Marina Rosenfeld is an artist based in New York. Her hybrid visual-musical works have been at the forefront of the redefinition of musical practice within the field of contemporary art since the ’90s. Her performances, sound installations and objects, including lenticular photographs produced in tandem with vinyl LP compositions, and custom loudspeakers deployed in public and often monumental spaces, have worked to recast social and sculptural relations as musical, blurring the line demarcating the improvised or incidental from the composed.


from Room40:

Over the past decade, Marina Rosenfeld’s work has come to represent one of the most progressive approaches to experimental sound emanating from New York.

Known equally as a composer of large-scale performances and a groundbreaking turntablist, Rosenfeld has been a leading voice in the increasing hybridization between the domains of visual art and music. Her sonic palette--drawn from hand-crafted dub plates she imprints with blips of vinyl static, bursts of instrumental and electroacoustic noise, and other audio detritus--evokes both the ecstatic electronic artifice of early electronic composers like Morton Subotnik and the post-punk ferocity of Kim Gordon. In recent works, like P.A., roygbiv&b and Teenage Lontano, her acclaimed “cover version“ for teenaged choir of Ligeti's Lontano, she’s also created and deployed custom loudspeakers, inserting her music into complex scenarios where monumental spaces disperse and distort sound.

Rosenfeld’s work has been widely commissioned by institutions internationally, including in recent years the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011), the 2002 and 2008 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, the Stedelijk Museum (2009), the Tate Modern (2006), the Serralves Museum (2011), and festivals including the Liverpool Biennial and Ultima Festival (2010), the Holland Festival (2009), PERFORMA Biennial (2009 and 2011), Ars Electronic, Maerz Musik, Mutek and Wien Modern, among many others.

As a performer she’s collaborated with artists including Christian Marclay, Sonic Youth, George Lewis and DJ Olive; Merce Cunningham Dance Company; and the art-band Text of Light, among many others. Her recordings are released by Room40 (Brisbane), Charhizma (Vienna), Innova (Minnesota), and formerly Softl (Cologne). Her latest solo recording, Plastic Materials (Room40), was named a top release of 2010 by the Wire magazine.


key works:

While still a student at CalArts (Los Angeles) in 1993, Rosenfeld first created the Sheer Frost Orchestra, a graphically scored musical performance realized by 17 women on floor-bound electric guitars, deploying nail-polish bottles as sensitive sound-producing implements. This performance, always created in situ with the collaboration of local performers, has been widely produced since then, most recently at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2009. Other performed works include Emotional Orchestra (Deitch Projects/NY, Tate Modern/London), WHITE LINES (Wien Modern, British School at Rome, Taktlos Bern, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art and many others), and 2008’s Teenage Lontano, Rosenfeld’s “cover version” of Gyorgy Ligeti's 1967 orchestral work Lontano, for 34-voice teenaged choir and suspended speaker installation. Teenage Lontano was premiered in the vast Drill Hall space of the Park Avenue Armory in New York as part of the Whitney Biennial 2008. The work had its European premiere in Amsterdam in June 2009 as a co-production of the Holland Festival and Stedelijk Museum and its third and fourth productions in 2010-11 in Oslo for Ultima Festival and Perth, Australia for Tura New Music. Other recent works include Cannons, 2010, for live musicians and a suite of four graduated steel “bass cannons”; the site-specific series P.A./Public Address, created in residence at the Park Avenue Armory during 2009; and roygbiv&b, a choral installation/performance with loudspeaker installation commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and premiered in its five-story atrium.


improvised music:

Rosenfeld also performs frequently as a turntablist, mostly using original dub plates (acetate records), and has been privleged to collaborate with many extraordinary musicians, including Ikue Mori, Christian Marclay, George Lewis, Christof Kurzmann, Kaffe Matthews, Nels Cline, Zeena Parkins, Lee Ranaldo, Anthony Coleman, Martin TÈtreault, Philip Jeck, Kim Gordon, Raz Mesinai, and many others. Performers in Rosenfeld’s Sheer Frost and Emotional orchestras have been too numerous to list, but include Laurie Anderson, Kembra Pfahler/aka (Voluptuous Horror of) Karen Black, Barbara Ess, Okkyung Lee, Chiara Giovando, Honeychild, Jutta Koether, Josephine Meckseper, Jacqueline Humphries, Jennifer Baron, and many illustrious others.  Between 2004 and 2009 Rosenfeld also performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; the art-band “Text of Light”; Sonic Youth’s “Good-bye Twentieth Century” tour; the London Musicians Collective’s “Turntable Hell” touring project; and “The International Turntable Orchestra” in Berlin.


some recordings: 

Sour Mash (2010, Innova), a collaboration with George Lewis

Plastic Materials (2009, Room40/Brisbane)

joy of fear (2006, Softl/Cologne)

The Sheer Frost Orchestra: Hop, Drop, Drone, Slide, Scratch and A for Anything (2001, Charhizma/Vienna)

theforestthegardenthesea: music from Fragment Opera (1999, Charhizma / Vienna)


teaching:

Rosenfeld is a member of the faculty of Bard College's MFA program, the Milton Avery School of the Arts, and has been co-chair of its department of Music/Sound since 2007.


writing:

Rosenfeld’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Leonardo, the LA Weekly and in John Zorns “Arcana II: Musicians on Music.” Her work is the subject of a chapter of “In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art” (Continuum, 2009) a new book by art historian Seth Kim-Cohen, and is included in Theresa Sauer’s “Notations 21” (Mark Batty, 2009).