Past Exhibitions

Christian Marclay: Mixed Reviews (American Sign Language) takes writing about music as its theme, and deaf actor Jonathan Kovacs signing a long, collaged text in American Sign Language (ASL) assembled by artist Christian Marclay from reviews of musical performances and records. Marclay is a New York-based visual artist and composer whose work explores the juxtaposition between sound recording, photography, video, and film. Marclay's career as an artist began in Boston in the late 1970s when he was a sculpture student at the Massachusetts College of Art.

Mixed Reviews is a work that is conceptually loud while it is literally silent. The work is both a testament about the impossibility of communication and a compelling instance of translation creating new forms of art. For the deaf, music is a different experience than for the hearing, and this work calls into question the hierarchy that values the musical experiences of the hearing over those of those of the deaf. Kovacs uses arm movements and facial expressions as he translates the found written language about music into ASL. His performance is unmistakably musical although it is silent, and his gestures resemble those of a symphony conductor. While the deaf community has long insisted that signing has musical, aesthetic, and poetic versions just as any aural language does, this work for many of the hearing will be the first actual experience that makes this palpably true.