MICHAEL G.F. PRIOR
ELASTIC ORGANUM
Heide Museum of Modern Art
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Michael G.F Prior Elastic Organum detail 0:32 min
MICHAEL G.F. PRIOR: ELASTIC ORGANUM
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MICHAEL G.F. PRIOR: ELASTIC ORGANUM Linda Michael
This exhibition is part of a series by Michael G.F. Prior, a Melbourne practitioner working with visual art and sound performance. It is inspired by the organum, a twelfth-century polyphonic composition for the human voice in which parts are accumulated over time to create evolving rhythmic and harmonic structures. Using finely tuned motors, Prior creates self-playing devices that contribute distinct voices to a composition that animates the gallery space. As in an organum, they work together to create a whole. The installation emerges from a process of play: Prior improvises with objects and materials ready to hand to create esoteric machines whose particular magic serves no explicit lesson or function. Their often ready-made parts are chosen for practical reasons, for their ability to create rhythmic shapes and sounds. A striking uniformity of look and colour emerges from this utilitarian approach, creating its own minimalist aesthetic. Cardboard boxes, cymbals from a drum kit, copper piping, lengths of wire, a microphone stand—all tend to be basic forms, without added colour or refinement. Circles, squares and lines predominate, in black, bronze-brown and silver, and only the central triangular mirror is cut to shape. Here ‘Art is Easy’, to borrow a Fluxus (or a punk) mantra. Prior applies cycles and rhythms to these physical objects to see how they might function in a temporal way. He draws upon their inherent properties: flexibility, resonance, reflectivity, magnetism; the way objects sway, spin, hide, reveal, drape, drip or are subject to gravity. By setting into motion the installation’s provisional
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elements—water, light, ball, tube, chain—he allows a sequence of phasing synchronicities to unfold. The overall composition bends and stretches as a result of repetition, chance and gentle rhythmic, tonal and spatial variations, and speaks to our natural impulse to decipher patterns. As Prior says: ‘Because the things that I’m making are based on motors, each with a certain number of revolutions per minute, when I put multiple motors in a room together, it creates a series of cycles. In a similar way to process music, these cycles compose sound but also visual rhythms and these, like sound, play off each other in various ways’.* Prior’s mechanisation of simple materials creates a composition whose aural rhythms and tonalities we experience together with our observations of form and movement. Much of it is subtle, at the edge of awareness. Rotation is the base rhythm, echoed in the repeated circles or spheres, and inflected by natural irregularities—the shape of a rock, the flow of air, the evaporation of water. Among other sounds, it creates the drone of a ball chain brushing against a turning cymbal, a continuous low-key sound that sets the tone for other more capricious layers—the tinkling of metal chain on copper, the amplified static of metal brushing against live wires, the soft whirring of balls grinding dust into a mirror. The metallic resonance of Prior’s composition references British industrial artist David Jackman, who releases sound recordings under the name Organum. Elastic Organum belongs to a tradition of using ordinary objects to create sound, from the noise machines of futurist Luigi Russolo in the early twentieth century to installations by Ernie Althoff, notable Melbourne sound artist and instrument maker. Althoff’s work is similarly reliant on the sonic potential of simple processes and materials, and the interplay of repetition and variation. Prior’s work has sources in other forms too; for example, the way comics represent the passage of time with 10
MICHAEL G.F. PRIOR: ELASTIC ORGANUM
panels, or ‘containers’. These marks on paper are echoed in the linearity of the installation, like a collection of drawings in space. Prior’s hidden automata, abstracted through live video, mimic the illusionism of pre-cinematic technique. Prior’s simple physics highlights the beauty of natural forces. In common with other artists working today his work has an ecological dimension—he makes his work from what he has to hand, with little waste, and recycles one work into another— anticipating a future where we will need to rely on basic material and processes. As Prior says, ‘I feel like I’m making these esoteric machines that have no purpose, but maybe in the future they will; maybe they are prototypes’. In Elastic Organum Prior has created a world with its own logic and time, a cybernetic ensemble of objects, sounds and materials wherein electrical and gravitational forces create a space of wonder and anticipation. * All quotes are taken from Michael Prior’s public talk on Elastic Organum, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 21 June 2014, 2pm.
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MICHAEL G.F. PRIOR: ELASTIC ORGANUM
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Heide Museum of Modern Art
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Michael G.F Prior Elastic Organum video 0:44 min
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BIOGRAPHY Michael Prior was born in 1977 in Sydney. In 2002 he received a Certificate IV in Sound Production from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, and graduated from RMIT University with a Bachelor of Media Arts in 2005 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in 2008. Prior has collaborated regularly as Chronox, with Lachlan Conn, producing installations, publications and performances. He also runs Tape Projects performance space in Carlton, Victoria, and has published music, books and ephemera with Tape Projects and Thoth Press, among others. Prior’s solo exhibitions include Florid Organum, West Space, Melbourne, 2014; Outlet (Objects in Space), Conical Gallery, Melbourne, 2009; Loophole, Berlin, Germany (sound performance), 2008; and Headmuzak, Firstdraft Gallery, Surry Hills, New South Wales, 2006. He has participated in group exhibitions including Dub Stijl, Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne, 2014; ONO Project, Hobart; Have You Eaten Yet? Asian Art Biennial, Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, 2007; and Liquid Architecture 7, City Watch House, Old Melbourne Gaol, Melbourne, 2006. Installations by Chronox include Volume Works, Lamington Drive Gallery, Collingwood, Victoria, and Poliscope, What Tomorrow Brings, Wollongong City Gallery, New South Wales, both in 2013; Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Fitzroy, Victoria, 2011; Liquid Architecture 11, Bouverie Studios, Carlton, Victoria; Lamington Drive Gallery, Fitzroy; Firstdraft Gallery, Surry Hills; MONA FOMA, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart; all in 2010; Platform Contemporary Arts, Melbourne; Hatched 09, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, in 2009; and Liquid Architecture 9, North Melbourne Town Hall, Victoria, in 2008. In 2013 Chronox participated in Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, with a sound and video work, and in 2011 undertook a performance tour of 11 venues across the United States. Performance installations by Chronox include Bunch of Twos, West Space, Melbourne, 2011; and Now Now Festival of Spontaneous Music, Wentworth Falls School of Arts, New South Wales, New South Wales, 2010.
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Other collaborative projects include Transit Lounge, Transmediale 08, Program Gallery, Berlin, Germany, 2008; 100 Proofs the Earth is Not a Globe, Next Wave Festival, Victorian Space Science Education Centre, 2010 (with Tape Projects); Scratch, Banana Alley Vault 8, Melbourne, 2006 (with Tape Projects); |:|, Transit Lounge, Berlin, Germany, 2006 (with Benjamin Ducroz, Kristina Matovic, Tanja Kimme and Ben Milbourne); and Adventures of Me and Me, Forest Upstairs, Edinburgh, United Kingdom, 2005, (with Zoe Scoglio). Prior’s soundtracks include Neomad and Ngurrura (Big hArt—Yijala Yala), interactive iPad apps, both 2013; Junk Punks (Big hArt), video screened on ABC TV, 2012; sound design for animated self-portrait by Arlene Textaqueen, National Portrait Gallery Online, 2007; and sound design and music for Up For Grabs (feature film, dir. Tadgh Taylor), 2007. Prior produced and featured on Tape Projects, Locked Groove, Compilation LP, 2008. Chronox has published ‘The Loop’, a text in Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction, Surpllus, 2013; a CS on Dungeon Taxis, New Zealand, 2011; and on Thoth Press an LP, 2010; a 7”, 2009; and a CD, Total Transitional Flexibility, 2008, and a documentary video for West Space Journal, http://westspacejournal.org. au/issue/summer-2013/ michaelprior.org
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Heide Museum of Modern Art
EXHIBITED WORK Michael G.F. Prior Elastic Organum 2014 metal and wood stands, microphone stand, copper pipes, steel wire, ball chains, bamboo, cymbals, ball bearings, magnets, cameras, projectors, drinking glass, rocks, mirror, water, pump, PVC tubing, motors, laser diode, amplifier, speakers, electronics, analogue voltage control system Courtesy of the artist
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MICHAEL G.F. PRIOR: ELASTIC ORGANUM
Produced on the occasion of the exhibition: MICHAEL G.F. PRIOR: ELASTIC ORGANUM Curated by Linda Michael Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Saturday 21 June – Sunday 5 October 2014 © Heide Museum of Modern Art, the artist, authors, designer and photographers. Design: Tristan Main Photography: Christian Capurro ISBN: 978-1-921330-37-7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We are grateful for Michael’s enthusiastic participation in Heide’s program, and his efforts to ensure the work’s smooth operation over an extended period. Thanks also to Heide staff, particularly Stephanie DiBattista and the front-of-house team, Samantha Vawdrey and Tristan Main for their work on this project, and to Louis Balis for his support.
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