Black Thoughts Ari Benjamin Meyers
September 7—October 5, 2013

Black Thoughts Ari Benjamin Meyers

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Do You Have Black Thoughts Sep Oct2013 Exhibition Flyer Front Back
The New Empirical (840hz), 2013 Modified grand piano (Irmler, Leipzig 1893), custom-made tuning fork The grand piano is manipulated to perform just one tone: A-flat (840 Hz), the single note that was left out of the main theme in the original composition by Satie. This seemingly simple intervention has required the piano to be completely rebuilt and restrung with custom-made strings. Now each of the piano keys is tuned to the A-flat. Vexations 2, 2013 (background) Graphite pencil on paper 840 sheets of custom-made music paper Following Satie's instruction to perform 840 repetitions of the one page-long musical piece, Meyers composed his own version of the piece and, instead of playing it, wrote it down 840 times. The hand-written copies of the new music score are transcribed from memory, thus each page may contain unexpected changes. Photo © Andrea Rossetti

Press Release

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Ari Benjamin Meyers at the gallery. The artist and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers is interested in exploring modes of representation and presentation of music and musical structures in the context of visual art. His conceptual projects and installations often expose inconspicuous yet tangible details of music-making: music scores themselves, forms and arrangements of musical instruments, concert settings, and gestures of performers and conductors. At...
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Ari Benjamin Meyers
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Ari Benjamin Meyers

Ari Benjamin Meyers was born in 1972 in New York. He lives and works in Berlin. Ari Benjamin Meyers’ work explores structures and processes that redefine the performative, social, and ephemeral nature...