Terre Thaemlitz (b. 1968, USA)
Reframed Positions, 2020 [fragment of the exhibition in photo above]
Soulnessless: Cantos I-IV, 2012-2020 [multimedia performance]
Meditation on Wage Labour and the Death of the Album, 2008

The Substation, Newport (VIC), Australia / visited 13/03/2020

This is a refreshingly confusing one. Ideologically we must be as far apart as it gets – I don’t care much for identity politics, market critique or activist art. Yet, on some methodological-philosophical-attitudinal meta-level we must be soulmates.

Thaemlitz deliberately makes works that don’t fit well in readymade categories – wildly mixing themes, media and genres, facts and fiction, artistic expression and analytical sharpness, aesthetics and anti-aesthetics and what else. That’s what I am doing, too, even if our reasons may be very different.

I am also inspired by her being grounded in sound and yet being able to branch out into other media as well as follow sound into most unexpected domains. E.g. in Canto III “Pink sisters” of Soulnessless he is interviewing nuns about their convents’ sound systems. Totally random, it would seem, but soon you realise that such sound systems are there to amplify the god’s word and a number of other implications. And activist art suddenly comes across as witty and insightful inquiry rather than propaganda.

A lot of my brainpower is currently consumed figuring out the ways to frame-package-present my materials. Thaemlitz has given me some insights on that as well. I was not too excited about the gallery exhibit – rather dull photos, videos with endless texts to be read signalling “activism” that for me is almost a stop sign. Yet, when the same videos were presented performance-style, with introductions and no easy escape, they left me amazed, amused and inspired.

And the concept of “Meditation on Wage Labour and the Death of the Album” as world’s first full-length MP3 album consisting of 30 hours of unhurried piano sounds was very clever conceptually, interesting sonically and provides some formal affirmation for a 24 hrs sound piece I am currently working on.