Dissonant Abstraction

A Conversation between Lynne Cooke and Richard Serra

September 6, 2007 6:00 p.m. Co-curator Lynne Cooke and Richard Serra discuss the artist’s work and the exhibition Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years. Photo courtesy of Paula Court

Dissonant Abstraction

In conjunction with the MoMA exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, Bang on a Can presents a pair of concerts that reveal how pioneering European composers of 100 years ago forever changed the music in New York. Each concert pairs two composers—an early-20th-century innovator, and a New Yorker they influenced. The music is performed by alumni and faculty of the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA, a program dedicated entirely to the creation, study, and performance of the most adventurous music of our time. This second evening in the series features one of Arnold Schoenberg's shortest, oddest, most intense pieces, Herzgewächse, a shockingly expressive vocal miniature originally written for Vasily Kandinsky's journal The Blue Rider. Morton Feldman's meditative work Three Voices, for solo voice and two prerecorded solo voices, a luxurious, introspective setting of a poem by Frank O'Hara, has a much slower tempo than the Schoenberg piece, but is ultimately no less intense.

Conversation with Gund and Laib

In conjunction with MoMA's presentation of Wolfgang Laib's Pollen from Hazelnut, Agnes Gund, President Emerita of The Museum of Modern Art, joins the artist in conversation about the installation and his creative process. Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, moderates.

Artist Talk: Scott Snibbe

Media artist and filmmaker Scott Snibbe and his collaborator Lukas Girling discuss their work and its relationship to sound in space, with a particular focus on REWORK_(Philip Glass Remixed) [GLASS MACHINE], which is featured at MoMA Studio.

Artist Talk: Joe McKay

Artist Joe McKay discusses his work and its relationship to sound in space, with a particular focus on Light Wave and Tweetagraph, his interactive installations in MoMA Studio.