The word feminism was the subject of a public conversation that took place on November 18, 2014, at MoMA. Under the heading “Translating Feminism,” Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Agata Jakubowska, and Gayatri Sinha discussed the term’s implications for artistic practice in their respective areas of scholarship. In Latin America, Fajardo-Hill argued, feminism has often been regarded as a bourgeois…
“Let’s convert all the systems into poetry and visions.” Felipe Ehrenberg, Telegraphic Work, 1970. In this text, Zanna Gilbert explores the Work Secretly titled Upwards and Onwards…whether you like it or not by the Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg, considering how mail art works continue to provoke even years after their inception. “Let’s convert all systems into poetry”…
Moją specjalnością były filmy o miłości, o macierzyństwie, śmierci, martyrologii czy funeralnym świecie, ilustrowane muzyką konkretną. Ja zilustruję w moim warsztacie dowolny film na dowolny temat. Chciałem wygenerować czy wynaleźć, wymyślić dźwięki, których cechą jest to, że dotąd nigdy nie zaistniały, nie dają żadnych skojarzeń, bo jak ktoś bierze muzykę instrumentalną, to natychmiast słuchacz widzi…
Eugeniusz Rudnik—a lifelong sound engineer of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio—speaks about the early years of Polish electroacoustic music, about his distrust of both musical scores and the deceptive idea of musical and artistic progress, and about the fine line between sound engineer and composer.
Mail art celebrates a fissure in the system and, in fact, mocks its methods of silencing and control, creating opportunities for direct communication without manipulative intermediaries. This text, authored by Colectivo 3, was disseminated as part of the ongoing project of the Poema Colectivo: Revolución, in 1982. It sheds light on the strategies and ideas that…
“I have not graduated from Gutai’s way of thinking. I still want to do something new, that which has not existed before.” Motonaga Sadamasa was eighty-six when he made this reflection on Gutai in 2008, thirty-six years after the group had disbanded. Gutai was not a collective bound by rules of art-making. Rather, it was…
This text was originally published under the theme “Polish Radio Experimental Studio: A Close Look”. The theme was developed in partnership with Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (MSŁ). It was edited by Magdalena Moskalewicz, MoMA with Daniel Muzyczuk, MSŁ. The original content items in this theme can be found here. Depending on the type of recording, the whole apparatus changes like a…
Browse scans of the complete music scores co-published by the Polish Radio Experimental Studio below and read the essay “Alchemist Cabinet of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio: Music Scores of and for Experiments” to learn more.
Japanese artists Shigeko Kubota and Shiomi Mieko arrived in New York in 1964 at the invitation of George Maciunas. Working in sculpture, performance, and video, Kubota was active in the avant-garde art community of Tokyo in the early 1960s, and then, after her move to the U.S., among the Fluxus artists in New York. In…
Just as alchemists in the Middle Ages were the masters of arcane knowledge, so the core members of the Studio—the sound engineers—were masters of new technology in music.
The Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES), established in Warsaw in 1957 under the auspices of Poland’s official state broadcaster, provides a fascinating insight into the importance of a site as a key catalyst for avant-garde exploration and production.
I believe that painting ultimately still rests on a linguistic level, which enables us to make proper judgments regarding the proficiency and profundity of expression. In other words, what matters to artists is what kind of language they authentically have a feeling for and whether they have entered a desirable linguistic state….Sometimes the feeling for…
