Ken Butler 427 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11222 hybridluthery@gmail.com
Ken Butler is an artist and musician whose Hybrid musical instruments, collage artworks, performances and other works explore the interaction and transformation of common and uncommon objects, altered images, and diverse sounds as function and form collide in the intersection of art and music.
Butler is internationally recognized as an innovator of experimental musical instruments created from diverse materials including tools, sports equipment, and household objects. The idea of bricolage, essentially using whatever is “at hand”, is at the center of his art, encompassing a wide range of practice that combines assemblage art, live music, instrument design, performance art, theater, sculpture, installation, photography, film/video, graphic design, drawing, and collage.
Biography
Ken Butler studied viola briefly as a child and maintained an interest in music while studying visual arts in France, at Colorado College, and Portland State University where he completed his MFA in painting.
He has been featured in exhibitions and performances worldwide including The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Prada Foundation in Venice (as part of the “Art or Sound” exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2014), The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, New Music America (twice), Mass MoCA, and The Kitchen, The Brooklyn Museum, Lincoln Center and The Metropolitan Museum in New York City as well as in Canada, South America, Thailand, and Japan.
His works have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, Smithsonian, and Sculpture Magazine and have been featured on PBS, CNN, MTV, and NBC, including a live appearance on The Tonight Show. Awards include fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pollack/Krasner Foundation. He won first prize in the 2016 international Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech University.
Butler has performed with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, David Van Tieghem, Butch Morris, The Soldier String Quartet, Matt Darriau's Paradox Trio, The Tonight Show Band, and The Master Gnawa musicians of Morocco. His CD, Voices of Anxious Objects is on Tzadik records.
Works by Ken Butler are represented in public and private collections in Portland, Seattle, Vail, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, Washington, Paris, Tel Aviv, and New York City including the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has performed and/or exhibited throughout the US, and in Canada, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, Russia, Thailand, Peru, and Japan.He resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Education and awards
Ken Butler studied viola as a child and maintained a strong interest in music while studying the visual arts at Colorado College and in France at The Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence, completing his M.F.A. in painting from Portland State University in 1977. He moved to New York City in 1988 from Portland, Oregon. His numerous grants and awards include multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Pollock Krasner Foundation, The New York State Council for the Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission, among others.He won first prize in the 2016 international Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech University.
Teaching
He has taught courses, workshops, and lectured at universities, schools, museums, and cultural centers in the USA, Canada, Germany, and France, and has collaborated with dancers, artists, designers, composers, and film-makers. Ken is fluent in French and has traveled extensively. He was a visiting Artist at University of Michigan in 2003-04.
Career and Life Highlights
In addition to making numerous artworks, performing live throughout the world on dozens of his hybrid instruments, Ken also won first prize in the state in a national car design competition for the Fischer Body Company Craftsman's Guild while in high school, where he played viola in an octet and ran the mile on the track team, painted Van Gogh-style oil paintings under the shadow of Mt. St. Victoire while studying art and French in France, studied photography with Ruth Berhardt and ran a student darkroom, co-ordinated a multi-media festival while in college, came in 3rd out of 50 cyclists in a 60-mile race in the mountains of Colorado, and saw Jimi Hendrix live 3 times.
He worked on Claymation films with Academy Award winner Bob Gardiner, had a film in the Ann Arbor Festival with his own experimental work in 1973, made sets and performed skits and live music on stilts with a fake mustache as "The Great Kendini" with the D'anse Combeau Orchestra, was art-director for Gus Van Sant’s first feature film “Mala Noche”, had an MFA art studio in Portland that some people thought was the "science department?", performed music for deaf children on his "K-Board" instrument with lights in upstate New York, has been racing and building custom 1/32nd scale slot cars since childhood, was featured on MTV2 with seven different station breaks over a period of 3 years in the 90's, and built instruments for and performed with the Thai Elephant Orchestra in Chaing Mai,Thailand (an orchestra of live elephants).
He appeared on NPR radio's New Sounds with John Schaefer and Studio 360, has performed at the Patrons lounge at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC in addition to having a work in the collection, performed thousands of times as "Sound Invention" with his instruments for more than 1/4 million children in the New York area with Young Audiences program since 1988, played in front of over 3,000 people outdoors in France as an opening act, was signed by John Zorn to his Tzadik record label on the steps of Tower Records in New York City, performed live with the Kevin Eubanks band on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and at the Katherine the Great Theatre at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg Russia in a tuxedo.
He had simultaneous exhibitions at the Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was artist-in-residence for a month in Hamburg, Germany for a series of concerts and exhibitions sponsored by The Klanghaus, attended the first Burning Man on Baker Beach in San Francisco in 1986, is the subject of a CNN Great Big Story video that has over 7 million views, won first place in the Guthman International Musical Instrument competition, “the Pulitzer of instrument design” at Georgia Tech University, and has won numerous art and music fellowships including from the Oregon Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, the NY Foundation for the Arts, and the Pollack/Krasner Foundation, and has exhibited and performed in museums, galleries, lofts, private homes, backyards, basements, and other alternative spaces for over 50 years.
Additional Performance and Exhibitions …
Other performance and exhibition highlights in New York City include The Kitchen, where he presented a major multi-media work “Insects and Anxious Objects” in 1996, and a large-scale inter-active audio-visual installation entitled “Object Opera” presented at Thread Waxing Space in 1995, as well as The Whitney Museum, The Wintergarden Theatre at the World Financial Center, The Brooklyn Museum, The Queens Museum, The New Victory Theatre, The Great Hall at Cooper Union, C-Space at the Citicorp Atrium, Exit Art, The Drawing Center, The Performing Garage, Roulette, The Knitting Factory, Tonic, Experimental Intermedia, Location 1, BAM Cafe, The Bowery Poetry Club, The Puffin Room, ABC No Rio, Florence Lynch Gallery, The American Gallery, Test-Site Gallery, American Primitive Gallery, Sideshow Gallery, and Franklin Furnace, where he presented his New York premiere, a multi-media performance called “Hybrid Antics” in 1987 with multiple projections and live music performed on his hybrid musical instruments with three musicians.
Other national and international highlights include a solo exhibition and a series of performances at the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut, as well as presentations (exhibitions and/or performances) at The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Maryland Institute of the Arts in Baltimore, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Painted Bride in Philadelphia, The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Images du Futur in Montreal, The Apollohouse in Eindhoven, Holland, Archipel Urbain in Grenoble, France, and a 6-city tour of Germany ending at Podewil in Berlin, Germany. In 2001, Butler was invited for a month as Artist in Residence by the city of Hamburg, Germany where he presented a series of concerts and collaborations with local artists and musicians, sponsored by The Klanghaus.
Additional venues in the US include The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University, The Art Gallery of Ontario Canada, The Slusser Gallery at the University of Michigan, The Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, and Barbara Tillman Gallery in Miami, The House, and The Dance Studio in Los Angeles, The Oakland Museum, The Portland Center for the Performing Arts, The Portland Museum of Art, Portland Center for the Visual Arts, The Art Gym at Marylhurst College, NW Artists Workshop, and Blue Sky Gallery, in Portland, Oregon, Tha Hallie Ford Museum in Salem, and On the Boards in Seattle, where he premiered his multi-media work “Hybrid Antics” in 1985.
International Music Festivals
International music festivals include The NY Texaco Jazz Festival, New Music America 88 Miami, New Music America 90 and The International Cello Festival in Montreal, Printemps de Bourges Festival, Aix-en-Othe Festival, The St. Brieuc Art Rock Festival and Music-Action Festival in France, Instants Chavires in Paris, the Cave 12 Solo Festival and Festival de La Batie in Geneva, and the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle. Ken’s work was featured in exhibition and performance for the award-winning Edgefest Festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2005.
Summary of Reviews
His works have been extensively reviewed including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Village Voice, New York Press, Artforum, Art in America, Smithsonian Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and People Magazine, among many other publications.
Selected media appearances
Butler has been featured on numerous national and international radio and television programs including a live appearance on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno where he performed on his instruments with the Tonight Show Band in 1999, a live performance and interview on National Public Radio’s "New Sounds” with John Schaeffer in 2000, a radio feature, "Ken Butler's Hybrid Instruments" on Studio 360 with Kurt Anderson in 2004, both on WNYC radio, and a feature story on “City Arts” by Harvey Wang on PBS Channel 13 in 1995, in New York City. A recent online video from CNN's Great Big Story series about Butler, "The Junkyard Virtuoso", has nearly 7 million views.
Butler and his hybrid instruments were featured in live performance for 7 different Station ID’s for MTV (M2), “A Guide to (Really) Alternative Music”, produced by Monad Films, NYC, in 1997; He has also appeared on “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” on Fox TV , and was a contestant on NBC’s To Tell The Truth. Other TV feature stories include a story on CNN International by Jeanne Moos, CNBC by Alex Dawson (also run on NBC news) in NYC in 1998 and a feature story, “Another Story From Planet Earth” for Fuji Television, Tokyo, produced by Mado Productions in 1995.
Recordings
His CD, Voices of Anxious Objects, with a 16-page booklet, is available on John Zorn's Tzadik label, and he is also he is featured on Gravikords, Whirlies & Pyrophones: Experimental Musical Instruments, along with a 96-page booklet and CD, on Ellipsis Arts. See his discography in Resume.
Musicians
Since 1981 Ken Butler has played music (just once in many cases) with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, David Van Tieghem, Butch Morris, The Soldier String Quartet, Matt Darriau's Paradox Trio, Anthony Coleman, Tom Cora, Cooper-Moore, Melvin Gibbs, Akim Funk Buddah, Jon Bepler, Terry Dame, Ed Potokar, Nick Demopoulos, Adrian Romero, Ferdinand Forsch, Jon Rose, Charles Burnham, Jason Hwang, Rob Thomas, Yuli Beeri, Isaac Gardner, Jessica Lurie, John JB Butler, Stan Wood, Steve Koski, Tarik Banzi, Stomu Takeishi, Seido Salifoski, Jerry Gibbs, Will Calhoun, Jeff "Tain" Watts, Gene Jackson, Kenny Wollesson, Bill Buchen, Vin Scialla, Danmiel Jodocy, Satoshi Takeishi, Michael Evans, Ed Potokar, Judith Ren-Lay, Christine Bard, Hearn Gadbois, Rowan Storm, Rufus Cappadocia, Michelle Kinney, Martha Colby, Nioka Workman, Avram Fefer, Graham Haynes, Bradford Reed, Mike Delia, Steven Marsh, Chris Cunningham, Michelle Kinney, Brad Shepik, Miki Navazio, Mark Ribot, Jean-Francois Pauvros, David Simons, Raphael Mostel, Eugene Chadbourne, Julia Heyward, Dina Emerson, Judith Ren-Lay, Rebecca Moore, Shelley Hirsch, Tim Hill, Marie Afonso, Sepideh Vahidi, Heather Mabin, Lisa Karrer, Krystle Warren, Christoph Grund, Wolfgang Von Steurmer, Essiett Essiett, Glen Moore, Peter Herbert, Mark Helias, Emmanuel Mann, Gary Kelly, Jaron Lanier, Reza Derakshani, Hans Tammen, Ben Neill, Roy Campbell, Avram Fefer, Michael Attias, Daniel Carter, Tom Chess, Yosvany Terry, Bert Wilson, David Watson, Masahiko Kono, Judy Dunaway, Steve Sandberg, Kwakye Obeng, Jojo Kuo, John Mettam, Sam Bennett, Raquy Danziger, Manongo Mujica, Chocolate Algendones, Peter Basil, Loretta Roome, Eric Feinstein, Michael Stirling, Martin Zarzar, Tom Grant, Tod Carver, Mike Denny, Cam Newton, Ric Soshin, The World Drum Trio, 3-Legged Torso, The Tone-Art Ensemble, The Master Gnawa Musicians of Morocco, and The Tonight Show Band with Kevin Eubanks.
Ken Butler’s art historical influences and favorite quotes
After growing up with my mother’s Van Gogh and Picasso prints on the walls as a child, I ventured into drawing, colored pencil, pastels, and Cray-Pas pastels, (not so much paint), sitting for hours at my drafting table, gifted by my parents. My father noted, entering the room, that I often had the radio on along with the television (with the sound off) - perhaps a predecessor to my later interest in multi-media? I was eventually drawn to scissors, X-acto knives, and explored cutouts, building miniature dioramas and creating flatworks. I was drawn to precise detail and precision, and recall making a tiny half-inch hatchet with brown construction paper (pencil lines for wood-grain), with a blade from two layers of aluminum foil, the edge “sharpened” by flattening it with a spoon. For the fire, I rolled the paper into tiny logs, and made the flames from orange and red plastic, cut into tiny waves.
Further down the road I found myself drawn to Cubism for its formal inventions, spatial distortion, use of collage, and “hard edged” but rather low-relief depth, Dada for its anarchic passion and multidisciplinary fervor, Futurism, for it’s embrace of the new technology, Constructivism for it’s spatial compositional sense, and Surrealism for its diversity and imagination, and with the conceptual frameworks of Pop, Op, and abstraction. Duchamp had opened up the world of ideas taking precedence over the demonstration of one’s skills.
I was particularly drawn to the inventions and discoveries that transformed the world surrounding the turn of the twentieth century and the advent of the first World War, the effect of which was cataclysmic and it’s horror shut the door on many strains of artistic and creative expressions (while opening others). Prior to WW1 there was widespread disillusionment, outrage and disgust with economic inequities, and a desire to overthrow predecessors. The historically significant Paris Exposition of 1900 brought the world together in unprecedented ways as the Europe began looking to cultures outside the west (Eric Satie hearing Balinese Gamelan, Picasso’s eyes an African masks, etc.).
Everything changed between 1912 and 1914: Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, The Armory Show, Einstein's Relativity, Freud's Psychoanalysis, Schoenberg and Stravinsky's riots, Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, Russolo's "Art of Noise" Manifesto, and Picasso and Braque's collage inventions, among many others. In the 30 year period between 1885 and 1914, creative artists like Cezanne, Picasso, Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray, Tatlin, Leger, Matisse, Stieglitz, Stravinsky, Satie, Ravel, Ives, Debussy, Scriabin, Janacek, Paganini, Cocteau, Diaghlev, Nijinsky, Isadora Duncan, Sarah Bernhardt, Alfred Jarry, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Charlie Chaplin, Lumiere, Eisenstien, Leni Riefenstahl, Fritz Lang's Metropolis Frank Lloyd Wright, Gaudi, Eiffel, and Roebling manifested a whole new world.
As the new photographers forced “genre painters” toward oblivion or abstraction, and the avant-garde saw the their “mistakes” (multiple overlapping exposures, exaggerated foreshortening and blurred movement) depicted on film, a direction for painting clearly led to Cubism, Futurism and the iconic “Nude Descending a Staircase” by Duchamp, which created a fervor at the Armory Show in New York in 1913, called by the local press “an explosion in a shingle factory”, shredding the art world to pieces.
In this unprecedented period of innovation in all fields, we had the invention (or new popularity) of photography, film and radio, the light bulb, sound recorder, phonograph, the telephone, the automobile, airplane, bicycle, internal combustion engine, steam engine, refrigerator, type-writer, mass production, the assembly line, vaccines, pasteurization, the discovery of radiation, electrons, and x-rays, and the exploration of the North Pole, to name a few. Coming form a world of fuel lamps, horses, rotten food, wood ovens, poor sanitation and unbearable smell, this must have been a shock to everyone. The sudden revelations on all sides, coupled with the advent of photography profoundly transformed the aesthetic, cultural and scientific landscape. The pervasive restlessness in the culture at this time expanded out in all directions to form the template for the next 100 years.
I am drawn to visual artists Van Gogh, Matisse, Bosch, Uccello, DaVinci, Duchamp, Picabia, Schwitters, Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, Leger, Picasso, Braque, Gerald Murphy, Matisse, Jean Tinguely, Hannah Hoch, Yves Tanguy, Oskar Schlemmer, Raoul Hausmann, Muybridge, Atget, Max Beckmann, Magritte, Calder, Stuart Davis, Charles Sheeler, Frederick Kiesler, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and eventually to more contemporary artists Arman, Rauschenberg, Bill Woodrow, David Mach, Donald Lipski, Brian Jungen, Rebecca Horn, Bruce Nauman, Willie Cole, David Hammons, Chris Burden, Dennis Oppenheim, Vito Acconci, Louise Nevelson, Joseph Cornell, Urs Fischer, Irwin Wurm, Tony Cragg, Sarah Sze, and many others, especially those who work with objects.
Multi-disciplinary artists of influence are Laurie Anderson, whose performances were transformative to my thinking and were a huge influence, along with others like Julia Heyward, Perry Hoberman, George Coates, and Robert Wilson, among many others.
Some of my favorite quotes
“Art should attend us everywhere that life flows and acts. Not the old, not the new, but the necessary.”---Vladimir Tatlin, 1920
“You may paint with whatever material you please, with pipes, postage stamps, postcards or playing cards, candelabra, pieces of oil cloth, collars, painted paper, newspapers.”---Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, 1913
"The highest goal of music is to connect one's soul to their Divine Nature, not entertainment." ---Pythagoras
“I could see no reason why used tram tickets, bits of driftwood, buttons and old junk from attics and rubbish heaps should not serve as materials for paintings; they suited the perpoise just as well as factory-made paints. It is possible to cry out using bits of old rubbish, and that’s what I did, gluing and nailing them together.”---Kurt Schwitters
“The artist should be alone …..Everyone for himself, as in a shipwreck.” ---Marcel Duchamp
“There is no solution, because there is no problem.”---Marcel Duchamp
“It takes a long time to become young.”---Pablo Picasso
“Everything you can imagine is real.”---Pablo Picasso
“I have seen what no man has seen before., when Pablo Picasso, leaving aside painting for a moment, was constructing this immense guitar out of sheet metal ….Some witnesses, already shocked by the things that they saw covering the walls, and that they refused to call paintings because they were made of oilcloth, wrapping paper, and newspaper, said, pointing a haughty finger at the object of Picasso’s clever pains: What is it? Does it rest on a pedestal? Does it hang on a wall? What is it, painting or sculpture? Picasso, dressed in the blue of Parisian artisans, responded in his finest Andalusian voice: “It’s nothing, it’s el guitare!” And there you are! The watertight compartments are demolished. We are delivered from painting and sculpture, which already have been liberated from the idiotic tyranny of genres. It is neither this nor that. It is nothing. It’s el guitatre! ---André Salmon, from La Jeune Sculpture française, seen 1914, published 1919
“...profound analogies between humanity, the animal, vegetable, and mechanical worlds...all the significations of light, sound, noise, and language....luminously explains the governing laws of life: the necessity of complication and varying rhythm: a synthesis of speed and transformation...a perpetual dynamic of thought , an uninterrupted current of images and sounds, is alone able to express the ephemeral, unstable, and symphonic universe that is forging itself in us and with us.”---Filippo Marinetti,The Variety Theater
“Art questions are of absolutely no interest to me now,” said Marcel Duchamp near the end of his life. He preferred breathing. “My art is that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It’s a sort of constant euphoria.”---Marcel Duchamp
“The artist should be alone …..Everyone for himself, as in a shipwreck.” ---Marcel Duchamp
“Duchamp has “a supreme ease.” ---Andre Breton, (early on in NY around 1916)
“The capitals could have been in the chicken runs before they were in the temples, the marble urns could have been planted with basil before they were filled with dead bones. Only this is known for sure: a given number of objects is shifted within a given space, at times submerged by a quantity of new objects, at times worn out and not replaced; the rule is to shuffle them each time, then try to assemble them.”---Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“Curiosity is the main energy.”---Robert Raushenberg
“I don’t really trust ideas, especially good ones. Rather I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.”---Robert Rauschenberg
“You begin with the possibility of the material.”---Robert Rauschenberg
“A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil, and fabric.”---Robert Rauschenberg
Ken Butler: Background
At the time I created my first hybrid instrument quite by accident in 1978 by adding a fingerboard, tailpiece, pegs, bridge, and contact microphone to a small hatchet which I then played as a violin, I was working in a variety of primarily visual media including painting, photo/collage, film and slide animation, and inter-active sculpture/light installations. The axe-violin, which I have played at hundreds of live performances was both my first sound piece and sculptural object and further created the fusion of art forms and conceptual framework I was seeking – a transformative and poetic bricolage of form and function and cultural identity. Since that time I have created over 400 hybrid string (and a few percussion) instruments/sculptures from primarily found objects and materials, numerous inter-active sound and light installations, assemblage works, and live performances ranging from solo concerts to large-scale multi-media events with text, instrument-controlled multiple slide and kinetic shadow projections, and live music played on hybrid instruments by several artist/musicians.
A brief discussion of function and form.
Any object that can be vibrated, with no exceptions, is “playable” to some degree in the hands of a skilled musician with some quality miking, engineering, and practice. Most of the Hybrid Instruments are not intended for performance and would be considered assemblage sculptures. The nearly 50 or so that are playable are designed to be amplified with contact microphones and have no acoustic sound. There are over a dozen that are extremely playable and are used in live performances and recordings. I made the first of nearly 400 hybrid instrument in 1978, the Axe Violin, and have been performing live with them since that time.
Ken Butler career narrative, 2024
One of my first memories as a young child was grasping the sides of my mother’s baby grand piano in the living room, standing on my tip-toes to peer into the vast space, fully engaged as she deftly demonstrated the wonder of the mechanical action that transformed the pushing of the keys into the precise movement of the wooden hammers hitting the strings. I peered in amazement at the mechanical action, but was, alas, somewhat dismayed by another aspect. “Those little hammers are really neat, Mom, but the strings are all the same --- just flat and lying there…shouldn’t it be more like an Alexander Calder circus?” I was off and running and encouraged by my very creative mother, who was a talented pianist (her high school boogie-woogie band was called “Satan and the Seven Devils.” She was Satan). She was also deeply imbedded in the visual arts and I grew up with a pair of M.C. Escher woodcuts that she purchased from the artist in his studio while we were living in Europe. They adorned the walls along with posters by Picasso and Van Gogh and several of her copies of paintings by Franz Marc. She had educated her eye overseas, as my father worked for the Marshall Plan post-war and moved the family to Europe, where I attended Montessori School in The Hague, Holland for first and second grade and then a move to a large house in the suburbs of Paris. Dutch and French were in my ears early on.
We returned to the US for a spell in Idaho followed by a move in fifth grade to Portland, Oregon. Saturday art classes at the Portland Art Museum followed and I had my first solo exhibition of small copies of Van Gogh paintings done in Cray-Pas at my grade school in seventh grade. Around the same time, while attending an orchestral concert, and asked about it by my mother afterwards, I said “I like that “fat violin,” and was soon taking private lessons and playing viola in the school orchestra, and in an octet with four violins, two violas, and two cellos. I loved playing the music but still considered visual art to be my main passion. My listening went from classical to folk to blues and eventually to jazz, and I took jazz piano lessons for a short time in high school, neglecting to call back the teacher after vacation. Strings were my jam, and I have always had a guitar and violin within reach.
I also grew up with a strong interest in automobile design and building models of all kinds, (pertinent in the sense that I ended up much later assembling artworks from diverse parts) and at age 15 entered a contest promoted at my high school by The Fischer Body Corporation to design and build a model car. I labored for 150 hours carving and sanding my dream car, which won first prize in the state and nearly a trip to Detroit. There is a trophy at Lincoln High in Portland. Interestingly enough, the intense labor required to build a car from a wood block proved too time-consuming for my sensibilities and as it is similar to the working processes of a luthier (string instrument builder) I was soon inspired to create my works with a less demanding and more spontaneous process.
This continuing interest in the arts led eventually to a college degree in studio art at Colorado College, including a junior year in Aix-en-Provence, France (1968, I was 20) studying painting in the style of Van Gogh in the home of Cézanne … sipping red wine while oil painting on an aged wooden easel in the landscapes and environs around Aix (makes me chuckle now…okay, I did not have a beret!). An interesting anecdote of the time, related to the cultural upheaval of the era, was my one and only experience with LSD, (Owsley purple, shipped from San Francisco) which I dropped one afternoon in the outskirts of Aix with friends, carrying me through to the morning with many new radical visual and auditory visions, to say the least. Interestingly enough, considering that I was a rather serious student of painting, I found the hallucinations to be way too extreme, the colors wildly exaggerated, and it looked like kitsch to my eyes. Once was enough.
Even then, I didn’t really care for the process of painting: the mess, mixing, smell, cleanup, the cans of thinner with brushes, waiting for the paint to dry, and the like. In addition, with my studies of art history, I was gradually drawn away from post-impressionism and into the collage feel of Cubism, and the contrary, absurd, and edgy world of Dada and Surrealism. I developed a strong interest in Marcel Duchamp’s use of mechanical metaphors and imagery and embraced photography where I eventually became focused on images of discarded and smashed objects in junkyards, mashed up like cubist collages.
Visiting museums around the world, I would often peruse the exhibitions rather quickly and head directly to the bookstore, where I would devour the many artists books, seeking those kindred spirits and developing a broad sense of what had come before. At one point in my late twenties, I strongly embraced a cubist/constructivist bricolage “man and machine” aesthetic, coming out of DaVinci, Duchamp and Picabia, Jean Tinguely, and contemporary kinetic sculpture and installations.
After graduating with a degree in painting in 1970, I had produced a group of large canvasses of manipulated images of objects based on my photos or collages, with images ranging from steel pipes, a smashed car, light bulbs, a mound of salt, a flashcube, and a spoon, fitting into the current New Realism movement, and finding abstraction within existing objects. This led to my first exhibition after graduation, “Sharp Focus Realism”, at the Rubicon Gallery in California in 1973.
This direction expanded during my MFA period at Portland State University where I sought to combine all these elements into works using photography, drawing, collage, found objects, and I produced large (some 6x12 feet) photograms with Diazo paper (light-sensitive paper used by architects at the time, replacing blueprints). These large scale mixed media works installed on the wall were the culmination of this direction, away from painting. I made my first real film, “Hand Song” at this time, essentially animating studio objects in the studio, “conducted” by a vintage wooden mechanical mannequin hand. The film was accepted to the Ann Arbor festival.
At the time I created my first hybrid instrument quite by accident in 1978 by adding a fingerboard, tailpiece, pegs, bridge, and contact microphone to a small hatchet which I then played as a violin, I was working in a variety of primarily visual media including painting, photo/collage, 16mm film and slide animation, and inter-active sculpture/light installations.
A train of thought that gradually presented itself and became prescient was the gradual transition from drawing to photography, to collage, to assemblage, to performance. My paintings had a lot of detail and precision and were very labor-intensive, which drew me to photography, where a machine could render imagery of extreme detail effortlessly. Combining photo images and drawing seemed like a good direction until I asked myself, ”Why paint or photograph a dented chrome hubcap when you can just make a piece with the actual hubcap?” This changed everything as I was much less interested in “demonstrating my rendering skills” than I was in creating compositions with images and objects. It was this thinking that led to the creation of the first hybrid instrument.
The origin of the first Hybrid Instrument, the Axe Violin 1978
The path to the creation of my first hybrid instrument and ultimately performance work was begun in the mid-seventies while working with contact printing full torso x-rays onto light-sensitive diazo paper used by architects. The resulting images were extremely guitar-like (vertebrae as frets and neck, etc.) and were used as a backdrop for a large wall installation utilizing an actual guitar and violin. Entitled "Harmony on the Critical List", the work had a musical/medical theme as well as dada-futuro-cubist qualities. As I was already musically involved with string instruments, I then began to think of the ergonomic and proportional relationship they bear to the human body.
In 1978 (at age thirty) I was in my basement in Portland when I saw a small rusty hatchet left by a former tenant. Something compelled me to pull it up under my chin as though it were a violin. Immediately I imagined it as a fully functional instrument and went upstairs to see if it would perchance fit into a small violin case, which it did absolutely perfectly. I fitted a fingerboard, tailpiece, tuning pegs, bridge, and contact microphone to the axe and was quite amazed when it sounded remarkably good played though my guitar amplifier. So I could really play my "axe". I was unaware at the time of the profound effect of this creation on my artistic life, which had just initiated a future of live performance. The Axe Violin was both my first sound piece as well as sculptural object and further created the fusion of art forms I was seeking - a transformative bricolage or hybridization of form and function and cultural object identity.
In addition to being the first three-dimensional work, the first true found object sculpture, and the first playable sculpture, it fostered a new reaction to my work. Whereas prior, viewers had said the like of “You have a nice compositional sense,” “You can really draw,” or “Nice color sense,” they now said “Good idea.” I realized that all I had done was re-arrange objects that other people had made. Hence, collage and assemblage became my jam, and soon live multi-media performance.
A significant life event occurred in 1981, when I was selected to show a group of my hybrid instruments in a major exhibition at The Portland Center for the Visual Arts, curated by Linda Cathcart. I was excited to show them, and had a row of small ones on a long shelf and a large group leaning against the wall on a raised platform. The gallery director approached me, more-less demanding a performance as part of the programming. As I had never played then live, and my jazz guitarist brother John, who I had jammed with on them, was living in Holland, I was hesitant. She was quite forceful and I thought that I could perhaps put together a program with some talented string players who were friends, show some slides and it would be no big deal, as local performers usually drew a small crowd. We would have some fun and that would be it. As it happened, the local TV crew showed up at the chaotic “rehearsal” in the space, and a clip was shown on the news that night, and (drum roll) to my shock, nearly 350 people came to the performance, my very first! We got a standing ovation and I was hooked. I realized that in a performance, I could project hundreds of images of my artworks, experiment with lighting, kinetic sculpture, and perform music of my own invention on my hybrid instruments with other musicians. This became the template for that aspect of the work from there on.
Two years later, in 1983, I was contemplating methods for controlling electrical devices from the stage, and built a small device with light switches and outlets that I could “play” from the stage. Desiring to put all my fingers on the switches, I had the idea of modifying a surplus organ keyboard with small contact switches underneath the keys which would give me much more control. I wired the switches to 50 female electrical plugs, thereby using the keys to activate whatever was plugged in.
I imagined being able to plug in devices that produced sound but happened upon a hurdy-gurdy (a mechanical string instrument), which has keys that touch up against strings, and I installed a single guitar string underneath the keys of the keyboard, with a contact mic on the end, thereby enabling the keys to turn on a device as well as produce a sound by “hammering” down on the string. I thus planned to hammer and pluck or bow the string sticking out the far side, when I suddenly realized that the perfect thing for further activating it I had already constructed, a vertical bicycle wheel auto-strummer with guitar pics imbedded in the tire. When I plugged in lights and kinetic devices to the K-Board, placed the strummer on the string, turned out the room lights, and swithed it on, I was stunned that the instrument had huge potential as a multi-media image-making sound machine. The K-Board was born.
This creation and the process of imagining large-scale projection environments activated by a keyboard, allowing the viewer/participant to “play” the environment eventually led to the creation of large-scale interactive projection and sound environments culminating with “Object Opera”, at Thread axing Space in New York, a 3.000 square foot installation, in 1995.
Back in 1983, I was applying for grants, doing odd graphic design jobs, some illustration and whatever I could do to generate income, and have been essentially self-employed since graduating. A momentous and life-altering event occurred in September of that year, when the mail arrived and my companion brought me three envelopes, one from The National Endowment for the Arts, from whom I had applied for the first time for a Fellowship. The other two were from The Oregon Arts Commission, and a local cable company for a video production grant. Miraculously, the cable company granted me $3,000, I was awarded a $5,000 fellowship for the OAC, and was stunned to open the third letter to see I had won another $7,000 from the National Endowment. I was gob-smacked, and not only was that a major boon to my ability to produce new works but more profoundly, I clenched my fist, and thought to myself, “I can DO this.” Very soon after, I sold a large artwork, and a film group in Arkansas actually purchased a copy of my experimental film “Hand-Song” from 1977, for their collection. I was off and running with confidence and determination. Whodathunkit.
In the mid-eighties, at the advice of my mother, I put together a live music presentation with my instruments called “Sound Invention” for Young Audiences, a national organization that presented school performances and workshops. I designed the program around the science of sound, the origin of music and instruments, and how they work, with a group of hybrids including the Axe-Violin, Tennis Racket Banjo, Shovel Guitar, and the K-Board, which enabled on-stage participation from the students, primarily aged seven to ten. (I also worked with Kindergarten through High School age). In workshops, we built thousands of instruments and they drew imaginary instruments of their own invention. When the kids took the stage and played the K-Board, the packed auditoriums came alive with exhilaration, discovery, and elation, producing some of my most cherished memories. I continued to refine the show and made the bulk of my living dragging massive amounts of gear throughout Portland and then the five boroughs of New York after moving in the late eighties, clear through to the late 2000’s. Around a quarter of a million kids have watched me play live on a one-string Golf Club.
I have sold nearly 150 works, mostly hybrid instrument sculptures and am fortunate to be in collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and they have taken me around the world to many unexpected destinations.
In late 2006, at age fifty-eight, a life-threatening illness put a stop to everything. I’ll keep this short here, because it is a long complex story, but I was diagnosed, with no symptoms, with liver cancer and told I needed a transplant. Needless to say, the following five years became by far the most challenging of my life and caused a profound shift in priorities. A terrible infection prior to the transplant had me within hours of my demise, followed by a painful and arduous two-month hospitalization, and finally a successful operation. Seventeen years later it’s quite miraculous that I am alive. I had no health insurance. The eleven-hour operation, with a posse of nearly a dozen doctors was a cakewalk compared to the preceding three months. It is by far the busiest and most focused I have ever been in my life. Thank you NYU Langone hospital, Bellevue, and Woodhull, and my very dearest friends.
This experience partially prompted a body of work called TORSO, from 2014, where I pulled trash from my bins and cans, determined to use the cast-off refuse to make art in the form of a human torso, also referencing the guitar/body metaphors previously explored. Some of these 60”x40” collage works were done on clear vinyl, enabling the overlay of different versions of the central figures, and allowing for many variations as the clear screens could also be reversed. I combined all of the overlay options and made a short film of the same name, which abstractly references aspects of this challenging voyage to hell and back. I’m fortunate to be alive!
Bricolage
The concept of “bricolage,” essentially using whatever is “at hand”, is at the center of my art, encompassing a wide range of practice that combines assemblage art, live music, instrument design, performance art, theater, sculpture, installation, photography, film/video, graphic design, collage, and drawing. Bricolage is a term not easily translated into English. Perhaps “handyman”, “tinker,” “jack of all trades.” “Mr.Fix-it,” or the like come closest to the term, but they lack the gravitas of the real concept. (“Tinkering” has a somewhat lightweight connotation, even though the airplane and other major inventions were created by just that process). The term bricolage is derived from French anthropologist Claude Levi-Straus’s “The Savage Mind”, where the definition extends to “creating a new world by re-contextualizing and re-purposing the existing parts of the new world”. It is a good fit for my use of found and discarded materials for my art-making.
Career metaphor
If one thinks of the metaphor of a “ladder of success,” I always visualized different methods that individuals take to “climb.” Some grasp a sturdy ladder and carefully mount each step with both feet and both hands, moving slowly and assuredly, likely guaranteeing solid eventual success. Other run up quickly with abandon, perhaps fall, and grab another ladder. My approach was to gather small, lightweight ladders, one for each discipline, that could connect together, allowing me to combine them in different ways to “climb the wall,” perhaps a bit un-stable compared to those with a single discipline, but it allowed me to reach many parts of the “wall” with numerous combinations and cross-pollination that kept things interesting, if challenging at times. My backpack of ladders is still growing and seeking new heights.
A brief anecdote about my move to New York
I had achieved a decent level of success with my art in Portland by the mid-eighties and was interested in extending my reach beyond the area. Someone indicated that the best way to get a gig in Seattle was by way of San Francisco, Los Angeles or New York, so I paid visits to all three, falling in love with the vital street vibe of New York City. I applied to a performance art program and was invited by Franklin Furnace (thank you Martha Wilson) in 1987, where I presented my multi-media performance “Hybrid Antics” to enthusiastic response. I was invited back by to the city by video/performance pioneer Julia Heyward to perform in her work “Mood Music” at The Kitchen, a cutting-edge downtown space. During that period, I contemplated moving there and was invited back by Martha Wilson for a performance art showcase, and I made the rounds to some of the presenting venues at the time, King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, Café Bustello, A-Mica Bunker, etc and made rough contacts to possibly book a performance when I returned. Back in Portland, a little more than a month from my return, I rolled up my sleeves, put the contact numbers in front of me, grabbed my phone and, with low expectations but determination, I started to make calls. Miraculously, I got everyone on the phone, they remembered me and and I booked five gigs in less than 10 minutes on the phone. Unbelievable. At that moment I said “I’m f-ing moving there!” The rest is history.
inks to artists/instrument builders/sound artists/musicians
http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/
http://www.jonroseweb.com/index.html
Great Music (no particular order, or reason)
Miles, Hendrix, Coltrane, Bartok, Monk, Dolphy, James Brown, Debussy, Taraf de Haidouks, McLaughlin, Aretha, Manitas de Plata, Ivo Papasov, Bulgarian Women's Choir, Dylan, Parissa and Dastan Ensemble, Buddy Guy, O.V. Wright, Odetta, Djivan Gasparian, Jeff Beck, Sam Cooke, Roland Kirk, Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan, Fred Neil, Steve Coleman, Maurizio Kagel, Elvin Jones, King Sunny Ade, Zappa, Django, Bill Evans, Sarah Vaughn, Ravel, Fela Kuti, Sonny Rollins, Jaco, Iva Bittova, Penderecki, Otis Redding, Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, Radio Tarifa, Paganini, Devo, Ornette, Eliot Carter, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Clifford Brown, Oliver Nelson, Nina Simone, Ellington, Stravinsky, Zakir, Mingus, Chick Corea, Paco, Messiaen, Cannonball, Ayler, Mahalia Jackson, Parween Sultana, Piazolla, Dimi Mint Abba, Captain Beefheart, Harvey Mandel, Jobim, Eno, L. Subramanian, Carmen Linares, Beatles, Who, Zep, Andy Bey, Huun Huur Tu, Paradox Trio, Luiz Bonfa, Stevie Wonder, Cream, Milton Nascimiento, Prince, Sly Stone, Wilson Pickett, Fairfield Four, Joni Mitchell, Satie, Enescu, Albert King, Doors, Denilo Perez, Dafnis Prieto, Cesaria Evora, Yasmin Levy, Debashish Bhattacharya, ONB, Clarence Carter, Ramones, Anour Brahem, Frissel, Tristano, Shadjarian, Harry Partch, Oum Kahlsoum, Okay Temiz, Kurt Elling, Glen Velez, Bismillah Khan, The Bluesbreakers, Otis Rush, Lou Reed, Rom Narayan, Richard Bona, Fred Frith, Tom Cora, Aphex Twin, Horowitz, Sandy Bull, Stanley Clarke, Gary Burton, Joan Baez, Ian and Sylvia, Bert Jansch, The Residents, Cheb Khaled, Sussan Deyhim, Houria Aichi, The Allmann Brothers, Naked City, Masada Strings, Simon Shaheen, Teremeto de Herez, Freddy King, Percy Sledge, Cecil Taylor, The Yardbirds, Moby Grape, Taj Mahal, Bernard Hermann, Stan Getz, Gilberto Gil,
Great Movies (no particular order)
Woman in the Dunes, The Red Desert, A Raisin in the Sun, Personna, Brazil, Juliet of the Spirits, Latcho Drom, Metropolis, Black Cat White Cat, Vertigo, Rashomon, Das Boot, Aguire the Wrath of God, The Pawnbroker, Delicatessan, Children of Paradise, Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau), Battleship Potemkin, Outback, 1900, Rendezvous, 8 1/2, One-Eyed Jacks, Black Orpheus, The War Game, The Seven Samuri, Yojimbo, Dr. Strangelove, Forbidden Games, The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, Prisoner of Second Avenue, The Red Sorghum, Twelve Angry Men, Tokyo Story, Caspar Hauser, La Notte, Morgan, Summer and Smoke, Alexander Nevsky, Suddenly Last Summer, Prospero’s Books, La Strada, Fitzcarraldo, Time of the Gypsies, Underground, El Topo, A Touch of Evil, Wavelength, City of Lost Children, Ballet Mechanique, Irma La Douce, A Thousand Clowns, Winged Migration, Shoot Louder I Don’t Understand, The Loved Ones, The Passenger, The Hustler, Network, Sahara, The Odd Couple, To Have and Have Not, The Chase, Birdman of Alcatraz, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Key Largo, City of God, Constant Gardener, Koyannisquatsi, Organism, Casablanca, Streetcar Named Desire, Flamenco, The Bicycle Thief, The Garden of the Finzi-Continas, The Birds, Vengo, Jules and Jim, 400 Blows, North by Northwest, Amarcord, The Night of Cabiria, Viridiana, Ran, Do-Des-Ka-Den, Maltese Falcon, The Station Agent, Goldfinger, Apocalypse Now, Citizen Kane, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Guns of Navarone, Asphalt Jungle, D.O.A., A Soldier's Tale, Paths of Glory, Hero, Lost Weekend, Far from the Madding Crowd, Blade Runner, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Good Morning Miss Dove, The Blandings Build a Dream House, Elvira Madigan, Captain Blood, Spartacus, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Emek Bakia, Ballet Mechanique, Andalusian Dog, How Things Go,