music, love, tradition, banjo, songs, singer, original,

Result #1

music, love, tradition, banjo, songs, singer, original, vernacular, and the like.The albums are free. Like sound records, they have no visual edge, but they look like physical objects, and are mounted on the wall, a standard installation and limited to five. I see the K-Mart way, the way some of the earliest music comes across. My eyes sometimes get in the way of the music, or seem to push to one side of it, on a longer, narrower installation. The shelf on the floor looks like a soundboard, but its length is determined by the number of headphones plugged into it.I am most attracted to the music, or to the texture of the art, and especially to the sound quality. The combinations, the contrasts, the clash of sounds, as well as the rhythm and rhythm, are mesmerizing, yet their rhythm is controlled, fixed, that is, it doesnt fly. The recording is very small, and the album itself is large. If the experience is one of continuous listening, as I hear it to be, the sound is a rush of emotions, of the evocative sensuous possibilities of classical music. It is breathy, quick, relaxed, with no drama. The way it is played is relaxed, its rhythm is good, relaxed, but with no anticipation of future surprises. The sound quality, that critical other requisite of high art, is good. It isnt as loud as I am used to, and its depth isnt a surprise. There are no overtones or distracting high-tech heaps of sound. The sound is happy and pleasant.Its not a surprise that music is good. It is part of the natural world, and we are conditioned to respect the natural order that has governed this world. There is a great harmony of sound, and its structure is revealed by its sounds. But if music is good, it is good because of an order. It is a good sign, a good sign for the world.

Result #2

vernacular, and beyond.

Result #3

music, love, tradition, banjo, songs, singer, original, vernacular, singing, felt-tip pen, and dust. They are treated as conceptual, as if by a stage director and screenwriter (although perhaps no screenwriter), but with each detail taken as an element in the composition. The artist offers only the most general idea of what she is doing and the most ordinary language she can use, without her knowing it and without the viewer ever being forced to accept it. This technique is sometimes successful, in work where the viewer does not know what a piece is about. In this case, however, the visual implications are not significant enough. The pieces are too egotistically executed, and their execution is too amateurish.This situation might be seen as an antidote to the conventional narrative of the minimalist: it has always been considered more interesting to read the actions in the work as details of a drama, to read the meaning of the black outlines of the figures and objects that always seem to be absent from the pictures, than as a totality. The more important point is to see the drama as a bit of a reduction of sensual situations. The minimalist understands that its possible for this kind of visual reproduction to become totally decorative, as it has been in the case of the most traditionally abstract art. The minimal is not purer, because it is a symbolic representation of visual forms. The minimal is a reduction of visual forms. This reduction, however, does not take into account the fact that there are so many kinds of visual forms, that the reduction does not take into account the multiplicity of visual meaning that the play with sensual and symbolic images has entailed. I have seen many plays in which the protagonist is reduced to a number of props, or of a simple sign with no more expressive value than a sign. In those cases, it is the scene itself that is important: the act of visual representation is reduced to the choice of one symbolic sign or sign and, thus, the significance of the sign is not enhanced.

Result #4

music, love, tradition, banjo, songs, singer, original, vernacular, and so on. The installation is closed, and the walls are divided into two sections. Here, the history of music is conveyed in the poetic fragments, that is, the voices of hundreds of thousands of people. The enormous sound tracks, created by more than one hundred synchronized recordings (each composed by a different artist), emanate from a central speakers array. They disperse into endless proliferations, dissolving in various physical and psychological combinations and then reappearing in the form of live performances and numbers on paper.The sound and image of these continuous and distorted sounds, of which the stage is practically a sculpture, eventually come to a halt, only to be repeated, strung up, repeated, or played over and over again. This is the first encounter of the user with the true present, a quiet present that they witness, touch, listen to, feel, enter, and exit, a noisy present that they become part of. So that in the first part of the work they may feel in the flesh as much as they can, once they are brought into the world, experiencing the instruments, the physical apparatus, and the instrument of sound, which they now hear, experience intensely.The soundscape that moves toward the center of the stage establishes a distance between the individual performers and the audiences. The sounds are so precise, so vivid, so filled with the emotions of ecstasy and longing, that it is as if they were recordings of the recordings of voices made by long-lost lovers. The experience of the performance, like that of the ancient musicians who were found to be speaking with the dead, finds a golden ratio between its emotional and the individual experience of time. The individual moments, usually fleeting, are annihilated by the frequency of the sounds. It is as if the actors had been given orders to make noise—to raise the volume. Yet the noise of the voices is not loud enough; they are silenced.

Result #5

music, love, tradition, banjo, songs, singer, original, vernacular, and folk music. What if it werent the art of such disparate genres as the painters brush, the blues, the scuba divers, or vaudeville? This was Musilmans idea: She wanted to show how music—like the natural world—is, in fact, better understood when it is sung.The work that made the most sense in a gallery setting was Untitled, 2016, which features the only music in a long, karaoke-like solo performed by four women, three of whom were women: Kiki Kogler, Roxette LaBelle, and Beaux Themede, and performed by five women and three men. The sounds were the natural vocalizations of sea creatures and humans alike, and the music was created by an older woman and three young women. The music played on a piano laid out on the floor and carried a text describing the process by which the unruly spirits of the new land were absorbed into the dominant society. The work combined the logic of Raphaels scores with a folk music infused with seductive female sounds and symbols. Gently played from an upright piano with a VCR, and cast in bronze and anchored to a lower wall, it at first seemed like a showcase for a new form of work, but it was a unique work that had been performed in a room that is normally used only for sound engineering—a sculpture in a gallery.Such theatricality, of course, is not new to Musilmans work, but it was especially resonant in the context of her past collaborations with directors such as Craig Kauffman and Andrew Russell and musician Ryan Trecartin. The three women in Untitled, for example, created a musical scenario based on the spontaneous, or spontaneous but spontaneous, gestures of a Native American. Their performance is an act of reverence.