Terry Fox
‘(RE/DE) CONSTRUCTIONS &c.’
June 1 - July 13, 2023
Performance: Wednesday, June 25, 2003, 17.00 hrs.
The Kunsthalle Fridericianum is putting on a large exhibition to celebrate the 60th birthday of the American artist Terry Fox, born 1943 in Seattle. His name mainly turns up, in Europe as well as in America, in association with the emergence of Body Art. As early as 1970 he mounted a performance at the Art Academy Düsseldorf together with Joseph Beuys and one year later invited Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim to a collaborative action in a New York gallery. And yet Terry Fox’s way of working within the art circuit acquired unique status, which was not least of all based on his ephemeral mode of operating. In search of a new form of communication, he decided to determine the context of his art on his own. His performances, instead of being works of lasting character, were marked by the transitory and by real-time physical presence. According to Fox, "the only people that this art exists for are the people that are there, and it’s the only time the art exists". Early actions were announced on posters at fixed times and shaped routine street scenes into public theater. For instance, at a weekly market in London, the public that gathered for the announced occasion mixed unremarked with the shoppers-cum-involuntary actors. The happening thus engendered stood out hardly at all from what was there to begin with; it all occurred front and center and without any objective distance. Fox himself considered his interest in the performance to be that in an everyday encounter, something that happens between people. His increased attention to the element of sound as an artistic means of expression can be understood against this background. "Sound is a mean of communication, a universal language. It enters the healthy ear without the impediments of language or prejudice. It is perceived by every culture in the same way: via the auditory canal. It enters the ear without the consent of the listener. (…) Performance is, for me, an attempt to discover a language or method of communication which bypasses these barriers as sound does". (Terry Fox)
Within his framework of sound performances or sound installations Terry Fox has repeatedly taken up the acoustic qualities of everyday things, whereby the surrounding space or objects serve him as resonators. He himself only comes on the scene as one other triggering element that makes visible – or audible – the energy inherent in things. His proximity to John Cage, who subsequently overcame conventional compositions and instruments, is obvious, as well as is the attempt – above all that of the Fluxus movement – to visualize music. Yet his use of acoustics to bring space itself into resonance and reveal its implicit properties also makes the differences very clear. Just like the sound works, so do his textual works extend more and more into space. Since the 80s, Terry Fox has increasingly studied the relationship between text and image and highlighted the no longer questioned meaning of terms and sign systems in our language. Enigmatic language games or a text that spreads across several walls and must be stalked letter by letter make the words a tangible experience that sensitize our perception.
Terry Fox’s way of working does not allow a neat division into different phases. Instead, over many years, a thick weave of recurring, newly found, intermedially networked situations has occurred in a process-in-progress that calls for new and repeated probings. Accordingly, the worlds he generates never appear to be husks clamped over textures, but a case of the outside and inside mutually conditioning each other. Barriers become blurred and do not stand for parameters that are independent of one another. The texture of the site becomes the texture of the work, to then immediately become site again. This gesture of a constant remake, of dismantling and renewing tested methods and experiences, will also be a theme on view in the newly conceived exhibition. One part of the exhibition in the Fridericianum will document earlier actions in the form of film, photograph and sound material. Another part will comprise his variously (re)arranged acoustic and object-related works, as well as drawings and musical scores.
On June 25th Terry Fox will open a performance weekend with a sound performance at the Kunsthalle.
Copyright Gallery Paule Anglim
14 Geary Street | San Francisco, CA 94108 | 415.433.2710
