Art/music review: Sissy Spacek at Issue Project Room, Brooklyn

Last night E and I went to a concert at the Issue Project Room, a concert/installation space in a former can factory in Gowanus (also houses Valerie Hegarty's studio!). While I wasn't consulted about the kind of music I was going to hear prior to the event, I tried to retain an open mind. We walked in to pick up our tickets from Will-Call (E's name was the only one on the list), and then sat down in the space: a long narrow white-washed room, buttressed by white wooden pillars, with metal folding chairs facing the end of the room.

Gerritt Witmer took the stage first. After a brief intermission to rearrange the room into a crescent shape, with the chairs facing one long wall, Sissy Spacek came out to perform. The first piece consisted of a bandmember tying a bunch of gardenias to an electric guitar with tape, and then removing them. While it may sound like it would sound weird, the sounds produced by a gardenia brushing against a guitar string was oddly luminous, soft, angelic. The next bandmember played his electric guitar with a wrench and bunch of metal strips, producing a much more jarring sound.

This work, which offers the listener no comforting melody to rely on, no strain of recognition, challenges the listener to examine her expectations of "music." It made me more attentive to the sounds I was hearing, looking for where they were emanating from and imagining complex sound productions of diverse and distinct elements. Rosalind Krauss wrote on minimalist art and the future of museums that both profoundly decenter power: whereas previously, art consisted of representations easily identified in scenes that reified our values and civilizational understanding, minimalist art and experimental sound remove any stable foundation. They challenge expectations, and by refusing to give us melody or identification, allow the viewer and listener to bring herself to the work. We bring the meaning now, it is not produced elsewhere for us to consume. This makes art/music profoundly subjective.

While Sissy Spacek isn't something I could listen to on my iPod on the train - it is definitely performance art/music, I appreciated how Sissy Spacek forced me to examine my assumptions about what I hear, where those sounds come from, and the meanings that I search for in the world around me. After all, art is meant to challenge assumptions and speak to something deep, submerged, subjective, intimate.






Link to Issue Project Room's discussion of the event here.