World of Echo: Arthur Russell and Julius Eastman
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Gallery Hours
Wednesday–Sunday, 12-6pm and during concert intermissions
Closed on Mondays and Tuesdays -
Borrowing its title from Arthur Russell’s 1986 album, this exhibition reconsiders the legacies of two maverick artists Arthur Russell and Julius Eastman, focusing on their intersections, shared spaces, and continued echoes today. The show takes Seth Parker Woods’s audio installation The Holy Presence–which presents his performance of the ten cello parts in Eastman’s 1981 masterwork The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc in an array of speakers–as a model for an immersive, focused, and somatic intersection each of the artist’s work. Incorporating archival materials including rarely seen video and newly available audio, the exhibition draws attention to the various modes of collaboration between these two artists–as curator, conductor, performer, musician, and friend, from 1975 until their all-too-early deaths. With particular attention to the ways in which their work implicated the queer body and utilized language as modes of liberation, this exhibition seeks to reimagine their legacies as multi-hyphenate, world-straddling artists whose work together encompasses the breadth and possibility of creativity expanse from classical performance and minimalist composition, to the rise of disco and dance, and experimental intermedia work.
About To the Fullest
The music of legendary collaborators Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell is singular and boundless. These are expansive, quintessentially queer pieces in which every moment is full of choice. Their profound and personal sounds demand that performers become unabashedly themselves, merging and getting lost in the notes and rhythms, finding themselves again and again, and emerging whole and newly committed to self. This intrapersonal endeavoring is matched externally with musical structures that create profound belonging within a group.
This project represents a landmark collaboration between LA Phil Insight, REDCAT, and Wild Up uplifting the legacies of these maverick artists.