23 September - 23 October 2005
In the past few years Guy Bar Amotz has made protean, sculptural installations which incorporate music and the possibility of music and which refer to the structure of 'sound systems'. His sculptures, such as those made for 'Burning Love' (2000), ‘Dance Machine’ Tate Britain (2003) or his on-going project 'Positive Vibration', comprise configurations of modular units housing home-made speakers and are made from cast and polished fibreglass fused with everyday found objects as diverse as a broken drill, discarded parts of a stereo or cut-up tennis balls.
His exhibition at the Centre of Contemporary Art, Geneva (2003) comprised works that were connectedly referred to as ‘Mochileros’, meaning backpacker in South America, and were the latest in a line of hybrid, reactive, sound systems. Their “look” was an industrial one - Hardcore, Punk Techno, Heavy Metal, badass motorbike design. The backpacks for example had a slick sci-fi appearance that brought to mind the idealist forms of Romanian modernist Brancusi. The two artists also shared an alignment in their use of primitivism. For Bar Amotz this translated into a brutish visual sensibility, but, at the same time, a lavishly elegant one.
Bar Amotz’s new work is based around a sculptural homage to the American primitive blues guitarist John Fahey (1939-2001) and built into a crate trolley. Whilst clearly maintaining his links with sound performance, this particular work is ‘without sound’. However, it acts as a pa speaker prototype for a proposed Electro Busking Band that is being produced in partnership with Platform For Art and will tour performances through the London Underground in 2006. The sculpture, cast in rigid rubber, bares a portrait of John Fahey along with a snapped-off acoustic guitar (late in his career Fahey traded acoustic for electric guitar). Fahey was a troubled, laconic musician who embodied a sense of melancholia and tragedy, he is frequently sited as a clandestine influence by contemporary guitarists. Another area of reference for Bar Amotz in this work is Picasso’s repititive guitar motif.
Alongside, Bar Amotz is also exhibiting a series of still sculptures built around mundane everyday objects and incorporating the futurist and primitive forms of Giacometti’s surrealism and Boccioni. One of these works, ‘Angola’, is built around a discarded pair of shoes mounted with three candles and inlaid with a toy globe and a moraca baring the portrait of Che Guevara.
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