I have never tripped on acid. And, unless you count the WinAmp visualizer, I have never seen colors when listening to music. But I recently visited Visual Music, a collection of paintings, experimental videos, "color organs" and digital installations, and I can say with confidence that I have experienced the fusion of hallucination and high art.
In collaboration with Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art, Washington D.C.'s Hirshhorn Museum has assembled artwork by several artists in several media spanning several decades.
Colorful, kinetic paintings of the abstract persuasion with occasional cubist influences greet visitors in the first room, followed by a sequence of charmingly rudimentary Klee sketches. A pastel-hued Georgia O'Keeffe and a cluster of Kandinsky-esque ruminations, culminating in Kandinsky's own "Painting with White Border," a moderately large canvas splashed with the cacophony of competing nationalism, complete the traditional, painted portion of the exhibit.
The next room screens a continuous reel of early-to-mid 20th century music-video experiments, none longer than a few minutes.
Some videos are simple, hardly more than precursors to Fantastia, while others skip the soundtrack altogether, instead striving to communicate rhythm through chromatic layering and geometric juxtaposition. The results are hit-or-miss -- while I was thrilled by the sometimes-primitive, sometimes-elaborate attempts to illustrate sound, other visitors were turned off by the outmoded, silent rhythm-by-color projects.
A collection of "color organs" immediately follows the music-videos. Like multi-hued molasses, the color organs' lava lamp-like contents crawl across dimly-lit screens, mildly morphing along the way. One room features a handful of older color organs, or contorted slide projectors rigged with custom stained-glass look-alike wheels.
But while the contrast between early color organs and their descendants paints a vivid picture of the limited expression found in technological determinism, the older artwork appears relatively static and one-dimensional next to the more stimulating, modern pieces.
A sequence of digital media installations follow, ranging from iterated, monochromatic patterns playing across tilted televisions to immersive, swirling kaleidoscopes projected onto wall-sized screens.
A variety of breathtaking computer animations complete the exhibit in true synaesthestic style. Of note, one installation pairs what sounds like sitar music with spiraling animations that grow and shrink like breathing spirographs, concurrent, intricate circles melting into each other like competing ripples on a pond's surface, swapping colors all the way. The effect is a hypnotic, enchanting visual; a beautiful synthesis of sculpted aural and visual stimulation.
As a whole, Visual Music (through early September) measures artists' attempts to illustrate "sound in time." And successfully so -- the predominantly chronological journey from once-controversial, now-adored paintings to often-trippy, always-enchanting music-video installations, while not life-altering, could delightfully skew your perspective over the course of an afternoon.
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