Net For Art

Sample image

The former Talking Head's latest bizarre and brilliant scheme
by Rob Harvilla (Village Voice)
June 3rd, 2008
www.villagevoice.com

"So, what do you want to know?" asks David Byrne, beaming beneath a straw fedora, as erudite and affable as ever, even with a couple busted ribs. "What's not apparent?" He's gesturing to an ornate antique organ, the only adornment to this cavernous 9,000-square-foot hall in the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan. A bewildering farm of tubes and wires runs out from the back and snakes along to the walls, the towering columns, and the pipes looming overhead, as if the instrument itself were on life support. Not much, at first blush, is apparent. (...)

www.villagevoice.com

David would like it if you came and had a go at the organ. Or, more accurately, the venue itself. Playing the Building, his partnership with arts gurus Creative Time, is basically an interactive experimental-music station, a chance for you (and/or your kids) to pretend you're a member of Einstüerzende Neubauten for a couple minutes. Each key on the organ connects to a tube, which connects to some facet of the building, which dutiful whirls or clanks or whistles or saws at your command. The tones are generally arranged low to high on the keyboard, though you can't exactly play "Stormy Weather" on it; it'd be more satisfying, perhaps, to rattle off a few full-keyboard slides, Bugs Bunny/Jerry Lee Lewis–style, though so far, everyone seems too polite (or too fearful of busting the thing) to do this. Probably just as well. Your choice, though. Spray-painted in yellow onto the cement floor at the foot of the organ is a simple request: "Please play."

Holding court and testing errant keys a few days before the exhibit's grand opening this past Saturday—it's now open to the public Friday through Sunday, from noon to 6 p.m., until mid-August—David stresses that he's not a musician here, but a facilitator. It's his gift to the masses: "It's nice that they can come in and play the thing," he says. "It's not a piece of music that you download or you buy, something like that. It's something that you actually have to sit and do." Furthermore: "You can see how it works. It's not like a piece of software where the actual workings of it, unless you're a real techie, are completely hidden to you. It's pretty easy to see which ones are blowing air."

The ex–Talking Heads frontman—who, after a couple decades of fantastically strange projects (deadpan PowerPoint presentations, a McSweeney's-approved faux Bible treatise entitled The New Sins, that musical about Imelda Marcos, etc.), finally feels like he's shed the Rock-Star-Makes-Art tag and can stand on his own as a conceptual artiste—first mounted Playing the Building at an old factory in Sweden a couple years back. He remembers fondly the empowerment it engendered among folks there: "They didn't feel inhibited about playing the thing. They didn't feel like they were amateurs and only professionals can play it. They didn't feel like it requires a composer or a musician to play, because obviously it's not like a regular instrument. So that, I think, helped loosen people up—and kids and adults and whatever, they all felt they could have a few minutes fooling around on it." (...)

View more @ www.villagevoice.com/music/0823,more-songs-played-by-buildings,458791,22.html