Montage has been hailed as one of the key structural principles of modernity, yet its importance to the history of modern architecture and urbanism has not been adequately explored. This presentation, derived from the recently-published Graham-funded book by the same title, introduces key concepts that chart the history of montage in late nineteenth-century urban and architectural contexts, its application by the early twentieth-century avant-garde, and its eventual appropriation in the postmodern period. Focusing on a specific case study, the talk demonstrates the centrality of montage in modern explorations of space and in conceiving and representing the contemporary city. After the talk join us for a reception celebrating the publication of Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space (Yale University Press, 2018).

Martino Stierli is The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, a role he assumed in March 2015. Martino oversees the wide-ranging program of special exhibitions, installations, and acquisitions of the Department of Architecture and Design. His exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 is currently on view at MoMA. In 2016, he cocurated, with Ann Temkin, the exhibition From the Collection: 1960–1969.

Previously, he held a SNSF Professorship at the University of Zürich. Stierli is the author of Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (Getty Research Institute, 2013) and coeditor of Participation in Art and Architecture (I. B. Tauris, 2016). He is the cocurator of the international traveling exhibition Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. His scholarship has been recognized with a number of prizes and awards, among them the ETH Medal of Distinction and the Theodor Fischer Prize from the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich (2008). In 2012, he was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He holds a PhD from ETH Zürich.

Image: El Lissitzky, Wolkenbügel, 1924-25. Photomontage. Courtesy of the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art, Moscow.

Computer music pioneer Carl Stone performs unreleased recent works, including Don Dae Gam and Sun Nong Dan, named after favorite restaurants, in this special concert for Lampo. Stone studied with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney at CalArts during the early 1970s, and, while still a student, began using appropriated material to generate work. His exploratory techniques led to a body of complex sound collages, widely credited for laying the groundwork for the entire sampling movement, and defining the arc of his singular practice over the decades since. He has proven a prolific and imaginative voice in electronic composition, mashing together notions of high and low culture and recontextualizing diverse ethnographic materials, from Purcell to Spears, into immensely beautiful, time-bending music.

Stone will also present an artist talk at the Lampo Annex on Friday, November 30, click here for more information and to RSVP.

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has supported and partnered with Lampo to produce this performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a non-profit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Carl Stone (b.1953, Los Angeles, Calif.) has composed electroacoustic music almost exclusively since 1972, and has used computers in live performance since 1986. He was among the vanguard of artists incorporating turntables, early digital samplers, and personal computers into live electronic music composition. An adopter of the Max programming language while it was still in its earliest development at the IRCAM research center, Stone continues to use it as his primary instrument, both solo and in collaboration with other improvisers. He is currently a faculty member at Chukyo University in Japan. Two retrospective volumes of his work, Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties (2016) and Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties (2018) are available from Unseen Worlds.

In her Lampo debut, Madalyn Merkey premieres the performance of Digital Concert Creatures, a quadraphonic work for synthetic computer sounds and voice. Here, she sets autonomous sonic characters, or “creatures,” in motion, building sound by layering frequencies. “The main idea is that each letter on the keyboard has a different personality defined by four columns of numbers on the computer screen,” she writes. “Each keystroke catches a snapshot of the ‘creature’ as it moves along a compositional path, which then becomes complicated or influenced by the other keys being pressed.” Through a mix of control and chaos—and informed by mathematics more than traditional musicianship—Merkey’s new work is as playful as it is dense.

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has supported and partnered with Lampo to produce this performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a non-profit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Madalyn Merkey (b.1988, Oklahoma City, Okla.) is a composer and performer of live computer music based in Oakland, California. Her practice began as a visual artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she transitioned to sound and time-based art in 2010. Her recent work is concerned with using principles of logic to create computer programs that generate distinct sound surprises in a live setting. Merkey is also the English translator of Due scuole di musica elettronica in Italia, a pioneering electronic music text written by Enore Zaffiri in the 1960s. Her translation, Two Schools of Electronic Music, is forthcoming from Die Schachtel. Recordings of Merkey’s work Scent (2012) and Valley Girl (2014) are available on New Images Ltd.

Join us for a talk by Manuel Raeder focusing on the work of his Berlin-based interdisciplinary design office, Studio Manuel Raeder and independent publishing house, BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE. Concerned with the construction of narratives in the form of books, exhibitions, and communication design, the studio works closely with artists and designers to explore how books can be used as experimental devices to document or conceive of ideas, as well as how exhibition design can trigger different sensorial experiences through a spatial experience. Through his interests in the meaning of books in space, the archive, and the future of libraries, Raeder questions how different forms of organizing and categorizing can define or alter history.

Studio Manuel Raeder has collaborated on over 150 artist’s books and has been responsible for the communication strategies and graphic identities of several cultural institutions and galleries including Kölnischer Kunstverein (2007 – 2011), Kunstverein München (2010 – 2015), Para Site Hong Kong (2012 – 2014), Artists Space New York (since 2009), Galerie Neu Berlin (since 2005), Mendes Wood DM São Paulo/Brussels/New York (since 2014), kurimanzutto Mexico City (since 2016), as well as the fashion label BLESS (since 2004).

In 2011, Manuel Raeder founded the publishing house BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE to distribute and publish artists who have a strong interest in exploring the format of the artist’s book. In doing so, the studio has developed longstanding collaborations with artists such as Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Mariana Castillo Deball, Haegue Yang, Nora Schultz, Danh Vo, Heinz Peter Knes, Leonor Antunes, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Eran Schaerf, and Sergej Jensen, amongst others.

In collaboration with Elgarafi, the studio created a temporary shop in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Apart from offering Elgarafi prints, books published by BOM DIA and Muebles Manuel furniture, the space also hosts regular events.Specializing in high quality artist books that are conceived as an integral part of artists projects or as artworks themselves.

BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE — ‘good day, good afternoon, good night’ in Portuguese — conveys the idea that books can become part of everyday life, regardless of the time of day.

Concurrent with this event, the Graham Foundation Bookshop will host a BOM DIA pop-up featuring a selection of recent titles.

Image: Exhibition Architecture by Studio Manuel Raeder for Eduardo Costa, Mental Relations, 2017 at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, photo: Ramiro Chaves

The Whole Earth Catalog (1968–1974), was a cultural touchstone of the 1960s and 70s. The iconic cover images of the Earth viewed from space made it one of the most recognizable volumes on bookstores shelves. The lecture will shed light on material aspects of the Catalog—its mode of production and behind-the-scenes debates- and to better understand the intentions of its protagonists.

Caroline Maniaque-Benton, PhD, is Professor of the History of Architecture and Design at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture  Normandie, and part of the research laboratory Ipraus- Umr AUSser /University Paris Est. A past fellow of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), she is the author of Le Corbusier and the Maisons Jaoul (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009),  French Encounters with the American Counterculture 1960–1980 (Ashgate, 2011), and the editor, with Meredith Gaglio,  of the anthology entitled Whole Earth Field Guide (MIT Press, 2016).  She is the co-curator of the exhibition Mai 68. L’architecture aussi!, Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris, May-September 2018. She also is editing the book Les années 68 et la formation des architectes, Rouen, Point de vues, 2018.

This talk is presented in relationship to the 2012 publication grant to Caroline Maniaque-Benton for The Whole Earth Field Guide (MIT Press, 2016).

Image: Back cover image of a cutaway globe against a pink background showing the two Americas, filled with earthworms breaking through the surface. Paul Krassner and Ken Kesey (eds.), “The Realist Presents: The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog,” Realist 89 (New York: Realist Association, March 1971). Courtesy Stewart Brand and the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries

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