The New York Times, June 13, 1982

Forays Into Sound and Videotape

An art show that can be played on a turntable: that’s the catch-phrase for “Revolutions Per Minute,” a two-record album of 21 “original sound works” by artists who exhibit at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Inc., 31 Mercer Street. Though the punny title has a political ring, not to worry. The most revolutionary aspect of the disks is – well, that they spin. But the artists themselves, released from visual imperatives, give us quite an earful: they talk, chant, sing, act, ruminate, tell stories, play roles and coax sounds from offbeat instruments, each in a separate segment.

To be sure, most are performance artists of one sort or another, or are at least at home with the notion that artists may be heard as well as seen. The Conceptualist Les Levine, for example, renders a plaintive country and Western ballad that he himself has written; the California stunt man Chris Burden recites an anti-nuke “atomic alphabet,” and Eleanora Antinova, alter ego of the multi-mediaste Eleanor Antin, reminisces campily about her life as a dancer in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

The album was the idea of Jeff Gordon, a music writer-producer who has written songs for Joan Baez and is a partner in the Greene Street Recording Studio in SoHo. Wanting to “bridge the gap” between the visual and the aural, he approached the dealer Ronald Feldman with a proposal for a record with which visual artists could experiment with sound. Possibly inspired by the recording success of the performance star Laurie Anderson, most of the gallery’s artists allowed themselves to be signed up.

As demonstrated amply last fall in “Soundings,” the lively show on the role of sound in 20th century art at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, N.Y., the idea of such media-crossing by visual artists is by no means new. Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, among others, made sound part of their art; the collagist Kurt Schwitters even did “noise poems.” Such contemporary figures as Andy Warhol and John Giorno have made their own albums, and in 1977 “Airwaves,” a two-disk album put out by One Ten Records, boasted the talents of Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Jacki Apple, Connie Beckley, Diego Cortez, Terry Fox, Leandro Katz, Richard Nona and Dennis Oppenheim, among others.

The similarity of some of their material to that of popular culture, the growing audience demand for tapes and disks, and the increasing sophistication of sound studios have awakened more performance artists these day to the possibilities of recording. But the problem for those keyed mainly to visual presentations is to devise an effective means of aural expression. On “Revolutions Per Minute,” not everyone has succeeded. Even though the pieces are each fairly short – nor more than three or four minutes – some wallow inanity, such as Chris Burden’s shouted “atomic alphabet” (“A for atomic, B for bomb, etc.); an exceedingly boring meditation by Schlossberg, a “language” artist , on the differentiation of “metaphors” from “vibrations,” and Douglas Davis’s heavy-breathing disquisition, “How to Make Love to a Sound.”

There’s a little cheating here, too, since several contributors get by with recorded passages from previously taped material. They include Joseph Beuys, and the Russian émigré artists Komar and Melamid, who last year conducted a “School of Revolution” for students from the Massachusetts College of Art. And the group of art-oriented architects who function under the banner of SITE (Sculpture in the Environment) simply present a clutch of comments from the public on a new building they have put up in Texas.

More effective pieces include a slightly loony reading by William Burroughs in which phrases are eerily “echoed” in reverse with the aid of a “time machine” designed by Piotr Kowalski of M.I.T.; Ida Applebroog’s “Really, Is That a Fact?” a mélange of cocktail party clichés ending up with a sneak punch, and Hannah Wilke’s “Stand Up,” a militant ballad written and sung by the artist herself.

But what’s really interesting about “Revolutions Per Minute” are the performances that manage to give sound a structure or color without a narrative content. Jud Fine, for example, a Conceptual artist who is interested in “space-time” relationships, makes a riveting polyphonal chant from the words “Polynesian/Polyhedron.” David Smyth, an artist from upstate, scored Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” for three typewriters and personally conducted the typists who performed – very effectively, too. A nice discovery is “Pieces of Sound,” the work of the late Vincenzo Agnetti, an Italian artist who juxtaposes his own incredibly liquid voice – reciting numbers – with loud clots of noise produced by playing a prepared drum set. And then there is Terry Fox’s “Internal Sound,” a kind of intergalactic drone achieved by stringing two piano wires from end to end of a Bolognese church and plucking them with the fingers. It sounds like nothing so much as two piano wires strung from end to end of a Bolognese church and plucked with the fingers.

The “Revolutions Per Minute” show at the Ronald Feldman Gallery, which includes fanciful record sleeves designed by the artists represented, allows viewers to listen to each segment of the record via earphones. It has been dismantled for the time being, but will be up again from July 9 through the month. It will also appear at Documenta, the international art exhibition at Kassel, Germany, this summer, and at the Tate Gallery in London from Aug. 22 through Sept. 10. The record is available through the gallery at $15.

GRACE GLUECK