XS: The Opera Opus was a no wave avant-garde music and art performance created by Rhys Chatham and Joseph Nechvatal in the mid 1980s. [1] [2] [3] Jane Lawrence Smith sang the lead role in the Boston performance and Yves Musard danced the main role. [4] Its theme was the excess of the nuclear weapon buildup of the Ronald Reagan presidency. [5] [6]
XS: The Opera, Shakespeare Theatre, Boston was the final production and consisted of three soprano singers, 4 trumpets, six electric guitars. bass, drums, 35 mm slide projection and dance. The duration was 90 minutes. Choreography: Yves Musard, 35 mm cross-fade art slides: Joseph Nechvatal
Musicians: Rhys Chatham (conductor) with Pamela Fleming, Steven Haynes, Ben Neill, James O'Connor, David Wonsey, Karen Haglof, Robert Poss, Mitch Salmon, Bill Brovold, Tim Schellenbaum, Conrad Kinard, J.P., Peggy Ackerman, Jane Lawrence Smith, Elly Spiegel.
The history of XS was included with an XS Exemplification sound slideshow in the No Wave art exhibition Who You Staring At?: Visual culture of the no wave scene in the 1970s and 1980s at Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2023. [7] A video documenting the Centre Pompidou, Paris March 8th, 2023 event XS: The Opera Opus: An Operatic Transvaluation of No Wave Aesthetics by Joseph Nechvatal and Rhys Chatham was held and has been published online at the Centre Pompidou website. [8]
No wave was an avant-garde music genre and visual art scene that emerged in the late 1970s in Downtown New York City. The term was a pun based on the rejection of commercial new wave music. Reacting against punk rock's recycling of rock and roll clichés, no wave musicians instead experimented with noise, dissonance, and atonality, as well as non-rock genres like free jazz, funk, and disco. The scene often reflected an abrasive, confrontational, and nihilistic world view.
Glenn Branca was an American avant-garde composer, guitarist, and luthier. Known for his use of volume, alternative guitar tunings, repetition, droning, and the harmonic series, he was a driving force behind the genres of no wave, totalism and noise rock. Branca received a 2009 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.
Installation art is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called public art, land art or art intervention; however, the boundaries between these terms overlap.
Ben Neill is an American composer, trumpeter, producer, and educator. He is the inventor of the "Mutantrumpet", a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument.
Ludlow Street runs between Houston and Division Streets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. Vehicular traffic runs south on this one-way street.
Rhys Chatham is an American composer, guitarist, trumpet player, multi-instrumentalist, primarily active in avant-garde and minimalist music. He is best known for his "guitar orchestra" compositions. He has lived in France since 1987.
Kiki Smith is a German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS, feminism, and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works in the Lower East Side, New York City, and the Hudson Valley, New York State.
8BC was a nightclub, performance space, and art gallery located at 337 East 8th Street in the East Village neighborhood of New York, New York. Founded in 1983, the space closed in late 1985.
Joseph Nechvatal is an American post-conceptual digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses.
Jane Lawrence Smith, born Jane Brotherton, was an American actress and opera singer who was part of the New York art scene beginning in the 1950s.
Launched from the Lower East Side, Manhattan in 1983 as a subscription only bimonthly publication, the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine utilized the audio cassette medium to distribute no wave downtown music and audio art and was in activity for the ten years of 1983–1993.
Noise Fest was an influential festival of no wave noise music performances curated by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth at the New York City art space White Columns in June 1981. Sonic Youth made their first live appearances at this show.
Peter van Riper was an American sound and light environment artist, musician and pioneer of laser art and holography.
Paul Thek was an American painter, sculptor and installation artist. Thek was active in both the United States and Europe, exhibiting several installations and sculptural works over the course of his life. Posthumously, he has been widely exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, and his work is held in numerous collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Kolumba, the Art Museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne.
viral symphOny is a collaborative electronic noise music symphony created by the postconceptual artist Joseph Nechvatal. It was created between the years 2006 and 2008 using custom artificial life C++ software based on the viral phenomenon model. It is 1 hour and 40 minutes in length. The first movement of viral symphOny - and raw viral field material - was released in 2006 as a CD by The Institute for Electronic Arts in Alfred, New York. A low resolution extract from the pOstmOrtem section of viral symphOny was published in NME magazine.
Ground Zero Gallery was an art gallery formed in the East Village of Manhattan in New York City in mid-1983 as a vehicle for the partnership of artist James Romberger and his co-founder Marguerite Van Cook. In 1984, the gallery found its first physical home on East 11th Street and showed the work of many East Village artists who went on to gain national recognition. It was an early proponent of installation art. Ground Zero was the production name for many projects in various media undertaken by the team of Van Cook and Romberger prior to the September 11 attacks.
Vera Lutter is a German artist based in New York City. She works with several forms of digital media, including photography, projections, and video-sound installations. Through a multitude of processes, Lutter's oeuvre focuses on light and its ability to articulate the passing time and movement within a tangible image.
Alan W. Moore is an art historian and activist whose work addresses cultural economies and groups and the politics of collectivity. After a stint as an art critic, Moore made video art and installation art from the mid-1970s on and performed in the 1979 Public Arts International/Free Speech series. He has published several books and runs the House Magic information project on self-organized, occupied autonomous social centers. His partial autobiography was published in 2022 in The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest as Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Artworld. Moore lives in Madrid.
Harvestworks is a not-for-profit arts organization located in New York City. It was founded in 1977 by artists supporting the creation and presentation of art works achieved through the use of new technologies. The Harvestworks TEAM Lab supports the creation of art works achieved through the use of new and evolving technologies.
Oliver Beer is a British artist who lives and works between London and Paris. He makes sculptures, installations, videos, and immersive live performances.