[spectre] In FONS AUDIO #12, Kristin Oppenheim gives us some tips for approaching her sound installation 'Hey Joe' (1996), which is part of the MACBA Collection.

[Radio Web MACBA]

*In FONS AUDIO #12, Kristin Oppenheim gives us some tips for approaching
her sound installation 'Hey Joe' (1996), which is part of the MACBA
Collection.*

Link: http://bit.ly/vuxDkT

Kristin Oppenheim (Honolulu, Hawaii, 1959) lives and works in New York. She
uses her own melancholy and mysterious voice as a means to dramatise the
exhibition space and stage the poetic relationships between sound, personal
memory and collective experience. The austerity of her installations link
her to the minimalist current, while the experimental use of voice and
sound bring her into line with conceptual art. The earliest attempts at
using the human voice in the visual arts can be traced back to the sound
poetry of the Futurists and Dadaists in the twenties, which were taken up
again in the fifties by the lletrists and by figures like Vito Acconci,
Henri Chopin and John Giorno.

Kristin Oppenheim takes fragments of popular songs or poems that she has
written or found and sings them repeating them in a loop that almost
functions as a mantra. In 'Hey Joe' (1996), the artist recites the first
line of the homonymous track that Jim Hendrix made famous in 1962, which
talks about a man who has murdered his wife and plans to run away to Mexico
to escape a jail sentence. The verse that Oppenheim recites goes like this:
«Hey Joe, where're you going with that gun in your hand?» The repetition of
this question and the fragility of the voice that speaks it plunge the
spectator into a haunting atmosphere in which the sense of danger and
vulnerability rises in crescendo. At the same time, the artist places two
spotlights in the ceiling that project beams of light onto the floor of the
empty room.

Related info: http://bit.ly/rpF0Wc  <http://bit.ly/rG9Dut>
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