Jasper Marsalis: Einschub

For his first institutional exhibition in the United States, Jasper Marsalis (b. 1995) transforms the lower-level galleries of the Aspen Art Museum into a responsive audio-visual environment in which the viewer is both a subject and a participant. Creating an immersive assemblage, Marsalis combines the infrastructure of live events, including a stage affixed with contact microphones, spotlights, a camera, and a screen, with new works including paintings, sculptures and the growing rhizome of a potato plant. The exhibition unfolds as a site for performance where visitors play a crucial role in generating new images and sounds, and extend their limits of perception. 

Marsalis, who lives between Los Angeles and London, instigates links between acts of artmaking and communal acts of spectacle, questioning the role and power of an audience. In the galleries, Marsalis gives form to both vigilant and despondent acts of observation, depicting spotlights, stages, cinemas, and abstracted body parts in oil paintings. Mirrored, shiny materials, from disco ball tiles to found scraps of foil reflect a crude impression of the viewer as they encounter the work. A pair of sculptures fashioned from bowling balls and tree branches provide a rudimentary diagram of sight: a readymade eyeball with a materialized gaze erupting outward. Their sinuous wooden legs invoke both alien spacecrafts and the basic tripods that appear across the exhibition as both art and technical supports. Together, these artworks sketch a skeletal network of tools for entertainment. 

In this show, Marsalis implicates his audience with sly, slapstick tactics, amplifying their motion through the gallery with embedded microphones and cameras that are programmed to transmit close-ups of faces to LED screens. Building upon performances and sculptures from the 1970s by American conceptual artists Dan Graham and Vito Acconci, in which cameras were used to blur boundaries between the observers and the observed, Marsalis approaches these devices as mechanisms of sensory expansion. Made louder and duplicated, the viewer becomes an estranged version of themselves within Marsalis’ circuits of sight and sound. 

The exhibition’s title, Einschub, references a scoring technique by 20th century German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in which a composition is interrupted by a musical insertion that breaks with its formal governing structures. Marsalis posits that the exhibition itself, a carving out of space and time for contemplation, is an einschub. In this gallery-cum-arena, objects are people and people are objects, all navigating systems of display and capture.

Marsalis performs music using under the name Slauson Malone 1, and has performed at the Park Avenue Armory, New York; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and Bourse de Commerce, Paris. An intimate series of musical performances by guests invited by Marsalis will unfold in Aspen on the closing weekend of the exhibition.