Simultaneous Soloists

Simultaneous Soloists is an artist’s book emerging from the exhibition Anthony McCall: Solid Light Works and its accompanying performance series Four Simultaneous Soloists, organized by David Grubbs. It documents these ephemeral events through multiple means: an extensive conversation between McCall and Grubbs detailing a decade of working together, interviews with sixteen participating musicians, writings by art historians Branden W. Joseph and Swagato Chakravorty, and visual materials ranging from McCall’s drawings and archival materials to photographs of the exhibition including images sourced from social media. The “simultaneous soloists” of the title variously refers to a grouping of McCall’s sculptural volumes of light, to gatherings of improvising musicians, and to McCall and Grubbs themselves—sympathetic artistic sensibilities proceeding in suggestively parallel practices.

Simultaneous Soloists considers from a plurality of perspectives the challenge of combining McCall’s visual art with sound in live performance. It is unique among books about visual art, sound art, and experimental music in describing a conceptually linked set of performances within an exhibition through so extensive an oral history. Interview subjects include Susan Alcorn, MV Carbon, Maria Chavez, Che Chen, Jules Gimbrone, David Grubbs, Sarah Hennies, Eli Keszler, Okkyung Lee, Miya Masaoka, Christopher McIntyre, Tomeka Reid, Ben Vida, Yoshi Wada, Nate Wooley, and C. Spencer Yeh.