BE THEREManifestosPresented by Kent Gallery October 23, 2008- December 20, 2008Reception: October 23, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pmCharles GainesCharles Gaines will unveil his first new major project since the 2007 Venice Biennale. Manifestos is a new ambitious suite of related drawings, musical scores and video installations in which Gaines examines the tradition of revolutionary manifestos and the way in which music is linked to revolutionary ideology. Manifestos were used by revolutionary groups to create awareness and solicit support for their movement. In this project, Gaines applies the text of four revolutionary manifestos – the Black Panther Manifesto, the Perspective for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life Manifesto, the Socialist Congress Manifesto and the Zapatista Manifesto - to a system designed to translate the text into musical notation. The music is written by dissecting the text and scoring as musical notation any letter in the text that is used as a music notation, letters A-H. The use of the letter H represents the code used in early Baroque tradition for B-flat. All other letters and spaces between words are notated as rests. The original musical score that is realized is played and recorded by a piano quintet (one piano, two violins, a viola, and a cello). Through this systematic process, Gaines breaks down the manifesto’s text and transforms it into a seemingly random, yet strikingly beautiful work of music. Much like John Cage’s Roratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegan’s Wake, 1979, the elements derived from the systematic progression are not intended to work harmoniously, or relate to each other but are linked to the manifesto itself, conspicuous by its very absence. Gaines may perhaps be best remembered for his recent participation in the Arsenale section of the 2007 Venice Biennale where he exhibited Airplanecrash Clock, 1997-2007. Rob Storr makes the following remark of Gaines’ work: The dialectics of order, aberration and disorder define the basic dynamic of Gaines’ multifarious practice and locate it at a point where abstraction meets representation. Anomalies serve as diagnostic tools for opening up systems to examine their latent tropes and their tendencies toward dysfunction. Some of the telltale signs Gaines scrutinizes occur within language or the structure of images: for instance, mapping the permutations of a tree’s growth, diagramming a dance by choreographer Trisha Brown or noting the incidence of racially loaded terms in texts by Don DeLillo and James Joyce. Since his first solo exhibition in 1972, Gaines frequently exhibited with Leo Castelli and John Weber Galleries in New York. He is also the recipient of numerous awards, including most recently in 2007, a $50,000 United States Artist Award. This will be Gaines’ first gallery exhibition in New York since 2000. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10-6 pm. For more information please contact (212) 627-3680. Reviews of Manifestos
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