Jonny Detiger, Amplified Space

JONNY DETIGER Amplified Space

Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project

HOWL! HAPPENING takes its name from the unpredictable, free-form happenings of the 60s and 70s, where active participation of the audience blurred the boundary between the art and the viewer. More to be experienced than described, Howl! Happening will curate exhibitions and stage live events that combine elements of art, poetry, music, dance, vaudeville, and theater—a cultural stew that defies easy definition.

For more than a decade, Howl! Festival has been an annual community event—a free summer happening in and around Tompkins Square Park, dedicated to celebrating the past and future of contemporary culture in the East Village and the Lower East Side.

The history and contemporary culture of the East Village are still being written. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, immigrants, fashion, and nightlife are even more relevant now. While gentrification continues apace and money is king, Howl! Happening declares itself a spontaneous autonomous zone: a place where people simultaneously experience and become the work of art. As Alan Kaprow, the “father” of the happening, said: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.”

Cover: DJ Table (detail), 2012 DJ Booth and Now Wow, 2012

JONNY DETIGER Amplified Space

Published on the occasion of the exhibition January 12 – February 9, 2017 at Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 15

Sound System Richard Fleming

Jonny Detiger creates environments and objects that engage at least four out of the five senses. There are things to look at, things which alter the light around us, things to touch and sit on, lots to listen to, and even things to smell, as when scented soap bubbles burst beside our ears. Detiger loves the element of surprise, and to engage fully with his work you must be willing to explore and risk that surprise. It’s something like a contract. You have to do more than look and pass by; his side of the bargain is that nothing unpleasant will happen to you if you engage. It’s all about, he says, “creating an uplifting feeling.” Many of his works are, in many senses, sound systems.

Among other things, a sound system is an invitation. In Kingston, Jamaica, one of many Caribbean cities where the so-called popular districts are crowded together down by the harbor, at the foot of rugged mountains, you can be on a rural road up in the hills and hear the languid bass and the MCs on the microphone, far down below in the city, distant and muffled, but identifiable by their human warmth. The beat, throbbing out of vast stacks of bass boxes and spreading over the landscape as a pulse, serves as its own best advertisement. All you have to do is follow the sound, the booming invitation to the dance.

I thought about this when I asked Detiger how he came to club music, the sonic quality and vibe of which permeates many of his audio-driven works.

In Jamaica, one hears that sound well into the countryside, mingling with the song of crickets, tree frogs, and the wind ruffling the tropical foliage. It becomes an organic element. Detiger lives in an urban loft of immaculate shiny surfaces and a brilliant white epoxy floor. It feels like a space age laboratory, and I wasn’t expecting him to answer that he traces his musical sensibility back to the early 90s, when he lived off the grid at the end of a long dirt road in Ibiza. There, he said, the thump of balearic house music reached his house in much the same way: as a texture. It became simply another element of the natural environment. When I have experienced

sound this way, I’ve always thought it remarkable how a broadcast product of human technology transforms into something organic.

A sound system is also a piece of furniture. The towering speaker boxes of a Colombian picó, a Mexican sonido, or a Jamaican “sound system” are part of its essence and personality, and the music, the records, the MCs on the microphone are mere shadows of themselves when isolated from the physical amps, tweeters and cabinets. It is no coincidence that all of these manifestations of sound system culture—and the cult of sound reproduction technology originally derived from the 50s and 60s home stereo console, the original hi-fi—are notions Detiger clearly loves, as he infuses them with a crisp modernity that results in something like an encounter between Studio One and Dieter Rams. Detiger takes the design of his environments and objects very seriously, and applies to them a rigorous and polished minimalism— but what I’m trying to argue is that they are full of soul.

The sound system originated when in the heat of the tropics people took their hi-fis out of their living rooms and onto the sidewalk, creating an instant party.

(In that sense one wishes Detiger’s show at Howl! could take place in July instead of January.) A sound system both represents and becomes a community. It’s a gathering of like-minded, affiliated people, sometimes fanatical.

When folks talk about what’s missing from the East Village of the 80s, which they loved, they largely allude to this feeling. My favorite piece of Detiger’s, Boom Boom Box, can only be completely experienced in community. Four polished black boxes, each with a cozy cushion, are spread throughout a pleasing maze of tinted Plexiglas walls. To sit on one triggers a loop of bassy, percussive, musical love. The piece is loaded with hundreds of different recorded loops. All work harmoniously and temporally with one another, but you cannot experience the piece properly without at least another sitter.

Whether it is your date, your posse, or one or more strangers, it takes two, and preferably four, to tango. Detiger points out you may not even immediately

realize you are interacting with other sitters. Then, suddenly, whether with friend or stranger, you find yourself standing, sitting, reacting and participating in a real-time remix.

An audio loop, the repetition of a piece of sound rolling end over end, derives conceptually not only from Reich, and Stockhausen, and bits of magnetic tape spliced into infinity, but from the action of a turntable, another of Detiger’s concerns. The primacy of the loop in sample-based music comes out of early hip hop culture (itself likely derived in part from Jamaican sound systems), when DJs with two turntables seamlessly extended the breakdown of a record by cutting back and forth between two copies. Detiger references these various antecedents in The Love Machine: three turntables, dating back to that early console hi-fi era, or rather “record-changers” capable of playing five LPs in a row. The surprise here is in the random. The unplanned and asynchronous dropping of the records into the playing field creates never-to-be-repeated poetic interactions between the spoken words reproduced by the three turntables. On the wall, the Spin-o-rama series, while spinning at a mere 1 rpm, made me think again of a spinning turntable. They inevitably recall Duchamp’s rotoreliefs, a series of off-center spirographic drawings that anticipate almost the entirety of op art. (Detiger on Duchamp: “Every time you have a great idea, you look around and you find out that guy already did it.”) Even here, sound is important: Detiger points out the subtle, soothing hum of the very analog motor driving the spinning laser cut acrylic discs.

I think there is a risk New Yorkers rushing through might miss the funk that lurks within Detiger’s sharp, polished corners and brilliant surfaces; the sense of joy he hopes you will take away. But I think he means for these objects to be an invitation to community…to interaction. “You don’t really know what it is, until you approach,” he says of the Love Shower. “But if somebody is in a bad mood, they can sit on it, and be instantly showered in love.”

Boom Boom Box, 2009

Big Bass, 2016

Love Machine, 2017

Drum’n Bass, 2017

Spin-O-Rama’s, 2008-2016

(Really) High Fidelity Carlo McCormick

Like curios scavenged from some impossibly chic future—or maybe more the treasured artifacts of that future we were promised but never delivered; a shiny new world of flying cars, friendly robots and surfeit leisure in that all-expansive ultra lounge where sound envelopes the soul in bubbly sonic cocktails spilling out in pill-shaped pools of happiness—Jonny Detiger’s sculptural hybrids design better living as a highly aesthetic, multisensory, interactive and experiential conceptual décor. Ecstatic and really funny, a wink in the mind’s eye and a secret little love finger to tickle one’s fancy, you just get the feeling that Detiger offers meaning through magic, super smart but unabashedly ridiculous, the hypnotic dance of a trickster-artist who took Fluxus out on a danger date with the promise of some dark rock club of angry intellectuals but then the bait and switch of a hedonistic dance floor swarming with smiling people bearing shimmering gifts of light and love. Can you dance to it baby?

At play with Cage’s chance, measuring sound as a wave, joy as a kind of dizzying geometry, color as an emotional nuance, Jonny invites us to take a seat so we can feel the beat and stroll through rainbow prisms that we might get lost in, a psychogeography of being there. At last, science left to the alchemists, art forged in the act of participation, experience

Love Shower, 2008

delivered from the realm of individuality and offered up to the collectivity of community. The more players the more chaotic, but in this a sweeter, richer sound, more dazzle to the vision and depth to the space. Here is catharsis without the trauma, the audio illusions of stereo multiplied exponentially to the sum of everything and then distilled down to a minimalist essence, primary colors fractured into impressionist shards and op medleys, love the message of popular culture most eschewed by fine art, disembodied and crystallized into iconic primal and precious riffs from Moroder’s Donna Summer of Love and the Floyd’s Remembrance of Syd’s Past. It is all too much, but can it ever be enough?

Everyone will experience Detiger’s universe of concrete abstractions in their own way, but they will do so together, for ultimately it is all about the company we keep. By the notions of art we might look at Jonny’s work as a succession of objects (with occasionally something like paintings that seem like anagrams of ideas on the A-side of a forgotten single), but they are rather more akin to vessels; perfectly packaged, beautifully sexy containers for something we may never hear, see, touch, smell or taste so much as know. They bring us distant memories as a matter of present anticipations, the roiling echo and strobic flashbacks of culture before it became an industry, and industry when it was still an ingenuity. The song remains the same but now it is an infinitely extended remix, an anthem of togetherness written in a chorus we all sing along to, even as we forget the words and visit each sound as a picture that keeps on changing. Do you feel the love?

Jonny and Love Shower

The Kaleidoscope Crystal, 2010 Opposite: Punk Crystal, 2011

The Kaleidoscopic walk-in sculptures, 2010

Shine On Me Crazy Diamond, 2008

HOWL! COMMUNITY

HOWL! COMMUNITY

Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo QuiĂąones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker

Howl! Board of Directors Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus

BOARD OF ADVISORS Curt Hoppe Marc H. Miller Dan Cameron Carlo McCormick James Rubio Debora Tripodi Lisa Brownlee

Founder and Executive Director: Jane Friedman Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Program Director: Carter Edwards Gallery Coordinator: Liz Cvitan Marketing and Public Relations: Susan Martin Social Media and Development: Michelle Halabura Videographer: Darian Brenner Video Editing: Yoon Gallery designed by Teddy Kofman Creative Consultant: Some Serious Business Website and Branding: Modern IDENTITY

Jonny Detiger: Amplfied Space Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project January 12 – February 9, 2017 © 2017 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 15 ISBN: 978-0-9975565-4-4 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. NY, NY 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 Photography Front: © 2016 Lazaro Benet Essays © 2017 Richard Fleming © 2017 Carlo McCormick Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper for Modern IDENTITY

The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman

Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project www.howlarts.org / info@howlarts.org

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