Artwork Details
- Title
- Report
- Artist
- Date
- 2001/2015
- Location
- Dimensions
- Component B: 8 1⁄2 x 11 in.
- Copyright
- Video © 2015 Raven Chacon. Composition © 2001 Raven Chacon
- Credit Line
- Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
- Mediums Description
- single-channel video, color, sound, and printed score shown on music stand; Component A: 03:48 minutes
- Classifications
- Highlights
- Object Number
- 2020.61A-C
Artwork Description
Trained as a composer, Chacon (Diné) often starts from musically notated scores to create conceptually rich artworks across creative categories. Since scores are inherently fluid, even when they take fixed form in a video or print, the works based on them retain the possibility for further interpretation, collaboration, and reanimation in new contexts.
A performance of his 2001 composition of the same name, the 2015 video-installation Report recasts guns as musical instruments, rather than solely as instruments of violence. Having no flexibility in tone, pitch, or volume, the firearms used in Chacon's score create a sonic complexity through the rhythmic staggering of different caliber shots. Location, casting, and framing for each performance, however, dramatically shape understandings of the shooters and their actions. In this video, percussionists of various backgrounds and genders resolutely fire across a New Mexican landscape, offering musical resistance to the myth of an uninhabited American West and a reminder that gunfire has long been the soundtrack of this land.
Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies, 2023
Exhibitions
