The programme OPEN SPACE: FOCUS ON DAVID BEHRMAN includes the presentation of a selection of films that illustrate some of the collaborative relationships that Behrman maintained and maintains with artists from other disciplines, namely with his partner Terri Hanlon, a California artist who works mainly with video. Recently, we have seen the publishing of ‘She's More Wild...’, a record album that brings together an archive of pieces that Hanlon did with David Behrman, Paul DeMarinis, Fern Friedman and Anne Klingensmith in the early 1980s at Mills College. Behrman also contributed musical supervision and soundtrack to ‘Meringue Diplomacy’, Hanlon's experimental documentary that tells the story of Antonin Carême, the eccentric and innovative chef, gastronomic sculptor and founder of the great French cuisine, who lived between 1783 and 1833.

David Behrman has also had a series of collaborations with artist Robert Watts, known as a founding member of the Fluxus movement and for expanding eligible techniques and media in the art field. Behrman composed the soundtrack for Watts' film ‘Cascade’ (1968), considered to be one of the first compositions to mix electronic sounds with ambient sounds. Watts, Behrman and Bob Diamond conceived the installation ‘Cloud Music’ in the late 1970s, an immersive installation in which images of the sky captured in a window and broadcast on video are analyzed and turned into the music score for a composition that fills the space with subtle electronic harmonics.

‘MERINGUE DIPLOMACY’ [2010], 57’

TERRY HANLON

‘Meringue Diplomacy’ is a fantasy based on fact inspired by the life of the great chef Antonin Carême. Carême, in addition to many other accomplishments, created an entertainment and culinary environment which helped the diplomat Talleyrand determine the course of post-Napoleonic France. This French culinary history is filtered through a conceptual, romantic, psychedelic ’70’s San Francisco Bay area lens. Without “how to” food shots, Meringue Diplomacy combines classic documentary style, gestural choreography and animation. One could say of this work that it delivers information on two very different levels: one rational, as in traditional documentary, the other painterly, visual, abstract, perceptual.

‘Meringue Diplomacy’ was the second of larger pieces that Hanlon started in the 90’s and was completed in 2010. Hanlon started shooting the video in 1997, and completed her scene and animation collection in 2009, working in almost every pre-hi-def format then available, from Video-8 to DV Cam.

‘Meringue Diplomacy’ has a music score directed by David Behrman. The soundtrack features music by Behrman, Jacques Bekaert, Barbara Held, John King with the ETHEL String Quartet, Laetitia Sonami, Maria Ludovici and Jon Gibson. The cast features Eric Barsness, Jacques Bekaert, Carol Clements, Laetitia Sonami, and Joe Hannan. ‘Meringue Diplomacy’ premiered at the The Alliance Française in New York and is included in the collection of MACBA in Barcelona.

‘CASCADE’ [1968], 26’

ROBERT WATTS

Original 16mm; digital transfer from VHS copy.

Robert Watts (Burlington, Iowa, 1923) was an American artist best known for his work as a member of the Fluxus international group of artists. He organized the proto-fluxus Yam Festival in May 1963 with George Brecht, and was one of the main protagonists, along with George Maciunas, in transforming New York's SoHo into an artists' neighborhood.

Watts explored enthusiastically through every evolving technology in his time. Starting from late 1950s this includes his negatives from tiny spy cameras, super-8 and 16mm films, 35 mm negatives and slides, early video experiments, an innovative interactive work with the Apple II computer. Of all that, Cascade has been a rarely seen or noted element of Watts’s oeuvre.

Watts created the film in 1962 and David Behrman’s soundtrack was added in 1967.

Posthumous showings of “Cascade” have happened at Anthology Film Archives (1992), Newark Museum (1999), and Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid (2002).

‘CLOUD MUSIC’ (Documentation excerpt) [1974-1979], 3’

ROBERT WATTS, DAVID BEHRMAN, BOB DIAMOND

This short film is an excerpt from the video documentation of the installation ‘Cloud Music’, the result of a collaboration between three artists: Robert Watts, David Berhman, and Bob Diamond. ‘Cloud Music’ is a synthesis of sound and image. In this installation A closed-circuit video camera is directed through a window to the sky. A video analyzer and audio synthesizer read the image on a TV monitor, transforming the movement of clouds and changing light into an original score of music that transports the natural environment into the gallery for a new and immersive audio-visual experience. The result is an electronic score that fills the space with subtly shifting harmonics. Visitors listen to video as a nature-driven event unfolds in real-time. As sound is composed from light, Cloud Music is at once a conceptual homage to “chance” and was an inspiring technological triumph that stands for the importance of evernew means to experience the world.

In 2013 ‘Cloud Music’ was acquired into the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington.