it was quite scary actually—especially when the lights came on at the end and you could see all the people who came to watch the concert. Some of Florian Hecker’s work also feels like a sonic assault. How did you end up working with him?
I was curating a musical weekend event at MoMA PS1 in the midnineties and had asked Russell Haswell to come. I had been interested in a few of these Austrian outfits like Farmers Manual and other acts on Editions Mego. I actually didn’t know Florian, but was introduced to him through Russell. Funnily enough, when I met Florian for the first time he had missed his interview for art school in Munich! So he said, “Angela, you have to get me an interview for art school in Vienna. I need the most important person to write me a recommendation so I can get in!” He was very, very focused. He’d given up his chance to study for the gig. He was basically saying that he had come to New York because I had invited him to and missed his interview and now I had to help him. So that’s what we did: we got Alana Heiss [founder of PS1] to write him a review to go to another art school in Vienna. Getting back to the idea of artist as musician, I also think it’s interesting to consider the concept from the other end: musicians who have one foot in the art world. In Germany there are quite a few, with probably the most prominent example being Kraftwerk. Their music recalls cybernetics: emotionally transportive aspects of their music are often represented by systems of transport, which are themselves sources of rhythmic repetition, programmed by man and played by machine. You’ve also created recursive systems with your sound drawings, with machines that record the sound qualities of a given space and transfer them into large format images. How important is coding and decoding, translating and transferring information from one form into another for your work?
I’m a big Kraftwerk fan, and the whole man-as-machine thing is very appealing. It’s a very strong aesthetic, especially when considering what they write their songs about. Like the topic of driving, which is actually very boring. But to answer your question, coding and decoding are very important and transubstantiation or alchemy are interesting ideas for me. I’m an artist who really thinks about objects and the state of things; whether an object is two-dimensional or three-dimensional; whether it’s based on the wall or the floor. There’s something very interesting about the spatial shift of something from one form into another. It’s a negotiation, how things do or don’t go together and what’s the conflict. In your work the observer is often involved in the piece itself—not just in terms of completing its meaning but also as an active participant in the encoding of information.
Yes. The idea of encoding code and decoding code fascinates me. The music on the second release of my record label ABCDLP was composed and performed by George van Dam on violin, though it was made specifically to drive one of my drawing machines in a specific way. I knew I would make it as a vinyl, where the sound produced from the needle in the groove would drive the drawing machine, which is drawing on the wall. I was thinking about the stylus and pen and making the connection between man, that one long groove and a single area on the wall with a yellow rectangular drawing. I think it’s important to mention that this specific drawing machine is driven better by certain frequencies, so the composition was made within certain ranges and within certain parameters that fit to the microphone on the machine. The actual quality of the movements drawn on the wall was very much like the sound of the violin. Composition made the drawing, and the 56 EB 3/2013
machine became the instrument. I made the machine first, and then we set the parameters for the frequencies and stuff and talked about the structure of the piece and the length. Depending on which piece or machine, different microphones will be used. For some drawing machines, the mic is more geared towards the human voice and the picture produced corresponds to that. But of course I have little control of what actually happens in the environment. You also work a lot with the physical representation of rules, as well as with color—two themes that Ludwig Wittgenstein often addressed. Wittgenstein famously claimed that his remarks on color would be of little use for visual artists because he wrote about the meaning and use of color words and how they reflect our conceptual schemes, as opposed to color organization or aesthetic function.
As an art student I read Wittgenstein, but that was long ago. As a young artist it was very beneficial for me to have read Wittgenstein laying out the internal logic of language. When you’re an artist and you’re putting things together, it’s often about being pragmatic in terms of combining elements in a given language. He also lays out philosophical ideas in an especially poetic way.
That happens by itself, but it’s not an intention to make something poetic, especially not for me. I’m thinking about structure. The way some people talk about art is sometimes a little bit cringe making. When people say something is “poetic” it’s like being romantic, and that sounds really terrible to me. Poeticness is a by-product, an accident. You’ve mentioned John Cage as a major influence. You actually met him, too. How did that come about?
I was in my early twenties and I was invited to New York to be in a group show in a gallery and John Cage was also in that show. I was young and I remember reading a lot about him on the plane, so I was very excited to meet him. When our works were being installed we spoke with each other about the work and some of the other pieces in the show. And we talked about mushrooms, because there was a mushroom growing out of this wooden piece of art by Louise Bourgeois. We were wondering about where it came from: From the place it was stored, or from the wood which it came from in Mexico? He was actually an expert on mushrooms and I knew that, so we spoke quite a bit about that. We also spoke about the process of chance and how he uses that in his work. I find it very inspiring how he invented his own language and established his own artistic space to talk about language and music. I don’t really think of him only as a musician. I think of him as an artist because of the experimental freedom of his work. The things that he did are a way of seeing. It’s about perception. What’s the difference between sound art and music?
I don’t like to think of sound art. I don’t like those terms. I like to think about music and about art. “Sound art” sounds like a bureaucratic definition. It doesn’t appeal to me. It’s interesting to hear your description of going beyond the expected modus operandi of organizing sound as an entry into creating art. With your label you’ve kind of gone the other way by appropriating the formats of musicians—LPs and home listening—while musicians often want to get away from those formats in doing art.
Well, I also work with text and rules and structure and materials, and