Marco Fusinato
The Color of the Sky Has Melted
11 August–6 October 201211 Aug–6 Oct 2012
Melbourne artist Marco Fusinato explores rhetorics of extremism in art, music, and politics. For his shocking installation Aetheric Plexus, encroaching visitors trigger a huge sound-and-lighting rig that blasts them with 13,000 watts of blinding white light (as if they were the performer) and 105 decibels of deafening white noise. In Mass Black Implosions, Fusinato takes scores by avant-garde composers like Iannis Xenakis, ruling lines from every note they contain to a vanishing point. In doing so he trumps the older composers, detourning their revolutionary (but often more traditional-looking) scores into propositions for new compositions suggesting sonic simultaneity and collapse. In Double Infinitives, Fusinato amplifies classic found news images of anonymous rioters in unidentified riots to heroic, history-painting or billboard scale. There is often a cool ambivalence and distance in Fusinato’s take on revolution, and in the Double Infinitives he seems to be asking: do these images exemplify an authentic archetype of revolt or rather its cliched, default-setting characterisation by mainstream media? Fusinato also works as a musician, in the avant-garde ‘noise music’ tradition, exploring the ‘use and abuse’ of electric guitars. He has collaborated with such fellow-travelers as Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and The Dead C’s Bruce Russell. Fusinato’s recent releases include Ambianxe and Ripping Skies. The Color of the Sky Has Melted was curated by Charlotte Day as a joint project with Artspace, Sydney, with support from Besen Family Foundation.