National Museum of Women in the Arts Talk
Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco
August 27, 2021
Catharine Clark (Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA) [CC] Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese have traveled to the gallery from New York for Open Field, which is the current exhibition that centers on the legacy and the ideals of Black Mountain College, as they are reflected in a younger generation of artists and seen through the lens of Anni Albers.
We are delighted that all of you are here. Nora and Marshall have many works in the show. You’ve already heard them perform Tone Grove that Phyllis Chen wrote and they also have the two works on paper to my right.
I’m going to let them do all of the talking. So now let’s hear from Nora and Marshall.
Nora Ligorano [NL] Thank you, Katie.
As many of you know, Marshall and I are collaborators who have worked together since the last century. And in order for us to talk to you as members of the National Museum of Women in the Arts today, I’m 51% part of the collaboration and he’s the 49%.
[CC] This is why we’re allowing Marshall an honorary presence here at this women’s group.
[NL] We’ve been collaborating for many years. Our work is conceptually based. Like Amy Trachtenberg’s installation in the gallery, we use many different materials in our practice.
We really are interested in material, in changing the definition of what material is and can be through reworking and assigning a new identity to a particular material, in this case, some of the textiles and prints by Anni Albers.
For Listening to the Material, we extended our collaboration further. We invited the composer Phyllis Chen to join us first in helping figure out how we could make and play a music box and to also learn about the potentential of music boxes in general, and to get a deeper understanding of how to relate visual art to sonic material. It also turned into a good opportunity to invite somebody else to join our collaboration.
We commissioned Phyllis to create a piece for Open Field and we are really happy with how it all turned out. Special thanks to the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation in New York for helping to make this work happen.
And the collaboration kept growing to include Emma Lanier and Caveri Suresh’s dance performance which we accompanied.
It kept getting bigger when we asked our good friend Seth Janofsky, a luthier in the Alameda, in San Francisco to make the music boxes. We’re really happy to have this opportunity to work with him on these instruments.
First Movement
Drawing for a Knot
[NL] I’m going to play now the First Movement based on Anni Albers’ Drawing for a Knot.
[CC] Does everybody know Anni Albers’ Drawing for a Knot? We’ll show you in a moment what you’re listening to in terms of its visual form,
[NL] That was part of the piece I just played.
This is the music roll and if you look on the back of it, you’ll see a meandering line, which is Drawing for a Knot.
The score is to be turned and played four different ways, though I’m not going to play this in four different ways. But the way I assigned it, composed it is to play it from front to back, flip it over and then back to front and that’s the entire piece.
When I was making this, I really was thinking that I wanted to hear what Anni Albers’ textiles look like. I wanted to translate her artwork sonically and set it to music. And so literally I drew right onto the card and punched holes in the intersecting lines.
I was interested to hear the resolution of that process, of that drawing. That was the impetus for this work.
[NL] The artwork to my left is like Mary Muszynski’s work in the front of the gallery in that it has four translucent layers printed on Japanese tissue.
You can actually see Drawing for a Knot printed four times turned and layered four different ways.
[CC] You are welcome to operate the music boxes obviously so that you yourselves can, can play and hear the sound of the artwork.
[NL] Please touch the artwork and indulge yourselves in the music.
Third Movement – Orchestra
Marshall Reese [MR] I want to start by talking about the other work on paper next to the one Nora was talking about.
Points with Variation is a grid of intersecting threads overlaid with Japanese tissue. The holes that we cut in it reveal the crosshatching of the threads beneath it. It’s based on one of Anni’s sketches from her Sketch Book published by David Zwirner Books.
We both think of these as scores.
We were inspired by a type of music notation called graphic notation which instead of traditional notes and rests is written using geometric forms, rectangular forms, lines and squiggles as notation to give the performer more freedom to interpret the work.
Nora’s approach in interpreting Anni’s weavings was different from mine in the sense that Nora has good pitch, and she hears pitches as notes. She associated specific pitches for these 30 note music movements that correspond to Anni’s drawings.
My approach differed. The parallels between Anni Albers’ prints and graphic music notation really struck me, particularly the composer Earl Browne’s Four Systems (1954).
I was drawn to her prints that related to music Second Movement III and Orchestra. My Second and Third Movements are based on these prints.
My compositions are over there in the other gallery, I’ll play one of them in a moment.
I scanned her prints selecting particular designs overlaying it onto the card and punched points where her print’s trapezoidal shapes intersected the card’s grid. I also cut slits where the hypotenuses intersected the grid to create ascending and descending arpeggios and horizontal slits for tone rows.
The main principle behind all of this is that we wanted to look at Anni Albers’, textiles, and prints and go backwards. To think of them from their final forms and how they would be resolved as a Jacquard weave. The Jacquard loom is one of the first machines of the industrial age and has been a central idea for much of our work.
Jacquard’s loom operated with punch cards. It’s considered one of the first computers. In effect, these music rolls are the punch cards referring to the Jacquard loom. And then we said, well, how will we hear this? We started investigating mechanical instruments, the music box came to the fore as did player pianos and the work of Conlon Nancarrow.
[NL] We wanted to move a player piano in here, but then we thought that might be a little too much for Katie.
[CC] We would’ve loved it. It would have been great.
[MR] Now I’m going to play the Third Movement.
Listening to the Material
[CC] One thing, you said you sort of took your inspiration from something Anni Albers said about listening to the material, and it’s also the title of your piece. Do you want to say a little more about that?
[NL] When you and Anton Steuber contacted us, and said we’re putting together Open Field, would you guys have something to bring to the table here?
We’ve worked with woven fiber optic surfaces. And we always are destroying and re-engineering stuff in our work. At first we thought, let’s do a fiber optic tapestry. Let’s do that!
And then we decided that we really wanted to shake everything up and, you know, go into a whole new place just after COVID. Let’s think about new materials. Let’s just get some books and research this a bit more.
The driving force in this whole project was a quote Anni Albers said. “Listen to the material.” We said to each other, “Let’s go back to basics, punch cards.” And so that guided and directed us. We listened to Anni’s words.
How we listened to the material directed us to where we are here today with this project.
[CC] Does everybody understand what a punch card is? Because maybe we can, speaking of going back to the basics, just explain a little bit about the history of the punch card and your ideas of weaving
[NL] The first automated loom was the Jacquard loom. It’s French. It dates from the early 19th century, though there were several previous inventions in the late 1700’s.
So that a card, I’m not going to say it looks one of ours, because I don’t know what kind of fabric that would make, but it is a card assigning different parts of the loom to do different things.
And it was the first computer because it was sort of zeros and ones. Marshall and I have used it as a central trope for the past 10 years. That is one of the foundations for the work that we do, thinking about punch cards in relation to translating information.
[CC] While we are talking a little bit about how the exhibition was established, I began working with Nora and Marshall, I guess, about a decade ago.
We met through the Zer01 Biennial in San Jose in 2010 when they were showing a fiber optic weaving.
When I say fiber optic weaving, or more importantly, when they say it, Marshall and Nora are talking about fiber optic threads that are woven, just like you would weave any other kind of thread on a loom. And since the weaver’s shuttle damages the fiber’s sheathing, the fiber optics have intentionally low quality as carriers of data.
But what this process does is to let light leak along the side of the threads and then they can control it. The way the color and the patterning that the light gives off through the fibers are data visualizations, and we won’t get into the details of that, but I encountered the work at the quilt museum in San Jose.
And I love this idea of reaching back to these deeper references to the pre-computer through the Jacquard and the punch card and then this very forward-looking artwork making use of technology. But of course also the references to Josef and Anni Albers that are embedded in those projects.
So that was like my sort of first encounter with how very contemporary practices could rely on this kind of historic earlier 20th century ideas to form something new and beautiful as they are.
[NL] One thing I like about the fiber optic data tapestries is that the way that the light is allowed to seep onto the fabric’s surface is a leakage. It’s a way of reverse engineering fiber optics through the weaver’s …
[CC] … shuttle.
[NL] It actually reveals the hand of the weaver. You can see the hand of the weaver through the light that comes through the threads.
And that brings us back to the presence of the hand in this new work – to turn the crank – to push the scroll through the instrument – to make the music.
