12-05-2025
Revivification at the Art Gallery of WA is a strange and tender revival of experimental composer Alvin Lucier
On a quiet Saturday morning in the heart of Perth, a crowd gathers inside the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA), with the disoriented mood of any social event that takes place before noon.
But there's also a sense of confusion about just what the mood should be.
We are here, in theory at least, to listen to a performance by a dead composer who, beyond the dark, waiting tunnel of the exhibition entrance, is at least in some way physically present.
Through the passageway is a "brain in a jar", curator Robert Cooke jokes, somewhat uneasily.
It's part of an AGWA exhibition that makes a bold promise: to reawaken what has ceased to exist.
Before the entrance, watching over the living, is a large photographic portrait of the late artist at the centre of AGWA's Revivification: the legendary American experimental composer, Alvin Lucier.
For more than 50 years, until his death in 2021 at the age of 90, Lucier was a pioneering figure in electronic and electro-acoustic music. His work was often described as "making the inaudible audible".
Lucier announced his artistic arrival in 1965 with his groundbreaking work 'Music for Solo Performer', which used then-cutting-edge technology to translate his brainwaves into sound on percussive instruments while he, the performer, sat still on a stage, eyes closed, electrodes attached to his head.
This strange, speculative installation I'm standing before six decades on, feels like exactly the kind of thing Lucier might have created himself — if he'd lived long enough to make use of contemporary neuroscience that could, in effect, grow a brain outside of the human body.
In Revivification, a collaboration between Australian artists Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson, and Matt Gingold, along with neuroscientist Stuart Hodgetts, the group attempts to bring Lucier back to life — not just metaphorically.
They describe the work as an extension of Lucier's "cellular life".
Inside a dark, cave-like chamber, 20 large brass plates line the walls.
Behind each one sits a mallet connected to a motor, poised to respond to electrical activity from a miniature brain organoid: a cluster of neural cells, cultivated from white blood cells Lucier had donated before his death.
The cells are alive. They are growing. Like a real brain, these neurons are communicating with one another.
Using electrodes, the organoid's electrical activity is recorded and sonified — translated into sound — creating a feedback loop.
In theory, the organoid could experience the sound vibrations it has helped to create and respond to them.
The sound that results is some blend between the resonant tones of a temple, and a haphazard pitter-patter like a child on a drum set.
At the centre of the chamber sits the organoid itself, sealed inside a box.
Only one visitor at a time can peer down at it through a magnifying-glass porthole. The viewer in that moment has to alone contend with the question: What am I looking at?
A hopeful, speculative dream, perhaps — that a person might indeed live on in some way after death, continuing to interact with the world, even continue to make art.
Or, as Thompson puts it, were they peering into an "abyss": life, "but not of the same living experience"?
The installation raises another question: even if we can continue a creative life after death, should we?
The science behind Revivification is state of the art. But the feeling it evokes — the wonder and anxiety, the moral tension — is centuries old.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the obvious reference point. A work produced in another age of technological anxiety in the early part of the 19th century.
Not unlike our present moment; the fears about scientific overreach in the context of AI, and the vulnerable place of the human in our rapidly changing world.
And yet, beneath the speculative weight of Revivification lies something unexpectedly tender: a sense of deep affection.
At its heart, the exhibition is also an act of homage. Four artists' love for an elder, and an unwillingness to let him go.
In a panel following the opening, the artists speak with both humour and sincerity about the bonds they developed with each Petri dish of Alvin Lucier's cell tissue.
"I had this really personal and emotional attachment to Dish 8," Gingold says to laughter, though he's serious. "Dish 8 had these really strong neural activations.
"At some point, it got contaminated and there was one night where we knew it was going to die. And we were recording it. And it was really emotional because I could see these activations changing. I could see that it was going into these states where it was activating a lot and then dying back down.
"It is something that is alive," Gingold says. "It's got a life of its own."
In the final years of Lucier's life, the group spoke to him fortnightly via zoom. Before his death, Lucier's daughter, Amanda, told Guy Ben-Ary it was true to form that her father would agree to a project like Revivification.
"She said, you know, it's so like him that at the end of his life, he's just organising a way to keep on composing."
At one point speaking to me, Gingold strangles the word "spiritual" as he begins to speak it. Concepts of the transcendent or sublime have often seemed antithetical to the secular and scientific interests of experimental art.
But Revivification has a strangely spiritual nature to its questions about the ineffability of creativity and where it might come from.
In our increasingly disembodied age — where human creativity seems ever more threatened by non-human technologies — Revivification offers something quietly radical: a reverence for one man's life, and for the very human tissue through which he made his work.
Revivification is at the Art Gallery of Western Australia until August 3, 2025.
