Abstract
On April 8, 1996, New Langton Arts in San Francisco held a mini-retrospective of Richard Lerman’s work. The event took place in conjunction with the recent Soundculture ’96 Festival. Lerman describes the retrospective’s theme as follows: “All this work has evolved from my explorations using piezo disks to amplify small sounds.” Lerman’s most recent video and stereo sound piece, 'Sonoran Desert Ants' (1996) challenges the shifting in perspective of humans, pairs the sounds of small feet and mechanically transmitted vocalizations with an equally close-up shot of the ants. The soundscapes are made up of the voices of specific and detailed components of the ambient or general surroundings. The dynamic tension between audio and visual perspectives challenges how we generally integrate the two senses into a unified worldview. Furthermore, to demonstrate how sound may elicit memories of past events, Lerman employed the vibrations of rusting barbed wire and the hanging tuning forks in his most unsettling video works, 'Manzanar and Dachau' (1994). Through the use of pre-recorded tape delays, sounds were gradually layered. They generated a rich texture that vividly described the entire Holocaust event and resonated with the audience the unforgettable experience of history.
Preservation Process
Archived from http://switch.sjsu.edu/archive/nextswitch/switch_engine/front/front.php%3Fartc=160.html. Documentation of the preservation processes used for this collection is available at https://github.com/NickSzydlowski/switch. Metadata for this item was created and augmented by Thong Huynh, Spring 2022, ART 104.
Recommended Citation
Quin, Douglas
(1998)
"Richard Lerman at New Langton Arts April 8, 1996,"
SWITCH: Vol. 4:
No.
1, Article 9.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/switch/vol4/iss1/9