Post-Score
January 13 - February 19, 2023
Opening Reception January 16, 4pm

Gallery Talk February 15, 6pm
Closing Reception and Performances February 19, 2pm

Please join us for a public discussion and gallery talk with curators Heather Warren-Crow and Andrew Weathers, moderated by Natalie Hegert, on Wednesday, February 15, at 6pm.

CO-OPt will host a closing event on Sunday, February 19, beginning at 2pm, featuring durational performances by Llano Estacado Monad Band, Heather Warren-Crow, and Cody Arnall, and shorter pieces by Abbie Bugh and Jessica Lambert. The centerpiece of the event is LEMB's rendition of the entirety of Cornelius Cardew’s graphic score Treatise. Audiences are invited to come and go at any time between 2pm and 5pm.

Post-Score is a group show of graphic and text scores curated by CO-OPt members Heather Warren-Crow and Andrew Weathers. The show collects contributions from over 30 artists across media, from music and performance art to poetry and painting. Artists created new event scores on index cards and sent them as mail art through the USPS. Included work ranges from text instructions in the tradition of Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations to mutated traditional musical notation to drawings and performance texts, showcasing the breadth of the form.

Contributing artists include: Sarah Ruth Alexander, Emmerich Anklam, Brandon Blair, Christie Blizard, Christina Carter, Jordan Dykstra, Kevin Corcoran, Catherine Czacki, Venetia Dale, Rachel Devorah, Adam Farcus, Cait Finley, Assaf Gidron, Luke Gullickson, Justin Houser, Gretchen Jude, Jessica Lambert, Cheryl E. Leonard, Emy Martin, Mira Martin-Gray, tanner menard, David Menestres, Esther Neff, Manuel Passôa de Lima, Sidney Pink, Mallory Prucha, Erik Schoster, Ryan Seward, Sivan Silver-Swarz, Matt Smiley, Teodora Stepančić, Cassia Streb, Maya Weeks, Audra Wolowiec, and Cody Yantis. 

Post-Score opens on Monday January 16th at 4pm, with performances of contributed scores as well as classic graphic and text scores by Earle Brown and La Monte Young. CO-OPt will host a closing event on February 19th at 2pm that includes a performance by Llano Estacado Monad Band of the entirety of Cornelius Cardew’s graphic score Treatise.

Scores oscillate between a record of the past and a guide to the future. They document an event that already exists in some form, if sometimes only in the artist’s mind, and provide instructions on how a version of that event can be (re)enacted, if sometimes only in the reader’s mind. The score continually wedges itself, sometimes uncomfortably, in the sliver of space between the past and the future that we like to call the present. The word score comes from Old Norse and means to make an incision. A score is also twenty items, let’s say, sheep, their numbers marked with a line scratched into wood. A score can be settled, can register a debt. A score may be a work or only what you read to perform a work.

Composers of the 1950s and 60s turned to graphic and textual scores as an alternative to conventional music notation, which was accused of limiting the autonomy of performers by rudely telling them exactly what to do. Typical scores have also been blamed for being patriarchal: those sticks with notches transferred from father to eldest son upon death to mark a bequeathment of livestock the son is then required to tend in the most specific of ways. While the new form of notation is considered indeterminate—that is, open to chance and/or the creative decisions of performers who must decide how to interpret it without the encumbrance of tradition—there are scores that are so complex as to make the supposedly liberatory act of participation feel burdensome in itself. The event score came into being when participation was freedom from the constraints of capitalism intent on turning people into products; now, participation is required, and that oscillating gap between past and present is full of data that both records our past and determines our future actions. As always, we suppose, sometimes we want to be told what to do and sometimes we don’t, and sometimes we want people to know what we did and sometimes we want that to go unnoted. Performing an open score with an ensemble sometimes requires first figuring out together how to translate a document into a shared language, then realizing we don’t speak the same language to begin with, then collectively making up our own alien glossary. When you watch a performance of a score you are always watching people read, whether the score is a diagram or a paragraph, a jagged line made by a child (see Venetia Dale’s contribution) or page 1 of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves with words removed (Audra Wolowiec).

Fluxus artists of the 1960s, some moving between music, poetry, and performance art, used textual scores as part of an artistic practice that embraced pedestrian activities as performances easily imagined and, sometimes, performed. Everyday folks might not be able to play the French horn or do an arabesque, but they could drip water into a bowl. All sound is music. Vice versa. All movement is dance. The stamps put on mail by the United States Postal Service can be made otherwise meaningful. Other scores are deliberately impossible to realize and must exist only in the imagination of the readers, as if to prepare us for the loss of the gold standard in 1971.

Our exhibition of scores is a public exhibition of things and a private exhibition of sweet no things, phantoms, heard in the mind’s ear by an audience of one. All scores are read. All reading takes place in time. When time meets action, we have an event. An event score is both an obligation and an invitation.

Feel free to handle the scores.

 About the curators:
Heather Warren-Crow is an artist and filmmaker based in Lubbock, Texas. Her work across performance art, video art, and experimental film foregrounds the voice and plays with sound-image relations. She has exhibited in galleries and in performance spaces, on screens and on stages, in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, India, Japan, Mexico, Tanzania, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, and across Europe and the United States. Recent exhibitions include the Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe, CAM Perennial in San Antonio, the International Kansk Video Festival in Siberia, and the New York City Independent Film Festival. Her video reCAPTCHA was given the Best Experimental Film Award from the 2021 San Francisco Shorts Film Festival and Best Experimental Micro-Film Award from the 2021 Oregon Documentary Film Festival. Her event scores and performance texts have been published in exhibition catalogs and academic journals and performed by students at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and Texas Tech University.

Andrew Weathers (b.1988) is a composer and improviser originally from Chapel Hill, NC and currently based in Littlefield, TX. His work engages with notions of place, tradition, repetition, and spirit, splitting the difference between folk music and Land Art. Weathers studied composition at UNC-Greensboro and electronic music at Mills College in Oakland, CA.

A consistent presence in the underground music scene over the past decade, Weathers’ work covers a wide spectrum from solo acoustic guitar to electronic noise. He also performs and records regularly with Tethers, Tender Crust, Wind Tide, Satin Spar, Tamarisk, Llano Estacado Monad Band, and Real Life Rock & Roll Band. Weathers also produces recordings for the Full Spectrum and Other Minds record labels, curates the Longitudes music series at CO-OPt Research + Projects in Lubbock, TX and works as a freelance mixing and mastering engineer.