The Maryanne Amacher Archive

Maryanne Amacher’s ‘Thinking of Stockhausen’ (published in Artforum in 2008) is her only known statement on the posthumous life of an artist’s work. Far from any standard model of canonisation, Amacher writes:

Imagine what it was to encounter Stockhausen’s supreme energy to discover, to explore entirely new ways of presenting music, to delve into the interacting energy of the spectrum itself, and listen into the inner life of sounds themselves! [...] Imagine the Character K.S. appearing as a fully animated 3-dimensional presence in your room in a few years, emerging from a VR display...[w]alking out of the screen into your room, emitting his radiant energy sometimes in great strides, often flying in different trajectories while interacting with celestial images visible in his crown, or settling nearby beside you. K.S. emanates sonic imaging in subtle myriad dimensions due to the sensorial depth embodied in his enhanced auditory/visual perceptions.

Since its inception after Amacher’s death in 2009, The Maryanne Amacher Archive has taken up this stance as a challenge to formulate a posthumous structure for Amacher’s own work as radical as the works themselves. Amacher’s lifelong pursuit of material intelligence, of a practice of ‘listening mind’, stands in timely contradistinction to many of the prevalent dichotomies that populate contemporary sonic discourse. Locating listening in the nexus of body, mind, and history – in a listening subject’s encounter with a world – Amacher’s practice continually pursued a fugitive rigour which staged the emergent encounter of emergent subjects and objects. Situations in which ‘labyrinth gives way to skin’. Understanding Amacher’s work as a body of living thought provides the current archival initiative with a mission in essential proximity to forms of pedagogy and interpretation as an extension of Amacher’s own investigative methodology, now reflexively mapped back onto her own materials. Robert The and Bill Dietz present the work and vision of the Archive thus far (including audiovisual glimpses into rarely seen, unpublished materials), and their plans for the Archive’s future.