Reading: “A Sonic Alarm for Our Natural World Going Silent” byAllison Meier on Hyperallergic

http://hyperallergic.com/232262/a-sonic-alarm-for-our-natural-world-going-silent/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The%2020%20Most%20Powerless%20People%20in%20the%20Art%20World%202015%20Edition&utm_content=The%2020%20Most%20Powerless%20People%20in%20the%20Art%20World%202015%20Edition+CID_1e2606c34b9af2b4b5862b9a4318c9b9&utm_source=HyperallergicNewsletter&utm_term=A%20Sonic%20Alarm%20for%20Our%20Natural%20World%20Going%20Silent

Hong Kong artist Samson Young. Entitled Pastoral Music, the exhibition will run from 05 November to 20 December 2015. Team (gallery, inc.) is located at 47 Wooster Street, between Grand and Broome, on the ground floor. Concurrently, our 83 Grand Street space will house a one-person exhibition of new work by Ryan McGinley.

For his New York debut, Samson Young presents a multi-media exhibition that transmutes his own extensive research on military history into an amalgamative artwork in three cohesive parts.

Nocturne, the central element of the exhibition, consists of a live performance protracted over the bulk of the show’s nearly two-month running time. For this work, Young collected video recordings of night bombings – predominately U.S. attacks on the Middle East, ranging from the Gulf War to ISIS – and edited the found footage into a six hour-long film, which plays mutely on his laptop computer. As he watches, the artist uses household objects and “live foley” techniques to reproduce the sounds of explosions, gunshots and debris as accurately as possible. This work is conceived of as a “Sonic Warfare Training Program,” with the artist taking on the role of training combatant; by the end of the show, he will know the aleatoric composition by heart. His “sound effects” are broadcast on-site via pirate radio frequencies, accessible via FM receivers both within and outside of the gallery. Divorced from their violent context, the sounds of war are captivating and sonorous, even beautiful.

Young locates and draws from past examples of artists’ direct involvement in warfare. Particularly significant to this exhibition was his discovery of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, an American World War II tactical unit known colloquially as the “Ghost Army.” Consisting largely of artists – sound technicians, architects, musicians, actors, painters and set designers – the unit’s primary mission was to conceive and execute deceptions. They employed the likes of fake radio transmissions, recorded combat sounds and inflatable tanks in order to create the pretense of an active battlefield and mislead enemy forces. The explicit convergence of artistic creativity and actual military strategy is a crucial moment for the artist; the Ghost Army’s activity provides a rough template for the artist’s own practice.

The show’s second component consists of Young’s manual transcriptions of those same war-sounds into graphical scores, to be performed as sonic weapons, battlefield deceptions in the mode of the Ghost Army. Significantly, these pieces are translations, not original compositions, a means to interpret and process already existing sounds rather than create new ones. This academic, research-oriented approach is critical to Young’s practice: these works re-enact and re-purpose history, presenting an expository dissection and deconstruction of an infrequently considered aspect of warfare; sound, both intentional and incidental, plays an integral role in combat, acting as a powerful psychological weapon.

TEAM Gallery, 47 Wooster Street, nyc

http://www.teamgal.com/exhibitions/324/pastoral_music