Mission Statement
The aim of this project is to examine collaboration across mediums.
Artists were assigned a partner who specializes in a different art form to create a new work together. These partnerships include musicians, photographers, writers, sculptors, and more.
Every artist was introduced to the project the same way. They were not given strict or prescriptive instructions in an effort to encourage each group to collaborate in slightly different ways.
Some groups chose to work together on a piece from start to finish that integrated their respective mediums.
Others started with a piece that was developed independently by one artist, and was later built upon by their partner, or responded to, in their respective art form. For one collaboration, each artist sent their partner an independent work as a source of inspiration.
Most partners have never met, and none are based in the same city. Each group responded to the prompt, long distance communication, and how to integrate their preferred medium differently, which produced entirely unique works.
The exploration of multi-medium collaborations is nothing new.
The most obvious challenge that collaborations across different mediums must reckon with is that some art forms are temporal (pertaining to time) while others are spatial (pertaining to space). How can a musician working in time collaborate with a sculptor working in space?
This was explored long before this project by musician Andrew Bird and sculptor Ian Schneller in their piece, Sonic Arboretum.
The work involved a collection of horn speakers made by Schneller, which amplified Bird’s 50-minute composition, Echolocations: Canyon. This piece was performed and recorded by whistling and playing violin in canyons to explore the natural reverberation of the environment. The work was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and well as New York City’s Guggenheim throughout the 2010s. Schneller’s speakers were placed intentionally, some even spinning, so that the music also explored the reverberation of the particular gallery it was presented in. In this way, it was impossible to perceive the temporal music without the spatial dimension of the room.
Daniel Albright explores this topic in the book, Untwisting the Serpent.
In his introduction, he compares the combination of arts to the combination of musical notes.
Each note can be played on its own, or at the same time as others, creating a chord. This polyphony can be seen in the unity of mediums as well. Albright goes on to examine how an opera has traditionally been talked about through isolating its components. The music is separate from the text, which is separate from the stage design.
Instead, Albright argues, “perhaps these are chords in which one element is a music note, another is a word, and the third element is a picture- chords that compose themselves out of different layers of sensuous reality.” In this way, an opera is not just a combination of various art forms, it creates something greater than that:
“Certain collaborations seem to possess such an intimate integrity that all consciousness of the constituent arts vanishes. The arts that pertain to time, such as poetry and music, seem to acquire a new dimension in space; the arts that pertain to space, such as painting, seem strangely temporalized.” — Albright
A more recent example of this is seen in Reich Richter Pärt,
which is on exhibit at The Shed at Hudson Yards from April 6th to June 2nd. The work is split up into two collaborations, one between painter Gerhard Richter and composer Steve Reich, the other between Richter and composer Arvo Pärt.
The collaboration between Richter and Reich is in immersive live performance, where on one side of a large gallery sits the New York based ENSEMBLE SIGNAL, which performs Reich’s composition. Richter’s visuals are projected on the opposite side of the gallery, with the audience in between.
The visuals present an abstract painting by Richter digitally repeated, mirrored, divided, and other forms of manipulation, until it is left as solid bands of color.
“The structure of the music and the film are tied together,” said Reich in an interview shared by The Shed. Two repeating notes composed by Reich respond to two pixels seen on the screen. As the strips of color expand to four pixels, four arpeggiating notes can be heard. These patterns continue to correspond for the entirety of the work. Between the audio and visual “the structure and mood are locked.”
Michel Chion has been writing about the unity of mediums throughout his career.
The French film theorist, author, and composer coined the term synchresis, fusing the words and concepts of synchronism and synthesis. Synchresis is defined in his book, Audio-Vision: Sound On Screen, as “The spontaneous and irresistible mental fusion, completely free of any logic, that happens between a sound and a visual when these occur at exactly the same time.”
“Certain experimental videos and films demonstrate that synchresis can even work out of thin air- that is, with images and sounds that strictly have nothing to do with each other, forming monstrous yet inevitable and irresistible agglomerations in our perception.”
How can different art forms be fused to create a concise artistic statement? Is it possible to perceive both the spatial and temporal acting as one? When perceiving this unity, it is internalized as a dissonance or polyphonous harmony?
The Sum of Their Parts may raise more questions than it answers, but its goal is present an experiment to place these questions into action.
