(courtesy of David Moss)

David Moss is a self-described “extreme vocalist.” In his bizarre, entrancing performances, he babbles and sings in invented languages, his commanding but playful use of his voice leaving audiences speechless. This Saturday, at the University of Chicago’s Bond Chapel, Moss will premiere his latest composition, “Hyperglyphyx.”

The composition focuses on “a rhythm that drives the human genetic package,” Moss says. Trained as a percussionist and self-taught as a singer, Moss is interested in finding ”a pulse, a beat, a chant buried” deep in human memories and “chemical hieroglyphics.” It is what cannot be expressed in grammar alone that excites Moss. To find these hidden beats and pulses, he uses warped excerpts from texts selected partly for their content, “and sometimes for the rhythm and color of their language,” he says. He cites three diverse authors. “[Italo] Calvino, the Italian writer, has attracted me tremendously because of his imagery about time and memory and physical location and philosophy of places…Melville, especially in ‘Moby-Dick,’ represents this kind of incantational power of speaking and writing through repetition and exaggeration and onomatopoeia—it’s almost like chanting. [Franz] Kafka lies between the two, dealing with narrative puzzles and mysteries.“ The excerpts are critical in Moss’s improvisations. “I like to know that I have someone’s beautiful words in front of me that I can jump into and use as material to start something new again.”

Moss’s Saturday performance is part of the “Praxes of Theory” conference, a two-day international colloquium that explores the relationship between aesthetic theory and performance practice in a variety of disciplines. Appropriately, the colloquium is being hosted by the University’s Germanic Studies, Theater and Performing Studies, and Cinema & Media Studies departments, along with the Renaissance Society. Artists and scholars will discuss a variety of formal papers and conceptual performances, including Moss’s vocals.

“Hyperglyphyx” and a history of unique, titillating performances have kept Moss’s name in discussions of the avant-garde. One of his current projects is the improvisational trio Denseland, formed in February of 2008 to investigate “being compact, earthy, and massive.” To the novice listener, Denseland sounds a bit like the lovechild of Tom Waits and a washing machine. But somehow the trio’s music really does sound earthy—it suspends listeners in an alternate world of sounds that creep, crawl, scrape, and slink.

This ability to activate instruments and his voice into something that seems to move has earned Moss significant critical praise. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991 and a DAAD Fellowship (Berlin) in 1992, and in 2005 he was a soloist in the opening concerts of both the Venice Biennale and the Queensland Biennial Music Festival. In 2001, with funding from the Belgian government, Moss founded the Institute for Living Voice, which offers workshops, concerts, and discussions focused on singing.

When Moss comes to town on Saturday, it will be no surprise if his audience is awestruck. He will likely turn Bond Chapel into a playground for his voice to take flight. Or to sink, swim, swoon, or skate.
Bond Chapel, 1050 E. 59th St. May 22. Saturday, 8pm. Free. renaissancesociety.org

The exhibition in Venice in 2009 (Alexandru Axiente)

“Seductiveness,” on display from May 2nd through June 26th, was initially displayed in the Romanian Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennial. The project is a collaboration of the artists Stefan Constantinescu, Andrea Faciu, and Ciprian Muresan, and the Romanian architecture firm studioBASAR.

The piece is a self-contained unit of art—nothing lies outside the confines of its walls. A labyrinth of passageways, rooms, and stairs, the building fits as snuggly as possible into the confines of the Society’s exhibition space. Inside, it directs viewers through three video installations, a photography slide show, and a garden that sits on top of the structure.

This elaborate setup acts as a sort of theatrical stage, placing each component of the project in a carefully contrived atmosphere with the viewer. The piece’s website expresses this as “‘performances’ of an interpretative type, generated by an entire set of relationships…between the vision of the author, the expectations of the viewer, and the particular circumstances of the encounter with the work.” Isolated and immersed by the structure itself, the viewer is placed in more immediate quarters with the various pieces.

“Seductiveness” is inextricably tied to Romania’s history as a Soviet bloc country and its relatively recent transition to democracy. The slideshow looks at political graffiti in Romania, and one of the video installations addresses the issue of exile in a series of conversations with Chileans who fled the Pinochet regime to Romania and the rule of Nicolae Ceausescu, the country’s communist leader. The ideas of political freedom and the pursuit of liberty, and the ways in which they are tied to the state, are given a unique interpretation in this framework, an interpretation that is fundamentally shaped by the socio-political climate of Romania.

But the piece is also tangled up in the personal experience. Another one of the videos chronicles a fictional bus ride of a man calmly communicating death threats into his cell phone. The garden, surrounded by a sterile white roof, stands as a reminder of the simplicity and delicacy of life amidst the violent and abstract language of other displays. Even the viewer’s place in the ongoing “performance” of the piece, their immediate role in the production of the art itself, gives “Seductiveness” an introspective and immediate air.

In this relief, the question of Romanian identity or place in the world community passes into the periphery. Instead, lying at the center of all of this is, as the Society’s associate curator Hamza Walker puts it, “the question of moral progress in an existential sense.” Drawing from a fundamentally different set of experiences than one is likely to get, say, on the South Side of Chicago, “Seductiveness” attempts to pose and approach that question from many different standpoints. Be it a Chilean-Romanian nationalist or fictional character on a bus, the capacity for moral progression is addressed at every turn.

In a sense, this question of moral progress is one mark of a more unified world community. On the one hand, there is unprecedented access to new information about events as they unfold across the world, an ever constant reminder of the largeness of the world. In this we are allowed a greater picture of the human race’s capacity for good and for bad. But at the same time, this gives us a greater recognition of the difference between people and defines a more concrete sense of identity. And so perhaps it is fitting that such a work has ended up in Hyde Park, by way of Venice, from Romania.

The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Avenue, Bergman Gallery, Cobb Hall 418. Opening May 2. Sunday, 4pm. Runs through June 2. Tuesday through Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday and Sunday, 12pm-5pm. (773) 702-8670. renaissancesociety.org

(courtesy of The Renaissance Society)

Saunders thinks of films as “texts which are always in the air, in the back of our minds,” and his animated pieces play much the same role in the space of the Renaissance Society: their movement is inescapable. Bursts of black-white-black in the gallery come from the animated films as they switch back and forth almost painfully between negative and positive images. There is none of the smooth progression of frames expected from animation. Instead, the sense of movement here is chaotic—the jumps between frames are sudden, obvious, jarring.

Collectively titled “Passage Works,” these films are, in Saunders’ mind, the driving force behind the show. They are projected in two directions—both out into the hallway, luring viewers in, and inside the gallery itself. “I imagined walking inside of a film,” he says of the spaces. The arrangement of constant movement that Saunders created with these films pervades the gallery so thoroughly that even when looking at the still works, a progression of images never stops invading at the corners of the viewer’s eyes.

Saunders is a painter, but in “Parallel Plots” painting is part of a more complex process. Using photographs of obscure actors from the early days of film as references, Saunders draws his own film positives on mylar, retaining some of the integrity of each photo while adding brushstrokes and painted textures. He then takes the positives and makes either contact prints or enlargements, resulting in photographs that look like altered negatives. The works are recognizably both paintings and photographs—a somewhat disconcerting feeling for the viewer used to art that is easily classifiable by media. Saunders cites this tense interplay between the two mediums as a major inspiration for the show. The hybrid creations that result are almost all unframed, producing an effect of intermediacy and incompleteness, much as the films in the space are collections of moving images, but never quite movies.

Even as he deals directly with the physical experience of film, Saunders is not a filmmaker. “My interest in film is really more about how we experience films—how we encounter them, are moved by them, possess them,” he says. And while Renaissance Society curator Hamza Walker calls the subjects of Saunders’ work “stars” in his essay on the show, Saunders explains that “if these are celebrities, it’s a very personal and idiosyncratic selection.” The subjects of the portraits are not easily recognizable because the artist intentionally picked mostly unknown figures from the history of film; the subjects’ obscurity changes the effect of their presence. They become what sanders calls “performances caught in amber, but also living things that you can watch and re-watch and experience in the present.”

For “Parallel Plots,” the Renaissance Society has become a space directly inflected with this simultaneous experience of film, photography, and painting. The viewer is involved, if only by stepping in front of the projector. But more than that, the forgotten stars, their faces staring out in still images from the walls and flickering against them in film, require constant attention.
Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. Through April 11. Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5pm. (773)702-8670. renaissancesociety.org

Bernstein read to a large audience on Sunday, February 14, at a reading sponsored by the Renaissance Society. He was in Chicago for the opening of his daughter Emma Bee Bernstein’s show “Masquerade: A Retrospective,” which runs until February 27 at DOVA Temporary. (Emma was a graduate of the University of Chicago; she died in 2008.) At the reading, Bernstein read selections from his forthcoming selected poems, “All the Whiskey in Heaven”; translations; a poem of Louis Zukofsky’s in a deep New York Jewish accent; an essay by Emma from her book “Girldrive,” which was published in October; and recent poems, including a moving series dedicated to Emma.

“I think of poetry as a fundamental activity within our culture, marginal though it is—as a historical, cognitive, philosophical, aesthetic project that can do an enormous amount in terms of reflecting on the culture we’re in,” Bernstein said. At times in his career Bernstein has been seen as an antagonistic figure, criticizing “official verse culture” and events like National Poetry Month; in our interview, he took a more conciliatory tone. “I always find it amusing in the agonism over poetry that the refusal to be dogmatic and to have principles is routinely described as dogmatic and intolerant but the only thing that seems to be tolerant is absolute intolerance: which is neoliberalism at its heart.”

“Poetry allows us to work out and to think through conflicts and agonisms in a space that isn’t directly involved with macropolitics,” Bernstein said. “One of the roles that poetry can have is to question the nature of how language is used to normalize, to regulate, to suppress expression.” At the reading on Sunday, there was plenty of laughter expressed in the room. In Bernstein’s work, the serious ambitions of poetry are conveyed with plenty of irreverence and humor. “For me poetry is a form of sophism and of rhetoric rather than of truth and sincerity.”

Born in Moscow in 1977, Shteynshleyger embraced Orthodoxy at the age of 16. Around this time, her family moved to the United States, where Shteynshleyger attended the Maryland Institute College of Art and received her MFA from Yale University in 2001. Since then, she has produced two full bodies of work. Her first, “Siberia,” captured the natural beauty of the land that had once hosted the gulags, the string of forced labor camps for criminals and political prisoners during the reign of the Soviet Union. Her second, “City of Destiny,” deals with the Orthodox community in Des Plaines, Illinois, in which she lived for four years, as well as her surroundings on Chicago’s North Side where she has lived since. While “Siberia” was simply photographs of nature, “City of Destiny” includes both portraiture and still lifes, and addresses the issue of Shteynshleyger’s religion head-on. It is from this later body that the exhibition at the Renaissance Society has been curated.

The presence of Shteynshleyger’s religion in her art is obvious. Not only do overtly Jewish objects (religious texts and challah bread) and persons (wearing yarmulkes and Orthodox beards) appear in her photographs; her work is also graced by the contemplative seriousness that is a hallmark of her faith. Stark, white light illuminates Shteynshleyger’s subjects, casting upon them an aura of solemnity. Each work is thoughtfully and intentionally positioned, whether it shows a couple in a rowboat or an abandoned picnic table. This positioning, however, is not only intentional but necessary, as Shteynshleyger shoots with a 4×5” view camera mounted on a tripod, a setup that forces its user to be deliberate. “When you work with a view camera, it has a presence of its own. There’s you, the subjects, and the camera,” said Shteynshleyger of the process. It is to Shteynshleyger’s credit, then, that despite her medium, her photographs rarely look overly staged.

But the presence of the camera, and the distance that it puts between artist and subject, is something more easily noticed by viewers of Shteynshleyger’s work. “I do partially hide behind the camera,” Shteynshleyger admitted. “I always thought of myself as an outsider [when taking a photograph].” This self-imposed disconnect is, perhaps, a function of the continuing struggle that Shteynshleyger feels as an artist who openly acknowledges her religion: “The Jew in me is not embarrassed about being an artist—it’s that the artist in me is very embarrassed about being a Jew.”

Perhaps, though, it is this distance—the distance that the embarrassed artist puts between herself and her faith when she steps behind the camera—that makes these photographs different and new, that has helped Shteynshleyger escape the usual downward career trajectory of overtly religious artists. It creates a tension in her photographs that lends them an interesting and unexpected aspect; it elevates them from being simply declarative religious art to being serious art that addresses faith as a complex, and sometimes alienating, experience.
Renaissance Society, room 418, Cobb Hall, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. Through February 14. Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5pm. renaissancesociety.org

The first image one sees on entering the exhibition is a life-sized photograph of a young woman in a blue suit jacket, standing in a paper-tape-littered room of a stock exchange. “Art student working on commodity futures exchange” is flanked by photographs of F-16s and no-entry signs outside of Poland-based “black sites,” secret CIA-run prisons where the U.S. government has held suspected terrorists. Ripped from the headlines, the photos force the viewer to question their context: what is the woman doing there, what is she looking at, and why does she seem lost? What’s the relation between the barbed wire, Poland, Polonia, globalization, poverty, and immigration?

This initial encounter prepares the viewer for the rest of the exhibition, which tells the story of Polish identity less than it questions its existence. In a way, Sekula’s work explores the possibility of telling such a story objectively and in isolation, and questions the ability of documentary photography to witness a complete narrative without context or elaboration.
Sekula, whose family emigrated from Poland at the turn of the twentieth century, uses photography and textual quotes to form complex narratives that raise questions regarding the social, cultural, and political impact of globalization as well as about the practice of photography itself. The impossibility of telling one story without examining a vast number of others is a theme throughout the exhibit. For instance, a distorted photograph of a painting of Polish immigrant and Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski’s battlefield injury is placed beside an image of “I heart Kielbasa” T-shirts being sold at a Chicago street festival, comparing the commercialization of modern national identity with historical myth. Quotes on Keynesian economics, the Versailles treaty, and mid-twentieth-century European political maneuvering stand opposite a blown-up filmstrip of University of Chicago students waiting for the hammer and sickle-shaped shadow cast by the campus Virginio Ferrari sculpture on May Day. The juxtaposition connects Poland’s national identity to its occupation by European powers, and global politics to the Chicago school of economics.

Sekula universalizes the story of Polish immigrants by including photographs of other ethnic minorities; he implicates the global in the personal by placing military images near sentimental family portraits. Just as individual photographs are enriched through their interaction with other photographs in the exhibition, they also interact with supplementary texts. These range from Polish jokes to quotes by Rousseau and de Beauvoir, as well as Polish and American politicians. Not only do the texts and titles provide useful explanations, but they also provide an emotive and theoretical context for viewing the artwork.
Walker explains that though Sekula’s works are political, they are “different from blatantly political works of traditional documentary photographers, where photographs give a complete, direct narrative of the case at hand.” Rather, he suggests, “you can think of [the pieces] as cinema, as the story board of a film….[Sekula] talked about it in terms of montage…a train of thoughts that would connect these points.”
Renaissance Society, room 418, Cobb Hall, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. Through December 13. Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5pm. renaissancesociety.org

“It’s a cult,” Walker goes on to say, “the kind where you never know quite when you got into it.” The students laugh. They all know what he means. An outsider would laugh too, at their cultishness. The gathering was sponsored by the Renaissance Society and their partner group, the Wrens, a student organization at the University of Chicago that works to create connections between people making and discussing art in Chicago. The group brought students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, DePaul, Northwestern, University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Chicago to the UofC campus and treated them to brunch and a tour of the museum’s latest exhibit. The event successfully fostered lots of conversations among students about how to host similar events in the future at other schools.

Fearless leader Walker took the students into the gallery and proceeded to walk them through the current exhibit, a series of photographs by American artist Allan Sekula. His commentary was filled with references only serious art students would understand, invoking the mystical names of art gods. His followers received it warmly. When Walker took a minute to stereotype the UofC students in one of Sekula’s photos, which shows a crowd waiting to see the statue outside of Pick Hall cast a shadow of the hammer and sickle, he got laughs from both the UofC and non-UofC attendees.

Some of the newly initiated trekked over to the Smart Museum and the Seminary Co-op Bookstore post-brunch to steep themselves in more art. As for the still-unconverted, they surely met some cool artsy people, got inspiration for outfits they will remind themselves never to wear, and finally saw some contemporary art they could stomach.

John McPhee (Andy Newcombe/flickr)

Along with Peter Brötzmann, Ornette Coleman, and Evan Parker, McPhee is one of the legends of his musical generation, which redefined improvised music as a medium of dynamic energy, unbridled expression, and surprise. McPhee came to jazz surprisingly late in his life. Initially trained on the trumpet, he traveled to Germany with the U.S. Army’s band, and only in his early thirties did he discover the experiments in modal and out jazz being conducted by Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman. He taught himself saxophone and was soon recording music, with the funk-influenced free jazz of “Nation Time,” a tribute to political poet Amiri Baraka, appearing on his own independent label in 1970. His career was not a rocket ride to stardom, but rather a slow ascent boosted by a loyal listenership. Using grant money from the financial services company UBS, a Swiss fan named Werner Uehlinger founded HatHutRecords, a now successful imprint for avant-garde jazz and classical music, solely to make McPhee’s music available to his public.

McPhee has not relented for a minute since then. With incredible vitality, he has manned alto, tenor, and soprano sax, trumpet, trombone, flugelhorn, and less academic instruments like the Casio digital horn. He has been an active thinker, as well as a vibrant player, devising unconventional music theories and a series of guiding axioms for his own improvisation, which he called “Po Music”—a methodology for sounding out new “positive, possible, poetic” ways of approaching his instruments and creating sounds. He has crossed a wide range of musical idioms, from the bold out funk of his first album to fiery, untempered free jazz. McPhee has also experimented with electronic music as well, working with the great early electronic composer Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening Band.

This group’s goal was to explore how new sonic environments would affect their music, at one point recording at the bottom of a cistern. For his Bond Chapel performance, McPhee will likely bring not only his incredible sonic palette, but also a particular sensitivity to the idiosyncrasies of the unusual performance space. The University of Chicago’s gothic chapel is an unusual visual and aural environment for experimental music, and the recent performances the Renaissance Society has brought to the space have been welcome surprises in their incongruous pairing of the traditional and spiritual with music that moves forward and sounds out the unknown.

Fred Lonberg-Holm, the Chicago-area cellist joining McPhee, performed in the space during the Renaissance Society’s last round of concerts in the spring, while percussionist Michael Zerang, also from Chicago, has played in the Renaissance Society itself. The two are closely identified with the local avant-garde jazz scene and justly known as two of Chicago’s most unpredictable forces in free improvisation. Both Zerang and Lonberg-Holm approach their instruments with total abandon in their searches to develop new techniques and new sonic possibilities. The two have met McPhee in a musical setting before, as part of the Peter Brötzmann Tentet. This time, the scope is narrowed down to McPhee, Zerang, Lonberg-Holm, and the vaulted ceiling of Bond Chapel.
Bond Chapel, 1050 E. 59th St. November 9. Monday, 8pm. (773)702-8670. Free. renaissancesociety.org

In a 1955 article titled “The Aging of the New Music,” philosopher and critic Theodor Adorno writes, “[Avant-garde music] has in its essence the refusal to go along with things as they are, and has its justification in giving shape to what the conventional superficies of daily life hide and what is otherwise condemned to silence by the culture industry.” According to Gann, Cage helped bring about a sonic liberation in avant-garde music in the same vein. As the “enfant terrible” of modern music, Cage had a Zen-like acceptance of all sounds—even silence—as valid sources of music. Silence is part of sound; sound is not heard just in terms of pitch and harmony, but in duration. To an unschooled public, Cage’s “4’33”” was a piece of silence, verging on a joke, as he instructed its performers not to play their instruments for the entirety of the piece’s three movements. However, there was no such thing as silence in the sense of an absence; to compose silence was a paradox of a theoretical condition as well as impossible.

In his lecture, Gann explained the traditional interpretation of “4’33”,” which states that the piece opens the listener up to the sounds that exist in his or her surroundings, but added that it opens one up to this possibility only when zero is taken as its basis. According to Zen principles, there is no distinction between playing and not playing; the division between art and life is artificial, and drawing a distinction separates one from the richness of life’s surrounding. “4’33”” took the ego out of music by refusing to let the performer’s ego overshadow his sounds. Cage once said that “4’33”” did not need a performer at all, only an audience. Each performance of the piece is a new piece entirely. Cage told composer William Duckworth that he listened to the piece every day, and that its influence and philosophy guided all the music he wrote.

“Several Silences” on display at the Renaissance Society; Sam Bowman

A conceptually broad show whose depth doesn’t quite match its breadth, “Several Silences” aims to explore silence, whether as a subjective sense of having nothing to say, arid formalism, a negational strategy, or as the aforementioned Siemens Arts Program curator Thomas Trummer phrases it, “the great other in the history of Western thought.” It’s a sweeping objective, and the anodyne results are a testament to the number of pitfalls avoided in its curation. As Renaissance Society curator Hamza Walker notes, silence “lends itself to really bad poetic interpretations.”

Ryan Gardner’s 2008 piece “A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor” maintains the cloying trend of titling works for self-aware bombast to dispel any alienating earnestness. Illuminating silence as a moral and physical lacuna, his hundred limpid balls are the centerpiece of the show. Harry Shearer’s “The Silent Echo Chamber,” the aforementioned bank of mute TVs, offers some blandly reputation-confirming character studies of the last election’s major figures. Brow furrowed, Obama looks poised and thoughtful while McCain seems to giggle in a private world. Hillary Clinton is a stoic smiler, and Larry King is ready to pounce. Lewis Baltz’s 1989 photograph “Anechoic Chamber, France Télécom Laboratories” is calmly charnel. Jagged rows of sound-absorbing elements recall terracotta soldiers fixed in eternal formation. In contrast, Troy Brauntuch’s photo-inspired conté crayon drawings keep secrets. His contribution, “Untitled (Shirts numbers 1,2 and 3)” is a smoky depiction of a shelf full of men’s shirts at upscale discount clothier Century 21. A memento mori several times over, it’s based on a photograph taken in mid-September, 2001. Alas, it partakes in this decade’s other titling trend, numbered curtness. The German collective Geissler and Sann’s “personal kill #13” presents a mud-floored brick and concrete corridor from an American urban warfare training site, which complements the antiseptic stillness of Baltz’s anechoic chamber from across the room with lively bootprints, echoing Brueghel the same way a laser parallels a mirror in the sun.

The real pitfall “Several Silences” avoids is “4’33”,” even though the exhibit stumbles a little. After 40 years, John Cage’s point that only the grave is truly silent has basically permeated the art historical canon and seeped a few inches further. Thankfully, the Ren doesn’t beat that dead horse, but both “tributes” to the work are what kids on the 55 bus call “triflin’ shit.” Carl Michael von Hausswolff scores tactical points with his interpretation, an unplayable record with an 81” groove, but it’s a quip for a cocktail party. In that sense it became the high-ceilinged, white-walled gallery of white wine sippers, but hardly earned its corner position. Manon de Bouere’s soporific two-shot film of a pianist twice performing the original is a worthy commentary on the ritualization of the avant-garde with as much relevance as your uncle telling you that home taping is killing music. As I watch two young men in sharp trousers and shirts buttoned up all the way walk out the door past the crowd of old men in jeans-and-blazers, I realize that a site-specific form of negational silence is at work.
Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave., room 418. Through June 7. Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5pm. (773)702-8670. renaissancesociety.org