Mass Black Implosion

“Mar­co Fusinato’s Mass Black Implo­sion series began in 2007. Ser­i­al in form, each work uses an exist­ing cul­tur­al doc­u­ment — a 20^th or 21^st-cen­tu­ry avant-garde music score — as the for­mal, mate­r­i­al and con­cep­tu­al basis for a set of actions or inter­ven­tions. Specif­i­cal­ly, work­ing with fac­sim­i­le sheets of the score, Fusina­to draws lines from each note on the page to one cho­sen point. Where a com­po­si­tion com­pris­es more than one sheet, these are then sin­gu­lar­ly framed and installed sequen­tial­ly on the gallery wall, cre­at­ing an extra­or­di­nary graph­ic ren­der­ing of the ener­gy of aur­al com­pres­sion and expansion.

In these works, treat­ed by Fusina­to as propo­si­tions for new noise com­po­si­tions, the qual­i­ties of each indi­vid­ual note and their rela­tion to those around them are effec­tive­ly com­pressed into a sin­gle point of intense con­cen­tra­tion. This is the ener­gy of implo­sion, which always infers at least the poten­tial of its counter ener­gy in explo­sion, ener­gy radi­at­ing out from the sin­gle point of ori­gin. Fusinato’s inter­ven­tion into the scores there­fore visu­alis­es and pro­pos­es the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a dialec­ti­cal ener­gy run­ning through the orig­i­nal work that has a polit­i­cal dimen­sion as much as an artis­tic one — a relent­less propen­si­ty to both destruc­tion and expres­sive cre­ation in the sin­gle action, or in this case the pro­duc­tion of noise.”

Blair French, The Nation­al: New Aus­tralian Art, 2017.

“Fusinato’s tech­nique of appro­pri­a­tion and over­lay in ​‘Noise & Cap­i­tal­ism’ calls to mind his ​‘Mass Black Implo­sions,’ 2007‑, draw­ings in which he traces straight lines from each note on every page of an avant-garde musi­cal score to a sin­gle arbi­trar­i­ly cho­sen coor­di­nate. Exper­i­men­tal com­po­si­tions from such fig­ures as John Cage and Cor­nelius Cardew are there­by trans­formed into dia­grams resem­bling col­laps­ing galax­ies. (He achieved the oppo­site effect in the pho­tographs that com­pose the ​‘Sun Series,’ 2002, by shoot­ing head-on into the radi­at­ing sun) … Deploy­ing the con­ven­tions of one-point per­spec­tive to con­vert the diachrony of the musi­cal score into the syn­chrony of a visu­al field, each ​‘implo­sion’ implies a new ver­sion of the score as a noise com­po­si­tion, all the notes meld­ing into a simul­ta­ne­ous cacoph­o­ny of inde­ter­mi­nate duration.”

Bran­den Joseph, Art­fo­rum, 2011.

Mar­co Fusina­to is an artist and musi­cian whose work has tak­en the form of instal­la­tion, pho­to­graph­ic repro­duc­tion, per­for­mance and record­ing. His over­all aes­thet­ic project com­bines alle­gor­i­cal appro­pri­a­tion with an inter­est in the inten­si­ty of the ges­ture or event. As a musi­cian, Fusina­to explores the idea of noise as music, using the elec­tric gui­tar and mass ampli­fi­ca­tion to impro­vise intri­cate, wide-rang­ing and phys­i­cal­ly affect­ing frequencies.

His work has been pre­sent­ed in many exhi­bi­tions, includ­ing: ​‘The Nation­al: New Aus­tralian Art’, Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art Aus­tralia (2017); ​‘All the World’s Futures’, The 56^th Venice Bien­nale (2015); ​‘Sound­ings: A Con­tem­po­rary Score’, the first ever exhi­bi­tion of sound at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, New York (2013); a range of projects and per­for­mances for ​‘The Immi­nence of Poet­ics’, 30^th Sao Paulo Bien­nale (2012); and ​‘Son­ic Youth: Sen­sa­tion­al Fix’ (2008−2010) a trav­el­ling exhi­bi­tion around Euro­pean muse­ums of artists who have col­lab­o­rat­ed with NYC rock band, Son­ic Youth. His on-going series of long-dura­tion noise-gui­tar per­for­mances, ​‘Spec­tral Arrows’, described as a mon­u­men­tal aur­al sculp­ture, first per­formed at The Glas­gow Inter­na­tion­al Arts Fes­ti­val Glas­gow in 2012, has since been per­formed in muse­ums and the­atres worldwide.