Violin generator 2019
The Rosenberg Museum in Melbourne
By curious circumstance and evading the logic of a random Universe...
Violin Generator at The Substation, Melbourne
For this time only and ever 4th-13th April 2019 (ah... you missed it then)
Installations of The Rosenberg Museum have been featured all over Europe in its 30 year life, now it's finally back in Australia and looking for a permanent home - so if you know someone with deep pockets and a suitable venue who is into contemporary art, new music, Fluxus, violins... please contact the museum.
The creation of violinist, composer, artist, inventor, writer, Jon Rose - The Rosenberg Museum houses a cornucopia of violin iconography - a cabinet of curiosities highlighting violin stories that are musically other, historically twisted, or culturally critical. Specially built for this manifestation of the museum, and housed in the thoroughly secured East German Room, is The Quantum Violin of Rainer Linz.
Video extracts taken when The Violin Generator was live are available here.
Despite being dead for over 20 years, Dr Rosenberg's facebook can be viewed and heard here.
The rosenberg Museum maybe seriously under-resourced, but in spite of that, it does have this great ability of collecting by chance the most unlikely stories.
Ripping us off blind was the Art Transport Company's main concern but they screwed up big time when they transported an extra box with our museum stuff which seemed to contain an earth sculpture looking something like a wombat with a bump on its head. Neither the Art transport people nor The Substation in Melbourne knew anything about it. We tried to find out who owned it and nobody was interested. By chance phone call with someone in the art world I discovered it was worth over $150,000 and was in fact a rare sacred object from Mali - a Boli - kind of animistic or spiritual artefact that contains blood, sacrificial bones, shit, piss, and God knows what else, covered in earth. No doubt, there is plenty to this narrative that is straight out of the colonial versus poor people playbook. We don't know the whole story but there seems to be only a few Bolis gathered up into the collecting arms of major museums eg. The Metropolitan New York. The owner of our visiting Boli recently died and his son seems to spend his time avoiding the responsibility of a huge art collection or in fact anything.
My partner Hollis was convinced that the Boli came to us to save my life, I'm not so sure, but I'll take any help on offer including blood and shit from west Africa.
Installations of The Rosenberg Museum have been featured all over Europe in its 30 year life, now it's finally back in Australia and looking for a permanent home - so if you know someone with deep pockets who is into contemporary art, new music, Fluxus, violins... please contact the museum. The museum is the creation of violinist, composer, artist, inventor, writer, Jon Rose and houses a cornucopia of violin iconography - a cabinet of curiosities highlighting violin stories that are musically other, historically twisted, or culturally critical.
Big thank you to the following Musicians who took part in Violin Generator:
Robbie Avernaim, Rainer Linz, Ernie Althof, Erkki Veltheim, Lizzy Welsh, Rachael Kim, Judith Hamann, Biddy Connor, and Chloe Smith, Dr. Jozef Cseres, Maria Moles, Michael McNab, Brigit Burke, visual curation by Kali Michailidis.
Australian violinist Jon Rose has done more than any musician to revolutionise the approach to his instrument, with technical developments and radical performance strategies.
Andy Gill, The Independent, 5 January 2013
