Works presented within the installation:

Shadows
Rant
Sight Sound Strings
Video Translations
The Death of the Piano
Music for the Dallas Community College Telecourses
How to Kill Yourself Using the Inhalation of Carbon Monoxide Gas
Interview Footage

Jerry Hunt Quotations

On His Work
"There are specific scenarios for each of my works that involve certain relationships with objects - what objects I carry, what are available. I have a list of strategies and a list of goals and interests and pursuits and exercises and desires that I'd like to work out with the audience. Some very personal, some confrontational and violent, some overtly sexual, some pretentious, some apologetic, some friendly. They're all just interpersonal games with tools.
The way I organize my material is very much along the line of my conversational sense. I meander; it's just my nature. In some ways, the meander is a most meaningfully provocative organizer because it's driven by natural processes. For example, in any kind of interchange, there is the situation, the exploration of the situation, the feeling out of the environment, and the assessment of the strong and weak forces in the environment. Every performance that I do, and every compositional gimmick or technique or structure that I use, is based on this model of conversational interaction.
Someone once..described [what I do] as a kind of religious experience in which the priest makes connection between the congregation and the god....Remember, particularly in charismatic traditions, a priest is not a person who says, 'Let me tell you what God just told me.' And, clearly, the leader of a voodoo ceremony is not there to say, 'God just said....' Instead, he says, 'Can you hear what he's saying?,' and he sets up a situation in which your eyes and ears can be . . . "

On Music
I don't think I could have ever had a career as a pianist because I never ever wanted to play the notes the way they were written. I was too sloppy to learn them quite right. And I've found that there are a few pieces I can never, ever memorize- -Rachmaninoff's, for example, because of the way he composed: First he wrote the pop song, the tune with the chord changes. Then he slithered around a lot, up and down, and after he got the slithers in, the he'd put accent marks over a few of the slithered big notes and scrape some of the the other slithers out, and voila! Sonata No. 1, Sonata No. 2. Which is the thing I like: it's kind of an aesthetic, degenerate cocktail music.

On Women
I think for many women still one of the easiest choices is just to socially relax, and that will result in a house and a life and a washing machine. Just by relaxing a little. It's still very endemic to U.S. culture. A girl really has to work very hard to stop being a girl.

On Life
I don't know how the world works; I just know it doesn't work the way anybody ever told me it did, if you understand what I mean. My whole life has been one great big happy easy accident in which all of my stresses and neurotic reactions and unhappinesses have been complete luxury items that I can indulge in to whatever degree I find satisfying. In a way I wish everyone could have that choice.

Jerry Hunt (1943-1993) was a brilliant, one-of-a-kind artist and human being. A pioneer of real-time electronic and computer music and video, he designed and built much of his own equipment long before the advent of commercial samplers, digital signal processors and computers. Because his tools were so idiosyncratic it was difficult to know how it all worked; I'm not sure that anyone ever really knew what he was doing. For this reason his performances were wonderfully disorienting -- one never knew exactly where these sounds and images were coming from, or what their relationship was to his onstage activity. In fact, you never quite knew if it was all "working" or not, but that was part of the mystery and the charm of it.

-Excerpted from "Jerry Hunt: Performance Artifacts" by Steve Peters

http://www.jerryhunt.org/JerryHunt/mw_39.asp

Shelley Hirsch wishes to thank Diapason for presenting the exhibition and Rod Stasick for providing the archival materials that made its realization possible. She also wishes to give special thanks to Steven Housewright (Jerry's partner of 28 years) who gave her permission and encouragement to present and perform virtual duet's with her hero's work.

[top]