Marina Rosenfeld

Open Frame Festival, 28 September 2009
Brisbane Powerhouse

On the first eve of the Open Frame Festival, a small and somewhat sedate Brisbane audience was graced with an improvised turntable performance by New York conceptual artist and composer Marina Rosenfeld.  Throughout the performance, Rosenfeld gracefully moved between the two turntables, gently manipulating hand crafted ‘dub plates’ to reveal blips and drawn out electronic, instrumental and vocal sounds.

Rosenfeld refers to her dub plates as ‘a form of notation—musical housing’ in which she composes with, for and through (1). She claims that they have informed her practice as an artist dealing with ideas of tactile technology, sampling pre-existing music and challenging assumptions built around concert performances.

In addition to being an experimental turntablist, Rosenfeld is widely recognised for her interdisciplinary installations - combining what she refers to as ‘materials’ such as technology, musical composition, live performance, architecture and space to create a multifaceted sensory experience.  Rosenfeld has been commissioned by numerous institutions in Europe and North America and her first visit to Australia has been made possible primarily through her recent artist residency and headlining performance at the Totally Huge Music Festival in Perth.  

At an artist talk, held at QUT the day before Open Frame Fesitval, Rosenfeld eloquently spoke about some of her major sound installations and performances. A stand out piece is ‘Teenage Lontano’ a large scale performance involving a teenage choir positioned in a single line and each sharing a set of headphones with one other.  A spinning speaker is suspended from the ceiling, resonating electronic sounds, and the teenagers progress to produce vocal sounds following compositional prompts on the headphones.  The resulting performance is a ‘cover version’ of Gyorgy Ligeti’s Lontano.  Teenage Lontano was first performed as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial and was recreated for the Totally Huge Music Festival, performed by local teens.

Since early dada, fluxus and avante garde experimentations, sound has become increasingly recognised and appreciated as a sculptural medium within the visual arts, more so than in many musical establishments.  Rosenfelds practice continues to break boundaries between music and the visual arts, leading to hybrid forms of installation and performance. She often collaborates with untrained people from whichever community she has been commissioned to work in. This relational aspect to her work further explores boundaries within the visual arts field - expanding the definition of art and going beyond the art gallery context to a much wider audience.  

There is an essence that exists in most of Rosenfeld’s work that distinguishably belongs to the artist, mainly due to the etheral nature of the sounds that she composes.  Her performance at Open Frame Festival carried with it this essence, however I was left wanting more - more space, more resonance, more of the whispy vocals that occasionally surfaced or, simply... just more of Rosenfeld speak so captivatingly of her ideas.

(1) Marina Rosenfeld interviewed by John Cage, New York, 2007

Caitlin Franzmann