This talk discusses the artist’s works in sound and positions them in relation to the post-Cagean avant-garde: La Monte Young, Simone Forti, Steve Reich, David Tudor, and the Judson Dance Workshop. In particular, it details the transition from a single-author works model to one based in collaborative practice, a shift that was expressed unevenly across the durative arts in the 1960s.
Conference on the exhibition
Friday 2.45 pm
Bruce Nauman’s Sound Works: Music, Dance, Performance, Recording
Benjamin D. Piekut
Benjamin D. Piekut is a historian of experimental music, jazz, and rock after 1960. His first monograph, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits, was published in 2011 by the University of California Press. He is also the editor of Tomorrow is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press 2014, and co-editor (with George E. Lewis) of the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2 volumes, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). His second monograph, The World Is a Problem: Henry Cow and the Vernacular Avant-garde, is under contract with Duke University Press. In celebration of the John Cage centennial in 2012, he co-edited (with David Nicholls) a special issue of Contemporary Music Review. His essay in The Drama Review, “Deadness,” co-authored with Jason Stanyek, received the “Outstanding Article Award” in 2011 from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and was named one of MIT Press’s “50 Most Influential Articles” in all disciplines. Previously a lecturer at the University of Southampton in the UK, he is now an associate professor in the department of music at Cornell.
