La Monte Young     Marian Zazeela

Dream House Sound and Light Environment

Guggenheim Museum

Exhibition The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia

Annex Gallery 4

 

Friday, January 30 – Sunday, April 19, 2009

 

The La Monte Young   Marian Zazeela Dream House sound and light environment at the Guggenheim Museum opens Friday, January 30, 2009 in Annex Gallery 4 as the centerpiece of the exhibition, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia. The exhibition continues through April 19, 2009.

This new site-specific Dream House installation is a rare counterpart to the 16-year ongoing Dream House installation at 275 Church Street.  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 Guggenheim light environment Marian Zazeela presents three works, the environmental Imagic Light II, the neon work, Dream House Variation IV (1989-2009), and the wall sculpture, Open Rectangle II (2002) from her series, Still Light.  In Imagic Light II, Zazeela projects pairs of colored lights on mobile forms to create seemingly three-dimensional colored shadows in a luminous field.  Originally conceived in 1989 and created in 2009, Dream House Variation IV is the fourth and final variation of the neon sculpture installed in the Dream House on Church Street.  Open Rectangle II was commissioned by Heiner Friedrich in 2002 at the same time the original sculpture opened at the Regenbogenstadl Dream House in Polling, Germany.

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.  As this is a setting of the same sound environment presented at the MELA Church Street Dream House, the two Dream Houses running in simultaneity represent a perfect unison in New York City for the first time.

 

The New York Times wrote:  “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989” at the Guggenheim Museum is a strange show, mostly good-strange, often beautiful-strange, and for sure long overdue. …As for Mr. Young, he and his “Dream House,” with a 24/7 drone and trippy lighting by Marian Zazeela, have long since become underground institutions. First installed as a permanent environment in his Manhattan home in 1962, then used for performances with his teacher, the Hindustani raga vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, and now reconstituted at the Guggenheim, “Dream House” forms a natural bridge to the conceptual and performance art that brings the show to a close."

 

In addition to the ongoing sound and light environment, on March 14th and 21^st the Guggenheim Museum and MELA Foundation will present two concerts of The Just Alap Raga Ensemble performing Young's composition Raga Sundara in the Dream House.  The ensemble includes Young, Zazeela, Jung Hee Choi and Da’ud Constant, voices; Jon Catler, sustainer electric guitar; Charles Curtis, cello; and Naren Budhkar, tabla.  March 28^th will feature a concert by Young and Zazeela’s disciple Jung Hee Choi performing RICE, her site-specific multi-channel video sound installation with audio, “Composition in the style of La Monte Young’s 1960 sustained friction sounds” in a setting of Zazeela’s Imagic Light II.  All concerts are at 9pm.  The Church Street Dream House installation continues to be open Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 2pm to Midnight through the Summer Solstice in June.

Tickets for the March concerts are available from the Guggenheim box office (212.423.3587 or 212.423.3575). Due to limited seating in the gallery, tickets for the concerts will not be sold online.  Additional information on the Guggenheim Dream House is available at the Guggenheim website:  http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/press-room/press-releases/2508-thirdmindrelease.  Additional information for the Church Street Dream House may be found on the MELA website:  http://melafoundation.org/dream02.htm

For more information regarding the Church Street installation, the Guggenheim installation, or the upcoming concerts, please email mail@melafoundation.org.