the life and death of medium

Death Mask of Issac Newton. Prepared by Artist John Michael Rijsbrack (1694-1770)

Noumeral Series.101 and Noumeral Series.102, 2012: Artist Christine Corday

on a train ride south to the city, i pondered the death and life mask from an image i was reading in the paper--never thinking on it before--i was moved by the sensate communication the mask gives to a comprehension of the individual's life---i was impacted by what is shared in being human. spending time with newton, schrodinger, beethoven, keats, joyce, and marat 's death masks i was moved by the nature their physical body gave as last impression of their living discourse---aspects of the artist's process in making these life or death masks drew parallels to the existing process of my "noumeral" works--it was curious to me then how the steel records the life, the history of the concrete Form much as the plaster over the subject's face. the plaster records the flesh, contour and eerie depth of soul from a human face; steel records the cement's, rendering a smooth depth of almost silence, like a wax cylinder full with yet with no audible sound of thousands of years of human-applied story, even its first combusted deposits 12 million years ago within the earth.

the strange smooth silent mask of steel upon the cement allows similar contemplation of the plaster's folds and creases over the details of a life uncaptured yet recorded by its flesh, the life and death of a medium.

the instrument of medium/ thawing of frozen timber

1970 recording of Jorg Demus performing Beethoven's last Piano Sonata (no. 32 in C minor, op 111) on Beethoven's 1825 Viennese Graf. [Bonn Germany]


Train, one of the 1997 recordings from the U.S. Navy Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) network and autonomous underwater hydrophones. Possible origins of this sound are an iceberg's keel dragging along the sea floor to other vibrations generated from moving fluids, like air blowing through a clarinet, of the ocean water and the right conditions around some seamount.

the becoming and disappearance of sense

my first visceral connection to art was about age 8 midst classical training on the piano--when i first conceived of the composer beethoven as a man, in the ordinary sense, as a human with one life--with many struggles, joys, but simply one man with one life--i felt this stirring of what a human can give with one life. as with any composer with a body of work, when playing his/her work you feel their person and devotions through the choices of themes, progressions, even hand placement [rachmaninoff crossing thumbs in prelude c sharp minor] 
this manner of thinking and playing brought me into a more intimate conversation on the one life, on being human, with each composer--these were my earliest discussions on art--and given that the composers were, well, dead--my imagination, my interpretation of these wordless discussions shaped me deeply and with no obvious arguments rooted singularly as foundations of my own compositions. 

decades later, in my brooklyn studio, when listening to classical piano and thinking back to the richness of gray given from such black and white keys--i would await certain pieces, memories from childhood. when the ninth symphony would play, i wondered what it would have been to be seated in the kärntnertortheater in vienna palpated with expectation of beethovens ninth--an anticipation built from his 10-12 year absence on stage, and although it was a premiere, there was no plan for a second performance. there was no way to record it or share or post it other than with one's own body, every available sense to absorb it as memory--a visceral memory, held within the body, shaping the self--
with the body as recorder, the memory dissolves with its device.

the function and question of memory and investigation of the senses in a culture where physical presence is no longer required to participate in an event evolves our definition of being human. perhaps other senses are becoming as others weaken--senses remain our reality makers and define our depth of presence and continue as points of departure and return with my work.

object

Christine Corday. UNE, 2008. 508 West 25th St. New York, New York.

a somatosensory experience ultimately allows the senses to inform identity or self with an unknown or an abstract. Forms of the PROTOIST series are prompts of this experience; not to be collapsed into or as "object" but rather as a relative, interconnected yet open marker of experience itself. object has been indoctrinated as an encounter of the term and meaning of "other", the Forms of the PROTOIST series explore dismantling this habitual, often sight-dominated, separateness-–to experiment informing one's self in the perpetual encounter of object without reinforcing other-ness but rather expanding the definition or object of "self." 
object, other, and self in quotations serve as abstractions from their known terms-–blurring their edges of distinction.