frieze 2013

frieze vip cars

The eye is more powerful than the ear. So the few works of art for the ear ran a good chance of being overwhelmed by the thousands for the eye filling the huge white tent of the Frieze Art Fair, on Randle’s Island, next to Manhattan. These sound pieces pushed their way to the front of attention by sneaking onto the VIP shuttle service cars offered by BMW. 

The trio of projects in Frieze Sounds are shown off on the trip from Manhattan to the tent where the fair is held in the solid studio of black BMW 7 Series. They include a trio of audio works by the artists Trisha Baga, Charles Atlas and New Humans, and Haroon Mirza.

trisha baga [ listen! ]

The artists were chosen by curator Cecilia Alemani, who is also the curator who picks art for the High Line in Manhattan. “Each of the participants has taken a different approach to this brief,” she said before the show. “Trisha Baga will estrange everyday noise; Charles Atlas and New Humans will use their own voices.” The mode of the pieces is auditory collage: Baga’s piece, called Hercules, mixes bits of weather forecasts, movie scores and multiple language phrases.

charles atlas & the new humans [ listen! ]

The artist Charles Atlas worked with the collective New Humans (Mika Tajima and Howie Chen) in “a new aural experience, utilizing electronically fractured vocals by Atlas and Tajima” producing “a poem-like babble of unrelated words.”

haroon mirza [ listen! ]

The work by Haroon Mirza sounds like listening to the fair floor itself—because it is. It is based on sampling actual sounds under the tent. Non VIPs can listen to the works through earphones set up in an area of the fair tent, or [ downloaded ] 

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