Terry Adkins Behearer 2004

Combining an interest in music and sound with a grounding in materiality and found objects, Terry Adkins’s works move seamlessly between the realms of performance, music, and sculpture. His multimedia performances employed unique, handmade instruments to explore different histories through sound and staging. Through both his sculptures and time-based work, he gave form to narrative and music, imbuing physical objects with the ephemeral quality of experience and sound. Composed of the brass-colored bells of two tubas connected by woven industrial tubing, Adkins’s wall-hung sculpture Behearer exemplifies the central concerns and methodologies of his practice. The title references a 1973 jazz album by Dewey Redman and a play on the word “beholder” that substitutes sound for sight. The piece was created as part of a larger project exploring Ludwig van Beethoven’s loss of hearing as well as the possibility of the composer’s Moorish roots. Through its materials and form, Behearer evokes music even in its inert state––allowing viewers to imagine, or “hear,” the sound it would produce in their minds, much as Beethoven would have done while composing.

Identification

Title

Behearer

Production Date

2004

Object Number

2015.2

Credit Line

Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds provided by Jorge M. Pérez, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and PAMM Ambassadors for Black Art

https://www.pamm.org/en/artwork/2015.2

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Physical Qualities

Medium

Steel and brass

Dimensions

60 x 37 x 22 inches

Visual Description

Behearer by Terry Adkins is a sculpture made of steel and brass. Its physical volume measures sixty inches tall, thirty-seven inches wide, and twenty-two inches deep. This is roughly equal to five feet in height, three feet in width, and two feet in depth. This sculpture hangs suspended on a gallery wall, with its longer dimension aligned vertically, like a portrait style painting. Adkin’s sculpture resembles in large part many brass musical instruments. It is made up of two large, circular tuba bells, which are the circular metal openings of brass instruments like tubas, trumpets, and trombones. These two bells are placed side by side, and face outward in opposite directions. One bell faces left and the other right, their outside rims nearly touching. The two bells are connected by a steel tube. This tube has the circumference of an arm, and travels along the gallery wall. The tube is at least seven feet long, and curves gently upward, over, and back down as it connects both the left and right brass bells. The tube looks like it is made of a woven metal fabric, with strands of steel interlaced on each other like the warp and weft of a piece of fabric. Behearer is made of polished metal, but with signs of weathering. The metal has a scuffed patina in places as well as some spots of verdigris. These are areas of the brass bells where some of the metal has corroded and turned green due to this weathering process.

Terry Adkins

Terry Adkins — b. 1953, Washington, D.C.; d. 2014, New York
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