Sound art for the blind. Tao Wells - solo - review

It's pretentious, it doesn't sound like it has a soul. It expects us to wait around for it, like we are working for it, then it fucks around and maybe sometimes almost kind of finds something, but it can't really deliver and in this off skilterness you do have some success in finding a balanced mélange. It is this incredible lack of range that the music suddenly becomes interesting, as the sound you hear is a sculpture made with hands with fingers and these fingers are prodding you where you can imagine them. Normally a pianists fingers are a flutter of abstract blurrings, not with Wells, Wells moves with the weight and assurance of an ordinary hand upon the physical body of the piano. Tao takes the piano and plays it, pounds it into a truce of equal submission and carefully negotiated domination, with a emotional complexity and intellectual maturity oft missing in contemporary avant garde piano performing. It's interesting to note the Wells before this foray into the foam arts, was recently written about in Spinoff as the maker of one the top ten art works of the last last ten. He's a Social media guru with thousands of followers, a old school blogger with a thousand a month hits held steady for ten years. He knows what it's like playing to a captured audience, a court, a closed society of the arcane culture makers, and their particular very real demands of ritual seduction and rounds of humiliation. Wells never tried to hide this aspect of the professional artist, the sleaze of dealings between public universities and the propped up careers of NZ's leading artists. The miscarriage of justice that that is. The immediate damage such behavior is causing as our leading artists are bought to keep their silence, to not say that they are working for the democratic state on maintaining the standards of democracy. Instead they are silent about their role and salary, instead they lie and create the impression that they are aloof, financially independent market driven successful artists independent, independent not bank rolled, by the state. Not given money to teach, do research for your business being an artist, we the people invest, but to see this happen not for it to be a secret, for everyone to see the strength of our democratic system by our very ability to appreciate our own propaganda and the pleasure that comes from consuming ones culture. Always a dangerous performance, why we keep coming back, and why it is also a war, held in forms more friendly than bullets. At this point, I realize that I've completely given up on completing this interview. That I was naked and ready to give up my life before to be with this man in whatever form he can take me.
-tw

review: Sound art for the blind. Charlie One Note: Tao Wells - solo