Held monthly each June, July, and August, Friday Flights invites artists to respond to the Getty’s unique architecture and gardens, and forge new connections to the collections and exhibitions through music, performance, film, and other creative interventions.
Each Friday Flights features a notable visual artist and musicians collaborating across disciplines to create site-specific performances. This summer, Friday Flights focuses on identity, addressing gender, race, nationality, and institutions.
In addition to headliners, other musical music performances and pop-up installations activate unique areas of the site, making the Museum’s courtyard an interpretive space, where artists are encouraged to push themselves, and the Getty, out of their comfort zones.
The 2017 season kicks off June 16 with a collaboration between visual artist Brendan Fernandes and musician How To Dress Well for Free Fall 49, a dance, sculptural installation, and performance wherein dancers fall 49 times, once for every victim of the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida on June 12, 2016. Free Fall 49 engages the falling body as a metaphor for queer politics in an attempt to understand brutality and offer sanctuary. It acts as a memorial to the targeted men and women at Pulse, whose appearance and culture were at a charged intersection of race, gender, and sexual orientation. They are remembered one year later, as bodies of difference remain war zones between political control and freedom of expression. Here the metaphor of falling includes the perseverance of getting back up, and defiance in the face of perceived defeat.
Also, on June 16, William Tyler and Noveller, two extraordinary solo guitarists who draw from radically different ends of the musical spectrum, collaborate for a unique performance, and musician Sam Rowell creates an immersive light and sound installation among the flowers of the Central Garden that transitions from day to night.
Up next, on July 14, artist Molly Surno presents We of Me, a performance featuring musician Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, wherein 20 men perform a choreographed soundscape using hand-crafted musical hairbrushes. The meditative, repetitive, layered composition explores gestures associated with the intimacy and ritual act of grooming, conflating private, public, and gendered worlds. Recalling La Monte Young’s projects Dream House, as well as sound baths held in Edward Van Tassel’s Integratron structure, this performance utilizes the physical and emotional effects of sound to merge the performers and onlookers into a collective experience.
July 14 will also include Sun Araw, the experimental psychedelic musical project of Los Angeles-based artist Cameron Stallones, and the Institute for New Feeling, an artist collective that describes itself as “a research clinic committed to the development of new ways of feeling, and ways of feeling new”.
The season ends on August 25 with artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s riveting presentation of Exploring the Nowannago: Kentifrican Modes of Resistance, featuring Tyler Matthew Oyer. In this provocative performance, Hinkle creates a tension with a double-noose tug-of-war as a part of her ongoing artistic navigation of the “Historical Present”. Performed for the first time with live-music accompaniment by The Kevin Robinson Ensemble (KREation), Hinkle’s performance abstractly confronts a multi-faceted set of contemporary issues and grapples with the residue of history.
Also, on August 25, Los Angeles-based visual artist and composer, Scott Benzel, whose analytical and often sound-driven work has been shown or performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum Of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and The Hammer’s Made in LA biennial in 2012, among many others, will present a new sound-based performance work. The series will be closed out by a rare performance by the hypnotic, New York psych-rock band Psychic Ills, of the cult-followed record label Sacred Bones.
All events are free and take place at the Getty Center from 6:00–9:00pm, No tickets or reservations required. Parking at the Getty Center is $15, reduced to $10 after 3:00pm