usonian poem (first version)

stereo sound installation
2004

the sound work entitled ‘usonian poem‘ was first installed outside of the hollyhock house designed by frank lloyd wright, in the barnsdall art park in los angeles. it was commissioned for the event – pleasure garden, which took place in various sites of the park.

my decision to work with wright’s hollyhock house began a few months earlier, in japan. i visited a house designed by wright in kobe, and while exploring one of the terraces an acorn fell on my head. i picked it up and put it in my pocket.

when i was invited to create an installation for the event, i not only wanted to create a work in conversation with the hollyhock house, but to bring my recent experience with wright’s work in japan into the conversation.

when people speak of site specificity, in relation to sound, it is usually a somewhat straightforward connection between site and sound. for myself, i tend to shy away from clear or overly logical decisions, thus, there is always room for intuitive decisions that might not add up intellectually, but offer a feeling of trust in terms of “rightness”.

thus i composed the soundscape using a series of processed recordings of the kobe acorn falling onto the strings of my lap steel guitar – so that the recordings played in front of the house in hollywood would be sonically touched by the sound of an object from a space in japan that wright had visited. formally, the soundscape was emanating from two speakers at opposite ends of a covered walkway, creating a sonic atmosphere for the space.

while the first iteration of the piece was wholly focused on the two wright locations, the second version, which was created for the e/static gallery in torino italy, included other elements and ideas – mainly the inclusion of language (visible on the walls), and ideas related to translation. 

having trouble sleeping because of jetlag, i spent much of my first evening in torino translating the names of torino streets into english. since i don’t speak italian, i could only read the italian words out loud and then would come up with corollary word in english – so that torino was transformed into “to rain on”… the entire list of words was penciled on the wall of the gallery, so that the sound piece and the writing/drawing became a kind of mash-up, where disparate things are pressed together, so that they begin to function more like a tug of war than an embrace.

of course, the making of the pieces and the ideas behind them followed a ridiculously idiosyncratic path moving locationally (from japan to los angeles to italy and finally to pennsylvania); moving linguistically (by connecting words in different languages – and knowing one and not knowing the other); blending architecture, sound and words into a single work (embracing the hybrid, the cluster, the constellation and the mess); and jettisoning logic towards intuitive connections (without questioning whether or not anyone can unpack the ideas.)

through this alchemical combination of trust and wonder the translation of the word ‘torino’ went through various permutations, moving from torino, to ‘to rain on’ to ‘falling water’ as if i’d always known that an acorn from frank lloyd wright in japan would lead me through language, drawing and sound towards a final place known as ‘falling water’, which would bring wright, and me, back to the beginning…