Arrived in Vienna, started my visit by meeting with the curator of the Tonspur project www.tonspur.at Georg Weckwerth in the Museum Quartier – MQ www.mqw.at. Georg showed me around his new exhibition co-curetted with Jozef Cseres “Membra Disjecta for John Cage – Wanting to Say Something About John” (on from 17.2-6.5.2012), an important show focusing on John Cage’s influence and inspiration on contemporary art in the year of what would have been his 100th birthday. http://johncage.tonspur.at/ The show features contributions from over international 60 artists whose work has been influenced by Cage and also features original work by Cage himself including ‘Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel’ eight screenprinted plexigrams created as a visual homage to Marcel Duchamp. My favourite piece was an experimental documentary by Sabine Groshup focusing on the Halberstadt organ project, a 639 year performance of Cage’s ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) which started playing on a specially constructed pipe organ in 2001 and is due to complete in 2640. The sound quality of this documentary (on headphones) was amazing. If you’re interested in hearing where the ASLSP performance of the piece is up to then listen to it here (www.aslsp.org) you never know you might just catch a change of chord.
Also in Vienna I’ve been out and about with my collection of microphones and digital recorders, capturing the ambience of a number of interesting Viennese environments, including; a farmers market at Yppenmarkt ; Westbanhof station and the Prater amusement park (where my husband got to fulfil a long standing ambition and ride the Wiener Riesenrad (big wheel) featured in the film the Third Man, he’s been humming the tune ever since and now I can’t get it out of my head.
