Midtown Mondays

I finally made it to the Austrian Cultural Forum to visit the Erwin Redl/Christian Fennesz exhibition. It is a collaborative project in the loosest sense; two site-specific light installations by Redl have been paired with Fennesz's Gustav Mahler Project, a series of audio recordings made at an earlier time and presented this past spring at the ACF. The two projects are quite different: Redl's grids of L.E.D. lights suspended on thin cables and presented in dimmed rooms evoke Minimalist art while Fennesz's source material is utterly Romantic. The two meet in the realm of the digital: Redl's lights evoke computer motherboards and the power indicators on the ubiquitous machinery of contemporary life while Fennesz dutifully layers his symphonic works with static, hiss, clicks, and other remnants of digital processing. But I don't want this to be a review. I just wish to somehow convey the beauty inherent in the incongruity between these two projects. They play off of each other wonderfully. The perfect symmetry of the lights begins to waver under the influence of the music. The music itself feels structured in some way, as if the architecture of the physical installation extended outward to the sound that fills the room. The exhibition is only up for two more days - 10am to 6pm Tuesday and Wednesday - so if anyone is in midtown and has half an hour, I definitely suggest stopping by.