Martin Beck: ... for Hours, Days, or Weeks at a Time

Rigorous research yielding sculptural and installation-type interventions and deep insight into an earlier era’s sound experiments

Published with The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

This volume ably documents the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum exhibition of the same name by acclaimed New York- and Vienna-based Austrian artist Martin Beck (born 1963). This work explores the methods and means through which environments are captured, compressed and represented. The suite of works is informed by Beck’s research into Environments, a series of 11 vinyl records from the 1970s produced by Syntonic Research that registered the acoustics of nature and meditative sounds with high-fidelity recording technology. Beck’s interest in these records lies in their pioneering role as atmospheric tools for self-optimization within an ever more competitive capitalist setting. Dissecting the series’ promotional material, Beck highlights and cuts into the claims made for creating spaces of heightened productivity in which one supposedly feels at ease and is ever more functional.