Marco Fusinato
The Colour of the Sky Has Melted

Marco Fusinato’s The Color of the Sky Has Melted is a major solo exhibition of the artist’s recent projects. Referencing the rhetoric of radical politics (its ambitions and failures), noise as music and the frameworks of conceptual art, there is a strong relationship between projects and evidence of a self-perpetuating logic and sustained inquiry in Fusinato’s practice.

Aetheric Plexus (2009) takes the equipment associated with the spectacle and turns it directly on the viewer in an assault of 13,200 watts of white light and 105 decibels of white noise in an unequivocal action to break the viewer out of their regular encounter with the artwork, by literally situating them in the work. 

In his ongoing series Mass Black Implosion (2007–) Fusinato takes scores by avant-garde composers like Iannis Xenakis and John Cage, and in this case the graphic notation scores of Greek composer Anestis Logothetis, drawing lines from every original note to an arbitrarily chosen point as propositions for new and even more extreme noise compositions.

In the series, Noise & Capitalism (2010) Fusinato takes a collection of insurrectionary leftist pamphlets from the twenty-first century, first enlarging and then setting out each pamphlet as it once would have been laid out on the printing press. The upper left quadrant contains the front and back covers; the upper right, the inside covers; the lower left, all those inside pages that would have been folded facing down, superimposed one upon the other; the lower right, all those that would have been folded facing up, similarly superimposed. While the titles remain clear, the overprinted contents render the lengthier writings an unreadable black morass of text and image.

In Fusinato’s Double Infinitive (2009) images from the print media of the decisive moment in a riot in which a protagonist brandishes a rock against a backdrop of fire is blown up to the heroic scale of history paintings. Although taken from varied places and historical moments, the series of images appears remarkably unified, showing political context banished in favour of archetypal (and ahistorical) rage.

THIS IS NOT MY WORLD (design: Joseph Churchward) (2012) is a banner originally made by a political artist collective in the 1970s in Zagreb, Croatia, living under a dictatorship without a gallery system. Fusinato takes the same format and content of the original work and invites internationally well-known graphic designers to reinterpret the original.

Presented as a photographic compilation of the music shopfronts and a video recording of one performance, Free 1998–2004 (2012) documents the artist’s impromptu noise-guitar performances in unsuspecting music shops around the world. Fusinato launched his full-blown improvisations until asked, politely or not, to turn it down or leave.

The Color of the Sky has Melted is curated by Charlotte Day as a joint project with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (11 August – 6 October 2012). This is the third such exhibition partnership in recent years between Artspace and IMA, following Peter Robinson’s Polymer Monoliths (2009) and Rose Nolan’s Why Do We Do The Things We Do? (2008).