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New York Times

Turning VHS Tapes of Gay Men's Choruses Into a Powerful Celebration

On a recent sunny morning in Lower Manhattan, Matthew Leifheit heard applause. It wasn't for a live performance, but for many old ones — the source material for 'No Time at All,' his sound installation that continues through June 30 at the New York City AIDS Memorial in the West Village. Culled from 53 VHS tapes, the piece is a continuous mix of music and songs performed by gay men's choruses from 1985 to 1995, complete with the distortions and degradations that occur when magnetic tape ages and deteriorates. The piece runs 65 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of silence, a quieting that tells as much of a story as the golden baritones. There are seven 'recitals,' as Leifheit calls them, that play every day through June from speakers nestled within the memorial's 18-foot white steel canopy. Leifheit, 37, said he deliberately included music from concerts that took place in the middle of the darkest early years of the AIDS crisis before the use of highly active antiretroviral treatments (HAART) in the United States. It was a decade, he said during an interview at the memorial, when many gay chorus members 'were reckoning with what they were going through, through music.' Leifheit said the project's title refers to how the passage of time might feel to people who remember going to so many funerals — and to the haste with which AIDS killed many of the men whose anonymous voices carry through the memorial. Documenting the loss, and musical joys, of those early AIDS years was his artistic attempt to 'dramatize the absence' and honor chorus members who 'are still with us and thriving.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.