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Broken Music

Courtesy Badischer Kunstverein, 2008
Courtesy Badischer Kunstverein, 2008
Courtesy Badischer Kunstverein, 2008
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    • Broken Music
  • 1963-1979
  • 30 records, altered
"Broken Music" comes from this classic period around the midway point of the 60s. About 1965, Milan Knížák worked with the classic medium of recorded music, vinyl records, which he actualized and activated first off by playing at different speeds and eventually even with scratching, cutting, breaking, shredding, painting and melting with flames, gluing and sticking together, combining with other objects and so on. „Active music“ arose from the collision of existing reality and a new reality, made exceptional through highly complex processes. Knížák’s broken music is at once a part of the material event and an unusual process of communion, it has an open process like a real action, it destroys one medium through the overlaying of other media and it is possible to imagine it as an act rewritten as an instruction to its own execution. J.S.