Jenny Schlenzka

There Will Never Be Silence pays homage to both John Cage and the MoMA exhibition There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage's 4'33" (2013–14) in a uniquely designed edition of 500. In a 1954 letter that Cage wrote regarding his so-called "silent piece" 4'33" (1952), he stated "the piece is not actually silent (there will never be silence…)." Sixty years after Cage's letter, the debut album from the newly created MoMA/MoMA PS1 Records reconsiders silence, the lack of silence and the status of recorded sound. Organized by David Platzker, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, MoMA, and Jenny Schlenzka, Associate Curator, MoMA PS1, the double LP features four compositions presented as artistic answers to Cage by artists Kevin Beasley, Lizzi Bougatsos, Sabisha Friedberg and Yasunao Tone. Their works shed light on how far Cage's ideas about sound have progressed in diverging directions.

Political, Minimal surveys works of art from the past 40 years that use a strongly reduced, geometrical formal vocabulary, but which nonethless manage to retain slim narrative clues, through a repertoire of shapes such as circles, pyramids, balls and cubes. From these most minimal of cues, these versatile artists are able to address subjects that range from ecological observations to body politics, from social and economical matters to ethical questions. Locating an imaginative mid-ground between the "purified" rhetoric of Minimalism and more politicized forms of art, among the artists contributing to this fascinating conceit are Adel Abdessemed, Monica Bonvicini, Tom Burr, Annabel Daou, Edith Dekyndt, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Hans Haacke, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Alfredo Jaar, Derek Jarman, Terence Koh, Klara Liden, Kris Martin, Helen Mirra, Seth Price, Gregor Schneider, Santiago Sierra, Taryn Simon, Rosemarie Trockel and Aaron Young.