Sound Texts #3: La Carmagnole and Mes Fleurs

Charles Gaines
Born in Charleston, USA , in 1944.
He lives and works in Los Angeles, USA .

Charles Gaines has pioneered conceptual art since the 1960s. His rule-based approach to artmaking is at tension with the personal and political content of his work, which is partly informed by his experiences of racism in the art world at the beginning of his career. After being initially rejected from the MFA program of the School of Art and Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology, he successfully petitioned for admission, becoming in 1967 the first black student enrolled in the program. In his work, Gaines has deployed impersonal structures to address political issues of personal concern, offering detached and systematic examinations of pervasive beliefs and ideologies.
For his series of Manifestos, Gaines set to music various texts by social activists, including the last public speech by the American activist Malcolm X in 1964 and “The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen” (1791) by the French activist and playwright Olympe de Gouges. To create his Manifestos, Gaines translated each letter of those texts into a corresponding musical note (C, D, E, F, G, A, B), treating any letter without an equivalent note as a rest. The resulting installations explore how the emotive properties of the atonal piano compositions affect viewers’ interpretation of the texts. Gaines also collaborated with Sean Griffin, composer and founding director of the Opera Povera consortium, to arrange scores for a live performance by a quartet.
In Notes on Social Justice (2013), Gaines inscribed excerpts from political and artistic manifestos onto sheet music for early American popular songs. For example, battle cries by the likes of Karl Marx and Nelson Mandela thus become alternate lyrics. Gaines’s effort to disseminate political speech through music suggests an attempt to define a new, militant popular ideology.