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25 Songs on 25 Lines or
Words on Art Statement
for Seven Voices and
Dance...
Joe Felber, Elliot Gyger and Lucy Guerin
University of South Australia Art Museum 6
April - 6 May 2000
AUTHOR: VIVONNE THWAITES | REVIEW
A strong feeling of religiosity emanated from this
installation at the Art Museum (and as it turned out
Buddhism is mentioned in the catalogue). The whole
comprised twelve swinging lights on long metal tubes,
sounds of chanting voices piped from seven cylindrical
tubes of floor to ceiling height, dull lighting and words and
sentences broken up both aurally and in letters on metal

2. panels mounted on the walls in grids of eight. Lucy Guerin
danced in images projected onto the floor and wall, focus
was placed on images of wrists and arms twisting and
bending in uncomfortable and arhythmical movements. It
was evident that the work was striving to look beyond the
familiar in each of these art forms.
This work has sprung from an in-depth look by Joe Felber
and his collaborators at Ad Reinhardt's Black Paintings of
the 50s. Ad Reinhardt (1913 - 1967) was an artist whose
works from the 1930s onwards were completely abstract,
finally reaching an all-black state. From 1960 onwards his
works were symmetrically trisected both verticaly and
horizontally and painted in near blacks with underlying
geometrical structures only just visible.
Although the springboard for this work is around forty to
fifty years old it confirms that the historical "...can be
fortuitously congruent in contemporary work." as pointed
out by Peter Cochrane, at the History Conference at the
National Library in Canberra that I recently attended. In
25 Songs three artists have produced a new work
responding to an older work showing once again that
"...there is no before or after in culture ...only now", a
relevant comment made at the same conference by Greg
Denning, a historian deeply interested in the performative.
Words and sentences are broken up on metal panels, the
dancer's movements are contorted, attempting to break
from known or expected movements, sounds are chanted
and non rhythmical ... these works are reflections on
Reinhardt's work where chance and the elimination of
evidence of the personality was an important part of the
goal.

3. Felber claims to want to achieve a "new hybrid
interpretation" of the 25 Lines of Words on Art Statement.,
Reinhardt's work of the 1960s. Felber has had an interest
in the connections between John Cage and Marcel
Duchamp and ways in which their work had similar links
to the work of Reinhardt. Cage was seen as the aural
Duchamp, and both Cage and Duchamp had an interest in
Buddhism which teaches the elimination of the "I". Cage
worked with ever-increasing restrictive rules and
attempted to remove the personality of the composer from
the music. Collaborations such as that between John Cage,
Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg conjoined
sound, dance and painting.
There is value in re-viewing influential movements in art
and through this extremely technically accomplished
project we are able to reflect once again on Reinhardt's
contribution through his core themes of 'negation',
'nothingness' and 'transcendence'.