Marina Rosenfeld

Six Inversions (After Arnold Schoenberg) (2013)

The two-channel video work Six Inversions was commissioned by the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna Austria as part of the exhibition Art Is: New Art, Reflections on Arnold Schoenberg in Contemporary Art, in 2013. Rosenfeld adopts Schönberg's concept of the inversion, and applies it at both structural and metaphoric levels to a series of scenes recorded at Schoenberg’s home in suburban Mödling and amongst his archive and library in Vienna with the pianist, Anthony Coleman. Assisted by and in conversation with Coleman, whose associative vocabulary ranges from Webern to Jelly Roll Morton, Rosenfeld enacts a series of conversational “readings” of Schoenbergian ephemera, including rows, charts, score fragments and musicological texts, resulting in a series of scenes evoking precise intervallic and ideological shits and substitutions that occupy modalities not just of pitch, but also of chronology, image, genre and history. Among Rosenfeld’s inversions is also one of her own identity in the work—as reader, as composer, as arranger—which she proposes by briefly substituting "Rosenfeld," a thrash-metal band active in Japan in the early ’90s, for herself at several junctures in the sequence. 

Six Inversions was exhibited in 2017 as part of the solo exhibition, After Notation, curated by Lisa Long, at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.