0Ae UThe Michigan Daily ( michigandailycom IThursday, January 21, 2010 4p4 y IM ,0 @ 0 04 H ~ LO-FHIGHBROW 4M weekend essentials Jan. 21 to Jan. 24 LECTU RE Part of the Department of Comparative Litera- ture's "Year of Transla- tion" series is Professor of English Literature and Judaic Studies Anita Norich's upcom- ing lecture "Yiddish: Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Yiddish Dif- ference, or: Why Yentl Sings." She compares the English translations of Singer's stories to their Yiddish origins, focusing on how Yid- dish presents the tales in a bold manner. The lecture is at 12 p.m. tomorrow, at 202 South Thayer Street. Free. 0 "DIGITAL ARTIST CORY ARCANGEL TURNS I 1 .41 0 S VIDEO GAMES ANDO" CATS ON PIANOS * 0 INTO ART 0 SBY WHITNEY POW A* DAILY ARTS WRITER READING This Friday, another installment of the Marks Webster Read- ing Series will occur in UMMA's Helmut Stern Auditorium. Two University of Michigan MFA students, Hanna Pylvainen and Jes- sica Young, will read their original fiction and poetry. It's a great chance to hear emerg- ing authors in a cozy, welcoming setting. And best of all, it's free, starting at 7 p.m. PH OTOS BY MAX C Digital artist Cory Arcangel got his Bachelor ot Music trom Oberlino Cooseroator A 'rcangel's exhibit "Corp 'Arcangel: Creative Pursoits" wll se ar toe UMMA01 Proje through April 11. BOTTOM Arcangel destroys a cage with a sword as part ot anu musical pertormance with the Digital Mosic Ensemble. The "Guitar Hero" clone sit- COLLINSs/Dail *@ Michigan Museum of Art yin Ohio. I Project Gallery doesn't play "Through the Fire and Flames" or "Sweet Child 0' Mine" or any- thing even moderately close to rock or heavy metal. In the gray-carpeted, sterile museum space, there is only one song available to play on the con- sole. The player is given just two notes, which are strummed once and then held over the span of sev- eral minutes. The buttons' sound- trails float ethereally down the screen. A rugged, distorted elec- tric guitar twang resonates in the exhihit space. The noise becomes increasingly mocking as the player sits, fin- gers unmoving on the fret hoard. The game, "Frets on Fire," racks up points over-enthusiastically: 2,000 then 3,000 and climbing. In this game, any player with fin- gers and a lick of patience will he guaranteed to end the song with thousands of points and the title of Rock God. This song, as produced on U"Frets on Fire," is a work titled Composition #7 by Cory Arcangel, ect Gallery whose exhibit, "Cory Arcangel: unscri pted Creative Pursuits," is on display at the UMMA Project Gallery through April 11L Arcangel himself is an artist at nMy the forefront of the contemporary digital and media-based art scene, producing works that use and examine mediums both cultur- ally familiar and unfamiliar: Pho- toshop, Guitar Hero-type games, the Sony PlayStation, viral videos, Maxell cassette tapes and kinetic sculpture a la '90s store displays. His works have been lauded by, as well as displayed in, institutions like The Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Ameri- can Art in New York City. Like Composition #7, the rest of Arcangel's body of work currently on display at UMMA analyzes the expanses between concepts com- monly seen as disparate - the gray area between high and low culture, the virtuosic and the ama- teur, the popular and the obscure. to these in-between spaces, Arcangel finds a way of twist- ing and playing with conceptions of what art is and how it breaks down. What kind of Oart "belongs" in a museum and what kind would you find in a working-class living room? Does "Guitar Hero" belong in an art gal- lery? Does Philip Glass belong in the living room? Are the two groups mutu- ally exclusive? "(The exhibit) is more of afocus on how expression happens in a particular medium ... so all the works you see are pivoted off of traditional ways that these things are traditionally used," Arcangel said. "I'll look at the ways people are using things and then look at the medium and then try to find a way in or out of it." While it's assumed that "Gui- tar Hero" is an outlet reserved for popular guitar music, Arcangel's Composition #7 undermines this concept - Arcangel's two-note song on 'Frets on Fire" is not a haphazard creation, but an actual musical piece titled "Composi- tion 1960 #7," which was created by renowned composer La Monte Young in the 1960s. The work itself is composed of only a B and F# notes, together creating a perfect fifth. in perfor- mance, these notes were, accord- ing to Young's instructions for the piece, to be "held for a long time." Using the lens of something as approachable and culturally omnipresent as "Guitar Hero," Arcangel plays with the audi- ence's field of interest by mix- ing the familiar with culturally obscure concept art. "The pieces present a mix of high and low fashion," said Jacob Proctor, associate curator of mod- ern and ontemporary art at the UMMA, who also curated Arcan- gel's exhibit. "That kind of mash-up goes back to some of the first steps I've ever seen in (Arcangel's) Beach Boys vs. Geto Boys mash-up," Proctor said, referring to a 2004 piece in which Arcangel mixed two culturally separate songs. In that piece, the Beach Boys' sunny rock was not positioned to rile up the aggressive rap of the GetoeBoys. Instead, thertwo groups were integrated with one another into a single track, displaying con- sistencies beyond the second word in both of the groups' names. These mash-ups created by Arcangel also include his perfor- mance of "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" (which can be found on YouTube), a song writ- ten by anti-war protester Ed McCurdy in i950 and covered by artists including Simon and Gar- funkel and Joan Baez. In Arcangel's recording, he accompanies repetitive acoustic guitar strums with his own auto- tuned vocals, presenting a strange intermingling of sincere lines like "I dreamed the world had all agreed / to put an end to war" with the superficially polished club sound of the past decade. The work brings together two genres that would seem to butt heads - if not completely contra- dict each other - in a way that's not only coherent but oddly pal- pable in the piece as well. * FROM YOUTUBE * r TO THE GALLERY* Arcangel's focus on music-ori- ented pieces stems from his Bach- elor of Music degree from Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. He uses his experience with music to explore different ways in which cultures can be combined. "Art was learning about music. And when I started to make art, I realized I just made the art- work based off of things I made in music," Arcangel said. "Because modern music - it's conceptual art." Also on display in the Project Gallery is Arcangel's work, titled Drei Klavierstuke, Op. it, which was made by editing and splic- ing various home videos of cats playing pianos. He put the video together so that each of the notes hit by a cat in the final video is in exact alignment with a note played in Drei Klavierstuke, Op. 11, a 20th-century musical piece by composer Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg's composition eschews traditional Western har- monies in favor of atonality, creat- ing a piece that sounds erratic and tuneless in comparisoncto contem- porary pop music. "Atonal music sounds like cats walking on pianos. It's an elabo- rate punch line, the whole piece," Arcangel said. Schoenberg's entire piece does sound like the random plunkings of paws on piano keys. However, when played alongside Arcangel's cat remix, the exactness of Arcan- gel's viral video recapitulation of the piece is strikingly precise and formulated. "I. knew people loved cats enough that I could do what is considered one of the most diffi- cult pieces in music ever," Arcan- gel said. "And I knew the cats were powerful enough -3I knew people love cats enough - to provide (the video) with a real mechanism for its own dispersion into culture." Upon the initial release of Arcangel's Drei Klavierstuke, Op. 11 on the Internet, the entirety of the composition, contained in three videos, was linked by a wide range of interest websites, from novelty blogs to museum websites to cat and animal lovers' sites, including CuteOverload.com. The See ARCANGEL, Page 3B DESIGN BY: MO STYCH FILM Start gearing up for the 2010 World Cup with the documentary film "The Game of Their Lives," playing Satur- day at 2 p.m. at the Michigan Theater. It's the classic underdog sports saga, blend- ing archive footage with interviews of the surviving members of the North Korean soc- cer team that shocked the world by reaching the quarterfinals of the 1966 World Cup. CONCERT "Past that county- line frontier where knowledge and affec- tion blur into nothing" (eh?), Metro Detroit- based five-piece Frontier Ruckus will bring its folksy mus- ings to the Blind Pig this Saturday, accom- panied by fellow Ann Arborites Light In August. With tickets starting at $8, it's well worth the price to hear Matthew Milia wax eloquent about lands way up 1-75. Doors at 9:30 p.m. td, E f .; "5 !'.3ri' ;v.H .M .r xiM1 M1 'K 7 , 7 , r4 N Yf 4 ' ;G "Ov