Kit Fitzgerald
1953, Springfield (United States)
Lives and works in New York (United States)
John Sanborn
1954, Huntington (United States)
Lives and works in New York (United States)
Ear to the Ground, 1981-1982
Umatic 3/4 inch NTSC videotape, digitized
4:3, color, sound
4 min. 50 sec.
Purchase, 1985
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Musée national d’art moderne - Centre de création industrielle (Mnam-CCI)
AM 1985-441
Kit Fitzgerald and John Sanborn belong to a generation of video art pioneers on the New York scene in the 1970s, who were attracted to the South Korean artist Nam June Paik. Inspired by Paik’s hybridisation and anti-art stance, these two American artists developed their own work while also engaging in dialogue with choreographers and musicians to forge new links between different art forms.
Between 1976 and 1982, Fitzgerald and Sanborn worked as a team to explore the relationships between music, performance and video-editing techniques in the New York underground networks of the time. In Ear to the Ground, the duo filmed experimental percussionist David Van Tieghem – whom Sanborn had met on an evening at the Kitchen, a renowned alternative programming space dedicated to performance and video – on the streets of New York.
Armed with two drumsticks, Van Tieghem brought a new rhythm to the streets of Soho and Tribeca, giving a sonic function to the urban objects he encountered: pavements, walls, pipes, iron curtains, telephone boxes and asphalt. This entirely improvised performance adopted the principles of European musique concrète, focusing on the ordinary sounds of the city rather than those produced by more conventional instruments. The work asserts its lightness as an ephemeral gesture, ultimately restoring its own sonorities to the city.