Eyes_1
EYES_1
Performance Installation
Opera Project by David Louis Zuckerman
Adapted from a poem/text by Owen Hutchinson
On Stellar Rays, NYC, Dec 15th, 2016
None of us imagine one at a time
A healthy anytime
To see this obituary
It’s informative after all
Years of service in the world
And one day while the labor goes quickly
No not in the way easy
My inner lover works out
Demolishing the universe
The truth is more joy
The truth is more joy than we know
And co-exist in NYC
Thank you same one
De Lafayette is our hero of two worlds
In memoriam
EYES_1 is a new live performance of songs by composer and artist David Louis Zuckerman, set to text adapted from artist Owen Hutchinson’s book Eyes_1. For the past year Zuckerman has been working on setting Eyes_1 as an ‘impromptu for piano and voice’. Hutchinson’s poems and journalistic musings reflect, through a contemporary and anti-nostalgic lens, themes of pastoralism, romantic love and protest, historically associated with the musical form of Lieder, or “Art Song”.
Sitting at a table in the center of the gallery, Zuckerman is put under hypnosis using a vehicle license plate with the engraving ‘EYES_1’. This object is a reference to the origin of the book’s title appropriated from the back of a car observed by the author, while the act of hypnotism is employed as a theatrical device situating the performance and its narrator within the realm of remote automation. There Zuckerman is incited to embody the voice of Peter Poppers, a figure who appears in Hutchinson’s text and speaks (in the author’s words) to “a vibratory world of brutal psychic forces alternating between the confined and the limitless.”
Zuckerman has chosen the musical form of impromptu, defined as a free-form composition with the character of an ex tempore improvisation, as if prompted by the spirit of the moment. Zuckerman’s recent work, such as chamber piece Per Diem, premiered by SEM Ensemble, and the opera The Augur (premiered at David Lewis Gallery) act as a kind of rejoinder to expressive romanticism. At once lyrical and favoring chromaticism over atonality, these works, including EYES, at the same time problematize the concept of drama and subjectivism through satirical interventions into our saturated and desensitized present.