Blank Forms is a

not-for-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

arts organization based in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. It was founded by Lawrence Kumpf in 2016 as a platform for the preservation and presentation of experimental and time-based performance practices. Blank Forms frequently works with individual artists on a long-term basis in order to create "in-depth public programs and educational materials that provide a range of perspectives on inherently ephemeral practices." In 2017, the organization established Blank Forms Editions, a platform for disseminating texts and recordings related to their programming through anthologies, books, and audio releases. Blank Forms has additionally organized exhibitions by

Catherine Christer Hennix Catherine Christer Hennix (also known as C.C. Hennix, born 1948) is a Swedish musician, poet, philosopher, mathematician and visual artist. As a musician, she has worked with figures such as Pandit Pran Nath, La Monte Young, and Henry Flynt. Se ...

Loren Connors Loren Mazzacane Connors (born October 22, 1949) is an American guitarist who has recorded and performed under several different names: Guitar Roberts, Loren Mazzacane, Loren Mattei, and currently Loren Connors. His music has touched on many genres ...

, Henning Christiansen, and Graham Lambkin. Although Blank Forms presents events on a largely nomadic basis through partnerships with a variety of spaces, in 2020 the organization opened their own exhibition space in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

's Clinton Hill neighborhood.

The Maryanne Amacher Foundation

Blank Forms was inaugurated on March 4, 2016 with Labyrinth Gives Way To Skin, the first of a series of seminars and listening sessions presented in collaboration with The Maryanne Amacher Archive to investigate the work of the late sound artist

Maryanne Amacher Maryanne Amacher (February 25, 1938 – October 22, 2009) was an American composer and installation artist. She is known for working extensively with a family of psychoacoustic phenomena called auditory distortion products (also known as dist ...

. Seminars, listening sessions, and concerts of Amacher's work by Blank Forms have taken place at

Redcat Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT) is an interdisciplinary contemporary arts center for innovative visual, performing and media arts in downtown Los Angeles, located inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. Opened in November 2003 ...

Artists Space Artists Space is a non-profit art gallery and arts organization first established at 155 Wooster Street in Soho, New York City. Founded in 1972 by Irving Sandler and Trudie Grace and funded by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Artist ...

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

The Kitchen The Kitchen is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary avant-garde performance and experimental art institution located at 512 West 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It was founde ...

, St. Peter's Episcopal Church,

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

, the Emily Harvey Foundation, and Holy Apostles and the Mediator. In 2020, Blank Forms established the Maryanne Amacher Foundation and donated the composer's archives to the

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, at 40 Lincoln Center Plaza, is located in Manhattan, New York City, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on the Upper West Side, between the Metro ...

for use by researchers and artists.

Notable Projects

In 2018, Blank Forms began the ongoing project of preserving and promoting the work of Swedish polymath and

minimal music Minimal music (also called minimalism)"Minimalism in music has been defined as an aesthetic, a style, and a technique, each of which has been a suitable description of the term at certain points in the development of minimal music. However, two o ...

composer

. That year, Blank Forms co-curated two exhibitions of her artwork—''Traversée du Fantasme'' at the

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (; Municipal Museum Amsterdam), colloquially known as the Stedelijk, is a museum for modern art, contemporary art, and design located in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

and ''Thresholds of Perception'' at Empty Gallery in Hong Kong—and released ''Selected Early Keyboard Works'', the first volume in their series of archival releases of her unheard music. Subsequent volumes have included ''The Deontic Miracle: Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku'' and ''Unbegrenzt''. In 2019, Blank Forms anthologized Hennix's writing in the two-volume set ''Poësy Matters'' & ''Other Matters''. In 2019, Blank Forms announced Intermediate States, a series of listening sessions, installations, and performances of the work of the French composer

Éliane Radigue Éliane Radigue (born January 24, 1932) is a French electronic music composer. She began working in the 1950s and her first compositions were presented in the late 1960s. Until 2000 her work was almost exclusively created with the ARP 2500 modul ...

. The ongoing program has included diffusions of Radigue's tape works ''Trilogie de la mort'', ''Adnos I-III'', ''Chry-ptus'', and ''Vice-Versa, etc...'' in addition to touring performances of her instrumental composition ''Occam Ocean''.

Exhibitions

In 2018, Blank Forms co-curated ''Traversée du Fantasme'',

's first solo museum exhibition since 1976, at the

. Later that year, Blank Forms occupied

's former space at 55 Walker St. in

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

’s

Tribeca Tribeca (), originally written as TriBeCa, is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Its name is a syllabic abbreviation of "Triangle Below Canal Street". The "triangle" (more accurately a quadrilateral) is bounded by Canal Stre ...

neighborhood for two art exhibitions with accompanying performance programs. ''Wildweeds'',

' first solo art show, was supplemented with performances by the guitarist as well as by

Charalambides Charalambides is an avant garde musical group originally from Houston, Texas, United States and lately of Austin, Texas. Formed in 1991 (under the short-lived name Mutual Admiration Society) by Tom Carter, Christina Carter and Kyle Silfer, they ...

. ''Freedom Is Around the Corner'' was the first retrospective of Danish

Fluxus Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus ...

artist Henning Christiansen's work in America, with sculpture, painting, video, sound works, objects, works on paper, self-published magazines, and other work shown. The exhibition also included the presentation of performances by Werner Durand, Mark Harwood,

Ute Wassermann Ute Wassermann (born 1960) is a German vocalist, composer and sound artist. Biography Ute Wassermann studied fine arts focusing on sound installations and performance at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg. Among her teachers were Hennin ...

, Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen, Lucy Railton, James Rushford, Stíne Janvin, Graham Lambkin, Áine O’Dwyer,

Lau Nau Lau Nau or Laura Naukkarinen (born 1980) is a composer, producer and musician from Finland. She plays also under the moniker Subatlantti, in IAX, a band formed with Kuupuu and Tsembla and is a visiting member of The Matti Bye Ensemble. She w ...

, and Apartment House, in addition to a screening of films by

Ursula Reuter Christiansen Ursula Reuter Christiansen (born 13 February 1943 in Trier, Germany) created work, whether it was painting or filmmaking, that showed examples of mythological symbolism. Biography Ursula Reuter Christiansen studied literature at the Philipp Univer ...

Anthology Film Archives Anthology Film Archives is an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent, experimental, and avant-garde cinema.Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

's Clinton Hill neighborhood. That winter, they presented ''Time Runs Through the Darkest Hour'', an exhibition of drawings, mixed-media works on paper, and a sound piece by Graham Lambkin.

Blank Forms Editions

In 2017, Blank Forms began publishing an anthology in book form, consisting of interviews, essays, poetry, newly-translated texts, and artwork and envisioned as "a platform for critical reflection and extended dialogue between scholars, artists, and other figures working within the world of experimental music and art." That same year, they released a cassette by

Charlemagne Palestine Chaim Moshe Tzadik Palestine (born 1947), known professionally as Charlemagne Palestine, is an American visual artist and musician. He has been described as being one of the founders of New York school of minimalist music, first initiated by La ...

, inaugurating the record label branch of Blank Forms Editions. The label has also released music by

, Hairbone,

, Graham Lambkin &

Joe McPhee Joe McPhee (born November 3, 1939) is an American jazz multi-instrumentalist born in Miami, Florida, a player of tenor, alto, and soprano saxophone, the trumpet, flugelhorn and valve trombone. McPhee grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, and is ...

Masayuki Takayanagi was a Japanese jazz / free improvisation / noise musician. He was active in the Japanese jazz scene from the late 1950s. In the 1960s he formed New Directions (later New Direction Unit), which recorded several albums throughout the 1970s. He also ...

New Direction Unit,

Patty Waters Patty Waters (born March 11, 1946) is a jazz vocalist best known for her free jazz recordings in the 1960s for the ESP-Disk label. Career Waters was born in Iowa and started singing semi-professionally in high school. After school, she sang for t ...

, and Afuma. In 2019, they expanded their publishing wing by publishing three single-author books, by

, and

Joseph Jarman Joseph Jarman (September 14, 1937 – January 9, 2019) was an American jazz musician, composer, poet, and Shinshu Buddhist priest. He was one of the first members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and a member of the ...

. In 2020, they announced the publication of a book of selected writings and interviews by

and a collection of poetry about music by

Thulani Davis Thulani Davis (born 1949) is an American playwright, journalist, librettist, novelist, poet, and screenwriter. She is a graduate of Barnard College and attended graduate school at both the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. In ...

. In 2021, Blank Forms Editions published

Alan Licht Alan Licht (born June 6, 1968) is an American guitarist and composer, whose work combines elements of pop, noise, free jazz and minimalism. He is also a writer and journalist. Biography Licht was born in New Jersey in 1968. His earliest mus ...

's book ''Common Tones: Selected Interviews with Artists and Musicians 1995-2020''.

Artists

Some of the artists with which Blank Forms has sustained extended relationships include: * Afuma * Onyx Ashanti *

* Henning Christiansen *

* Mark Ernestus' Ndagga Rhythm Force *

* Graham Lambkin *

Okkyung Lee Okkyung Lee (born 1975 in Daejeon, South Korea) is a South Korean cellist, improviser, and composer. Lee moved to Boston in 1993, where she received a dual bachelor's degree in Contemporary Writing and Production and Film Scoring (Berklee Colle ...

Áine O'Dwyer Áine O'Dwyer is an Irish experimental musician, known for her live performances and recordings, which explore the aesthetics of sound and its relationship to environment, time, audience, and structure. Originally from Pallasgreen, County Limer ...

* The

Sun Ra Le Sony'r Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, May 22, 1914 – May 30, 1993), better known as Sun Ra, was an American jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, and poet known for his experimental music, "cosmic" philosophy, prolific out ...

Arkestra *

Marianne Schroeder Marianne Schroeder (born 1949 in Reiden) is a Swiss pianist and composer. She studied with Giacinto Scelsi. She played at Carnegie Hall, Lucerne Festival and Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. She worked with John Cage and Shigeru Kan-no. She ...

* Akio Suzuki *

New Direction Unit *

* Yarn/Wire

References

{{Authority control Arts organizations based in New York City Art museums and galleries in Brooklyn