Dream
House Opens
for the
2011-2012
Season – Our
19th Year
La
Monte Young
Marian
Zazeela
Dream House
Sound
and Light
Environment
Extended
Exhibition
at
MELA
Foundation
275
Church Street, 3rd
Floor
between
Franklin
and
White
Streets in
Tribeca
Saturday,
September 24,
2011
continuing
through
Saturday, June
2, 2012
Open
Thursdays,
Fridays and
Saturdays from
2:00 PM to
Midnight
Contribution
$6.00.
Information
212-925-8270;
212-219-3019
Subways: #1
train to
Franklin
Street / A, E
/ N, R / #6
trains to
Canal Street
Dream
House,
a
collaborative
Sound and
Light
Environment
by composer La
Monte Young
and visual
artist Marian
Zazeela, is
presented in
an extended
exhibition at
MELA
Foundation,
275 Church
Street, 3rd
Floor. The
environment is
open
Thursdays,
Fridays and
Saturdays from
2:00 PM to
Midnight.
Suggested
contribution
is $6.00. The
long-term
exhibition
opened in Fall
1993 and will
continue for
this season
through June
2, 2012,
reopening
again in
September
2012.
Young
and Zazeela
characterize
the Sound
and Light
Environment
as "a time
installation
measured by a
setting of
continuous
frequencies in
sound and
light."
In the
light
environment
Marian Zazeela
presents four
works, two
environmental:
Imagic
Light
and Magenta
Day, Magenta
Night,
in
installations
specifically
designed for
the site; and
two
sculptural:
the
neon work, Dream
House
Variation I,
and the wall
sculpture, Ruine
Window 1992
from her
series, Still
Light.
In the
environment Imagic
Light,
Zazeela
projects pairs
of colored
lights on
mobile forms
to create
seemingly
three-dimensional
colored
shadows in a
luminous
field.
In the
concurrent
sound
environment,
La Monte Young
presents The
Base 9:7:4
Symmetry in
Prime Time
When Centered
above and
below The
Lowest Term
Primes in The
Range 288 to
224 with The
Addition of
279 and 261 in
Which The Half
of The
Symmetric
Division
Mapped above
and Including
288 Consists
of The Powers
of 2
Multiplied by
The Primes
within The
Ranges of 144
to 128, 72 to
64 and 36 to
32 Which Are
Symmetrical to
Those Primes
in Lowest
Terms in The
Half of The
Symmetric
Division
Mapped below
and Including
224 within The
Ranges 126 to
112, 63 to 56
and 31.5 to 28
with The
Addition of
119,
a periodic
composite
sound waveform
environment
created from
sine wave
components
generated
digitally in
real time on a
custom-designed
Rayna interval
synthesizer.
Both artists
are presenting
works
utilizing
concepts of
structural
symmetry.
Zazeela's
mobile forms
are arrayed in
symmetrical
patterns with
lights placed
in precisely
symmetrical
positions
creating
symmetrical
colored
shadows; the
wall-mounted
light
sculpture and
the neon are
both
symmetrical
forms.
Young's
sound
environment is
composed of
frequencies
tuned to the
harmonic
series between
288 and 224,
utilizing
numbers with
factors of
only 9, or
those primes
or octave
transpositions
of smaller
primes that
fall within
this range.
The
interval
288/256
reduces to a
9/8 interval
as does the
interval
252/224.
Thirty-two
frequencies
satisfy the
above
definition, of
which
seventeen fall
within the
range of the
upper, and
fourteen fall
within the
range of the
lower of these
two
symmetrical
9/8 intervals.
Young
has arranged
these
thirty-one
frequencies in
a unique
constellation,
symmetrical
above and
below the
thirty-second
frequency, the
center
harmonic 254
(the prime 127
x 2).
Young has
stated that:
"This
is my newest
and most
radical sound
environment;
the Rayna
synthesizer
has made it
possible to
realize
intervals that
are derived
from such high
primes that,
not only is it
unlikely that
anyone has
ever worked
with these
intervals
before, it is
also highly
unlikely that
anyone has
ever heard
them or
perhaps even
imagined the
feelings they
create."
In 1966, Young
and Zazeela
pioneered the
concept of the
continuous
sound and
light
environment,
and have since
presented over
thirty
large-scale
sound and
light
productions in
museums and
galleries
worldwide for
continuous
periods from
one week to
nineteen
years,
including
installations
in the
Metropolitan
Museum, New
York; Moderna
Museet,
Stockholm;
documenta 5,
Kassel;
Kunstverein,
Cologne; Dia
Art
Foundation,
New York;
Kunst im
Regenbogenstadl,
Polling;
Guggenheim
Museum, New
York.
Young and
Zazeela write:
The July 1969
Sound and
Light
Environment at
Galerie Heiner
Friedrich,
Munich, was
our first
public
short-term Dream
House. Under
a long-term
commission
from the
Dia Art
Foundation (1979-85) we collaborated on a Dream
House presentation at 6 Harrison
Street, New
York, set in a six-story building with a
nine-story
tower featuring
multiple
inter-related
sound and
light
environments,
exhibitions,
performances, research
facilities and
archives. This was perhaps our most
creative
installation
because for
the first time
we actually
had
substantial
space
available to
realize our
ideas. The Regenbogenstadl Dream
House in Polling, Bavaria, opened
in 2000 and is
intended to
exist as long
as
possible. It has become very highly
evolved,
presenting a
wide range of Dream House elements,
while the
MELA
Foundation Dream House Sound
and Light
Environment at
275 Church
Street, New
York, now in
its nineteenth
year, is our
longest
installation
to date. The various incarnations of
our
site-specific
sound and
light
environment
installations
around the
world, such as the 2010 installation at
Regenbogenstadl
in celebration
of the 1000
year
anniversary of
the village of
Polling, with
two
symmetrically
placed pairs
of mobiles in
a
configuration
of The
Magenta Lights and a sound environment of The
Opening Chord in The
Magenta Lights entrance gallery, The
Magic Chord in the far video-screening
gallery, and
the acoustical
mix in the
center Still
Light gallery to create The
Magic Opening
Chord, demonstrate the eternal
evolution of
the Dream
House, a work “with a life and
tradition of
its own,”
continuing
into time
“with a
capacity to
propel itself
by its own
momentum.”
In Minimalism:Origins
(Indiana
University
Press, 1993),
Edward
Strickland
wrote of their
collaborative
environments:
"Intense
light [is]
aimed through
[color]
filters at
quasicalligraphic
aluminum
shapes hung by
ultrafine
filaments.
The
effect is a
unique and
extraordinary
transvaluation
of perception:
the mobiles
seem to hover
unanchored,
while the
shadows they
cast in
various hues
attain an
apparent
solidity
against the
light-dissolved
walls equal to
their
literally
palpable but
apparently
disembodied
sources.
Like
Young's music,
to which it
serves as an
almost uncanny
complement,
Zazeela's work
is predicated
upon the
extended
duration
necessary to
experience the
nuances which
are its
essence."
The
one-year sound
and light
environment
collaboration,
The
Romantic
Symmetry (over
a 60 cycle
base) in Prime
Time from 112
to 144 with
119 / Time
Light Symmetry
(Dia Art
Foundation,
22nd Street,
NYC 1989), was
described by Village
Voice
critic Kyle
Gann as "some
of the
strangest and
most
forward-looking
art New York
has to offer."
The
1990 Paris
Donguy Gallery
Dream
House
environment
now in the
permanent
collection of
the Museum of
Contemporary
Art (MAC) Lyon
was featured
in the 2004-05
Sons
et Lumiéres
at Centre
Pompidou and
the Lyon
Biennial 2005.
Artforum
drew
connections
between the
New York and
Lyon
installations:
“For
the majority
of compelling
pieces here
were the older
ones, among
them a few
whose very
appearance
dramatized
that
vertiginous
sense arising
when objects
from different
eras come into
incongruously
close contact.
(“Time
does not
pass,”
Bourriaud
writes of the
effect, “it
‘percolates’”). In this department first honors must
be awarded to
La Monte
Young and
Marian
Zazeela’s Dream
House,
1993―.
At
its location
in the Tribeca
section of New
York City,
this roomful
of infinitely
repeating
cycles of
sound and
light
frequencies is
a veritable
wormhole in
the urban
fabric.
(Outside
it is 2006;
inside it
seems
perpetually
1985, the year
Young and
Zazeela’s MELA
Foundation
opened its
doors.
It has
since
maintained an
artist’s-loft
sensibility
once
indigenous to
the area.)
Relocated
to the
cavernous
industrial
space of La
Sucrière,
however, the
piece created
other wrinkles
in time,
seeming at
once placed at
the cultural
roots of
European rave
and trance
culture—indeed,
Lyon artistic
director
Thierry
Raspail told
me that Young
obtained the
very latest
subwoofers for
the occasion
(the deep
pulses raising
the roof and
making the
floor feel
ready to cave
in)—and also
utterly
futuristic.
Indifferent
to Young’s
deafening
drones was the
medieval
architecture
along the
Saône river,
visible
through the
installation’s
tinted
windows.”
Die
Tageszeitung wrote
about their
1992 DAAD
Ruine der
Künste, Berlin
environment:
"A
longer stay in
the Dream
House
is necessary
to experience
the full
effect.
The
mind is calmed
by the
environment in
a meditative
way, and
subtle sound
and light
effects that
are veiled at
first sight
then come to
the fore."
Of the
current
environment,
Sandy
McCroskey
wrote in 1/1
"Zazeela's
light
sculptures
have
invariably,
teasingly
refused to
surrender
their entire
secret to
photographic
reproduction,
so much do
they depend on
the retinal
impact of
activated
photons in
real time and
so much do
they exploit,
in ways
analogous to
Young's
techniques,
the creation
of visual
combination
tones and an
accumulation
of
after-images."
In Architectural
Design
(Wiley, Vol.
78 No.3,
May-June
2008), Ted
Krueger
described his
experience
with the
interaction of
the
illuminated
mobiles and
the sound
environment in
the Dream
House:
“The
spirals’
ultra-slow
spin is
induced by air
currents from
a viewer’s
movements or
thermal
differences in
the room. This
creates a
slowly
changing
composition of
shadows and
objects in
varying
intensities of
contrasting
hues. …
[Henry] Flynt
notes that the
rare drift
into
compositional
alignment by
these
dynamically
independent
objects
implies a time
scale that can
encompass an
infinite
series of
permutations.
The group on
the north
glides
momentarily
into an
approximate
bilateral
symmetry, and
I check the
alignment of
the group on
the other
side. Given
the scale of
the room, the
compositions
on both sides
cannot be
compared in a
single view,
and as I look
to the other
side I sweep
my head
through a
melody. The
interplay
between
movement and
stasis, of
sound and
light,
directly
integrates
these works.
Each becomes
the context
for the other.
Charles Curtis
wrote in
“Incomprehensible
Space” (OASE
#78, Journal
for
Architecture,
2009): “Dream
House
renders sound
as that which
it truly is,
audible
space…That
sound can
stand in a
kind of
complementarity
between all of
its parts
without
sacrificing
the
meaningfulness
of even the
smallest of
those parts is
the revelation
of Dream
House.”
NFT (Not For
Tourists), the
insider’s
guide to New
York City
2011, declared
the Dream
House,
“one of New
York City’s
greatest
treasures,” “a
Tribeca
Landmark” and
“one of the
coolest
long-running
sound and
light
installations
in the world.”
In The
Brooklyn Rail
(June 2003),
Nick Stillman
wrote:
“The Dream
House
can inspire
sincere
self-reflection—of
how people
physically
move, of how
little time
there is for
stillness, of
how we’ve
become trained
to seek and to
reward
movement and
action.
To
embrace the Dream
House is
to become
entranced and
lost in time.
And
with no
permanent
closing date
established
for Young and
Zazeela’s
collaborative
installation,
this could be
the dream that
never ends.”
For further
information,
email mail@melafoundation.org or
visit www.melafoundation.org.
MELA's
programs are
made possible
with generous
contributions
from
foundations,
individuals
and MELA
Members.