Martin Beck Last Night

NO.
5 ˚14
Martin
Beck
Last
Night
Video still from Last Night (detail), 2016

BERGEN KUNSTHALL Courtesy Martin Beck and 47 Canal, New York
© Martin Beck, 2017
Last Night
Tim Griffin
January 2018
Lately when considering art I’ve tended to think more about of being in a state of dis-position, so to say, that pervades
how people literally stand in a room—or better, about how the experience, which prompts one to consider whether such
any work of art creates and positions its audience. No doubt uneasiness is being generated by any specific artwork or
I’ve accrued this habit due simply to the pronounced rise of instead by larger disturbances in the field. Perhaps, in other
interdisciplinarity in contemporary art during the past decade. words, the ambiguity of one’s sense of position has plenty to
Today it’s not at all unusual to encounter choreography or do with the very instability of the institutional sphere of art
another performance in a space historically designed and and—to come back to conditions of viewership—the near
employed for static visual objects (or for crowd circulation, evaporation of a public to which it once was keyed.
for that matter), forcing us to reflect more deeply on any
discipline’s relationship with institutional contexts and frames. Martin Beck’s Last Night immediately made me think about
In fact, during the past five years or so a number of artists, such questions, and in no small part because the project
particularly those working in choreography, have accordingly underlined the historical paradox of our situation. To explain,
taken it on themselves to emphasize—as if in anticipation first take stock of the larger contemporary field: One is apt
of such shifting contexts for their practices—the sometimes to note that no aspect of artistic discourse is so pronounced
plainly conflicting qualities of image, sculpture, and motion today as its fraying and atomization—the sense that critical
inherent in their work. Put another way, they seem to calibrate models that held sway during the postwar era, making for a
each of their compositions to a number of disciplinary frames coherent (if often embattled) field, have finally lost their clear
at once: The active structuring of experience—which is to say rootedness in both art and everyday experience. Yet nothing
the structuring of display once assumed to be the purview of has arisen definitively to take their place. Instead, these
institutional space—has itself become part of the piece. Yet various modes of artistic engagement—from poststructuralism
what is always most striking to me in such situations is that to Institutional Critique and beyond—remain loosely in play,
one never quite knows how to behave or position oneself implemented most frequently according to their usefulness
with respect to such work—how to anticipate and place in specific circumstance and situation, seeming the stuff
oneself within any specific durational scope, and whether of citation within swift crosscurrents of overlapping and
to participate somehow or stand apart. Eventually one finds even contradictory influences in culture. Such discursive
oneself reflexively shuttling across registers of viewership disorientation corresponds strongly with that ambiguity found
and attitude or disposition. In fact, it’s a deep-seated sense within the protocols and physical parameters of institutional
spaces, where different modes of positing and positioning In turn, the casual, communal quality of The Kitchen’s
audiences—particularly given the transposition of disciplines architecture—which, it must be admitted, retains the
across registers—are placed in a kind of unsettled confluence. roughshod sensibility of Chelsea’s industrial club culture
In this regard, a recent observation by Beck comes to mind: as it was encountered when the organization landed in the
“As the tool of presentation, display structures the conditions neighborhood in 1985 (just a year after the final Loft party
of imaging: in a paradoxical twist, the way something is at 99 Prince Street that Beck’s work referenced)—became
displayed is the foundation for how that something can be increasingly palpable, even if its precise character remained
imagined, and hence, imaged.” unfamiliar as the “night” wore on. In recent decades, the
staging of social interaction—and of performances from the
And herein rests the paradox of our moment—or, perhaps past—have largely been enmeshed within dialogues around
more accurately, a kind of pseudo-morphism in space. This re-performance (which frequently privileges the representation
kind of overlaying of critical perspectives and disciplinary of social space over its inhabitation) and its summoning and
approaches within a single sphere evokes the art of another surfacing of suppressed histories. Yet Last Night managed
time: specifically, the loft culture of the 1970s and ’80s in New to mark the distance from that earlier moment, while
York, in which, beyond the question of disciplines, popular suggesting its continuing possibility in the present. Playlist
music was apt to overlap with avant-garde composition, aside, I couldn’t help but think of Duchamp’s rotoreliefs
and where, more important, stage and social scene were when looking at Beck’s video, recalling how they revolved
readily and regularly interwoven. But the sense of departure around a psychophysiological response among viewers, who
and possibility (and even playful sense of transgression) that would palpably feel (and project) an image approaching and
attended that earlier era has indeed been displaced by a receding before and within their eyes. Similarly, I think, those
kind of low-grade anxiety. Whereas the art of that earlier time who visited Last Night were within and without their bodies,
established a critical, albeit occasionally casual, relation to encountering the past as a projection, even while living
any fixed institutional frame—and to a public, or community, within its image. And this unusual occupation of the space—
figured within it, even if in counterpoint—artistic production enhanced, perhaps, by the simple fact that we were, on some
today assumes a similar pose only by virtue of that frame’s level, only listening to records—strangely allowed the space
erosion. In a sense, a previous era’s subversive relation to to become little more, or other, than a room. And this was
institutionality has given way to a search for one to subvert, or likely a surprise not only to anyone on The Kitchen’s curatorial
another to create. and production staff but also to those associated with the
Loft parties over the decades, concerned about their legacy.
Such a paradox and predicament has been especially on my Whatever cross-matching of art and institutional structures we
mind at The Kitchen, whose roots are, after all, in the loft might have encountered, producing almost nothing is nearly
culture of the 1970s and that era’s presentation of numerous impossible these days, when it comes to the framing of art or
disciplines—and of genres in culture, high and low—in a the figuring of a public. And yet that degree zero is what is
single room (and where, simply by nature of the space, the needed more than anything else to begin anew—and in new
positioning and behavior of any audience was indefinite). relation to history—today.
However, the organization’s current architecture contains
discrete gallery and theater spaces, which by virtue of their
contiguity readily house interdisciplinary projects, but only
while retaining materially the protocols and conventions
of each discrete specific institutional sphere. (The seams
may be retained, so disciplines are contiguous instead of
overlapping.) The building itself allows for projects embracing
a kind of contradiction, with its infrastructure laced with the
histories of discipline-specific spaces, which can nevertheless
be placed at the disposal of artists to manipulate. In this
regard, Beck’s Last Night seemed uniquely attuned to the site
even while (and by virtue of) containing many histories. For
example, by forcing The Kitchen to keep its doors open late
into the night—simply by virtue of the very extended duration
of the video—the piece invoked the legacy of institutional
critique (think of Michael Asher keeping the Whitney
Museum of Art’s doors open to 24 hours) at the same time
as suggesting those organizations that changed their hours
during the 1990s to accommodate the shifting hours of the
workplace at the turn of the millennium. Yet such incursions
in temporality were not keyed solely to the disruption of
institutional time. On the contrary, such changes arose only
because the documentation of a party taking place decades
ago lasted so long: The temporality of that community was, in
a sense, on display as much as any sound or image.
Video still from Last Night, 2016
Courtesy Martin Beck and 47 Canal, New York
Martin Beck
Last Night, 2016
Installation version for
Bergen Kunsthall, 2018
v7, January 6, 2017

acoustical tiles
wall D wall E wall F

equivalent to equivalent to equivalent to
Sikkens U2.21.09, flat Sikkens U2.21.09, flat Sikkens U2.21.09, flat
wall A
wall F
acoustical tiles acoustical tiles

throughout ceiling
50.0 cm
wall B wall D wall E
wall G
wall C wall H
wall G
equivalent to
medium neutral gray, flat
Martin Beck
Last Night, 2016
wall C screening area wall H
equivalent to medium neutral gray, flat equivalent to Installation version for
Sikkens U2.21.09, flat medium neutral gray, flat Bergen Kunsthall, 2018
paint plan
1:50
4
Martin Beck. Video still from Last Night, 2016. Courtesy Martin Beck
and 47 Canal, New York. © Martin Beck, 2017.
NO. 5
Last Night
Martin Beck
26. JANUAR – 18. MARS
5
MARTIN BECK
LAST NIGHT
26. JANUAR – 18. MARS
NO. 5
18
Martin Beck. Last Night, 2016. Installation view: The Kitchen, New York. Photo: Joerg Lohse.
prog2018-1_FINAL2.indd 18 27/12/2017 11:00

Åpning / Opening
26. 1. 20:00
Omvisninger / Tours
Hver søndag / Every Sunday 14:00
25. 1. 18:00 Medlem / Members
28. 1. 13:00 Barnefamilier / Families
Plattform
3. 2. 14:00 Tim Lawrence / Martin Beck
13 timers visning / 13 Hour Screening
24. 2. 11:00 – 01:00
Martin Beck – Last Night
Martin Becks kunstverk tar ofte utgangspunkt i

historiske undersøkelser av popkultur, motkulturelle
bevegelser, arkitektur og design. Siden 1990 -tallet har
Beck arbeidet med ulike former for erindring, abstrak-
sjon og en kontekstualiserende undersøkelse av arkiv-
materiale, utstillingshistorie og institusjonell praksis.
19
I Last Night består det historiske materialet av en liste med 118

sanger, organisert i den rekkefølgen de ble avspilt i, på The Loft
den 2. juni 1984 . Siden 1970 arrangerte David Mancuso ukentlige
fester i sitt eget hjem, først på adressen 647 Broadway og senere
på 99 Prince Street i New York. Det som etterhvert ble kjent som
The Loft har en unik posisjon i historien om moderne musikk og
klubbkultur. Med en intim atmosfære, preget av kollektivt sam-
hold og med fokus på musikken, hadde Mancusos klubb ingen
kommersiell agenda. Dette til forskjell fra diskotekene som etter
hvert preget New York med høy glamour- og kjendisfaktor.
I Martin Becks behandling av denne historien har spillelisten
dannet utgangspunkt for flere ulike verk. Boken Last Night (2013 )
inneholder en komplett katalogisering av sangene, inkludert
fakta om låtskriver, utgivelsesår, plateselskap og hvilken versjon
(mix) av sangen som ble avspilt. Denne informasjonen, som er ba-
sert på personlige og apokryfe kilder, har i sin tur vært gjenstand
for en rekke senere korreksjoner, gjort tilgjengelige som en serie
prog2018-1_FINAL2.indd 19 27/12/2017 11:00

”errata“ i et pågående revisjonsprosjekt. Prosjektet har også
tatt form av et todelt trykk (med låttitlene presentert som et
stykke konseptuell poesi), en skulptur (bestående av originale
12 " vinylplater) og en serie DJ -sett og sosiale arrangementer.
Den over 13 timer lange filmversjonen av Last Night (2016 )
består av en serie statiske tagninger av en platespiller hvor hver
sang avspilles i sin helhet. Hver ny låt presenteres med en ny
kameravinkel. Totalt ti ulike vinkler gjentas i et mønster basert
på det gylne snitt. Med et hypnotisk
I NO.5 re-presenteres fokus på platespiller-armens langsomme
kunstverk og utstillinger som
bevegelse langs den roterende vinyl-
er tidligere vist andre steder.
Programserien er et motsvar platen, vektlegges den fysiske gjengivel-
til en økende akselerasjon av
produksjon og resepsjon av
sen av musikken. I utstillingen benyttes et
kunst, og en anledning til å spesialtilpasset Hi-Fi-anlegg, satt sammen
skru ned tempoet og fokuse-
re på utvalgte utstillinger.
for å tilsvare lydkvaliteten man kunne
«Last Night» er tidligere oppleve på The Loft.
20 vist ved The Kitchen, New Martin Beck (f. 1963 , Bludenz,
York (2017) og som del av
utstillingen «rumors and Østerrike) bor og arbeider i New York.
murmurs» ved Museum
Moderner Kunst Stiftung
Ludwig Wien (2017). Martin Beck’s works often take their point
En ny publikasjon, med et of departure in historical investigations of
essay av Tim Griffin, vil være
tilgjengelig online og i vår pop culture, commune movements, archi-
butikk. tecture and design. Since the 1990 s Beck
has worked with various kinds of memory,
abstraction and a contextualizing study of archive material,
exhibition history and institutional practice.
In Last Night the historical material consists of a list of 118
songs, organized in the order they were played at the New York
dance party The Loft on 2 June 1984 . Since 1970 David Mancuso
had been hosting weekly parties in his own home, first at 647
Broadway and later at 99 Prince Street. What eventually became
known as The Loft has a unique position in the history of modern
music and dance culture. With an intimate atmosphere typified
by collective affinities and with the focus on music, The Loft had
prog2018-1_FINAL2.indd 20 27/12/2017 11:00

no commercial agenda — unlike the discotheques that, in time,
filled New York with the high-glamour and celebrity factor.
In Martin Beck’s treatment of this history the playlist figured
as starting point for several works. The book Last Night (2013 )
features a complete cataloguing of the
At NO.5 Bergen Kunsthall songs, including songwriter credits,
re-presents artworks and release date, label information and the
exhibitions that have been
previously shown elsewhere. exact version (mix) of the song that was
The programme series is a played. This information, which is based
response to the increasing ac-
celeration of both the produc- on both personal and apocryphal sourc-
tion and reception of art, and
es, has in turn been subject to a series
an opportunity to slow down,
revisit and focus on selected of corrections, made accessible as a
works or exhibitions.
number of ‘errata’ in an ongoing revision
“Last Night” has been shown
earlier at The Kitchen, New project. The project has also taken the
York (2017) and as part of the form of a two-part print edition (with the
exhibition “rumors and mur-
murs” at Museum Moderner song titles operating as kind of concep-
Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, tual poetry), a sculpture (consisting of 21
Vienna (2017).
original 12 " vinyl records) and a series of
A new publication with an essay
by Tim Griffin will be accessible DJ sets and social events.
online and in our shop.
The 13 -and-half-hour-long film version
of Last Night (2016 ) consists of a series
of lock shots of a record player where each song is played in its
entirety. Each new song is presented from a new camera angle.
A total of ten different camera angles are repeated in a pattern
based on the Golden Ratio. A hypnotic focus on the slowly
moving pickup across the rotating vinyl record emphasizes the
physical reproduction of the music. In the exhibition, a specially
adapted hi-fi system is used, assembled to correspond to the
high-level sound quality one could experience at The Loft.
Martin Beck (b. 1963 , Bludenz, Austria) lives and works in
New York.
prog2018-1_FINAL2.indd 21 27/12/2017 11:00

ENG
MARTIN BECK
LAST NIGHT
2 6 J A N U A RY – 1 8 M A R C H
NO.5
P l a t f o r m Ta l k : T i m L a w r e n c e a n d M a r t i n B e c k
Febuary 3, 2pm
13 Hour Screening: Martin Beck´s Last Night

February 24, 11am-1am
Martin Beck’s works often take their point of depar- new song is presented from a new camera angle.
ture in historical investigations of pop culture, com- A total of ten different camera angles are repeated
mune movements, architecture and design. Since the in a pattern based on the Golden Ratio. A hypnotic
1990s Beck has worked with various kinds of memory, focus on the slowly moving pickup across the rotating
abstraction and a contextualizing study of archive ma- vinyl record emphasizes the physical reproduction of
terial, exhibition history and institutional practice. the music. In the exhibition, a specially adapted hi-fi
In Last Night the historical material consists of a list system is used, assembled to correspond to the high-
of 118 songs, organized in the order they were played level sound quality one could experience at The Loft.
at the New York dance party The Loft on 2 June 1984. Like several other works by Martin Beck, Last
Since 1970 David Mancuso had been hosting weekly Night presents us with historical documents, not just
parties in his own home, first at 647 Broadway and as facts to be documented, but as material undergo-
later at 99 Prince Street. What eventually became ing constant processing, and with the potential for
known as The Loft has a unique position in the history reactivation and revitalization. The film combines the
of modern music and dance culture. With an intimate conceptually “dry” cataloguing project with an im-
atmosphere typified by collective affinities and with mersive experience that emphasizes the experience
the focus on music, The Loft had no commercial and the feeling of the music as the actual centre of the
agenda — unlike the discotheques that, in time, filled project.
New York with the high-glamour and celebrity factor.
In Martin Beck’s treatment of this history the Martin Beck (b. 1963, Bludenz, Austria) lives and
playlist figured as starting point for several works. The works in New York.
book Last Night (2013) features a complete catalogu-
ing of the songs, including songwriter credits, release At NO.5 Bergen Kunsthall re-presents artworks and
date, label information and the exact version (mix) of exhibitions that have been previously shown else-
the song that was played. This information, which is where. The programme series is a response to the
based on both personal and apocryphal sources, has increasing acceleration of both the production and
in turn been subject to a series of corrections, made reception of art, and an opportunity to slow down,
accessible as a number of ‘errata’ in an ongoing revi- revisit and focus on selected works or exhibitions.
sion project. The project has also taken the form of a
two-part print edition (with the song titles operating “Last Night” has been shown earlier at The Kitchen,
as kind of conceptual poetry), a sculpture (consisting New York (2017) and as part of the exhibition “rumors
of original 12” vinyl records) and a series of DJ sets and murmurs” at Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung
and social events. Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2017).
The 13-and-half-hour-long film version of Last Night
(2016) consists of a series of lock shots of a record A new publication with an essay by Tim Griffin will be
player where each song is played in its entirety. Each accessible online and in our shop.
Exhibition Map
No.5
1 Last Night, 2013; Last Night: Errata, vols. 1–3, 2014–17

Publications
Published by White Columns, New York; castillo/corrales,
Paris; Galerie Buchholz, New York; The Kitchen, New York
128 pages; 12 pages; 4 pages; 12 pages
11 x 8 1/2 in. (27.3 x 20.3 cm) each
2 Last Night, 2016

Video installation
HD video, color, sound, 13 hours 29 minutes
Installation view: Martin Beck, Last Night, 2018, Bergen Kunsthall, NO.5.
Image courtesy of the artist.
Photo: Thor Brødreskift
David Mancuso, Prince St. Reels, June 2nd 1984
Reel Track ID # Book Artist Track Name Record Label Year of
numbe numbe Page Release
r r Number
1 1 1.1 1 Donald Byrd Love Has Come Around Elektra 1981
1 2 1,2 2 Johnny Mathis Simple Columbia 1984
1 3 1,3 3 Working Week We Will Win / Venceremos Paladin 1984
1 4 1,4 4 Atmosfear What Do We Do (Club Mix) Elite 1983
1 5 1,5 5 Visual The Music Got Me Prelude 1983
1 6 1,6 6 The Gunchback Boogie Band Funn (Instrumental) Prelude 1982
7 Jeffrey Osborne Plane Love A&M 1983
1 7 1,7 7 Jeffrey Osborne Plane Love A&M 1983
1 8 1,8 8 The Strangers Step Out Of My Dream Salsoul 1983
1 9 1,9 9 Tamiko Jones Can't Live Without Your Love Polydor 1979
1 10 1.10 10 Mike Anthony Why Can't We Live Together SunnyView 1982
1 11 1.11 11 Risco Connection Ain't No Stopping Us Now Black Rose Music 1979
2 2 2.2 12 David Williams Come On Down Boogie People AVI Records 1978
2 3 2.3 13 Torch Song Prepare To Energise IRS Records 1983
2 4 2.4 14 Shannon Give Me Tonight (Dub Version) Emergency Records 1984
2 5 2.5 15 Jago I'm Going To Go Full Time Records 1983
2 6 2.6 16 Peter Brown They Only Come Out At Night Columbia 1984
2 7 2.7 17 The Earons Land Of Hunger (Dub) Island Records 1984
2 8 2.8 18 Giorgio Moroder Evolution Casablanca 1978
2 9 2.9 19 Strafe Set It Off (Walter Gibbons Mix) Jus Born Records 1984
2 10 2.10 20 Konk Your Life Sleeping Bag Records 1984
3a 1 3A.1 21 Earl Young Trammps What Happened To The Music Philly Sound Works 1983
3a 2 3A.2 22 One Way Feat. Al Hudson Music MCA 1979
3a 3 3A.3 23 Thirld World Now That We Found Love Island Records 1978
3a 4 3A.4 24 Level 42 Starchild Polydor 1981
3a 5 3A.5 25 Michael Wycoff Diamond Real RCA 1982
3a 6 3A.6 26 Dennis Edwards Feat. SiedahDon't
Garrett
Look Any Further Gordy 1984
3a 7 3A.7 27 Montana Sextet Heavy Vibes Philly Sound Works 1982
3a 8 3A.8 28 Don Ray Standing In The Rain Polydor 1978
3a 9 3A.9 29 Babe Ruth The Mexican Harvest/EMI 1973
3a 10 3A.10 30 Martin Circus Disco Circus Prelude 1979
3a 11 3A.11 31 Funk Masters Love Money Tania 1980
3b 1 3B.1 32 The Frontline Orchestra Don't Turn Your Back On Me ICE 1981
3b 2 3B.2 33 Liquid Liquid Cavern 99 Records 1983
3b 3 3B.3 34 Michael Jackson Thriller Epic 1982
3b 4 3B.4 35 Prince Irresistible Bitch Warner Bros Records 1982
3b 5 3B.5 36 Alexander Robotnick Problemes d'amour Fuzz Dance 1983
4a 2 4A.2 37 John Rocca I Want It To Be Real (instrumental) Streetwise 1984
4a 3 4A.3 38 Jocelyn Brown Somebody Else's Guy Vinyl Dreams Records 1984
4a 4 4A.4 39 David Joseph You Can't Hide (Your Love From Me) Mango 1983
4a 5 4A.5 40 Crown Heights Affair Say a Prayer For Two De-Lite Records 1978
4a 6 4A.6 41 The Winners Get Ready For The Future Ariola 1978
4a 7 4A.7 42 Lamont Dozier Going Back To My Roots Warner Bros 1978
4a 8 4A.8 43 Jimmy Cliff Roots Radical Columbia 1982
4a 9 4A.9 44 Nicodemus Boneman Connection Volcano (7") 1980
4A.9_III Jah Guidance (12") 1980
4a 10 4A.10 45 Joe Gibbs & The Professionals
Chapter 3 Joe Gibbs Music 1981
4a 11 4A.11 46 Rinder & Lewis Lust AVI Records 1978
4b 1 4B.1 47 Eddy Grant Walking On Sunshine Epic 1978
4b 2 4B.2 48 Fred Wesley House Party RSO 1980
4b 3 4B.3 49 Pleasure Take a Chance Fantasy 1980
4b 4 4B.4 50 Brass Construction Music Makes You Feel Like Dancing United Artists Records 1979
4b 5 4B.5 51 D Train D Train Dub Prelude 1982
5a 2 5A.2 52 Exodus Together Forever Charlotte Amalie 1982
5a 3 5A.3 53 Easy Going Baby I Love You Banana Records 1978
5a 4 5A.4 54 Bunny Sigler By The Way You Dance Gold Mind Records 1979
5a 5 5A.5 55 Dinosaur L #5 Go Bang! Sleeping Bag Records 1982
5a 6 5A.6 56 Phreek Weekend Altantic/PAP Records 1978
5a 7 5A.7 57 Modern Romance Everybody Salsa WEA International Inc. 1981
5a 8 5A.8 58 George Kranz Din Daa Daa Fourth & Broadway 1983
5a 9 5A.9 59 Strafe Set It Off (Walter Gibbons Mix) Jus Born Records 1984
5a 10 5A.10 60 Hashim Al-Naafiysh (The Soul) Cutting Records 1983
5b 1 5B.1 61 Paul Sharada Florida (move your feet) Fuori Di Testi 1984
5b 2 5B.2 62 Imagination Burning Up (dub) R&B 1983
5b 3 5B.3 63 David Astri dancing digits (LP version) Award 1983
5b 4 5B.4 64 Booker T & The MGs Melting Pot Stax 1971
6 1 6.1 65 D-Train Music Prelude 1983
6 2 6.2 66 Shannon Give Me Tonight Emergency Records 1984
6 3 6.3 67 Konk Your Life Sleeping Bag Records 1984
6 4 6.4 68 Tower Of Power Squib Cakes Warner Bros 1974
6 5 6.5 69 Torch Song Prepare To Energise IRS Records 1983
6 6 6.6 70 Chantal Curtis Get Another Love Key Records 1979
Love Has Come Around
Simple
Venceremos (We Will Win)
What Do We Do (Club Mix)
The Music Got Me
Funn
Plane Love
Step Out Of My Dream
Can’t Live Without Your Love
Why Can’t We Live Together
Ain’t No Stopping Us Now
Come On Down, Boogie People
Prepare To Energize
Give Me Tonight (Dub Version)
I’m Going To Go (Dub)
They Only Come Out At Night
Land Of Hunger
Evolution
Set It Off
Your Life
What Happened To The Music
Music
Now That We Found Love
Starchild
Diamond Real
Don’t Look Any Further
Heavy Vibes
Standing In The Rain
The Mexican
Disco Circus
Love Money
Don’t Turn Your Back On Me
Cavern
Thriller
Irresistible Bitch
Problémes D’Amour
I Want It To Be Real
Somebody Else’s Guy
You Can’t Hide (Your Love From Me)
Say A Prayer For Two
Get Ready For The Future
Going Back To My Roots
Roots Radical
Boneman Connection
Chapter Three
Lust
Walking On Sunshine
House Party
Take A Chance
Music Makes You Feel Like Dancing
“D” Train (Dub)
Together Forever
Baby I Love You
By The Way You Dance
Go Bang! #5
Weekend
Everybody Salsa
Din Daa Daa (Trommeltanz)
Set It Off
Al-Naafiysh (The Soul)
Florida (Move Your Feet)
Burning Up
Dancing Digits
Melting Pot
Music
Give Me Tonight
Your Life
Squib Cakes
Prepare To Energize
Get Another Love
Evolution
Koke
The Wildstyle
JDBZX Medley
Don’t Look Any Further
Baby I’m Scared Of You
Rude Movements
Love Is The Message
Rude Movements
Walking In Rhythm
California Style
Don’t Go Lose It Baby
I’m Going To Go
Burning Up
Can’t Live Without Your Love
A-Freak-A
The Message
The Stranger
Cavern
The Magnificent Dance
Above And Beyond
Plane Love
Rapper Dapper Snapper
Los Conquistadores Chocolates
Don’t Go Away
The Message
Florida (Move Your Feet)
Doctor Love
Ain’t No Stopping Us Now
Rude Movements
Matt’s Mood II
[?]
Anambra
Standing In The Rain
As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls
It’s For You
Estupenda Graça
Send One Your love
Race Babbling
Youth
Big Spliff
Boof ‘n’ Baff ‘n’ Biff
Space Intro
Fly Like An Eagle
Wild Mountain Honey
[?]
America Is Waiting
Mea Culpa
Last Night
Installation view: Martin Beck, Last Night, 01.09–24.11.2013, Kunsthaus Glarus.
Image courtesy of the artist, Kunsthaus Glarus.
Photo: Gunnar Meier/Kunsthaus Glarus.
Installation view: Martin Beck, Last Night, 01.09–24.11.2013, Kunsthaus Glarus.
Photo: Martin Beck
Martin Beck, Last Night, 2013
Publication
Martin Beck, Last Night, 2013
Publication
E-post for Bergen Kunsthall - here the original invite from the 2014 PS1 event... 16.01.2018, 14*01
Espen Johansen <ej@kunsthall.no>
here the original invite from the 2014 PS1 event...

Espen Johansen <ej@kunsthall.no> 16. januar 2018 kl. 13:59
Til: Espen Johansen <ej@kunsthall.no>
13 HOUR DANCE PARTY!

PS1's PRINT SHOP PERFORMANCE SPACE
Saturday September 27th Noon – 1am
MARTIN BECK & FRIENDS
MoMA PS1 / Printed Matter - The New York Art Book Fair / White
Columns / ALL GOLD
Invite you to a once-in-a-lifetime epic 13-hour dance party 

to launch Martin Beck’s book 'Last Night'
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=a16a99d5b5&jsver=dyO…sg=160ff0d2b9922060&search=inbox&dsqt=1&siml=160ff0d2b9922060 Side 1 av 2
E-post for Bergen Kunsthall - here the original invite from the 2014 PS1 event... 16.01.2018, 14*01
Saturday September 27th / Noon – 1am
at: MoMA PS1 Print Shop / 22-01 Jackson Avenue

(around the corner from MoMA PS1's entrance)
Records played by: Martin Beck & Friends

Sound design by Jim Toth
'Last Night' documents the 118 songs played during a 13-hour set by the legendary DJ David Mancuso 
on June 2nd, 1984 at the final party at the 99 Prince Street location of the Loft.
For this celebratory 13-hour launch party at MoMA PS1's Print Shop space, Martin Beck and guests will
replay - in their original sequence - all 118 songs David Mancuso played in 1984.
Part listening-session, part epic dance party, Martin Beck and his guests will play all of the 118 songs –
from original vinyl recordings - in full, journeying from the initial build-up to the final fade-out. Sound
design is by NY audio legend Jim Toth – whose systems have graced many of New York's legendary clubs
including the Mudd Club, Danceteria, and Santos Party House. Coinciding with Printed Matter's NY Art
Book Fair the event will run continuously from noon on Saturday September 27th to 1am on Sunday
September 28th.
MoMA PS1's Print Shop is 50 yards from the museum's entrance on Jackson Avenue, Long Island City.
Martin Beck's 'Last Night' is published with love by White Columns, New York, and will be available for
sale at the event. 128 pages. ISBN 0-9648468-7-X
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New York Nights | Pitchfork 05.12.2017, 14*04
New York
Nights
Andy Beta scours New York—from a

museum to a summer camp upstate—
trying to locate the essence of classic
dancefloors via memory, imagination,
and bass.
by Andy
Beta
Contributor
ELECTRIC
FLING
https://pitchfork.com/features/electric-fling/9519-new-york-nights/ Side 1 av 18
OCTOBER 8
2014
Beats in Space Mix (Part 1) —

Douglas Sherman and The Loft
Crew
V i a SSou
ounnddC
Clou
loudd
A1 “Last Night”
In the same way that images from

pop culture can present you with
S ou n d C lou d
a degree of seeming familiarity

with New York City without ever
actually stepping in a Chinatown
puddle, waiting in vain for the 7
train, or inhaling the steam rising
out from a manhole cover in
Midtown, I knew about David
David
David
Mancuso
Mancuso’s
Mancuso The
The
TheLoft
Loft
Loft before I knew
anything about The Loft. At the
turn of the century, a tip on a
message board from New York DJ
Dan Selzer mentioned that the
best way to hear the music of a
neglected dance producer named
Arthur
Arthur
ArthurRussell
Russell
Russell would be via a
compilation called David
David
David
David
Mancuso The Loft
Mancuso
Mancuso
MancusoPresents
Presents
Presentsthe
the
theLoft
Loft.
Loft
Situated in the heart of Texas at
the time, I special ordered the set
from a CD store, waited three
weeks for it to arrive, and then
experienced a strain of leftfield
disco far removed from the
“Jammin’ Oldies” rotation. The
fact that The Loft parties were
ground zero for modern dance
Mancuso Presents the Loft
music was an epiphany, as was
learning that Mancuso’s intent
involved reenacting the joys of
early
early
earlyfliers
childhood—early fliers
fliersoften
often
often
depicted
depicted
depictedscenes
scenes
scenesfrom
from
from“The
“The
“TheLittle
Little
Little
Rascals”
Rascals”—to
Rascals” frame a sense of
innocent wonder amid the
dangerous climes of NYC in the
early 1970s.
TRENDING NOW
A Look Inside
Migos’ Culture
early fliers often
depicted scenes from “The Little
Rascals”
Within a year, I was in the city

myself, but it would be almost a
decade before I experienced
experienced
experiencedThe
The
The
Loft
Loft
Loftin
in
inthe
the
theflesh
flesh.
flesh Recently,
Mancuso’s Loft resurfaced in two
different ways. New York’s long-
running Beats
Beats
Beatsin
in
inSpace
Space
Space radio
show invited Douglas Sherman
(who now helms The Loft parties,
thrown semi-annually at the
Ukrainian
Ukrainian
UkrainianNational
National
NationalHome
Home)
Home and
The Loft Crew into the studio for a
experienced The
live mix. And out at MoMA PS1,
Loft in the flesh
the West Village-based White
White
White
Columns
Columns
ColumnsGallery
Gallery
Gallery hosted a party
for the release of visual artist
Beats in Space
Martin Beck’s new book, Last
Last
Last
Night
Night.
Night
It’s not your typical art book.

Ukrainian National Home
Across 118 pages typed up in

Helvetica font, Beck presents a
list of all the records that
Mancuso played the night of the
last Loft party, at 99 Prince Street,
on June 2, 1984. “I came upon the
so-called Prince Street Reels, a
tape recording of the party from
that night, so I started to collect
the songs and listen to them in
sequence,” Beck tells me a few
days later. “It struck me as a
timely document of a changing
environment in mid 1984, as
something very pleasurable in the
midst of massive change: the
growing AIDS crisis, gentrification
in SoHo, digitization of music,
etc.”
It took 13 hours to play through

the songs listed in Last Night,
which range from Strafe’s “Set It
Off” to Michael Jackson’s
“Thriller”, Dinosaur L’s “Go Bang
#5” (a classic Arthur Russell disco
production) to the entire side of a
Pat Metheny album. Each page of
Last Night is not unlike a Discogs
Discogs
Discogs
entry, listing the runtime,
production credits, record label,
and year of release. Sure enough,
a copy of the book was set up near
the turntables as Beck and others
played each selection in order
while turning the pages.
Beck’s re-assembling of
Discogs
Mancuso’s set is a much easier
task today than it might have
been even 10 years ago. The
experiment started out simply
enough, he says: “I wanted to hear
the songs in sequence on a good
sound system in a room with
other people and see what
happens.” His expectations were
also set low: “A recreation would

be impossible, given the
specificity of The Loft parties, so
the event was conceived as a
listening session with the option
to dance.”
Beats in Space Mix (Part 2) —

Douglas Sherman and The Loft
Crew
V i a SSou
ounnddC
Clou
loudd
Last Night’s 13-hour dance party

won’t soon be mistaken for a night
at the original Loft. The disco ball
S ou n d C lou d
was about a tenth of the normal
size, there was no balloon drop,
and the two speakers set up in
PS1’s Print Shop didn’t quite
achieve the same transportive
effect as a battery of painstakingly
tuned Klipschorn floorstanding
behemoths. The revelers weren’t
Loft regulars executing wild
dance moves, but rather mostly
art kids with their tote bags
wiggling, a few politely
applauding after each unmixed

selection. Even so, there were
moments when a wormhole could
open on these songs—during the
skipping electro-soca beat of Eddy
Eddy
Eddy
Grant’s
Grant’s
Grant’s“California
“California
“CaliforniaStyle”
Style”
Style” (page
81), or the extended cavernous
percussion break of Risco
Risco
Risco
Connection’s
Connection’s
Connection’s“Ain’t
“Ain’t
“Ain’tNo
No
NoStopping
Stopping
Stopping
Us
Us
UsNow”
Now”
Now” (page 99), for instance—
making the passing of time
irrelevant.
Eddy
Grant’s “California Style”
Risco
Connection’s “Ain’t No Stopping
Us Now”
castillo/corrales
A CHRONOLOGY OF THE APPROX. 13 HOURS
EVENTS LEADING UP TO
TODAY MARTIN BECK
Nov. 14, 2014 – Jan. 17, 2015
In 2015
DOOMSDAY CELEBRATION
INTELLECTUAL
INTIMIDATION
52, AVENUE PIERRE-
BROSSOLETTE,
MALAKOFF
GROUP, THE
WHAT A TIME YOU CHOSE
TO BE BORN IN

In 2014
current past TOWER OF MEANING
PAGAN PUBLISHING
elsewhere
events IT WAS A DARK AND
STORMY NIGHT
Section 7 Books OVER THE TOP
Paraguay Press I WASN’T THERE
The
Social Life of the Book
castillo/corrales In 2013
today HIT THE NORTH BY
Visit the online store, get NORTHWEST
in touch, or SUPPORT FOR THE TEACHERS OF
us. CHILDREN
castillo/corrales still has an YOU & US OR, THE ART OF
email address: GIVE AND TAKE
castillocorrales@gmail.com IT STILL HURTS YOU PlayPrev|Next1 of 6
EVERYTHING IS A MESS IN
“Once you walked into the Loft you were cut off from
WHICH IT’S IMPOSSIBLE
TO TELL WHAT’S WHAT the outside world… You got into a timeless, mindless
NOTES FOR THE FUTURE
state. There was …a clock in the back room but it
only had one hand. It was made out of wood and after
FACE DOWN IN THE SNOW
a short while it stopped working.”

— David Mancuso quoted in Tim Lawrence, Loves
In 2012
Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music
THE POTENTIAL THEORY
OF ADOPTION
Culture, 1970-79, Duke University Press, 2004
UN EXCELLENT WEEK- “Everytime i hear this a try to imagine a sweaty new

END yorkloft aprtment full of amazing dancers,with this
PHILOSOPHY COMES dropped at 4am first light, sun starting to stream
FROM HER HAVING through the smoke and sweat, wow this really takes
DIFFICULTY
me there.”
“AOL’S AIM IS SO PASSÉ”
— fradajail, 3 weeks ago, comment on YouTube on
SAID EGIJA
Los Conquistadores Chocolates by Johnny
IT’S A FAMILY TRADITION
Hammond
TO PLAY IN A FOOTBALL
TEAM On June 2nd, 1984, David Mancuso hosted the last
party at the 99 Prince Street location of the Loft in
Hammond
TO BE BORN IN
On June 2nd, 1984, David Mancuso hosted the last
In 2014 party at the 99 Prince Street location of the Loft in
current past TOWER OF MEANING
PAGAN PUBLISHING New York. The party lasted approximately thirteen
elsewhere
events IT WAS A DARK AND hours.
STORMY NIGHT Martin Beck’s “Approx. 13 Hours” takes this ‘last’
Section 7 Books OVER THE TOP party as its subject in order to propose an
Paraguay Press I WASN’T THERE investigation on the use and an experience of the
The ‘records’ of a different era. The research, that started
Social Life of the Book
In 2013 with the compiling the songs’ information and
castillo/corrales
production data of the 118 records played by
today HIT THE NORTH BY
NORTHWEST Mancuso in the form of the book: Last Night,
Visit the online store, get
in touch, or SUPPORT FOR THE TEACHERS OF
published earlier this year by White Columns in New
us. CHILDREN York, unfolds as a broader exploration of the temporal
castillo/corrales still has an YOU & US OR, THE ART OF and spatial paradoxes of clubbing. What defines a
email address: GIVE AND TAKE club night and how does the temporary community
castillocorrales@gmail.com IT STILL HURTS YOU that it forms come into being? How can the exuberant
EVERYTHING IS A MESS IN
affect generated therein be represented (or exhibited)
WHICH IT’S IMPOSSIBLE in ways other than nostalgic remembrance and blurry
TO TELL WHAT’S WHAT photographs of ecstatic dancers? Is affect something
NOTES FOR THE FUTURE that can be displayed in the realm of abstraction?
FACE DOWN IN THE SNOW How can a document speak to that abstraction?

“Approx. 13 Hours” follows earlier projects by Beck,
In 2012 that deal with specific moments in recent history
THE POTENTIAL THEORY when individual impulses and collective energies,
OF ADOPTION ideologies and (sub)cultures are reveal their often
UN EXCELLENT WEEK- paradoxical tensions. The exhibition conceived for
END castillo/corrales will further develop into a set of
PHILOSOPHY COMES publications and a series of events, starting with an
FROM HER HAVING artist talk the day after the opening, on Saturday, Nov.
DIFFICULTY 15, at 8 pm. Screenings, book releases, and, last but
“AOL’S AIM IS SO PASSÉ” not least, an integral listening session / dance party
SAID EGIJA with the records in the playlist will follow. Wait for
IT’S A FAMILY TRADITION more…
TO PLAY IN A FOOTBALL
TEAM Avec le soutien du/With the support of

Installation view: Martin Beck, Approx. 13 Hours, Nov. 14, 2014 – Jan. 17, 2015, castillo/corrales,
Paris. Image courtesy of the artist, 47 castillo/corrales, Paris.
MARTIN BECK
HISTORY
AND
LOVE,
PLEASURE
AND
TIME
castillo/corrales today no.8: November 2014 – January 2015

1 Presentation constructs presence and can initiate present-tense
engagements with historical events, documents, and experiences.
Presentation aids the construction of a mental picture, allowing us
to imagine what is referred to. As the tool of presentation,
display structures the conditions of imaging: in a paradoxical twist,
the way something is displayed is the foundation for how that
something can be imagined, and hence, imaged. When working as
a visual artist with historical subject matter, how, then, does the way
one presents remnants and traces construct the history they
supposedly are signs for?
2 In my art practice, one of the histories I have engaged by way of

tracing its documentary trail is that of the rural commune movement
in the U.S. counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s. Commune
history is a history of togetherness, a history of utopian community
building that has been extensively documented from the get-go – in
mainstream photo magazines as well as in sociology seminars. At
the time it must have seemed there were few things photographically
more alluring than young people in the pasture, and few social
constellations seemed to be more easily modeled as a microsociety
in time.
Early on in my engagement with those histories, I decided
to bypass the abundant trail of photographs as well as first-person
accounts that can be gathered from interviews and conversations.
Rather than working with what was already captured and
captioned, I was curious about a different image of community:
to present togetherness not as bodies in proximity or as a narrative
but to construct images of an emerging social body by focusing on
the ephemeral aspects of the movement’s own publishing trail;
to distill from newsletters and pamphlets, from instructions and
memoirs, from analysis and poetry, an abstract vocabulary in the
form of textures, diagrams, relations, rules, and rhetoric.
The questions guiding the process were: How to trace and project
the connective tissue that constitutes togetherness? Does community
have a form? Are there rules that generate that form? I was
interested in an abstract language capable of reflecting the social.
A social abstraction. An image of an absence.1
3 This interest in communal forms started to extend into the seemingly

disconnected subculture that is rooted in the dance club. However
far apart the two cultures may be, my interest in the representability
of an ephemeral collective space and its associated events seemed
enough of a connection to stretch these questions from the context
of the rural commune into the world of urban dance parties.
1
Although I have long been a dance-music aficionado and, The Loft gatherings became a weekly feature, although they
likewise, have been reading about the history of dance culture, remained a clandestine affair because Mancuso’s loft was zoned for
this was a private passion discrete from my art practice. I thought industrial use rather than for public assembly and dancing.
of it as a collecting and listening endeavor that produces nerds Mancuso constructed an environment that was defined
rather than exhibitions. But my inquiry about the relationships by a unique combination of a generous space with a noncommercial
between the social and abstraction, between documents and attitude, a high-quality sound system, exquisite music selections,
imaging, started to close the gap between these public and private a carefully built constituency, dancing and, of course, a disco ball.
forms of historical investigation. They both are, after all, about At the party fruit juices and snacks were provided and people were
documentary remains. encouraged to bring stimulants of their own choice. There was no
What defines a night of dancing and how can the temporary membership, invitations were personal and, once invited, a donation
community that forms during such a night be grasped? What at the door provided entrance to Mancuso’s home as the location
underpinnings guide the event? What does space mean in a brightly of the party. The Loft would soon become the reference point for a
glistening environment of darkness? What is left after a night of new kind of communal space out of which the New York downtown
collective musical pleasure? Can the exuberant affect that was dance club emerged. The Loft on 647 Broadway lasted until
generated be represented (or exhibited) in ways other than mid-1974, when continuous police pressure due to missing permits
nostalgic remembrance and blurry photographs of ecstatic dancers? resulted in Mancuso losing his lease.
Does affect have a structure? And, is affect something that can be After a seventeen-month hiatus, Mancuso reopened the Loft
displayed in the form of an abstract vocabulary? Can such an in his new home on the ground floor and basement of 99
abstraction derive from and speak to the practice, rituals, relations, Prince Street at the intersection of Mercer Street. This time he got
and constituencies of such events? What is a document in that a certificate of occupancy and a public-assembly permit, but
context, and how can a document generate such abstractions? continued to run the Loft as an invitation-only party with
When, years ago, I started reading about the history of New no commercial agenda. Not charging admission or selling alcohol
York’s downtown clubs, I quickly became fascinated with one allowed Mancuso to avoid dealing with the licensing challenges that
particular narrative – the story of the Loft and its creator, host, and regular dance clubs face.
musical agent, David Mancuso. By 1976 disco fever was starting to take over the city; novel
and fully developed clubs would soon define an exploding cultural
4 What came to be known as the Loft started on Valentine’s Day 1970 movement driven by extravagant interiors, celebrity appearances,
as a private party hosted by Mancuso in his second floor loft and virtuoso DJs mixing a soundscape from the abundance of
at 647 Broadway, just north of Bleecker Street.2 Mancuso had been disco releases that were flooding a newly emerging market. At the
a regular at the East Village’s Electric Circus and Fillmore East, Loft, however, Mancuso stayed focused on his basic ingredients of
where, among other things, he attended lectures by Timothy Leary spatial simplicity and perfect sound in order to offer a unique
and witnessed the Joshua Light Show. By 1970 he had gathered experience for a devoted community of dancers. Rituals developed
a wealth of countercultural experiences and wanted to create a that structured the arc of the party. One of the most treasured is
communal space for listening to records and dancing. The inaugural the balloon drop: at the musical peak of the party, the hundreds
event at his loft was announced on handmade flyers featuring the of balloons held in a net at the ceiling are released onto the dance
words LOVE SAVES THE DAY and a visual reference to Salvador floor, creating ecstatic exuberance among the dancers as the
Dalí’s painting The Persistence of Memory. Mancuso started to play balloons are pushed around and extend the rhythmic movement
records as a way of communicating with his guests, sensing of the dancing bodies into the larger space. Although Mancuso has
and responding to the atmosphere in the space. His record playing always been the parties’ host, it is their communal atmosphere
sent the guests on a sonic journey in which, as the music historian that built the legend of the Loft. The Loft is a communal event that,
Tim Lawrence put it, time went into “symbolic reverse” and the however temporary or ephemeral, creates a sense of belonging. Being
dancers became a collective moving in “experimental regression.”3 “a Lofter” contributes to the regulars’ identity. The Loft
Dancing at the Loft was, as a regular put it, “not a means to sex but community also came to be known for its diversity of ethnicity,
drove the space.”4 gender, sexual orientation, age, style, and dance capability. As Loft
2 3
regular and DJ David Morales remembers: “The whole party portions I found were drawn from the night of that recording,
atmosphere was incredible. It wasn’t a club. It was a family thing. June 2, 1984. That date turned out to be one of the very last nights
You were going into somebody’s living room. … There were no of the Loft at its home on Prince Street.
outcasts. The crowd was very mixed. You could find somebody who Putting together the sequenced fragments that I had collected
was fifty years old partying next to an eighteen-year-old like me.”5 so far amounted to a playlist of about eight hours in length. Listening
Although Mancuso kept refining his sound system to achieve to it in one sitting became a wonderful commitment, generating
ultimate sound purity, he stayed away from the emerging trend of insights into the sonic qualities of the music played at the Loft as
mixing records. His focus was on the sonic space the records well as of the sense of poetry behind the sequencing of titles that
themselves created as well as on the narrative that playing the Mancuso was playing. When connecting the dots – the foundational
records in a particular sequence generated. Mancuso played each quality of the Loft for the history of the dance club, the sequential
record from beginning to the end, Morales said, “even if it was nature of how music was played there, it being one of the last
fifteen minutes long. No mixing, no disturbance. The record nights of its Prince Street iteration – I shifted my relation to the list
finished, you’d applaud, on to the next tune. It wasn’t about trying from something done for pleasure to something within the context
to impress with mixing. It was about music.”6 of my art practice. Nineteen eighty-four was also the year when
music went from analog to digital, when SoHo’s real estate fortunes
5 Few photographs of the Loft circulate; photography has always been turned, and when the dramatic impact of AIDS on New York’s
discouraged in order not to interfere with the journey that the downtown culture escalated, never mind George Orwell. The
dancers, individually and collectively, were undertaking. The Loft’s questions about nonmimetic imaging and documents that I was
mythology was never dependent on images of dancers, light working on in relation to commune history were just as pertinent in
shows, and exuberance but on something more immaterial – this was relation to the dance party. The list of songs is an organizational
not a celebrity club, not Studio 54 with gossip-column reporters document about something defined by affect, an abstraction that
lingering outside the door. To return to the question at hand: How points to a transitional moment within a highly charged
can one represent (or exhibit) a space that is intangible, a history historical context.
built on the sensorial, an atmosphere defined by affect? What are Further sleuthing allowed me to complete the June 2, 1984
the documents that remain? playlist, except for two entries that remain unidentified. I learned
Reading about the Loft led me, time and again, to the music that, some years back, the Prince Street Reels had been streamed
played there, to its significance, to songs that came to be labeled on a British house-music website. Many of the listeners took to
as Loft Classics. I started hunting for and listening to those songs, identifying the songs they were hearing and commented online as
using “best of” lists in disco literature, music compilations that the reels were broadcast.7 The complete sequence includes 118 songs;
people had put together, published, or posted online. No matter what the overall playing time amounts to approximately thirteen hours.
time period they are from, Loft Classics all have a certain rhythmic Concurrently with completing the playlist from the user
touch, something that is “special” about their percussive atmosphere. comments of the stream, making educated guesses about versions
They are also “positive” songs, often speaking of the pleasures played of particular songs, I had started to collect the vinyl records,
of love, relationships, and music itself. Collecting these songs felt compiling release and production data from their labels and
like moonlighting as a pleasure detective, and listening to the covers, supplementing from online sources where the information
songs in sequence, bringing them together in playlists that I found given on the record itself was incomplete.8 The contrast between
in books and online, and putting together my own playlists, became the bureaucratic rigor that was necessary for collating the data and
a late-night treat. Following that trail I learned about the the passion expressed not only in the music but also in the records’
so-called Prince Street Reels, a recording of a complete party at 99 verbal rhetoric produced a remarkable tension. Title; musician/
Prince Street, made on half-inch tape reels by François Kevorkian. band; running time; writing, production, engineering, mixing,
I realized that information on and about those reels would allow me mastering, and publishing credits; format; playback speed; label;
to sonically piece together not only songs played at the Loft, year of release – “Now That We Found Love”; Pleasure; Lucky
but a full sequence of songs played on a specific night. Cross- Three Music; Fantasy Studios; Blue Sky Records. … The tension
connecting the fragments made clear that some of the sequenced between conceptual restraint and affective exuberance became the
4 5
driving visual force of Last Night, a book I made about the playlist The presentation of the list is the heart of my exploration that
and the songs’ production data.9 Last Night documents the sonic became Last Night. It is a diagram that points to an image between
data trail of an ecstatic journey through a particular night at a images. Last Night is a poetic construction, as much a wish as it
particular moment in time, starting late in the evening on June 2, is evidence of something that actually happened: a construction that
1984, and continuing until noon the next day. The journey marks speaks of history and love, of pleasure and time.
an ephemeral space in time; a space of collectivity and emotion
guided by a sequence of songs. The journey begins slowly, 1 For an elaboration on these questions, see my “This Time We’ll Keep It a Secret” (2013) in
Triple Canopy 18, accessed December 29, 2014, http://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/this_time_we_
establishes an atmosphere, becomes a rhythmic language; it builds ll_keep_it_a_secret.
momentum – sonically, rhetorically, spatially, and affectively; it 2 The following description of the Loft draws from Bernhard Lopez, “David Mancuso” (2003), accessed
December 29, 2014, http://www.discomusic.com/people-more/49_0_11_0_C/; Tim Lawrence, Love Saves
builds exuberance, reaches peaks; at some points it slows down, the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
rests, or drifts; but then momentum is regained, the traveler taken 2004); Lawrence, “David Mancuso and the Loft” (2007) accessed December 29, 2014, http://www.
timlawrence.info/articles2/2014/1/4/love-saves-the-day-david-mancuso-and-the-loft-placed-2007;
into different realms as further peaks are reached. After about Vince Aletti, The Disco Files 1973–78: New York’s Underground, Week by Week (London: DJhistory.com,
eleven hours, one senses a change of tone that is ushered in by an 2009); Steve Hoffmann, “A David Mancuso Interview” (2009), accessed December 29, 2014,
http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/a-david-mancuso-interview.177215/; “Conversations in Text:
almost spiritual dispersion of energy followed by a shift in An Interview With Douglas Sherman, NYC,” accessed December 29, 2014, http://musicfordancersla.me/
concentration and a turn away from playing songs to playing whole conversations-in-text-an-interview-with-douglas-sherman-nyc/; Greg Wilson, “David Mancuso and the
Art of Deejaying Without Deejaying” (2013), accessed December 29, 2014, http://www.gregwilson.co.
sides of albums. The party is fading out and slowly entering the uk/2013/05/david-mancuso-and-the-art-of-deejaying-without-deejaying/.
cleanup state – of the mind and of the space. Closure is imminent. 3 Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 24, 25.
4 Loft regular Mark Riley quoted in ibid., 25.
Sometime around eleven in the morning the journey concludes with 5 David Morales quoted in ibid., 342.
two short songs: “America Is Waiting” and “Mea Culpa.” 6 Ibid.
7 http://www.deepfrequency.com streamed the Prince Street Reels in thirteen biweekly installments
between October 1, 2008, and February 18, 2009. Comments were posted on http://www.djhistory.com.
6 What kind of chronicle is this list, starting with “Love Has Come 8 The collection and compilation process was assisted by Amy Croft.
9 Martin Beck, Last Night (New York: White Columns, 2013) and Last Night: Errata (Paris:
Around” and concluding with “America Is Waiting” and the castillo/corrales, 2014).
cheeky “Mea Culpa”? What does this ghostly scaffold around
an architecture of the night present? What does it document? What
does it open onto or represent? A rhythmic journey, the rhetoric
of love, an exuberant space, pleasure at a crossroads, a seemingly
utopian community, a moment in time. This document has
the power to seduce one into feeling closeness with the history it
represents while continuously insinuating the distances to the
actual event. It simultaneously closes and opens the gap between
personal experience and collective memory. As it provides
access to a history it produces the absent presence of historicity.
There is something lost in making such a document, but also
something gained.
Last Night is an index for longing and mourning, and the
pleasures beyond. Last night – and last night. Making memory
persistent, it is a document that bends not only time – as the clocks
in Dalí’s painting do – but maybe also its own capability for
representation. The list that constitutes Last Night presents the
authority of the archive while pointing to the limits of archiving; it
signals the pleasure in and beyond the archive. Its indexical
accuracy in the realm of emotion, its emotive quality in the realm
of data, builds a paradoxical bridge between structure and desire,
between abstraction and affect, between form and the social.
6 7
With the support of
8
Edited and designed by castillo/corrales
on the occasion of Martin Beck’s exhibition “APPROX. 13 HOURS”
Printed by Apag, Paris
ISSN: 2272-2130
Julie Ault
Afterlife: a constellation
A painting by Martin Wong

A publication by Martin Beck
A text by Julie Ault
A photograph by David Wojnarowicz
A sculpture by Robert Kinmont
A stereoscopic photograph by Alfred A. Hart
An apparition by Liberace
An interview with Marvin Taylor
Documents and artifacts from the Downtown Collection at New York University
Two heliogravures by Danh Vo
Two paintings and a film by James Benning
Afterlife is a constellation of objects and events that converse about disappearance and recollection. With va-
rious modalities, these artworks, artifacts, and texts activate histories, marking the intricate relationship between
archive and historical representation. In unison Afterlife articulates a network of reference points, a cluster of
concerns, a collection of contexts, and the amalgamated complexion of my practice – artistic, curatorial, editorial,
and archival.
Martin Beck, Last Night, 2014, publication. In ”Afterlife: a constellation” by Julie Ault, Whitney
Biennial 2014. Installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy the artist.
Photograph by Martin Beck
Photograph by Martin Beck
Photograph by Martin Beck.
Martin Beck, Sleeping Beauty, 2015
Color coupler print
48 x 72 inches
Martin Beck, Sleeping Beauty, 2015
Color coupler prints
48 x 72 inches
Julie Ault
afterlife
12 November 2015 – 16 January 2016

Opening reception 12 November, 6-8 pm
Alfred A. Hart’s stereoscopic photograph of tree stumps cut by the Donner Party in the winter of
1846 marking the height of the snowfall that stranded the emigrants in the Sierra Nevada on their
migration west. Martin Wong’s compassionately rendered 1985 painting of a closed Avenue B
storefront depicts a casualty of irrevocable gentrification. Julie Ault’s essay “Dishes, Diaries, and
Cemeteries” speaks about her great aunt’s planned redistribution of household belongings
after her passing. Matt Wolf’s slide show gives insight into his exploration of the assembly of
personal treasures in David Wojnarowicz’s “Magic Box” . . .
afterlife, Julie Ault’s first exhibition at Galerie Buchholz, expands from her contribution to the 2014
Whitney Biennial and, in Ault’s words, “unites artworks, artifacts, texts, and publications as
equivalent participants in a conversation about disappearance and recollection.” Without declaring
themselves as belonging to the realm of artworks or non-artworks, fiction or fact, the elements
composing afterlife suggest their potential as records of the past, items that relay meaning
between the living and the dead, and the present and the absent.
Two paintings and three hand-lettered drawings by Martin Wong

A slide show by Matt Wolf
Three photographs by David Wojnarowicz
Three photogravures by Danh Vo
An interview with Marvin Taylor
An apparition concerning Liberace
A sculpture by Robert Kinmont
A stereoscopic photograph by Alfred A. Hart
Two paintings and a multiform work by James Benning
A photograph and a publication (and errata) by Martin Beck
A composite essay by Julie Ault
Artifacts and documents from The Downtown Collection
An anonymous ledger drawing
A crate of personal effects
Announcement Images Text

Julie Ault, afterlife, 13 November 2015 – 16 January 2016, installation view Galerie Buchholz,
New York. With mirrored passageways inspired by Liberace (1919 –1987) as seen in one of his
Las Vegas homes. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, New York
Martin Beck ”sleeping beauty”, 2015. Digital color coupler print. 122 x 183 cm. Installation view
from Julie Ault, afterlife, 13 November 2015 – 16 January 2016, Galerie Buchholz, New York.
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, New York
Martin Beck
Last Night, 2016
HD video with sound, 16:9 aspect ratio
TRT: 13 hours 9 minutes
Last Night is based on the 118 songs played by David Mancuso on June 2nd, 1984
at the last party of the 99 Prince Street location of the seminal New York dance
party, the Loft. The film shows each record being played from beginning to end in
the sequence in Mancuso played them. The records play on a vintage Thorens
turntable in a domestic atmosphere. Using ten different camera angles, the closely
framed views onto the records shift from one record to the next, thereby creating
a continuously varied sequence of perspectives that is guided by the musical arc of
the historic party. The complete sequence of songs amounts to approximately
thirteen hours, offering an intimate sonic journey mirroring a particular night at a
particular moment in time.
Beginning on Valentine’s Day 1970, David Mancuso started to regularly host dance
parties at his home on 647 Broadway and, from the mid ’70s on, at 99 Prince Street
in New York City. What came to be known as the Loft parties were unique in their
combination of communal atmosphere and high quality sound, centered around
music and dancing. The Loft became a legendary blueprint after which many
celebrated disco-era New York clubs tried to model themselves. The Loft parties,
however, retained their intimacy through being invitation-only with no commercial
agenda. Mancuso’s focus was on the sonic voyage the records and their
sequencing created. Mancuso did not mix or blend records. He played each song
from beginning to the end, no matter its length; when one record finished, the
next record went on.
Last Night is a poetic construction—revisiting the records that, in mid 1984,

generated the exuberance of a communal event. The film represents as much a
private experience as it is a memory of something that actually happened: a
construction that speaks of history and love, of pleasure and time.
The film is to be shown as a projection in a black-box-type screening room,

equipped with high-quality sound system and outfitted with comfortable couches
for seating. The film is shown as continuous loop, played back from a computer.
During the run of the show, there should be at least one day with expanded
opening hours so the the film can be viewed in its entirety.
Last Night film set.
118 songs
111 records
111 shots
10 different frames
1.618033988749894848204586834365638117
7203091798057628621354486227052604628
1890244970720720418939113748475408807
Martin Beck
Last Night, 2016
Donald’s Golden Section
frame 1 frame 2 frame 3 frame 4
frame 5 frame 6 frame 7 frame 8
frame 1 —> 10 shots 118 songs in 111 shots

frame 2 —> 11 shots
frame 9 frame 0
Martin Beck
Last Night, 2016
1.61803398874989484820458683436563811772030917980576286213544862270526046281890244970720720418939113748475408807 frame overview
shot sequence DIGIT 1
shot # song # track name artist
1 1 Love Has Come Around Donald Byrd

2 75 Don’t Look Any Further Dennis Edwards
3 36 Problemes d’amour Alexander Robotnick
4 98 Doctor Love First Choice
5 3 We Will Win / Venceremos Working Week
6 56 Weekend Phreek
8 35 Irresistible Bitch Prince
8 97 Florida (move your feet) Paul Sharada
9 44 Boneman Connection Nicodemus
10 92 Plane Love Jeffrey Osborne
shot on Friday, July 24, 2015

1 51 D Train Dub D Train

2 2 Simple Johnny Mathis
3 69 Prepare To Energise Torch Song
4 30 Disco Circus Martin Circus
5 62 Burning Up (dub) Imagination
6 25 Diamond Real Michael Wycoff
7 54 By The Way You Dance Bunny Sigler
8 32 Don’t Turn Your Back On Me The Frontline Orchestra
9 72 Koke (Part I & II) Tribe
shot on Saturday, July 25, 2015

shot # song # song name artist
1 24 Starchild Level 42
2 110 Youth Black Uhuru
2 111 Big Spliff Black Uhuru
2 112 Boof’n’baff’n’bliff Black Uhuru
3 102 Unidentified Unidentified
4 113 Space Intro Steve Miller Band
4 114 Fly Like an Eagle Steve Miller Band
4 115 Wild Mountain Honey Steve Miller Band
5 34 Thriller Michael Jackson
6 17 Land Of Hunger (Dub) The Earons
7 93 Rapper Dapper Snapper Edwin Birdsong
8 9 Can’t Live Without Your Love Tamiko Jones
9 74 JDBZX Medley F.K.
10 10 Why Can’t We Live Together Mike Anthony
11 19 Set It Off (Walter Gibbons Mix) Strafe
12 76 Baby I’m Scared Of You Womack & Womack
13 61 Florida (move your feet) Paul Sharada
14 53 Baby I Love You Easy Going
Sunday, July 26, 2015

shot sequence DIGIT 8_continued
15 4 What Do We Do (Club Mix) Atmosfear

16 14 Give Me Tonight (Dub Version) Shannon
17 47 Walking On Sunshine Eddy Grant
18 26 Don’t Look Any Further Dennis Edwards Feat.
Siedah Garrett
19 110 Youth Black Uhuru
19 111 Big Spliff Black Uhuru
19 112 Boof ’n’ baff ’n’ biff Black Uhuru
20 24 Starchild Level 42
Sunday, July 26, 2015

1 67 Your Life Konk

2 49 Take a Chance Pleasure
3 23 Now That We Found Love Thirld World
4 31 Love Money Funk Masters
5 58 Din Daa Daa George Kranz
6 105 As falls Wichita, so falls Wichita Falls Pat Metheny & Lyle Mays
7 67 Your Life Konk
12 67 Your Life Konk
13 105 As falls Wichita, so falls Wichita Falls Pat Metheny & Lyle Mays
Monday, July 27, 2015

1 101 Matt’s Mood II Matt Bianco

2 18 Evolution Giorgio Moroder
3 28 Standing In The Rain Don Ray
4 80 Walking In Rhythm The Blackbyrds
5 81 California Style Eddy Grant
6 16 They Only Come Out At Night Peter Brown
7 106 It’s for you Pat Metheny & Lyle Mays
7 107 Estupenda Graça (Amazing Grace) Pat Metheny & Lyle Mays
8 60 Al-Naafiysh (The Soul) Hashim
9 103 Anambra Ozo
10 22 Music One Way Feat. Al Hudson
11 59 Set It Off (Walter Gibbons Mix) Strafe
12 71 Evolution Giorgio Moroder
13 12 Come On Down Boogie People David Williams
14 91 Above and Beyond Edgar Winter
Tuesday, July 28, 2015

1 117 America Is Waiting Brian Eno and David Byrne

1 118 Mea Culpa Brian Eno and David Byrne
2 83 I’m Going To Go (Dub) Jago
3 85 Can’t Live Without Your Love Tamiko Jones
4 37 I Want It To Be Real (instrumental) John Rocca
5 38 Somebody Else’s Guy Jocelyn Brown
6 100 Rude Movements Sun Palace
7 50 Music Makes You Feel Like Dancing Brass Construction
8 88 The Stranger Shining Star
9 11 Ain’t No Stopping Us Now Risco Connection
10 45 Chapter 3 Joe Gibbs & The Professionals
11 65 Music D-Train
12 104 Standing In The Rain Don Ray
Wednesday, July 29, 2015

1 39 You Can’t Hide (Your Love From Me) David Joseph

2 63 Dancing Digits (LP version) David Astri
3 64 Melting Pot Booker T & The MGs
5 20 Your Life Konk
6 89 Cavern Liquid Liquid
7 55 #5 Go Bang! Dinosaur L
8 52 Together Forever Exodus
9 73 The Wildstyle Time Zone
10 86 A-freak-A Lemon
11 68 Squib Cakes Tower Of Power
Wedneday, August 5, 2015

1 42 Going Back To My Roots Lamont Dozier

2 108 Send One Your Love (Music) Stevie Wonder
2 109 Race Babbling Stevie Wonder
3 21 What Happened To The Music Earl Young’s Trammps
4 5 The Music Got Me Visual
5 78 Love Is The Message MFSB
6 116 Unidentified Unidentified
7 90 Magnificent Dance The Clash
8 66 Give Me Tonight Shannon
9 40 Say a Prayer For Two Crown Heights Affair
10 84 Burning Up (Dub) Imagination
11 70 Get Another Love Chantal Curtis
12 48 House Party Fred Wesley
13 87 The Message King Sunny Ade And
His African Beats
Friday, August 7, 2015

1 8 Step Out Of My Dream The Strangers

2 82 Don’t Go Lose It Baby Hugh Masekela
3 43 Roots Radical Jimmy Cliff
4 96 The Message King Sunny Ade and
His African Beats
5 13 Prepare To Energize Torch Song
7 46 Lust Rinder & Lewis
8 15 I’m Going To Go Jago
9 94 Los Conquistadores Chocolatès Johnny Hammond
Saturday, August 8, 2015

1 27 Heavy Vibes Montana Sextet

2 7 Plane Love Jeffrey Osborne
3 95 Don’t Go Away Affinity
4 41 Get Ready For The Future The Winners
5 29 The Mexican Babe Ruth
6 57 Everybody Salsa Modern Romance
7 99 Ain’t No Stopping Us Now Risco Connection
8 6 Funn (Instrumental) The Gunchback Boogie Band
9 33 Cavern Liquid Liquid
Sunday, August 9, 2015

1 6 1 8 0 3 3 9 8 8 7 4 9 8 9 4 8 4 8 2
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
0 4 5 8 6 8 3 4 3 6 5 6 3 8 1 1 7 7 2 0
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 31 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
3 0 9 1 7 9 8 0 5 7 6 2 8 6 2 1 3 5 4 4
41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60
8 6 2 2 7 0 5 2 6 0 4 6 2 8 1 9 0 2 4 4
61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80
9 7 0 7 2 0 7 2 0 4 1 8 9 3 9 1 1 3 7 4
81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100
8 4 7 5 4 0 8 8 0 7
record on run out
cleaning needle off
101 102 103 105 106–7 108–9 110–12 113-15 116 117–18
needle on record off
run in
“I spent a lot of time in the country,
listening to birds, lying next to a spring
and listening to water go across the rocks.
And suddenly one day I realized,
what perfect music.
Like with the sunrise and sunset,
how things would build up into midday.
There were times when it would be intense
and times it would be very soft and at sunset,
it would get quiet
and then the crickets would come in.
I took this sense of rhythm, this sense of feeling…”
— David Mancuso
Video stills from Last Night, 2016
Frame 1

Frame 2
Frame 3

Frame 4
Frame 5

Frame 6
Frame 7

Frame 8
Frame 9

Frame 0
LAST NIGHT
Martin Beck
2016
CAMERA
James Benning
EDIT
Martin Beck
James Benning
Garret Linn
dedicated to
David Mancuso and the Loft community
Martin Beck: Last%Night
March 22–25, 2017
Last%Night!is based on the 118 songs played by New York musical host David Mancuso on June 2,
1984, at one of the last parties of the 99 Prince Street location of his seminal New York dance party,
the Loft. The film shows each record played that night in sequence, from beginning to end, on a
vintage turntable in a domestic atmosphere. The complete progression of songs lasts approximately
thirteen hours, offering an intimate sonic journey that mirrors a particular night at a particular moment
in time.
Beginning on Valentine’s Day, 1970, Mancuso regularly hosted dance parties at his home on 647
Broadway and, after the mid ’70s, at 99 Prince Street. (The first was famously titled “Love Saves the
Day.”) What came to be known as the “Loft parties” were unique in their combination of communal
atmosphere and high-quality sound, centered around music and dancing. The Loft became a
legendary blueprint after which many celebrated disco-era New York clubs tried to model themselves.
The Loft parties, however, retained their intimacy through being invitation-only with no commercial
agenda. Curated by Tim Griffin.
March 22, 12–6pm (soft opening)

March 23, 11am–6pm
March 24, 11am–1am
March 25, 11am–1am
Closing night reception Saturday, March 25, 9–11pm
Martin Beck is a New York-based artist whose works often draw from the fields of architecture, design,
and popular culture. In 2017 Beck’s work will be presented in solo exhibitions at the Museum
Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna, at The Kitchen in New York, and at Galerie für
Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig. Previous exhibitions include Program at the Carpenter Center for the
Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge (2014–16), The thirty-six sets do not constitute a
sequence. at 47 Canal, New York (2015); contributions to the 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014–15) and
the 29th São Paulo Bienal (with Julie Ault) (2010); and Panel 2—“Nothing better than a touch of
ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes…” at Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia
University (2009). Beck’s books include About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (2007), The
Aspen Complex (2012), the particular way in which a thing exists (2013), Summer Winter East West
(2015), and An Organized Systems of Instructions (2017).
*over*%
Checklist of Exhibited Works
Last%Night,%2013;%Last%Night:%Errata, vols. 1–3, 2014–17

Publications
Published by White Columns, New York; castillo/corrales, Paris; Galerie Buchholz, New York;
The Kitchen, New York
128 pages; 12 pages; 4 pages; 12 pages
History%and%Love,%Pleasure%and%Time, 2015/17
Exhibition booklet
Last%Night, 2013
Two serigraphs
Last%Night, 2016
Video installation
HD video, 13 hours 29 minutes, color, sound
Video directed by Martin Beck
Camera: James Benning
Edit: Martin Beck, James Benning, Garret Linn
All works are courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal.
Martin Beck: Last%Night!is made possible with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual
Arts and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with
the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo
and the New York State Legislature.
Installation view: Martin Beck, Last Night, 2017, The Kitchen, New York.
Image courtesy of the artist, 47 Canal, New York and The Kitchen, New York.
Photo: Joerg Lohse
Installation view: Martin Beck, Last Night, 2017, The Kitchen, New York.
Image courtesy of the artist, 47 Canal, New York and The Kitchen, New York.
Photo: Joerg Lohse
Lost In Music: Reclaiming Past Disco Days At Martin Beckʼs ‘Last Nightʼ | Filthy Dreams 15.01.2018, 11)49
Filthy Dreams
For Minorities Who Don't Even Fit Into Our Own

Minorities
ART
Lost In Music: Reclaiming Past Disco Days At

Martin Beck’s ‘Last Night’
Posted on March 26, 2017 by EMILY COLUCCI Leave a comment
(https://filthydreams.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/giphy-1.gif)
Martin Beck’s Last Night at The Kitchen (GIF by author)
We’re lost in music

Caught in a trap
No turnin’ back
We’re lost in music
–Sister Sledge “Lost In Music” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43qB9FpfCR8)
https://filthydreams.org/2017/03/26/lost-in-music-reclaiming-past-disco-days-at-martin-becks-last-night/ Side 1 av 4
The ladies of Sister Sledge knew what they were talking about when they said there was no
turning back in their song “Lost In Music.” While the singers meant giving themselves over to the
rhythm of disco at the height of its dazzling era, there is, indeed, no turning back now either.
In other words, how can we, in 2017, turn back, revisit or reclaim the ecstatic energy of the disco
days of the 1970s and 1980s? Between then and now, an entire generation of dancers was
decimated by the HIV/AIDS pandemic while our cities wiped out communal nightlife spaces,
exchanging them for online communities and app cruising. How can we negotiate these losses,
honor what has been lost and what is left?
Artist Martin Beck (http://47canal.us/main.php?1=mb&2=pics) tangled with these questions of

loss and the drive for disco preservation in his deceptively simple film Last Night, the centerpiece
of his four-day long exhibition (http://thekitchen.org/event/martin-beck-last-night)of the same
title at The Kitchen. (http://thekitchen.org/) Last Night memorializes one of the last dances at
influential invite-only party The Loft
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loft_(New_York_City)) at its 99 Prince Street location in
1984. But, rather than trying (and failing) to recapture the amyl nitrate-scented high of that night,
Beck strips away the sweat-covered bodies, the dancing and the mirror ball and balloon-strewn
scenery for what is left–the music as its sonic memory.
Beck films the entire staggering 118-song playlist on a series of vintage record players in a
mundane, domestic space. Watching a record spin around and around on a monumental screen is
admittedly about as visually interesting as watching paint dry. I found myself sitting for song after
song, maddening spin after spin, of this parade of record players blasting disco classics.
The entire film runs an exhausting 13-hours, an extreme level of disco reverie that could only be
helped by copious and precisely dosed drug taking. However, in The Kitchen, all viewers did
(including me) was sit like lumps on one of three sofas. Hey! Anyone got any poppers?!
Despite its repetitive visuals, the music still maintains its transcendent high. The thing I’ve always
loved about disco, particularly the music played by The Loft founder David Mancuso, is its
sincerity. It’s even sincere about its cheesiness, as well as its unwavering positivity. Another room
in The Kitchen features a serigraph print that lists song titles. From “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now”
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuAZTWGfQTs) to “Come On Down, Boogie People,”
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2YJZFwGuz8)and “Prepare To Energize,
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo563FKZMeg)” the print reads like a manic poem to
disco excess from days gone by.
(https://filthydreams.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/sb_0157_v2b_file_sm-e1490455845542.jpeg)
Film still from Martin Beck, Last Night, 2016 (Courtesy the artist and The Kitchen)
Remembering The Loft
In many ways, the film, as well as the exhibition, works as a tribute to David Mancuso
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mancuso), who passed away with seemingly everyone
else last year. And it’s Mancuso’s inclusive legacy that makes Last Night feel like such a powerful
and provocative disco memorial.
Sparked in 1970 by his Valentine’s Day Love Saves The Day party, Mancuso, a guru-like figure,
began to throw parties at a loft in 647 Broadway, which would move several times in its existence.
The disco was influenced by rent parties in Harlem that, as Tim Lawrence reflects in his book Life
and Death on the New York Dance Floor (https://filthydreams.wordpress.com/2016/12/15/dim-all-the-lights-
tim-lawrences-life-and-death-on-the-new-york-dance-floor-1980-1983/), 1980-1983, “suggested
community-based model of unlicensed, private partying that could be sustained by donations”
(60).
Community-based is key to understanding the collective joy harnessed by Mancuso and The Loft.
Tim Lawrence explains, “The civil rights, gay liberation, feminist and antiwar movements fed into
the rainbow coalition identification of his come-as-you-are crowd” (61). And true to Lawrence’s
historical observation, club attendees at the Loft supported this fact. Louis “Loose” Kee Jr.
described a scene “with blacks, whites, old, young, straight and gay in the same room” (62).
The Loft was unusual because of this mixed crowd, a direct contrast to the more exclusionary
discos that came later. As his friend Colleen Murphy wrote in “David Mancuso Taught Us That
Being Selfless Is The Ultimate Act of Rebellion” (https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/david-
mancuso-the-loft-rip-colleen-cosmo-murphy)for Thump, “His cause was informed by the ideals of
the 60s counterculture, and was concerned with respect, equality, love and freedom. This may
sound like reverent, outdated “hippie-speak” to a young contemporary audience, but I would
argue that this set of values is not only defiant, but absolutely imperative in the face of the
growing right-wingism of the Western world.”
And it was then too. It’s no surprise that this air of acceptance became a communal space for
dancers, particularly queers and people of color who felt marginalized from dominant society and
certain nightclubs. As Archie Burnett said in Life And Death On The New York Dance Floor, “The Loft
was a sanctuary” (62).
Murphy echoes, “David’s aim was to build a community of like-minded souls and to provide an
inclusive safe haven where the only requirement was an open mind. In this era of social division,
this is a very daring concept indeed.” Yes, Colleen, yes it is.
Where Do Old Sanctuaries Go?
What is left of these sanctuaries (though there are even still Loft parties today) other than the likely
very blurry memories of the club goers? Well, as Beck shows, it’s the music, which still contains
that utopian energy that can, in its listening, gesture to an imagined space of possibility. A record
player in a dull space can still reflect on and point to the promise of communal belonging, inspired
by the sanctuaries of the past and a better future.
This impulse to glimpse at other worlds, even ones on a certain night in 1984, is reminiscent of Jose
Esteban Munoz’s notion of queer utopia as laid out in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer
Futurity. (https://nyupress.org/books/9780814757284/)As Munoz writes, “queerness exists for us
as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (1). Not only does
Beck’s Last Night reference the past, but it also invariably points to a possible collectivity in the
future.
“The here and now is a prison house,” writes Munoz, as he goes on to assert, “Queerness is that
thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing” (1). This is
what Beck’s film achieves. I won’t lie, it made me quite depressed to see the maximalist ecstasy of
disco converted into minimalism, but, on further reflection, Beck does exactly what Munoz
articulates: in transforming the euphoric to the monotonous, he points to the lack in the “here and
now.” More than envisioning a disco-filled world beyond this one–either in the past or the future–
himself, Beck leaves the work up to the viewer, allowing the unwavering feeling of loss to
motivate a drive to recapture these communal spaces.
“We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a
then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never
settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways
of being in the world and ultimately new worlds,” describes Jose Munoz (1). And just maybe, as
Sister Sledge croons and as Beck’s film indicates, the music will be our salvation.
Tags: Colleen Murphy, Cruising Utopia, David Mancuso, disco, Jose Esteban Munoz, Last Night,
Life And Death On The New York Dance Floor 1980-1983, Lost in Music, Martin Beck, Sister
Sledge, The Kitchen, The Loft, Tim Griffin, Tim Lawrence. Bookmark the permalink.
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museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien
Einladung Invitation
zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung to the opening of
Martin Beck Martin Beck

rumors and murmurs rumors and murmurs
am Freitag, 5. Mai 2017 on Friday, May 5, 2017

um 19 Uhr at 7 pm
Begrüßung Introduction
Karola Kraus, Direktorin, mumok Karola Kraus, director, mumok
Zur Ausstellung On the exhibition

Matthias Michalka, Kurator, mumok Matthias Michalka, curator, mumok
Eröffnung Opening
Thomas Drozda Thomas Drozda
Bundesminister für Kunst und Kultur, Federal Minister for Arts and Culture,
Verfassung und Medien Constitution and Media
Anschließender Empfang Followed by a reception

mit Sekt aus dem Hause Kattus with sparkling wine by Kattus
Ausstellungsdauer Exhibition duration

6. Mai bis 3. September 2017 May 6 to September 3, 2017
Mit Ihrer Teilnahme erteilen Sie uns die Erlaubnis

zur Veröffentlichung von Bild- und Videoaufnahmen,
die im Rahmen der Veranstaltung entstanden sind.
Sponsoren
museum moderner kunst
stiftung ludwig wien
MuseumsQuartier
Medienpartner
Museumsplatz 1, A-1070 Wien
Mit freundlicher Unterstützung Freier Eintritt bis 19
Martin Beck, Detail of Flowers, 2015, © Martin Beck, 2017

rumors and
murmurs
MuseumsQuartier
Museumsplatz 1, A -1070 Wien
www.mumok.at
Martin Beck, Detail von Flowers, 2015, Courtesy der Künstler und 47 Canal
Martin Beck 6.5.–3.9.2017 Sponsor
Medienpartner
Freier Eintritt bis 19
BECK_A1_Plakat.indd 1 13.04.17 13:26

Martin Beck
rumors and murmurs
mumok Museum moderner Kunst From May 6, 2017 will be presentinga one-person exhibition on the work of New
Stiftung Ludwig Wien York-and Vienna-based artist Martin Beck. Focusing on themes central to Beck’s
Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien
oeuvre such as display, memory, collectivity, and imaging, the exhibition will bring
together selected works from the past ten years with a new body of work produced
rumors and murmurs
for the occasion. As strategies of installation and display are central to his practice,
Exhibition dates
May 6 to September 3, 2017 Beck will actively engage with the exhibition’s format and layout. The show will be
composed of sculptures, photographs, video works, drawings, books as well as
watching sugar dissolve in a glass of water
May 6, 2017 to January 14, 2017 spatial interventions into the exhibition space.
One of Beck’s key bodies of work references modern exhibiting systems, specifically
Press conference
May 5, 2017, 10 am
taking up the relationships between emancipation and control that they incorporate.
His video installation About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (2007), for
Opening which he reconstructed George Nelson’s Struc-Tube exhibtion system from the
May 5m 2017, 7 pm
1940s, addresses questions of appropriation and economies of artistic re-
presentation while also reflecting on the paradoxical role modular exhibiting systems
have in the history of exhibitions. While ease of handling and wide-reaching
information delivery fulfilled the emancipatory quest of the modern avant-garde,
Struc-Tube’s coherence is also an emblem for the reorganization of labor in modern
capitalism.
Another work engaging questions of historicity and display is Beck’s rumors and
murmurs (Polygon) (2012). This painting-like fabric element covers a whole exhibition
wall and is, simultaneously, an autonomous art work, an architectural intervention,
and a functional object. It is defined by a subtle geometrical pattern resulting from
sewing together polygonal fabric segments that follow an “anarchic” geometry laid
out in Steve Bear’s counterculture building manual Dome Cookbook (1968). Rumors
and murmurs (Polygon) interlaces the 1960s pursuit of alternative living structures
with the experiential dimension of an exhibition space.
While Beck’s art has always exhibited conceptual rigor and an economy of means,
Martin Beck his more recent works further integrate the body and affect into his investigations of
Detail of Flowers (set 1), 2015 display. His project, Last Night (2013–), derives from one of the final parties at the
Courtesy Martin Beck and 47 Canal, New
York seminal New York dance venue The Loft at 99 Prince Street. Key to the project is a
© Martin Beck, 2017 book that meticulously lists the specifics of the thirteen hours of music played that
night. The book interlaces structure and passion and is a document about an
ephemeral space in time of community and emotion. Beck is currently working on a
Press contacts thirteen-hour film about the records documented in the book. The film, titled June 2,
Karin Bellmann 1984, will be a central element of the mumok exhibition.
T +43 1 52500-1400
karin.bellmann@mumok.at
Last Night points to historical junctures and paradoxes: moments when the promise
Katja Kulidzhanova of freedom and the exercise of control, escapist utopias and the economization of
T +43 1 52500-1450 the everyday, the possible and the impossible not only coexist but are mutually
katja.kulidzhanova @mumok.at
interdependent. A further part of this group of works is a thirteen-hour film (June 2,
Fax +43 1 52500-1300
press@mumok.at
www.mumok.at
1 Presseinformation, May 6, 2017

1984), which shows records being played on a contemporary record player in a
private setting at the party.
rumors and murmurs will also include sets of Beck’s recent body of work titled
Flowers (2015) which is composed of photographs showing the assembly and
disassembly of a spectacular flower bouquet by an elderly florist. When first shown in
New York, Beck combined such sets of Flowers with his stainless steel sculpture,
183✕113 (2014), a blue gradient wall sculpture (All that is left, 2015), and the video
work Strategy Notebook (2015) to form an environment that oscillated between
elegiac vanitas and corporate bliss. In the mumok exhibition sets of Flowers are
installed to form a guiding path through the exhibition and, at points, are juxtaposed
with 183✕113 and Strategy Notebook.
Curated by Matthias Michalka
watching sugar dissolve in a glass of water

May 6, 2017 to January 14 2018
In conjunction with Martin Beck’s own show, mumok is also presenting a new
selection and arrangement of works from our collection, curated by Beck himself. His
selection focuses on works of the 1960s and 1970s and indicates a number of
important influences on Beck’s own artistic work—in art and design, architecture and
popular culture. Abstract and figurative, and conceptual and painterly approaches
are presented in often surprising combinations and exciting arrangements. Beck
sees these combinations as scenes, in the sense of places where new links are
created and surprising conflicts are enacted. The exhibition title, watching sugar
dissolve in a glass of water, refers to a process of precise observation and the
transformation of aggregate states of affairs.
Martin Beck‘s collection exhibition is closely linked to his own show, rumors and
murmurs. The two exhibition designs—on two levels of the museum—are nearly
identical, but nonetheless meet different needs within their own specific contexts.
While the walls and spatial elements in watching sugar dissolve in a glass of water are
used primarily as functional surfaces, in rumors and murmurs the same architecture
is used to explore the borders between artworks, presentation structure, and
processes of orientation.
Kurzbiografie Martin Beck

Martin Beck lives in New York and Vienna. His exhibitions include The thirty-six sets
do not constitute a sequence (2015), 47 Canal, New York; Approx. 13 Hours (2014),
castillo/corrales, Paris; the particular way in which a thing exists (2012-13), Leonard
& Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal; Remodel, Ludlow 38, New York (2011); Panel 2—
“Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes…”,
Gasworks, London (2008), Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, New York (2009; The
details are not the details (2007) Orchard, New York. His works were on view at the
29thSão Paulo Biennial (in collaboration with Julie Ault) and the 4th Bucharest

Biennial (2010).
Together with Julie Ault, Danh Vo and others, Beck curated the exhibition Macho
Man: Tell It To My Heart for Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Culturgest, Lisbon;
and Artists Space, New York (2013).
Beck’s publications include Exhibit viewed played populated (2005), About the
Relative Size of Things in the Universe (2007),The Aspen Complex (2012), Last Night
(2013), the particular way in which a thing exists (2014), and Summer Winter East
West (2015).

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Exhibition view
Martin Beck. rumors and murmurs, mumok, Wien, 6.5.–3.9.2017
© Photo: mumok / Hannes Böck
Exhibition view
Martin Beck. rumors and murmurs, mumok, Wien, 6.5.–3.9.2017
© Photo: mumok / Hannes Böck
“Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”
Vince Aletti
There are probably a hundred songs I heard and danced to for the
first time at David Mancuso’s Loft in the early nineteen-seventies.
Hearing them now puts me right back there. The first few beats
of “I Like What I Like” are especially potent. An album track by
a Canadian rock group called Everyday People that I never heard
of again, the song opens with a long, atmospheric instrumental
intro—jungle drums, clave, tambourine, pulsing bass, and a riot of
animal-like cries—that builds to a song whose chorus summed up
the I-am-what-I-am mood of that moment: “I like what I like / I like
what I like / I like what I like / Because I like it.” Hardly brilliant, and
not exactly a radical declaration, but very much to the point on a
dance floor driven by energy and emotion. We were a band of out-
siders, celebrating together. The song sparked our tribal conscious-
ness, our dreams of wild abandon, but that refrain confirmed our
singularity, our difference: we each liked what we liked. Love is
love—no explanation necessary.
This was a time before disco, before anyone had a label for the
music we were dancing to. Old categories were breaking down and
new ones seemed unnecessary; liberation wasn’t just a movement
buzzword. It was a time to experiment, to mix it up, to take a trip.
I don’t think I really understood this until I went to the Loft. David
Mancuso was the first DJ I heard who was truly open-minded, who
appreciated and played everything: Bonnie Bramlett, First Choice,
and Manu Dibango, the Temptations, Love Unlimited, and Chicago,
Gil Scott-Heron and Barrabas. He was a madman and an innovator,
a quiet storm. Disco would not have happened without adventurous
DJs like Mancuso, because disco was not a single record; it was an
unbroken sequence of records mixed into a sustained flow of beats
and breaks: a symphony of surprises.
It flourished in places like the Loft, a members-only house
party held weekly in Mancuso’s sparsely furnished space in a walk-
up on Broadway near Bleecker Street in Manhattan. More than thir-
ty years later, my memories of those parties are hazy and impres-
sionistic, but Mancuso still throws occasional parties, and the basic
set-up hasn’t changed much since then. A long table was set with
big plastic bowls of fruit punch and ice water, smaller containers of
raisins, nuts, candy, and fruit, and a simple vase of flowers, usually
wild. Streamers and balloons festooned the ceiling, more balloons
skittered along the floor, the lights were dim and colored. It felt like
your tenth birthday party: not sophisticated, not fancy, but playful
and uninhibited. The picture on the card that members carried was
of the thirties-era Our Gang kids sharing bread and jam around a
table with a checkered tablecloth. The Loft was our clubhouse, our
fun house.
New York had other underground clubs besides the Loft,
but they tended to be more formal and chic—exercises in re-
strained, sturdy high-tech design that influenced virtually every
15
gay membership club that followed—or more flamboyantly glitzy.
Mancuso refused to call his place a club, preferring to think of it
as a party (it began as a rent party); members were invited guests.
On Broadway, we were in his home, with his loft bed high above the
turntables, and when he moved to larger quarters on Prince Street
in 1975, he brought this well-worn aesthetic with him. Since a lot
of us lived with mattresses on the floor and furniture that had been
dragged in off the street, the Loft was immediately comfortable. But
Mancuso’s informality felt radical. It wasn’t just unpretentious; it
was a rejection of uptown glam and downtown cool.
And that suited us perfectly. Looking through my journals, I find
descriptions of Loft parties where I was introduced to Susan Sontag
and Diane Keaton, but that was later, at 99 Prince Street, and it was
the exception. The Loft was not about celebrity; it was about com-
munity. In the democracy of the dance floor, the great dancers ruled,
but everyone had a place. I was invited to the Broadway location by
a friend named Tom Jones, a tall, handsome black guy from Chicago
who worked at a hip clothing store and lived in a building on East
Sixth Street that had been colonized by his hometown crew, includ-
ing Reggie, Willie, and Tom’s sister Kitty, an aspiring model. Late on
a Saturday evening, we’d meet at Tom’s apartment over a couple of
joints and a bowl of homemade potato salad. Judy Weinstein, who’d
been dancing in New York clubs since long before it was legal to let
her in the door, came in from Brooklyn to join the party. (Years later
she headed one of the first New York records pools, distributing new
releases to club DJs.) The Loft didn’t open until midnight, and we
tended to go early, before it got too crowded, and stay until it did or
until we were just too exhausted to go on. Like a lot of Loft-goers,
we danced as a group, in infinite permutations, combining and re-
combining over the course of the night. There were couples at the
Loft, but at peak moments—when the break in Eddie Kendricks’s
“Girl You Need a Change of Mind” kicked in or “Love’s Theme” swept
through—the whole dance floor surged and screamed and threw its
hands up in the air like a single, joyous organism.
Buffeted, stoned and sweaty, by a crowd of ecstatic dancers, it
was easy to lose yourself in the Loft’s collective consciousness and
follow the music wherever it led you. DJs often talk about taking
their dancers on a journey, and Mancuso was the trip master—not
yet a legend but already revered and emulated. Always a charis-
matic presence, he was also famously mercurial: dark, broody, and
withdrawn at times but truly radiant at others. In a period when
most DJs looked like hairdressers (think Warren Beatty in Shampoo),
Mancuso was a dashing hippie, with long hair, a full beard, and the
groovy vibe of another era. But once he got behind his turntables,
nothing else mattered but the music. Though far from a flawless
mixer, he never let an awkward segue stop his forward thrust.
With an intuitive feel for the shape and substance of the hours that
stretched before him, he tapped into the spirit of the crowd and
whipped it into a frenzy, then soothed it, teased it, and gradually
drove it toward another peak.
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Disco, named in 1974 when the record business needed a label
for the dance records that were suddenly all over the pop charts,
was never as simple as its detractors would have you believe.
When David Mancuso was at the turntables, it was a shape-shift-
ing, unpredictable, and decidedly multicultural thing. No ques-
tion, disco could be hedonism a go-go—an irresistible hormonal
rush—but when I first heard it at the Loft, it was also uplifting,
a new kind of gospel music. If Mancuso had a theme song, it was
MFSB’s exhilarating, orchestral “Love Is the Message.” He was
always conscious of the message in the music, the words we were
singing along to: “Yes We Can Can,” “We Are Family,” “Ain’t No
Stopping Us Now,” “Right On Be Free,” “Love Train,” “To Each His
Own.” We weren’t being preached to, but I often came away from
those parties feeling enlightened, buoyed up, and hopeful.
After Mancuso moved to 99 Prince Street and I got to know
him better, I began going to the Loft alone and early, sometimes
before the doors opened to members. David had a booth over-
looking the dance floor, a watchtower lined with vinyl records,
sound equipment, and controls for the lights. I climbed up there
and observed as the club came to life. After midnight, people
trickled in and gathered at the edges of the room, chatting and
tossing balloons in anticipation, but David was in no hurry to get
the party started. Instead, he set the mood, which was usually
vibrant, shimmering, and instrumental: an eclectic mix that might
include jazz fusion, Brazilian pop, African highlife, and something
indefinable that he’d discovered in a record store in Brooklyn
two days before. This was my favorite part of the night, a time
when David could experiment and test new records, sometimes
left-field discs I brought along because they reminded me of him.
People drift across the floor, dancing on their own, warming up,
relaxing. The music has a pulse but it’s not yet racing. If nothing
David played in the first hour could be called disco, it was exactly
the kind of subtle, seductive music that helped define dance music
in the seventies—the exotic, idiosyncratic, like-nothing-you-ever-
heard-before sounds that kept the driving thump of Eurodisco in
perspective and in check. As the music business narrowed defi-
nitions to maximize profits, DJs like Mancuso continued to play
whatever moved them and their crowds. The closer disco got to
Top 40 radio, the more determined David and his creative cohort
were to remain underground, keeping the beat-centric counter
culture alive.
By one o’clock, the room was buzzing and David was working
it, mixing in more and more familiar records, pleasing the crowd
but keeping it on edge, expectant. The booth began to fill up with
friends, fans, and promotion people, few of whom could get more
than a quick hug and a brusque word or two from David before
he went back to hunch over his turntables. I left to join friends on
the dance floor, to swoon and whoop when a favorite song came
on, to sing along: “I like what I like / I like what I like / I like what I
like / Because I like it!” What more do you need to know?
•
The Art of Turning
On Turning, Turning Over, and Forcefully Turning Loose
Christian Höller
To see the end, or what can be considered as such, as a new begin

ning. To present what lies in the distant past as though it just
happened. To turn what is supposed to be the past into a possible
version of the present, or a future yet to be found. And, at the same
time, consider the forces of resistance inherent in this process
of form finding and to assign them the appropriate place in the
chosen procedure.
All this resounds in the title Last Night, which identifies a broader
complex in Martin Beck’s recent work. The expression “last night”
refers, on one hand, to something that has already ended, and,
on the other, evokes an event that is still within reach. It is in the
past, maybe it happened only yesterday (or not), but its after-
effects can be distinctly felt, as it is pointedly put in the disco
classic “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life” (1981), which similarly
conjures up aftershocks—something that is no longer immediately
present but has undeniably triggered a turn of events. The act
itself may be irretrievably gone, but its life-saving effect persists.
It continues in the present and even the future, and the art lies
precisely in allowing this lasting effect: giving it a form that
neither places it at an unbridgeable distance nor marks it as over
once and for all. Conversely, this form should not suggest that
anything and everything can be unhinderedly accessed in the
present moment.
Martin Beck’s art oscillates between precisely these two poles.

He repeatedly draws on contexts and materials from past decades,
often in the areas of popular culture, design, or counterculture, in
order to extract fragments and traces of acutely persistent effects
from their supposedly concluded state. And, in an equally relevant
reversion of the process, he uses concrete “presentist” and con-
tinuously readable materials to demonstrate that the apparent
present is undeniably riddled with ruptures and gaps. Inasmuch
as the latter refer back to the past and, indeed, stem from nothing
else, Beck’s genealogical1 approach consists precisely of using
gaps in the present to tap into contexts and constellations of the
past, whereby both of these directions of access come with critical
constraints: While “last night” does not necessarily denote an
ending, the implication that it is already beyond reach is equally
plausible.
19
The primary methodological tool that Beck employs is “turning” (in
a general sense). This turning comes in various forms and operates
at different levels and is decidedly resistant to hypostatization into
a substantively solidified turn—into the one and only decisive turn.2
The turning affects not only the multitude of objects Beck takes up
or “reinvents” in an open manner, elements that have shaped the
character of his installations and ensembles of objects for many
years. Instead, it indicates to a perhaps even greater extent Beck’s
methodological approach to historicity (and to presence) per se.
Always inherent in the past—insofar as it can be brought into the
present—is a certain capacity for turning it around. This is not
about re-encoding or recreating in the sense of making something
functional for current purposes, but rather about the deliberate
release of forces out of the past, often pointing in unexpected
directions. Simultaneously—and this is the dialectical flipside that
is woven into Beck’s methodology—that which exists, or which is
displayed in the here and now, relentlessly turns to the past (and
concurrently aims toward a desired future). The small, unexpected
bends and diversions are once again the main focus here, rather
than the all-important “turn.” In this sense, Beck’s practice might
be described as an “art of turning,” the dynamics and form of
which will be traced here by referring to some motifs central to
his practice.
Turning On
First, we see only a quote, in white on a black background, a motto-

like passage that speaks of elementary rhythms of life.3 Then, fade
to black, the sound of setting a needle on a vinyl record and, a few
seconds later, the image of the turntable in motion. Many more
things are set in motion here: an expansive, seemingly endless opti-
cal-acoustic journey through the niches and folds of recent (or older,
or perhaps also future?) music culture. This at once literal and meta
phorical “turning on” kicks off Last Night (2016), the thirteen-and-a-
half-hour-long film that is one of the main components of the overall
Last Night project. Last Night, the film, is the final step (for the time
being) of a project that began in 2010 with the reconstruction of a
specific music playlist and which has been incorporated in different
ways into various exhibitions since 2013. Different media define the
form of the components, which complement and comment on each
other as well as generate unexpected new tensions. Beck himself
describes the project as an “inquiry about the relationships between
the social and abstraction, between documents and imaging.”4 One
20
might add that this “imaging,” or image generation, largely dispenses
with images in the conventional sense (such as photographs or doc-
umentary film footage). In Last Night the various shots of a Thorens
turntable in front of a russet curtain (the film uses ten different
subtly shifted camera positions) seem to, at first, contradict this. But
the principle of the film—you hear exactly what emanates from the
visible mechanics of sound reproduction—affirms that this is not a
historicizing or pastiche form of visualization.
Whether with or without images, the Last Night project’s primary

focus is the tension between “structure and affect,” between “con
ceptual restraint and emotional exuberance”5 that is integral to its
making. The 111 shots of the film depict the 118 tracks that were
played on the night of June 2, 1984, at one of the last Loft parties
David Mancuso hosted at 99 Prince Street, its second legendary
location in New York City. While to this day the Loft parties are con-
sidered the epitome and near inimitable historical high point of the
community-oriented dance culture6 that began to spread from 1970
onward, the film (like other parts of the project) breaks down this
affective concentration and mythical charge into a seemingly simple
structure. Each identified track is played in its entirety, leaving
the scheme’s integrity unimpaired by extraneous cuts. The playlist
formed the seed for this project, the “conceptual poetry” of which is
attested to by a list of song titles formatted for a print edition (2013)
as well as the book Last Night (2013).7 The book is apparently in-
debted to the idea of serial abstraction, whereas the film, by playing
every track from beginning to end (and doing so in flawless, crystal-
line sound quality), gives the total project a highly “affective turn.”
In general, this exclusive focus—that is, the full and uncut playback
of each track—exhibits a high level of presence, a musical moment in
the here and now that appeals to viewers / listeners in a visceral way
(and not via historical rigmarole). Last Night emulates and reworks
the concentration and validation that David Mancuso allegedly
brought to bear at some point, when he defied common DJ practice
and played each track in full, often even with short breaks in be
tween.8 In keeping with this practice is the conceptual restraint of
the film, which shows only the playback apparatus in situ, unbur-
dened by decorative historical details or a reconstruction of the
“original context” (whatever this may have been or looked like, since
all that remains are rudimentary visual documents of the Loft,
where photography was discouraged for decades.) Although the play-
list, the project’s structural framework, stems from a specific histor-
ical moment, its “performance” or reanimation is not intended as a
21
reconstruction of something not personally witnessed (because what
those who were actually there witnessed would hardly be relevant
to the energies channeled in the here and now). Instead, the spin
that Beck puts on the event aims to expose structure and affect—the
dry, inventory-like list and the reignition of pleasurable bonding and
imagined community feeling—in all their insoluble complexity, so as
to also open up a space for imaginary projections. And what’s more,
structure and desire, as alien as they may seem to each other on the
surface, act here as coalescent dimensions inasmuch as their combi-
nation constructs—indeed helps to actualize—a certain fiction. As if
it had all only happened last night, yet is perhaps irrevocably part of
the past.
Shoring up this reading is the fact that Beck modified the main pro-
tagonist of the film—the (historical) Thorens TD 125 MK II turntable
—by adding a different tone arm and phono cartridge,9 as seen in
the photo series Sleeping Beauty (2016), named after the cartridge
used. Apart from hands that occasionally appear in the frame, the
presence, “novelty,” and precision of the playback process are marred
only by a few small glitches, which may be due to the age of the arti-
facts used. The crackle, as well as the slightly warped and irregular
play of some of the records, demonstrates that historical material
(some of the records are over forty years old) does not always acqui-
esce to the desire for a flawless presentation. Furthermore, and this
is another affective tendency, the crackle and light scratches only
hint at rather than actually embody the historical patina the Last
Night project seeks to deflect or cast off.
The intricate editing pattern of the film also plays a part in this:
every record is assigned one out of ten different camera angles,
their sequence chosen in accordance with the “golden ratio” of
1.6180339887… The first 111 digits of this irrational number,10 pre
sented also in the print Records and Other Things (2016), structur-
ally indicate the point of view from which the rotating record and
its playback device (the turntable) is seen. No other parameters
intervene in this scheme, whether derived from the music or its
context, let alone inspired by the broader context of Loft-related
archive work. Moreover, the strict adherence to a mathematical
sequence—similar to the minimalist rhythms of many of the disco
songs played in Last Night—creates a rather joyful momentum,
savoring repetition to the fullest.
The “turning on” that Last Night executes skillfully oscillates, on

multiple levels, between structure and affect, thereby necessarily
22
revealing the insoluble tension between the two. This points to the
way Beck generally handles historical or any time-based material,
treating it less like documented facts to be worked through than a
sort of heuristic tool11 possessing a certain activation potential. To
ensure this activation, there must, at first, be a “turning around,”
which also constitutes an important module in Beck’s toolkit.
Turning Around
If, like Beck, one regards the connection between past and present
as something that is in “constant flux,”12 this has certain implica-
tions for the methodological repertoire relevant to the production of
art. This concerns in particular the way in which the materials used
are dealt with, their specific potential for reconfiguration into differ
ent formats and, in this sense, their “turning character,” which, at
the very least, influences the spatial implementation of a work in
an exhibition context. The connections that arise in Beck’s work
out of the combination of historical references, the media deployed,
and the exhibition arrangements cannot really be attributed to the
idea of solidification or fixation of supposedly unstable conditions—
the recovery of episodes that have been buried or have fallen into
oblivion, as is often the case in contemporary art. Instead, they
are the result of what Beck describes as a “continuous questioning,
unpredictability, and oscillating between hard fact, interpretation,
and fiction.”13 It is precisely this variegated system of connections,
in which the reference points of the past are sometimes just as loose
and variable as those of the present, that plays a central role in
Beck’s methodological repertoire.
One might figuratively outline Beck’s approach in the following

way: First, an initial, situational move is made, turning toward
something whose status is not yet fully secured or which is rooted
in many contexts (part factual, part fictional, part interpretative).
Subsequently, this “diffuse item,” the nature of which is more like
a framework of relationships, is twisted and turned in order to
disentangle it from its original embedding, often in a solidified or
sedimented historical framework. The aim here is not to isolate the
item from its context entirely but to “unlock” it while keeping its
context in mind and to “turn it around” in the sense of “rescuing” it.
It is crucial to give the item enough twists and turns to accomplish
the aforementioned oscillation between fact, fiction, and inter
pretation, or, even better, to bring it into a state in which it can
23
be continuously questioned, with a sense of uncertainty always
remaining.
This procedure can be observed in a number of Martin Beck’s works,

such as his larger project complexes The details are not the details
(2007) and Panel 2—“Nothing better than a touch of ecology and
catastrophe to unite the social classes ...” (2008).14 Its beginnings
are also noticeable in his earlier projects such as an Exhibit viewed
played populated (2003), an updated extension of the historical
exhibition an Exhibit from 1957, or, earlier yet, in storage (displayed)
(1997), which examines the historicization of pop culture.15 In every
case, the source material drawn upon seems to have been extracted
from a clearly defined context and developed and reconfigured in
such a way as to create almost uncontrollable polyvalence. This
“release,” which is of an equally opening and developing nature, in
turn affects the alleged original contexts, destabilizing them to a
certain degree. At the same time, however, it impacts the actuality of
what is presented—no matter if it is a modular display system like
in the film About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (2007)
(the centerpiece of The details are not the details), a screenprint of
aspen leaves like that in the project about Aspen, or a series of film
sequences picturing the American desert as in an Exhibit. The extent
to which the—in most cases open—(historical) field of reference is in
a “tension-filled relation with the present tense”16 depends primarily
on the respective media and installation methods used. There are
numerous possibilities to choose from, which we might refer to as
the specific “turning areas” of the individual project complexes.
In the Last Night project this “turning area” consists, as mentioned

above, of a playlist. The collection of 118 songs, derived from a
mixture of apocryphal and private sources,17 constitutes a formal,
or more precisely, an indexical schema that is gradually filled with
different media. The songs that—as far as we know—were played on
the night of June 2, 1984, at the Loft party at 99 Prince Street form a
type of diagram, a (historically more or less accurate) sketch, which
Beck has “unfolded” through various media formats. This unfolding,
which can also be regarded as a media turn, initially took place in
the form of the book Last Night (2013), in which a page is assigned to
each of the 118 songs with their full authorial, production, format,
and release information. Far from giving this ephemeral histori-
cal, or unrepeatable, event a fixed, definitive shape, the book—as
self-contained as it might seem at first glance—is open to numerous
connections. After all, the abstraction that the 118-part list seems to
represent does not end with this one-time act of “release”; instead—
24
and this is an essential feature of Beck’s understanding of his work—
it effectively allows it to “unravel” in several different directions.
For example, there are the additional “errata,” which document the
continual process of researching which exact versions were played
on June 2, 1984, and in what format (7-inch or 12-inch record, US
or UK pressing, etc.), while, of course, there is no guarantee that a
finalizing last line will ever be drawn under these archival efforts.
The continued twisting and turning of the data presented in the
book Last Night is a crucial aspect of the project in the sense that in
the time period the list refers to it was already common practice for
songs to be released in a variety of versions, remixes, and re-edits,
and in different formats. (Despite having been in widespread use
since 1982, CDs had not yet entered the DJ scene.) As a result, the
source material is highly diffuse and hard to fully disentangle thirty
years later. This is not the key point, though; what is much more
essential here are the many small “turns” and “returns,” the mixes
and remixes, the edits and re-edits, which are manifested in the
collected data, for example in the form of the above-mentioned 2013
print edition, which is strongly reminiscent of a work of conceptual
poetry. The 118-line poem, set in the Garamond font, which recalls
eighties-style computer typography, is accompanied by a second
panel onto which the words “Last Night” are printed almost illegibly
in white, emphasizing the ephemeral nature of the subject.18
The sculpture Approx. 13 Hours (2014) goes one step further and
accomplishes a revealing turn by perpetuating the usual transfer
process of the readymade from everyday item to art object while at
the same time remaining suspended in limbo. For this purpose Beck
collected the full set of records on the playlist. Presented as a stack,
they exhibit the sort of self-sufficiency that sometimes characterizes
objects “found” in different contexts of use and transferred into an
art context. At the same time, “packaging” the stack as a kind of
sculpture leaning against an empty wall indicates a kind of refrac-
tory materiality (or mediality) that may formally have its place in
an exhibition setting but also signifies the gap between the original
context of use and the impossibility of recapturing or exploiting it in
this setting. Moreover, the same set also exists in a second form, as a
collection for use by the owner of the sculpture, similar to the Struc-
Tube display system19 that Beck sometimes loans out. The records
can be used for actual DJ sets, as they were in January 2015 follow-
ing Beck’s exhibition at castillo/corrales in Paris, when the stack of
records on display was retrieved for a 13-hour listening session. The
turn inscribed in the object runs from “artwork back to artifact”20
25
and in this way sets it free again, or indeed even achieves a trans
disciplinary “turnaround” at a practical level.
Turning Loose
If there exists a continuous thread that runs through Martin Beck’s

work from the mid-1990s until today, then it is a process that might
be described as a methodologically driven “turning loose.” This is the
conceptually grounded release of moments of tension or activation
impulses that derive from specific historical constellations which
are characterized by a not readily apparent impact in the present,
or whose undiscovered potential lies in the future. Accordingly, the
focus here is not on one single substantive turn to be enacted or
demonstrated on the reference material but instead on the multitude
of small, interconnected, and, in some cases, unorthodox “turn-
ing points” that mark Beck’s practice in a crucial way. Just as the
translations Beck carries out always follow a non-linear, crisscross
course, they usually associate things that do not automatically
cohere in a given context, and their relationships are thus shaped
by areas of tension, gaps as well as possible turns and unforeseen
liberating forces.
This interrelating of historic as well as media and discursive turning

points, charged throughout with present-day relevance, was already
a central feature in the exhibition storage (displayed). Referencing
three significant sites—the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum
in Cleveland, the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, and the
Virgin Megastore in New York City’s Times Square—the formative
(and reformative) forces at work in nineties pop music are examined,
paying special attention to the fleeting lines of flight of a once wild
and unmanageable terrain. Consisting primarily of video sequences,
this project attempts to map out the “packaging” of pop culture, a
hot-button issue at the time. Beck’s next major standalone project,
an Exhibit viewed played populated, on the other hand, took a sin
gular historical exhibition event as its springboard.21 The event was
intertwined with conceptually condensed and sketch-like delib
erations on an expansive production of space—in other words, on
the artistic and discursive dissolution of spatial boundaries in the
course of late modernism.22 Integrated into both of the exhibitions
storage (displayed) and an Exhibit is a series of artifacts or works
that Beck himself did not create: in the former, it is a set of standard
cardboard boxes like those used in storage rooms (a reference to the
“packaging” of culture as an abstract visualization), while an Exhibit
26
features a photo series by Tim Street-Porter in which the architec-
tural theorist Reyner Banham is pictured riding a bike through the
desert, as well as six photographs of various editions of Charles
Jencks’s The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, which Beck
commissioned from six different genre photographers (a nod toward
Beck’s understanding of the concept of authorship as a highly com-
plex maze).23
Appropriated “foreign objects” such as these, which repeatedly

appear at the center of Beck’s exhibitions, proclaim an active
loosening, indeed, the deliberate detachment from all-too-restrictive
ideas of production and reception. This sense of “letting loose” is
also demonstrated by Pitch (for a Motorcycle Film) (2005), a seldom
exhibited series of photographs that can be traced back to a biker
rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. The looseness can be found here in an
imaginary script for a cinematic narrative, allegorically kick-started
by these twenty photographs showing either motorcycles polished
to a high sheen or the landscapes they traverse. As in most of
Beck’s work, there is a dynamic tension between the whole and its
individual parts. This is also made evident by the fact that Pitch is
itself part of a larger, quite epically titled group of works: “an image
guide: the final attempt of design to act as the ‘projection’ of a
society no longer based on work (and on power and violence, which
are connected with this), but an unalienated human relationship.”
Installed versions of this body of works, however, do not always
include the photo series.24
This period saw numerous collaborations with Julie Ault, including

a number of exhibition designs and a joint overarching project
titled Outdoor Systems (1998 –2000),25 which was pursued over the
course of several years. The project consists of various mediatized
crystallizations focusing on the liberating as well as ossifying
moments in the history of (mostly) American “explorations of space.”
The modules that were derived from external sources (such as
projects by Archigram, Superstudio, and Archizoom Associati), as
well as a supergraphic developed specifically for this project, bear
witness to utopian versions of freedom. A central feature of the
exhibition OUTDOOR SYSTEMS, indoor distribution at NGBK in Berlin
(2000) was the type of integration that mediates between various
types of “externally appropriated” material—whether everyday
cultural artifacts or works by other artists—the artists’ own work,
and a creative matrix connecting all these modules. The exhibition
Installation, created with Julie Ault for the Vienna Secession in 2006,
was also designed according to this plan.26 Included in the expansive
27
setting—the title is telling here—was a collaborative mural covering
an entire wall that visually explores poverty and income disparity in
the USA since the sixties. An axis led from this work to a multimedia
arrangement by Julie Ault, which delivered an exemplary presen
tation of the work of Sister Corita Kent, a pioneer of the socially
focused vernacular Pop Art of the sixties. Another vector pointed in
the direction of Beck’s three-part work Rumor (June 14, 1969) (2002),
which showcases, in a tightly intertwined photo-text work, different
perspectives onto a renowned 1960s building by Paul Rudolph at Yale
University in New Haven, Connecticut. Finally, directly in front of
the expansive mural and at the intersection of the sight lines leading
through the Secession space, an early version of Beck’s Struc-Tube
installation was set up, displaying, in this case, information panels
that explain the system and comment on the larger pragmatic con
text of artistic labor with inscriptions such as “the artist in social
communication.” All of these space-shaping modules, of which
Installation contained several more, were not “separated” or isolated
from each other along the visitor’s route through the installation.
Rather, the various (projective and associative) ways in which they
overlapped created a relational dynamic that surpassed the effect of
each individual work; historical energies were bundled and released
in the here and now.
Disconnecting a practical display device from overly restrictive

historicizing fixation is the focus of The details are not the details.
Its key component, the film About the Relative Size of Things in the
Universe, brings into focus the Struc-Tube system’s applicability in
a contemporary context—the system, developed by George Nelson in
the forties, had already featured in Installation. In an act involving
actual physical labor, the construction is introduced and then with-
drawn again, and with it the structure’s timeless variability, which
defies any fixation on a particular historical moment in design his
tory. The project (or exhibited versions of it such as The details are
not the details) is augmented with artifacts and works by other
artists that likewise evoke the suspenseful turning loose of an almost
para-historical fabric of relationships, rather than providing mere
information or demonstrative supplements. These include schematic
display drawings (Diagrams) that refer back to Klaus Franck’s book
Ausstellungen/Exhibitions (1961), chrome-plated connector joints
(abstracta, presented both as a photo series and as readymades),
and, finally, a sculpture that oscillates in character between show-
piece and display system (Display, stocked with books on the history
of exhibitions in the fifties and sixties). In addition, the Details
installation contained a photographic motion study from 1882 by
28
Eadweard Muybridge, a 1970 photographic edition by Sol LeWitt
referencing Muybridge, and an issue of the magazine Aspen laid out
in a vitrine (The Minimalism Issue from 1967).
The aim of including all these additional elements is not to create a

smooth, seamless presentation of selected historical works (such as
design highlights or artistic precursors). Instead, they mark pivotal
points at which the relationship between contemporary and histor-
ically remote (maybe even future) material grows increasingly com-
plex and substantially exceeds the unilinear approach according to
which A leads to B leads to C. Just as the Struc-Tube system can be
spatially extended ad infinitum, so can its use be extended into the
present (and future), regardless of the contextual situation. And just
as the system’s character oscillates today inconclusively between
showpiece and display, the distinction between presented object and
presentation aid is, retrospectively, no longer clear-cut—especially
since the object itself is supposedly “historical.”
In this context, Beck speaks of “transformative junctures in recent

history, moments when things shift and change, when it is not quite
clear which way things will be going, moments with contradictory
futures and multiple pasts.”27 Even if these “contradictory futures
and multiple pasts” are understood in more of a projective rather
than factual sense, artworks such as Display, or—more concisely—
the chrome-plated connector joints presented therein (which
physically hold the whole system together), can be seen as embodi-
ments of this “transformative juncture.” The exhibition Panel 2—
“Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite
the social classes ...” dealt primarily (and much more comprehen-
sively) with such a juncture, embodied, in this case, by a particular
event: the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA). The
term “panel” refers to a discussion held there in 1970, as well as to
the term’s more common definition as a presentation or exhibition
surface that brings together both thematic and personal associations
in terms of their protagonists (such as George Nelson and Reyner
Banham, who were present at the IDCA and play a key role in other
projects by Beck). Panel 2 explores the contradictory forces and
developmental directions that are contained in such a “juncture”—
in this case, the politically charged intersection of design-, social-,
and countercultural-history in the late sixties and early seventies.28
Beck’s ongoing examination since 2009 of American rural communes

in the sixteis and seventies, which has no overall title, analyzes this
intersection in even more depth. The outgrowths of this examination
29
have been manifested thus far in a variety of media and settings,
presented in various constellations for different exhibitions—another
indication that Beck’s exhibitions are always designed as singular
structures composed of continuously extended but also fine-tuned
modules. Much like previous projects, this work looks at specific
points of intersection, or what Beck describes as “display’s relation
to the social, the way form and the social are interconnected.”29
These intersections (“junctures” or “connector joints”) are not stable
or permanently secured. Instead, the main focus here, the “method
of construction,”30 pointing in this case to the relationship between
certain communication media and the construction of entirely new,
hitherto non-existent forms of community, is highly fragile. Its
approach more closely resembles cautious liberation rather than
categorical fixation.
Turning Over
Beck’s explorations of US commune culture were first presented

in 2010 at the Bucharest Biennale, as well as in the solo exhibition
Social Abstraction held at Kunstraum Lakeside in Klagenfurt. A
continuation of the project in modified form followed a year later as
part of the group exhibition Communitas at Camera Austria Graz.
Since then, the project has been “recrystallized” in a number of dif
ferent forms and media arrangements, all of them emphasizing its
openness for further development in countless different directions
while maintaining its epigrammatic character. The most comprehen-
sive versions to date appeared in the exhibitions Presentation (New
York, 2012), the particular way in which a thing exists (Montreal,
2012–13), and Last Night (Glarus, Switzerland, 2013).31 In most cases,
the project has been presented in combination with pieces from
other work complexes, underlining the tendency of Beck’s articula-
tion modules to transcend any strict embedding into a single theme
and to coalesce despite their highly diverse frames of reference.
These overlaps form the aforementioned “junctures,” where “time
periods, modes of production, spatial experiences” intersect.32
How this coalescence works in practice can be assessed based on

the two shows the particular way in which a thing exists and Last
Night. The Montreal exhibition, which drew on parts of The details
are not the details and Panel 2 as well as even earlier works, re
volved around the commune works already in existence at the time.
The spatial arrangement and a concept of form adapted to it33
allowed this context to be interwoven with those of other projects
or exhibitions in an intriguing way. This gave rise to unforeseen
30
relationships between the “connector joints” of the Struc-Tube
project and driving directions or navigation aids (which similarly
create “connections”) from the commune-based context. A film that
mapped the many waypoints on the way from San Francisco to the
Drop City commune in Colorado was as much part of this setting as
a series of film stills photographed from Michelangelo Antonioni’s
The Passenger (1975), which contemplates the seemingly infinite
vastness of a desert landscape devoid of any landmarks or guides for
orientation through a deliberately blurred lens.34 The Glarus exhibi-
tion in part omits this focus on specific “moments where boundaries
dissolve” while adding others drawn from the Last Night project that
shift attention toward communication media. Photographs of select-
ed pages from books on commune living are juxtaposed, for example,
with a photograph of the Struc-Tube kit (both of them elementary
display devices). The two-part print edition of the Last Night playlist
is also part of the exhibition, calling attention to Beck’s idea that
the concept of “display” (understood as an active verb)35 is able to
traverse a broad range of media and formal contexts. These sorts
of links, or imaginary connectors, which are made up of individual
works but transcend them in several directions and are sometimes
marked by spatial openings and gaps in certain exhibition settings,
are the defining feature of all of Beck’s meticulously designed
ensembles.
Another focus in his work with communes is the way that the central
connectors are initially all taken from the communication media of
the commune culture itself (books, leaflets, brochures, etc.).36 If the
point is to activate a certain manner of display, of how the mode of
presentation constructs the object presented, a very specific form
of presence is at issue here. These formatting interventions into the
objects and artifacts used, such as pages torn out of books, or the ex-
tracting of sketches and diagrams, are what counteract and disrupt
the original mediality or sociality of these artifacts.
The sculptural installation rumors and murmurs (Polygon), which

was realized in several versions, all centering on a wall hanging
made of a piece of fabric sewn together from irregular polygonal
pieces, can be traced back to a drawing in Steve Baer’s Dome
Cookbook (1968).37 The “loose geometry” of dome construction propa-
gated therein, an attempt at emancipation from the strict Euclidean
principle of R. Buckminster Fuller’s dome structures, is updated
in situ by the installation—not as a model for an actual communal
building (which would seem somewhat out of place in the exhibition
context) but as an abstracted texture from which a different kind
31
of spatial characteristic can be derived. This is a loose and some-
what unruly grid that directly intervenes in the exhibition setting,
changing the room’s atmosphere through its materiality and gener-
ating an “irregular” form that is only discernible at close range.
Similarly, the first versions of the exhibitions mentioned above
featured specially shaped sheet-metal parts (Painted Side Up, 2010)
that took up the construction principle of these commune domes
and translated them into the here and now, without allowing their
character to be fixated on historicizing elements signifying the
irreplaceable and ephemeral nature of the commune movement.
Instead, the colorful bits of scrap metal cut out from car tops
scattered erratically throughout the exhibition possess a rebellious
material quality that represents a kind of metaphorical “turnover”:
the reversal of a referential meaning to one that is self-referential
and asserts its presence in the here and now, the commutation—
humble though it may appear—of historical functionality into a
dysfunctional form that punctuates the exhibition.38
This sort of “turning over,” understood in the sense of an “over-

turning” by changing its form or as “turning the page” in a material
sense, characterizes many components of Beck’s commune complex.
Its force is at work almost literally in the series The First Five
Years (2013), a compilation of photographs pointing to six different
commune publications. None of these are 1:1 reproductions; in
many cases the original documents are cropped, their perspective
is shifted off-center, or they are marked by the artist’s gaze. Special
significance is attached to the traces of wear and tear—yellowing,
rubbing of printer ink, or library stamps. More attention is paid
to individual dedications or singular illustrations (anonymous or
“pseudonymous” portraits of commune members) than to the count-
less generalized interpretations of commune culture that historical
discourse is fraught with. In this sense, “turning over”—the over-
turning of, or “turning the page on” historical artifacts—once again
manifests itself as a form of setting loose focused on the present, as
a specific method for bringing something into the present tense (in
a truncated, fragmented, or partial form) in which the absence of
what is to be presented plays a decisive role. “To Mary who stayed
home” reads a photographed dedication; whatever became of Mary
(back then or today), the (generic) name acts as shorthand for both
her staying away and her return.
This type of “imaging,” which cross-fertilizes the refractory nature

of an object that still exerts an impact in the present with the un-
deniable absence of what was historically signified,39 can be found
32
in Beck’s practice in a variety of different forms. One of these is
articulated—also as part of the commune project—in the form of
a “palimpsest” made of pages torn out of books and then unevenly
stacked and pinned to a wall (Untitled, 2012). Five superimposed
layers (out of eight in total) can be made out in the arrangement, but
no overall historical meaning can be discerned from the visible frag-
ments (such as the heading “Families of Eden”). Instead, the work
illustrates how the use and handling of historical documents usually
works like a kind of stratification—one thing is layered over anoth-
er, things overlap with or overlay others, but the complete puzzle is
never fully put together. These torn pages, of which there are many
more in Beck’s commune-focused oeuvre, also convey a certain
destructiveness often evident in the handling and use of historical
records. In a different work named Untitled (2012), for example,
which depicts a man kneeling in a field, the right edge of the image
is torn along his neck, literally decapitating the protagonist—a hint
at the “de-essentializing” process Beck often puts his found mate
rial through.
The undermost layer visible in the aforementioned “palimpsest”

work, showing a drawing of a starry night sky, makes reference to
a series of photographs that Beck also extracted from the literature
about communes (Summer Winter East West, 2013). The source was
a commune manual that included hand-drawn diagrams of the night
sky as a practical guide for navigation. The “borderless” formatting
of the six individual images highlights the complete lack of appeal to
any sort of external factor or moment of transcendence—not even
allowing for a perspectival access to the images in the here and now.
The contents of the drawing, its recovery, cropping, and narrow
framing, seem to all come together at one and the same level—no
Then, no Now, no Here, no There are strategically defined. Indeed,
no authorial viewpoint can be found here that would seize control
of the crude material from the outside.
Turning Turns
The treatment of artifacts from the commune literature and their

communication displays represents a specific form of revising,
recoding, and releasing that can be subsumed under the terms
“turning loose” or “turning over.” Moreover, there is yet another
kind of turning action articulated in Beck’s work, a type of turning
around and reverting to something other than an earlier form. This
action, which can be understood as the simultaneous loosening of
33
content from its context and the envisioning of potential new ways
of embedding it, is manifested in various ways. One of these is the
method of deliberate, contrapuntal digression, such as the titling
of a photograph of the moon in the night sky with the sentence We
dismantle abandoned bridges …, a quote from a commune member
describing the procurement of raw materials for the construction of
the living domes—done at nighttime, in the moonlight.40 The title the
same thing can be done in different ways (2013 –), chosen for a series
of black-and-white photographs of the full moon at night, some of
them dotted with lens flare, can be traced back to an instruction book
for aspiring commune members. The contrapuntal, digressive aspect
here consists in the merging of two heterogeneous moments that
do not seem to correspond at first but begin to communicate sub-
liminally in the chosen constellation (or in the larger context of the
work). The moonlight and its immutable, recurring nature becomes
a symbol for historical social formations. At the same time, it also
becomes the focal point for utopian projections: like abandoned
bridges in the moonlight, connector pieces to nowhere, which linger
on without any apparent use yet suggest a multitude of associations.
This fate may have been shared by David Mancuso, who once found
his mantra for a new, progressive way of living that transcended all
art in the rhythms and appearance found in nature.41
An even more direct application of this digressive turning can be

observed in Beck’s film Turn Take Merge (2011). Here, he portrays
a series of instructions from the work Directions (2010), which de
scribe the route from Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, to Trinidad,
Colorado, the site of the former Drop City commune, as a sequence
of highly intentional changes in direction. While Directions depicts
a formal abstraction that results from the series of commands
with which an electronic navigation system breaks down the route
from A to B (in contrast, for example, to “do-it-yourself navigation”
using the night sky), Turn Take Merge is an exploration of the act
of turning itself. Rather than representing in its entirety the route
that once connected the bastion of the urban hippie scene with the
concurrent rural communal culture,42 the film is dedicated to the
many minor (and major) turns or intersections along the way; forks
in the road (“junctions” or “turnoffs”) that on their own make no
statement about the greater context but, in combination and on the
basis of the different camera angles and movements used, create a
dynamic diagram of said route. This cinematic diagram is riddled
with blank spaces and time differences whose relevance (and per
sistence) Beck repeatedly examines in his works. “Representing
a turn and the cognitive challenge that comes with it is ... a great
34
metaphor for looking at history as it is connected to imaging,”43 Beck
explains, highlighting the need for an ongoing sharpening of focus
that goes hand in hand with each change of direction. “Turning”
thus describes an intrinsic, central motif essential to Beck’s work, a
conceptually derived extension of context that is neither digression
nor regression but rather shift and pivot in one. This realignment,
the inner complexity of which also forms the focus of Aspen Movie
Map, a component of Beck’s Aspen project,44 is put into play to the
fullest in Turn Take Merge. For example, the individual “turns”
that must be made on the way from Haight-Ashbury to Trinidad,
Colorado, are filmed alternately by a camera mounted to the vehicle
facing either backward or forward, then from the side (using a static
camera), and finally from various wide-angle perspectives. In this
way a mental map is gradually constructed, a detailed diagram of
the changes in course that took place along the chosen route, gener-
ating an image on a cognitive level.
The “digressive” aspect that always generates a suspenseful sense of

delayed release in Beck’s practice, by refusing to rush to a conclu-
sion, can be either topic-related or self-reflexive in nature. In the film
Strategy Notebook (2015), key terms from an early seventies instruc-
tion manual for heightening creativity45 are subjected to this treat-
ment. The terms, all in verb form (that is, in the active mode), appear
slightly off-center in monochrome settings, which are modulated
along the RGB color wheel or the respective in-between shades. Red
becomes orange, which becomes green, and so on, while the words
“adapt,” “associate,” “combine,” and the like show up and then, after
a few seconds, disappear again. An alphabet of strategic leitmotifs is
thus presented in three different sets subtly interlaced by occasional
repetition, while an endlessly mutable color gradient suggests a uni-
fied continuum in which beginning and end are one. The final term,
“working forwards,”46 which makes reference to the term “working
backwards” also contained in the list, paves the way for the next
passage, which begins with the word “adapt.”
Nothing could be more emblematic of Beck’s complex, intricate, often

playfully gratifying art of turning. “Last night” may have been a long
time ago, but it is also still ahead of us.
Notes
1. Genealogy is understood here in the sense in which it is used by Michel

Foucault in his 1971 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”; see original
text, “Nietzsche, La Généalogie, L’Histoire,” accessed September 28, 2016,
35
https:// monoskop.org/images/8/8d/Foucault_Michel_1971_Nietzsche_la_
genealogie_l_histoire.pdf.
2. A synopsis of such “turns” that are viewed as substantial can be found
in Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den
Kulturwissenschaften, 5th ed. (Reinbek: Rowolt, 2014).
3. The quote originates from an interview with David Mancuso conducted by
Vince Aletti in 1975: Vince Aletti, “SoHo vs. Disco,” The Village Voice, June
16, 1975, p. 124.
4. “We dismantle abandoned bridges … An Interview with Martin Beck by
Christina von Rotenhan,” in Martin Beck: Summer Winter East West (Berlin:
Archive Books, 2015), p. 65.
5. Martin Beck, History and Love, Pleasure and Time, exh. booklet (Paris:
castillo/corrales, 2015), p. 5.
6. See the relevant passages in Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night
a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey (London: Headline, 1999);
Kai Fikentscher, “You Better Work!” Underground Dance Music in New York
City (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 2000);
Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music
Culture, 1970 –1979 (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003);
Bernard Lopez, “David Mancuso” (2003), accessed September 28, 2016, http://
www.discomusic.com/people-more/49_0_11_0_C/; Peter Shapiro, Turn the
Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (London: Faber and Faber, 2005);
Tim Lawrence, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 –1983
(Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2016).
7. See the artist book marked on the reverse as “Document,” Martin Beck: Last
Night (New York: White Columns, 2013).
8. See Richard Nixon, “A David Mancuso Interview,” Underground News,
issue 19, accessed September 28, 2016, http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/
threads/a-david-mancuso-interview.177215/.
9. The SME 3009 tone arm used is considered by insiders to be one of the
best models ever made. The phono cartridge (GAS Sleeping Beauty), which
was produced in the late seventies, is also a “vintage piece.” The Thorens
TD 125 MK II record player was famously used by Larry Levan at Paradise
Garage in New York City up until the venue closed in 1987. All of this can be
considered further evidence of Beck’s open references to historical artifacts.
10. Irrational numbers cannot be expressed as a ratio of integers. When written
as decimal numbers they do not terminate, or repeat.
11. See “We dismantle abandoned bridges …,” in Martin Beck: Summer Winter
East West, p. 62.
12. Ibid., p. 61.
13. Ibid., p. 62.
14. See the corresponding publications Martin Beck: About the Relative Size of
Things in the Universe (Utrecht: Casco—Office for Arts, Design and Theory,
and London: Four Corners Books, 2007) and The Aspen Complex, ed. Martin
Beck (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012).
15. A programmatic background text on this (as well as on many more of Beck’s
historically focused works) is provided by Beck’s essay “On Formatting
History (stored and exhibited),” in Julie Ault and Martin Beck, Critical
Condition: Ausgewählte Texte im Dialog (Essen: Kokerei Zollverein, 2003),
pp. 248 –66. Photographic documentation of storage (displayed) can be
found in ibid., pp. 32 ff.; see also Julie Ault and Martin Beck, “Exhibiting X:
Methods for an Open Form,” in ibid., pp. 377 ff.
36
16. “We dismantle abandoned bridges …,” in Martin Beck: Summer Winter
East West, p. 62.
17. This started with the “Prince Street Reels,” audio recordings of the party,
aired by the British Internet radio channel deepfrequency.com in thirteen
parts starting in October 2008 and partially recorded by some listeners.
These recordings formed the basis for later identification of the tracks.
18. As set out in the lecture “Last Night,” given by Beck on November 14, 2013,
at the Columbia University Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and
Preservation, New York City (unpublished), and in Beck, History and Love,
Pleasure and Time.
19. The display system reconstructed by Beck in 2005 exists as a sculpture
titled expandable, portable, viewable and as an assembly kit that can be
rented for exhibition purposes; see “We dismantle abandoned bridges …,”
in Martin Beck: Summer Winter East West, p. 66.
20. Ibid.
21. See Elena Crippa et al., Exhibition, Design, Participation: ‘an Exhibit’
1957 and Related Projects, Exhibition Histories series (London: Afterall
books, 2016).
22. See the publication an Exhibit viewed played populated (Frankfurt am
Main: Revolver, 2005), and Christian Höller, “Modernica Deserta,” in
ibid., pp. 25 ff.
23. Beck dedicated the artist book half modern, half something else to the
pre-2003 editions of Charles Jencks’s The Language of Post-Modern
Architecture (Martin Beck, half modern, half something else (Charles
Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, first, second, third,
fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh editions), Montage series (Vienna: Florian
Pumhösl, 2003). On aspects of authorship in Beck’s work, see Höller,
and Matthias Michalka, “Installationen,” in Julie Ault, Martin Beck:
Installation (Cologne: König, 2006), pp. 7 ff.
24. One example is the exhibition Why Pictures Now? at mumok, Vienna, in
2006, which did not feature Pitch.
25. See Critical Condition: Ausgewählte Texte im Dialog and the book pub-
lished on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition OUTDOOR SYSTEMS,
indoor distribution (Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, 2000).
26. See the publication Julie Ault and Martin Beck, Installation and the axially
interlocking modules presented therein in various exhibition views.
27. Martin Beck interviewed by Victoria Øye, “The particular way in which
a thing exists” (January 25, 2013), domus, accessed September 28, 2016,
http://www.domusweb.it/en/interviews/2013/01/25/the-particular-way-in-
which-a-thing-exists.html.
28. See the exhibition booklet June 14 –19, 1970, Gasworks, London, 2008, and
Peio Aguirre, “Conversation with Martin Beck” (February 2, 2010), accessed
September 28, 2016, http://www.rosab.net/en/the-aspen-design-conference-
1970/conversationwithmartin-beck.html?lang=fr.
29. “We dismantle abandoned bridges …,” in Martin Beck: Summer Winter
East West, p. 58.
30. Ibid.
31. See press release by 47 Canal for Presentation, accessed September 28, 2016,
http://47canal.us/mb1ex/mb1expr.pdf and the publications Martin Beck:
the particular way in which a thing exists, exh. cat, ed. Michèle Thériault
(Montreal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, 2013),
and Martin Beck: Summer Winter East West.
37
32. See Aguirre.
33. See, for example, the curatorial reflections by Michèle Thériault,
“Distillation, Condensation, and the Space of Production,” in Martin Beck:
the particular way in which a thing exists, pp. 29 ff., and Beck and Øye.
34. The work titled half modern, half something else (Michelangelo Antonioni,
“The Passenger,” MGM 1975, scene 4 [VHS version, photographic stills,
index]) (2001), augmented with a video component, was presented for the
first time in the exhibition Routes: Imaging Travel and Migration at the
Grazer Kunstverein in 2002.
35. See “We dismantle abandoned bridges …,” in Martin Beck: Summer Winter
East West, p. 58, and Beck’s analysis of the history of various exhibition
formats in his essay “Sovereignty and Control,” in Martin Beck: About the
Relative Size of Things in the Universe, pp. 44 ff.
36. See Martin Beck, “this time we’ll keep it a secret” (2012), Triple Canopy,
vol. 18 (April–July 2013), accessed September 28, 2016, https://www.canopy
canopycanopy.com/contents/this_time_we_ll_keep_it_a_secret, reprinted in
Martin Beck: the particular way in which a thing exists, pp. 185 ff.
37. Steve Baer, Dome Cookbook, (Corrales, NM: Lama Foundation, 1968), p. 4.
38. See Christian Höller, “Isolated, Scattered, Broken: Martin Beck’s
Engagement with US-American Commune Culture,” Camera Austria,
vol. 115 (2011), pp. 23 ff.
39. See Manuela Ammer, “A is about Longing, B is about Mourning,” in
Martin Beck: the particular way in which a thing exists, p. 153.
40. Albin Wagner [Peter Douthit], “Drop City: A Total Living Environment”
(1967), in Jesse Kornbluth (ed.), Notes from the New Underground: An
Anthology (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 254.
41. See Mancuso as quoted in the book Last Night and film Last Night as well
as Mancuso’s remarks in Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, pp. 87–88.
42. See Kornbluth and the numerous essays on communes therein; see also
Peter Douthit’s memoirs published under his “dropper name” Peter Rabbit,
Drop City (New York: Olympia Press, 1971) and John Curl, Memories of Drop
City: The First Hippie Commune of the 1960’s [sic] and the Summer of Love
(New York and Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2007), and in general, Timothy
Miller, “The Sixties-Era Communes,” in Peter Braunstein and Michael
William Doyle (eds.), Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the
1960s and ’70s (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 327 ff.
43. Beck and Øye; see Ammer, in Martin Beck: the particular way in which a
thing exists, pp. 148 – 49.
44. See Felicity D. Scott, “Dataland (and Its Ghosts): Aspen Proving Grounds,”
in The Aspen Complex, pp. 158 ff., and the extended version of this essay
in Scott, Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of
Counterinsurgency (New York: Zone Books, 2016), pp. 383 ff.
45. David Strauss, Strategy Notebook: Tools for Change ed. Catherine McEver
(San Francisco: Interaction Associates, 1972); see press release by
47 Canal for The thirty-six sets do not constitute a sequence, accessed
September 28, 2016, http://47canal.us/mb2ex/mb2expr.pdf.
46. working forwards is also the title of a collection of notes, sketches,
and material on a broad range of topics compiled by Beck; see the
lecture “An Organized System of Instructions,” held on April 14, 2016,
at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was part of the two-year exhibition
project Program.
•
© Artforum, December 2017, ”Best of 2017: Martin Beck,” by Branden Joseph.
Published by Bergen Kunsthall on authors. The essay «History and
the occasion of the exhibition: Love, Pleasure and Time» by Martin
Beck was originally published in
Last Night 2015 to accompany the exhibition
Martin Beck Approx. 13 Hours at castillo/corrales
in Paris. Reprinted here with the kind
Bergen Kunsthall permission of the author. Branden
26 January – 18 March, 2018 W. Joseph’s text, «Martin Beck» was
originally published in Artforum,
Martin Beck’s Last Night was first December 2017. Reprinted here with
shown at The Kitchen, New York, 22 the kind permission of the author
March – 25 March, 2017 and Artforum. Bergen Kunsthall
would also like to thank 47 Canal,
Texts the Kitchen, mumok, Kunsthaus
New commission: Tim Griffin Glarus, castillo/corrales, Galerie
Republished texts: Vince Aletti, Buchholz, and Artforum for sharing
Martin Beck, and Christian Höller documentation and facsimiles of
archived material.Printing
Editor Bergen Kunsthall
Steinar Sekkingstad
Copyright
Proof reading Catalogue C. Bergen Kunsthall, 2018
Bergen Kunsthall Texts C. the authors
Images C. the photographers
Design
Blank Blank ISBN 978-82-93101-38-3
Photo Rasmus Meyers Allé 5

Installation shots, Bergen Kunsthall: N-5015 Bergen, Norway
Thor Brødreskift. +47 55559310
Installation shots, Mumok: Hannes bergen@kunsthall.no
Böck. www.kunsthall.no
Installation shots, the Kitchen: Joerg
Lohse. In NO.5 Bergen Kunsthall revisits
Installation shots, Kunsthaus Glarus: and re-presents selected artworks
gallery and exhibitions, previously shown
elsewhere in the world. Initiated
Aknowledgements in response to the increasing
The essays «Ain’t No Stopping Us acceleration of both the production
Now» by Vince Aletti and «The Art and reception of art, NO.5
of Turning provides an opportunity to slow
. On Turning, Turning Over, and down and look again at particular
Forcefully Turning Loose» by works, exhibitions or fragments
Christian Höller were first published of exhibitions. Bergen Kunsthall
by museum moderner kunst commissions a new critical text
stiftung ludwig wien (mumok), in to accompany each of these re-
their exhibition catalog, «Martin presentations. The text will appear in
Beck. rumors and murmors», a publication series that is avalable
2017. Reprinted here with the kind online as a pdf and as a printed
permission of mumok and the copy in our bookshop.

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Video still from Last Night (detail), 2016

Last Night, 2016

Installation version for

Bergen Kunsthall, 2018

v7, January 6, 2017

wall D wall E wall F

acoustical tiles acoustical tiles

26. JANUAR – 18. MARS

prog2018-1_FINAL2.indd 18 27/12/2017 11:00

Martin Becks kunstverk tar ofte utgangspunkt i

I Last Night består det historiske materialet av en liste med 118

prog2018-1_FINAL2.indd 19 27/12/2017 11:00

prog2018-1_FINAL2.indd 20 27/12/2017 11:00

prog2018-1_FINAL2.indd 21 27/12/2017 11:00

13 Hour Screening: Martin Beck´s Last Night

1 Last Night, 2013; Last Night: Errata, vols. 1–3, 2014–17

2 Last Night, 2016

Espen Johansen <ej@kunsthall.no>

here the original invite from the 2014 PS1 event...

13 HOUR DANCE PARTY!

MARTIN BECK & FRIENDS

Invite you to a once-in-a-lifetime epic 13-hour dance party

Saturday September 27th / Noon – 1am

at: MoMA PS1 Print Shop / 22-01 Jackson Avenue

Records played by: Martin Beck & Friends

Change email address / Leave mailing list

Andy Beta scours New York—from a

Beats in Space Mix (Part 1) —

In the same way that images from

a degree of seeming familiarity

Within a year, I was in the city

It’s not your typical art book.

Across 118 pages typed up in

It took 13 hours to play through

also set low: “A recreation would

Beats in Space Mix (Part 2) —

Last Night’s 13-hour dance party

applauding after each unmixed

UN EXCELLENT WEEK- “Everytime i hear this a try to imagine a sweaty new

castillo/corrales today no.8: November 2014 – January 2015

2 In my art practice, one of the histories I have engaged by way of

3 This interest in communal forms started to extend into the seemingly

A painting by Martin Wong

12 November 2015 – 16 January 2016

Two paintings and three hand-lettered drawings by Martin Wong

Announcement Images Text

Last Night is a poetic construction—revisiting the records that, in mid 1984,

The film is to be shown as a projection in a black-box-type screening room,

frame 5 frame 6 frame 7 frame 8

frame 1 —> 10 shots 118 songs in 111 shots

shot # song # track name artist

1 1 Love Has Come Around Donald Byrd

shot on Friday, July 24, 2015

shot # song # track name artist

1 51 D Train Dub D Train

shot on Saturday, July 25, 2015

shot # song # song name artist

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Invite you to a once-in-a-lifetime epic 13-hour dance party 

To see the end, or what can be considered as such, as a new begin