Adam Magyar, Stainless

Back in January of this year, Joshua Hammer provided a wonderful description of photographer Adam Magyar’s recent series, Stainless, in his Matter profile of the the artist. Drawing a distinction between the objectivity of Magyar’s digital scans—of people waiting on subway platforms and entire subway cars full of passengers—and the subjectivity inherent to Misha Gordin’s nightmarish and totalitarian Crowds, Hammer said:

Magyar, an admirer of Gordin’s work, also creates black-and-white photographs and video images permeated with a similar brooding quality, though his human beings are bound not by political systems, but by the limits of perception.

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Hearing Hearing

In his contribution to the first issue of Ear | Wave | Event, Peter Ablinger claims that there is an historical schism between visual and aural art practices along the axis of perception— of observing observation or subjective access. Quite simply, he asserts: “There has never been a Cézanne of music.” According to Ablinger, the history of music composition continues to further refine (if not continuously redefine) the processual activities of shaping sound into various configurations, be they tonal, atonal, or what-ever, while perpetually avoiding hearing. To hear (here reduced to a matter of mere passive reception) is itself simply assumed, and individualistic differences between that which sounds and that which is heard, while often acknowledged discursively, remain external to the imperatives of musical praxis; the circumscription of what is heard remains the focus, over that it is heard at all.

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