<b>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.</b><br>
<br>Link: <a href="http://bit.ly/vuxDkT">http://bit.ly/vuxDkT</a> <br><br>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. <br><br>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.<br><br><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Related info: <a href="http://bit.ly/rG9Dut" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/rpF0Wc </a> <br>
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