1: Untitled from Family

2021
speaker, fixed audio (4 channels). 20m (excerpt 5m)

Family is a set of sound installation pieces commissioned by the Goethe-Institut for the birth centennial of Joseph Beuys. Talks and other spoken performances occupied a significant role in Beuys’s output. Family takes this talking as a cue, tracing speculative paths between modernism, German idealism, and the Scramble for Africa through the organizing metaphor of different genres of speech.

[1] is a “speech” of about five minutes. Archival audio of Joseph Beuys in interview with Kate Horsfield, recorded during the 1979–80 Guggenheim retrospective of the artist’s work and licensed by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Video Data Bank, is filtered out by recordings of texts by Marx and Engels spoken by Seth Brodsky. “Marx authorizes the voice of Beuys.”

(note January 8, 2022)