WHISPER SESSION #2
Moving Some Rocks by Martin Beck
April 1, 2020 12:00 am – 11:59 pm“Social rituals create a reality which would be nothing without them. It is not too much to say that a ritual is more to society than words are to thought. For it is very possible to know something and then find words for it. But it is impossible to have social relations without symbolic acts.” - Anthropologist Mary Douglas, 1966.
Moving Some Rocks is a playlist to unwind with and a reason to gather your next Zoom listening party.
Like great love letters, playlists connect people across decades and distances. Moving Some Rocks is a playlist specially crafted for WHISPER SESSIONS by Martin Beck, a multiform conceptual artist who works in New York City and Vienna. Beck’s artworks point to historical junctures and paradoxes: junctures in which the promise of freedom and the exercise of control, escapist utopias and the economization of the everyday, the possible and impossible not only coexist but are mutually interdependent.
Moving Some Rocks, now available for download.
Artist Biography
Martin Beck is a New York-based artist whose works often draw from the fields of architecture, design, and popular culture. A leitmotif in Beck’s practice is the notion of display: his works often address issues of exhibiting, presentation, and communication formats and, on a material level, negotiate display’s function as a condition of image-making. Recent solo exhibitions include I wish it would never get dark at 47 Canal, NY (2018 – 19); dans un second temps at Frac Lorraine in Metz, France (2018); rumors and murmurs at Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna; Last Night at The Kitchen in New York; (both 2017); and Program at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge (2014 – 16). Beck’s publications include About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (2007), The Aspen Complex (2012), Last Night (2013 and 2019), the particular way in which a thing exists and Summer Winter East West (both 2015), An Organized Systems of Instructions, and rumors and murmurs (both 2017). Together with Julie Ault and Scott Cameron Weaver, Beck just published the curatorial project Down the Rabbit Hole: JB in JT, accessible at www.o-townhouse.art.
