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Installation for 300 speakers, player piano and vacuum cleaner
This installation is currently at the Saatchi Gallery, London, in an exhibition called Newspeak from June to October 2010.
The Independent:
John Wynne's installation for 300 speakers etc has a frail monumentalism that you really have to see and hear.
The Financial Times:
Installations again steal the show. Few artists rise to the demands of the elegant double-height Gallery Ten: John Wynne’s sound and sculptural assemblage of 300 recycled speakers, pianola and vacuum cleaner, a lyrical/ironic musing on obsolescence and nostalgia, does so; its melancholy fragments from the pianola based on Franz Lehar’s “Gypsy Love” reverberate discordantly across the exhibition.
The Guardian:
Some works manage a sort of daydreamy feel. A plaintive few piano notes drift through the galleries, interspersed with a bit of ambient twang and electronic moan. These emanate from John Wynne's collection of 300 audio speakers, all reclaimed from a recycling plant, that tower in the corner of a double-height gallery and stand about the floor. Somewhere in all this is an old upright piano playing a piano-roll taken from a 1909 operetta. But only some notes get played. It sounds like John Cage or Erik Satie, and never repeats. There's a clever electronic gubbins hidden away somewhere that determines the sounds we hear. Cage would have enjoyed this. The most disconcerting thing, however, is a long length of vacuum-cleaner hose that snakes from a doorway and between the speakers to the pianola. The hose quivers, writhes and slithers about, as a hidden Hoover powers the pianola. It's like sharing the room with an awakening python.
The Evening Standard:
With John Wynne’s untitled installation of 300 speakers, amplifiers and other impedimenta I have no doubt that I am in the presence of a work of art. I do not pretend to understand it. I know only that, alone in Gallery 10 where the ceiling is exceptionally high, these grey, brown and black bits and pieces of our technological lives combine in an odd grace as they climb the walls in one corner. They recall, and trounce, Rachel Whiteread’s failure with white plastic boxes in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern and Anish Kapoor’s red-wax-in-the-corner cannon piece in the RA, but Wynne’s profound sense of order makes their disorder and haphazardry seem ridiculous.
It is enriched by eerie sound, by snatches of non-music on the piano, by whistles, distant bells and the wind whining in the wires of the ski-lift … This is the one work in Newspeak that, at least within its own parameters and in this setting, deserves to live a little longer than most other installations. |
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Playing with Words: The spoken word in artistic practice
A book edited by Cathy Lane and published by CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice)
Contributions from artists including Laurie Anderson, Ansuman Biswas, Jaap Blonk, Brandon LaBelle, Katharine Norman, David Toop, Trevor Wishart, John Wynne, Pamela Z
Click here for more information. A double audio CD will be released in 2010 |
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Autumn Leaves: Sound and the environment in artistic practice
A book with 27 free downloadable audio tracks edited by Angus Carlyle and published by CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice)
Audio compilation won a 2009 Qwartz Electronic Music Award in France
Contributions from artists including Peter Cusack, Jem Finer, Christina Kubisch, Phil Niblock, Hildegard Westerkamp, Chris Watson, John Wynne
Click here for more information
Click here for the audio tracks |
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Upcoming publications include contributions to:
Between Art and Anthropology, edited by Arnd Schneider and Chris Wright
The Art of Immersive Soundscapes, edited by Pauline Minevich and Ellen Waterman
Beyond Text: Critical Practice and Sensory Anthropology, edited by R Cox, A Irving and C Wright |
