MASTER PIECE (materpieces)

2024 Performed at Murate Art District

With Benedetta Manfriani and Umi Carroy (+ audience members invited to join)

MASTER PIECE, a text score, activates the history of European painting as both a homage to these great works and a feminist critique of the socio-economic and cultural conditions in which these works were created.  The score is a call to remember, to ‘re-call’ these subtle and powerful paintings with great love for all their qualities as traces of human experience and understanding through time. It also questions the socio-political structures that permitted the overwhelmingly dominant presence of certain men as creators and participants in this history of ‘Master’ works, with all their colonial and patriarchal implications, and to reopen the languages to see what spaces can be heard for those not historically included in this discourse.

Referencing the forms of Fluxus Event Scores (with a play on the word ‘Masterpiece’ and how certain Fluxus Event scores use the title ‘Piece’ in reference to musical forms) as well as Dada and Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, the score takes a list of the names and titles of the top 100 paintings in European Art History (a list which only includes paintings by men) and strips the works of their consonants, leaving behind the vowels to be sung. As the voice and lips cannot close when forming vowels, the works are ‘opened up’ and laid bare, stripped of their consonance with distinct languages; pointing through and across creative time to other ways of listening, reclaimed by the contemporary sounding body.  By taking an empty space in the title to change the meaning, from Masterpiece to Master Piece, the score points to a pausing together, an interval to question and reframe these histories through living listening and the cultural implications of this act.