Tag: Music

#29 Mehmet and Emmett

Mehmet and Emmett

The first thing you need to know is, they are serious about their values. Mehmet always wears white through 50% gray. Emmett always wears 51% gray through black. The second thing is, they are always in the throes of some kind of contemporary art experience, and cannot be stopped.

Mehmet is from Istanbul and proudly calls what he does “art rock”. Influenced by musicians like David Bowie, Philip Glass, Can, and Laurie Anderson, he fuses it with traditional Turkish instrumentation, with a heavy dose of Turkish rock pioneer Ervin Koray — extending the use of Koray’s electric baÄŸlama in the contexts of experimental and electronic contexts. After failing to get money for his 9-hour song cycle on the life of Klaus Nomi, he’s agreed to accompany Emmett on his current adventure project. He makes field recordings, and is sketching the first stages of a series of compositions exploring the psychoacoustics of fear. “It’s very easy, you know, to evoke a sense of dread by merely using discordant sounds, like Hollywood always does. But eh, I think fear, it can also be beautiful, and kind of still, ok? Like there is the fear that someone is trying to kill you, and then there is the fear of the unkown, the fear of your own mortality. I do not think these fears are naturally so discordant. I am hoping to experience these fears — or maybe, Emmett can experience them and I can stand, you know, back a few paces — and come up with a new musical language to explain them.”

Emmett is from Louisville, and he’s traveling around having adventures and documenting them for his latest work. Among other things, he’s investigating UFO sightings, accompanying Real-Life Superheroes on their crime-fighing patrols, getting his P.I. license so he can solve mysteries, and shadowing insurance investigators tracking art thefts. He plans to document all of these things via a gallery installation incorporating video, machines, and performance art.  In between these assumed lives, he visits other friends of his, contemporary artists, scientists, street artists, makers, and general freaks, and gets involved in whatever it is they’re doing. He calls it “Operation Busybody” and he has a grant for it.

The first stop on Mehmet and Emmett’s next trip is to visit a Japanese artist friend who’s suspending a giant bronze bear head over an active volcano.

Below is Emmett’s artistic statement. Mehmet never misses a chance to point out how douchey it makes him sound.

“Emmett Pierce’s work explores the intersection and interplay of memory, culture, and the socially constructed nature of reality through mixed media installations, sculpture, and performance art. Through directed praxis, he interrogates the scientific shibboleth of ‘the unexplainable’, inserting himself into situations as a participant, or a kind of flaneur. By documenting his experiences, he alchemically transforms his life experience into an emergent artistic situation that forces the viewer to confront their assumptions about identity, the tyranny of existence, and the permeable boundary between danger and complacency.

His artistic practice, influenced by such diverse thinkers as Derridas, Rousseau and Buckminster Fuller, incorporates Jean Tinguely’s sculptural machines, the legacy of Fluxus, and the latest in multimedia technology to create a postmodern tableau that requires the viewer to question the undefined elements of their existence as they maneuver through the works.”

Emmett’s actually an okay guy, though. But he won’t change the damn statement.