songs that reference political events which were of current relevance to them. Without prior announcement, a total of 58 songs were performed as a-cappella pieces on twelve Sundays in 2011 on the central staircase of the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Visitors to the museum found themselves as actors …
Ur-Geräusch / Primal Sound
* 2021 Stock. Language: English, German * “Ur-Geräusch” (Primal Sound) is the title of an essay by Rainer Maria Rilke, which was published in 1919 and subsequently lent its name to the exhibition by Carsten Nicolai that was mounted last year at the Kunstverein Braunschweig. In the text Rilke wrote about the phonograph, which was invented almost 140 years ago as a precursor of the record player and was the first device capable of reproducing sound. Paralleling this technical innovation, Carsten N…
Soundfair - Exhibiting Music 2007 / 2013
* 2021 Stock. Language(s): English, German * How can one put music on exhibit in an art context? This was the question preoccupying curator Clara Meister, artist and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers, and producer Thomas Mayer when they started Soundfair in Berlin in 2008 — an international exhibition project devoted to the concept of music. Over the next five years, they invited artists and musicians from around the world to develop new works at the interface of art, music, and performance that woul…
Notes (8 pieces) Source a New World Music: Creative Music
* In process of stocking * This book was published by Corbett vs. Dempsey and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago on the occasion of the exhibition: Wadada Leo Smith, Ankhrasmation: The Language Scores, 1967-2015; October 11 - October 29, 2015.
A facsimile of Smith's landmark treatise first published in 1973 in an edition of 200 copies, with two additional chapters of recent vintage and an afterword by John Corbett. Design by Wadada Leo Smith (original publication), Sonnenzimmer…
Graphic: Design Work, 1959–2013
* In process of stocking * Brochure for an exhibition held at Rice University Art Gallery, Houston. October 8–November 14, 2013. Includes an essay by curator John Corbett. Design by Sonnenzimmer. Artist and musician Peter Brötzmann is best known as one of the preeminent figures in contemporary improvised music. He was trained as a visual artist in his hometown of Wuppertal, Germany, in the late 1950s, and his early musical career as a saxophonist and clarinetist was paralleled by his first art e…
Paintings and Objects
Catalog for an exhibition held at Corbett vs. Dempsey, October 26 - November 30, 2007. Includes an essay by John Corbett. Design by Kathi Beste. Artist and musician Peter Brötzmann is best known as one of the preeminent figures in contemporary improvised music. He was trained as a visual artist in his hometown of Wuppertal, Germany, in the late 1950s, and his early musical career as a saxophonist and clarinetist was paralleled by his first art exhibitions in Holland and Germany. Brötzmann assist…
Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium
From scouring flea markets and eBay to maxing out their credit cards, record collectors will do just about anything to score a long-sought-after album. In Vinyl Freak, music writer, curator, and collector John Corbett burrows deep inside the record fiend’s mind, documenting and reflecting on his decades-long love affair with vinyl. Discussing more than 200 rare and out-of-print LPs, Vinyl Freak is composed in part of Corbett's long-running DownBeat magazine column of the same name, which was dev…
Studio_L28 – Sonic Perspectives on Urbanism
A multifaceted examination of sound as a central feature in urban planning. Though sound is a central feature within urban life, it still receives little to no attention within processes of urban planning. The main difficulty in integrating sound is that it remains largely immeasurable—decibel levels say little about whether a sound is wanted or not, intrusive or welcome.
Studio_L28 – Sonic Perspectives on Urbanism hooks into the debate here, experimenting with tools and strategies of observatio…
Tapuscrits – Poèmes-Partitions, Biopsies, Passe-Partout
* 2021 Stock. French edition * The collection of typescripts of the pioneer of sound poetry: a monument of some 1200 pages that offers an original approach to one of the most inventive, striking and influential poetic works of the second half of the 20th century, through 120 facsimile "scores", revealing for the first time the writing, in its visual and graphic dimension, which precedes and determines public reading. This publication brings together all the typescripts of the Poèmes-Partitions, …
Beyond Sound
* 2021 Stock. English Edition* Exploring the infra-spaces between images, sound, and voice in the work of artist Marcelline Delbecq, in conversation with art historian Pascale Cassagnau (in the framework of the “Beyond Sound” interview series, dedicated to sound arts).
After studying photography in Chicago (Columbia College) and New York (ICP), Marcelline Delbecq (born 1977, lives and works in Paris) graduated from the Beaux-Arts school in Caen (France), then received a masters degree in curator…
Beyond Sound
* 2021 Stock. English edition * This interview with Romain Kronenberg by curator Anne-Laure Chamboissier traces the filmmaker's progression, from his first projects to the most recent, including some currently in development. It reveals the complexity of a body of work where the relationship between image and sound is constantly reinvented with each new creation. (in the framework of the “Beyond Sound” interview series, dedicated to sound arts).
Romain Kronenberg is a film director and composer.…
Antilogy
Drawing from notions of "bad poetry" as the critical undoing of normative taste, Antilogy brings together works by the Brazilian artist and poet Alex Hamburger.
Central to Hamburger's practice and engagement with poetry is a focus on writing as the expression of a performative disruption and playful reworking of semiotic systems. With references to Fluxus intermediality, Brazilian concretism, experimental music, and sound poetry, Hamburger's work dynamically collapses the distinctions between fa…
Thèses/Voix
* French Edition * A collection of texts by Alessandro Bosetti, between theory, poetry and score, all of which breathe in concert with a series of sound projects and often focus on the voice from different angles and perspectives.
Alessandro Bosetti (born 1973 in Milan, lives and works in Marseille) is a composer and sound artist who focuses is in the fringe area between spoken language and music, working on the musicality of spoken words and unusual aspects of spoken communication, producing te…
Radiophonics Volume 1 - Radiophonic Cultures
* German Edition. 2020 Stock * Radio, which developed over the course of the 20th century into a crucial form of communication, is currently undergoing processes of fundamental reorganization under the general heading »digitalization.« When considered under the older term »radiophonics,« these processes unleash conceptual possibilities that surpass the simple scheme of economization or the acceleration of production- or broadcasting-forms. These conceptual possibilities are addressed by the exhi…
The Nomadic Listener
Based on the author's artistic research on migration, contemporary urban experience, and sonic alienation, The Nomadic Listener is composed of a series of texts stemming from psychogeographic explorations of contemporary cities, including Copenhagen, Berlin, Kolkata, Vienna, Delhi, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and New York, among others.
Each text is an act of listening, where the author records his surrounding environment and attunes to the sonic fluctuations of movement and the passing of events. What s…
Dirty Ear Report #03
* English Edition * Dirty Ear Report #3 documents a collective workshop by sound artists and researchers working in the fields of experimental dramaturgy, sonic social engagement, and voice studies. Representing the sixth in the series of the Dirty Ear Forum held in Lisbon in 2016, the Report brings together essays, text pieces, and documents from the participants. In particular, questions of affect and urban experience are considered, posing sound as a vehicle for generating performative cartog…