Hit Parade

Museum of Contemporary Arts Houston

October 31, 2013-January 4, 2014

Hit Parade is an interactive installation consisting of approximately 100 records of various sizes painted in fluorescent colors and 3 constantly revolving Technics 1200 DJ turntables. The room is dark; it is painted black and is lit only by three hidden ultraviolet lights and the glow produced by the painted records. The records do not play; for sound 9 Beet Stretch, Beethoven's 9th Symphony stretched out 24 hours and pitch corrected, a piece by Scandinavian composer/artist Leif Inge, is piped into the room.

The painting on the records are designed be interchangeable at the discretion of the viewing audience that is invited to handle the work. Since there are three different sizes to the differing record formats (33 1/3 record albums are 12 inches in diameter, 78 rpm records are 10 inches, and 45 rpm singles are 7 inches), they can be stacked with 1, 2 or 3 records visible at a time. There are several distinct design groups based on dividing the circular form of the records into halves, thirds or sixths.

Viewers have the power and potential to control virtually the entire appearance of the installation. The appearance includes not only what is left spinning on the turntables, but the piles of the unused records that are left to the sides.

The installation is a development of the paintings I had been making which have been associated with the visual perception and how the human mind perceives data and organizes it. I had been particularly interested in permutations of the circular form, and how static objects can suggest movement; this installation is the first time I've incorporated actual movement my work.

Interview with Gilbert Hsiao by Max Fields

Transcribed and edited by Max Fields

Artist Gilbert Hsiao creates illusions. At the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Hsiao uses records, turntables, UV light, fluorescent paint, and sound to create an installation that is as much about his personal art-making practice as it is about his audience. In his work titled, Hit Parade, Hsiao alters the viewer’s sense of space, time, and reality using a series of linear patterns painted in fluorescent paint on vinyl records that spin on turntables inside of a room lit with UV light. Beethoven’s 9th symphony plays in the background—slowed and stretched out—creating an ambient wave of drawn notes making the usually easily recognized melody, foreign and unrecognizable. Hsiao leaves it up to the audience to rearrange the records, assemble new lines and breaks in the installation, and configure their own tempo.

MF: What’s your connection to music? You’ve mentioned before that you are a huge fan of jazz and in particular Sun Ra. When did Sun Ra make

an appearance in your life?

GH: I was first exposed to Sun Ra when I went to college at Columbia. I grew up in Indiana where we just listened to rock and roll; we didn’t really have any exposure to jazz.

 But when I arrived at Columbia, I quickly found jazz and Sun Ra through the people I met. One of my friends mentioned this musician who came from Saturn who was doing a weekend engagement at The Spot, so I went down, checked it out, and was blown away. I was also collecting records by that time. Sun Ra had these legendary rare records that he put out himself and decorated, so I started seeking those out. Through those early experiences in school, Sun Ra became a life long obsession. I have hundreds of hours of tapes and various records, and I think now he is finally getting the recognition he deserves. The geniuses of the 20th century are Sun Ra, Charlie Chaplin, and Albert Einstein (laughs).

MF: How do you connect your artwork to music, specifically the work in Outside the Lines? Maybe first, could you explain what your installation in the exhibition is for the people who might not have seen it.

GH: The installation uses 7” 45’s 78rpm and regular 12” 33rpm records painted in geometric patterns with fluorescent paint, rotating on turntables in a black light room. The different sizes of the records allow for them to be stacked on to one another, so the view is free to manipulate the records anyway that they want. Last night at the opening I saw a couple of people manipulate the records in a few ways I hadn’t really thought of.

The idea for this installation came to me gradually over a long period of time. I had been worming with fluorescent paint for three decades maybe and it was only in the last year when I got a residency and a studio with no windows that I started experimenting with light. All of the elements for this project were there—my love of collecting records and my art-making practice using fluorescent paint. It just took some time to put them all together. What I find most interesting about the installation is the interactive aspect where the view can come and touch, handle, and manipulate the records however they want.

The original influence of music in my work goes back much further. I didn’t start working in an abstract vein until I left art school at Pratt, where I was a drawing major solely making figurative work. There were two pieces of music in the late ’70s or early ’80s that were influential: one was Music with Changing Parts by Philip Glass and the other Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich. They’re both very minimalist pieces that have fairly repeating motifs, incorporating phasing and overlapping, which creates mesmerizing and a visual effect for me. I tried to mimic visually what those pieces did aurally; I was trying to mimic the spacing and the pacing in the music in my work.

MF: The rhythm of your painting is quite different than what I associate with the term minimal because they’re quite complex and dynamic to the eye. And, in fact, this installation comes with a soundtrack playing in the space.

GH: A Scandinavian sound artist named Leif Inge composed that. It’s Beethoven’s 9th symphony slowed down into a 24-hour composition. It’s by far my most played piece on my iTunes. I have it playing in my studio all the time. Going back to minimalist music for second. Those two [Glass and Reich] pieces in particular, are as you say, very complicated. And minimalist is a misleading term to describe them. I think that’s why Philip Glass and Steve Reich didn’t like that term back in the early days.

MF: Those works are trance inducing. They’re the type of music you meditate to. I’m imaging your work is a reaction to and reflection of that idea.

GH: Yes, definitely.

MF: What are the limits, if any, you place on yourself while creating a new artwork, and how do those limits change or become altered during the process?

GH: The most important choice [when making a work] is the shape of the piece. The shape dictates what can happen within those boundaries. I’ve worked in a lot of irregular shapes, you know besides squares and circles and triangles, shapes I don’t know how to describe. The shape becomes the limitation, and I take it from there. The shape though isn’t random, I consider each shape by visualizing what I can do with each one—there are certain shapes I can’t work with. It’s quite hard to explain; it’s such a visual thing.

MF: Is there an aesthetic choice you make before you start painting, and do those choices change from your original plan? Maybe what I’m really asking is, do you know what your work will look like before the finished piece is realized?

GH: No, I don’t know what the work will look like before it’s done. I have an idea, but that’s really it. There are no preliminary sketches done before I make the work. There is a bit of planning with masking tape. The lines are very regularly laid out using the width of the tape as a guide. So when I’m done masking the first layer, it’s going to be all lines a quarter in apart and then I’ll put down the black paint, so I’ll have a black stripe, and then usually the next step would be silver. They aren’t going to be exactly parallel lines—they’ll be a bit off—that’s determined by the black lines I lay out first. It’s much easier to show than to try and explain in conversation! Anyway, at that point I try visualizing the work with color if I want to do color. If I leave it black and white it doesn’t mean the work is finished, I may come back to it weeks or months later to complete an idea I have where I’m thinking about color—that’s another game.

Once you start working with color, 9 times out of 10 there’s more than one color and you have to get all of them to harmonize. I’m trying to keep your eyes moving, just like music keeps moving.

MF: This installation shouted at me when I walked into the room. It was really fun to experience an interplay between the loud vibrant colors against this stretched out symphonic landscape, this really calm tone. The atmosphere in that room is really full of energy.

GH: I want you to have a sense of time, too. That stretched out Beethoven aids different sense of time. When you walk into an environment filled with UV light, it’s completely different than the regular full-spectrum lighting that you’re used to seeing. It’s a different reality. The vivid colors are produced when the UV light excites electrons in the fluorescent paint, making the paint look like an actual light source. When you’re in an environment like that, it’s really easy to lose sense of time, and the relentless turning of the records on the turntable adds to that effect as well.