Sculptures of Music or Experience

an arc of steel rod extends down and off a white wall. it is studded with sculpey flower blossoms, painted blue, gradating from dark at the top to light at the end. each flower was made within the run time of a disco song the artist erik hanson liked when he was a punk dj, so a playlist—and the listening to it—as sculpture.
Erik Hanson, Disco Songs I Liked When I was a Punk Rock DJ, 2003, sculpey, epoxy, steel, oil paint 
36 x 10 x 16 inches, image via Derek Eller

Speaking of photographs of perfume, in the early 2000s artist Erik Hanson was making sculptures of music. The first one I saw was at White Columns; it was blue stalagmites. Hanson dripped plaster into a stalagmite for the duration of each track on a David Bowie album. The two album sides were made on separate boards, which were then joined, facing each other, into a little box-like cave.

After the study I saw at White Columns—I think it was Ziggy Stardust—Hanson did a show of Bowie’s discography as little caves at Derek Eller. They were elegant, esoteric sculptures whose process was evident, but whose system was embedded in the titles. I’m left writing about sculpture because I can’t find any images online. Hanson made spiral drawings and other sculptural forms with the same durational strategy; the resulting work indexes the artist’s subjective experience of listening—or of making while listening—to a song. The body of work, then, becomes a catalogue of formative musical experience: playlist as autobiography as form, like the 2003 cascade of sculpey flowers above, Disco Songs I Liked When I Was A Punk DJ.

an intricately tangled sculpture made of lengths of wood painted in different colors, formed improvisationally by taking the letters of a sentence of text as a score, and resulting in a knot of angles, kind of like how a dna strand is curled on itself. the sculpture is inside the closed off domed space at the top of a building at girard college in philadelphia, made by steve roden in 2009. rip
Steve Roden, Nothing But What Is Therein Contained…, 2009, installation view at Girard College, Phila.

This, along with Chris Rusak and Amelia Konow’s Lumen Prototypes, make me think back on the systemic works of Steve Roden. He would devise a scheme, seemingly but never arbitrary, more or less mathematical, subjective or convoluted, and set it in motion to produce one thing from another: text into sculpture, city into sound. One thing I’d forgotten him saying about his 2009 project in Philadelphia, Nothing But What Is Therein Contained, is the importance of intuition within the parameters of the system, as the point, even. And I’d forgotten it in 2009, too.