A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.

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Lou Mallozzi

Professor

Contact

Bio

BFA, 1978, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibitions: Sector 2337 Chicago; Portland Art Center; Chicago Cultural Center; Diapason, Brooklyn; Fort Wayne Museum of Art; Indiana University Bloomington; Donald Young Gallery Chicago. Performances: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Arts Club Chicago; Ausland, Berlin; FRAC-Bretagne, Rennes, France; Radiorevolten Festival, Halle, Germany; Fylkingen, Stockholm; TUBE Audio Art Series, Munich; Podewil, Berlin; Renaissance Society, Chicago; Subtropics Experimental Music Festival, Miami. Curating and Organizing: "Sexing Sound: Gender Sound Music," 2015, Goethe-Institut, Chicago; "Sound Art Theories Symposium," 2011, SAIC; "Outer Ear Festival of Sound," 2000–2009, Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago. Publications: Leonardo Music Journal; The Drama Review; Experimental Sound and Radio, ed. by Allen S. Weiss (MIT Press); Sound Generation, ed. by Alexis Bhagat and Greg Gangemi (Autonomedia). Bibliography: New City; High Performance; The Wire; Signal to Noise; Paris Transatlantic. Awards: Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center; Emily Harvey Foundation Venice, Italy; Chicago-Lucerne Sister Cities; Harvestworks New York; Illinois Arts Council Fellowship.

Experience at SAIC

I have been teaching at SAIC since 1985. Since then, the school has evolved into an increasingly humane and rigorous educational environment. This evolution continues, since SAIC is an institution fundamentally built on inclusiveness, self-criticism, honest re-evaluation, and thoughtful experimentation.

Personal Statement

Though varying in form, complexity, and presentational context, my work as a whole focuses on efforts to dismantle and reconstitute sound, image, language, gesture, and signification in order to expose and explore the unstable relationships among perception, mediation, ideology, power and image. My artistic practice includes performances, drawing, installations, fixed media, improvised music, and sound design for cinema. I draw on the range of contexts and relationships between research, idea, collaboration, intuition, materials, and making that I explore in this multidisciplinary practice in order to inform how I develop course content and teach particular subjects. In my teaching, I seek to create an atmosphere of mutual respect for and among students that is encouraging and challenging. I connect material, technique, strategy, and theory to emphasize the fact that meaning and making are inextricably bound together in any informed artistic practice.

Current Interests

Body, impediment, duration, over-determination, redundancy, and site. Navigating the acousmatic gap, seesawing between seeing and saying. Exploring interference patterns between enacting and representing. A non-futuristic collision of past and present, passage and presentation. Microphony and its discontents. Technology as a prosthetic enactment of will or desire. Sounds sounding and voices voicing.

 

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This 3-credit graduate seminar provides a framework for developing an exhibition at the Czok Foundation in Venice, Italy, by inviting graduate students from studio arts, design practices, art history, curatorial practices, arts administration, and other programs to work collaboratively and intensely. The artwork, curatorial approach, exhibition design, and accompanying texts and online materials will all be created during the seminar. Enrolled students are encouraged to commit to both the 15-week fall 2025 seminar and a 3-week study trip in Venice in winter interim 2025-26 to install and present the exhibition on site.
We will read and discuss texts on the history and theory of curating; the history of Venice, in particular its relation to art making and exhibiting (Biennale) and an expanded critical exploration of its ¿international¿ status vis-a-vis globalization, commerce, and colonialism; strategies for communal production; and the relationship between institutional settings and artistic practice. Depending on the interests of the students, we will add more reading material whenever useful. Preliminary reading list of texts on Venice: Cristina Baldacci, et.al (eds.), Venice and the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Guide (Max Planck Institute, Berlin, 2023). Caroline Jones, ¿Biennial Culture¿, in The Biennial, ed. Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, Solveig Øvstebo (Ostfildern: Hatje/Cantz, 2010), 66-87. Paul Kaplan and Shaul Bassi, eds, African Venice: A Guide to Art, Culture, and People (Wetlands, Venice, 2024). Giulia Foscari, Elements of Venice (Lars Müller Editions, 2014).
The participating students will create all of the content and the curatorial approach from their own practices. This may be a combination of individual, small group, or complete class contributions. If participating in the Venice study trip, they will work collaboratively on all aspects of the exhibition, its programming, its interface with the public, and its assessment.

Class Number

2276

Credits

3

Description

This course is meant to provide an informal critical backdrop for those working within the broad range of art and technology. Students meet once a week to present and discuss their work. The faculty leader facilitates the dialog, which is designed to aid students to formulate their ideas and articulate a critique of their own work as well as that of their peers.

Class Number

2006

Credits

3

Description

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the use of the human voice in performance, sound art, text-based work, social practice, installation, etc. The root of our investigation is the voice as human utterance and material encounter, both live and mediated. We shall interrogate and experiment with the interaction of the voice¿s semiotic and acoustic aspects, its potential to unite and rupture, and the aesthetic, situational, technological, gendered, racial, political, historical, and social aspects of text, language, voice, expression, and communication. Critiques of student work are supplemented by readings and screenings of works by artists, writers, historians, theorists, and linguists.

Works by artists, writers, historians, theorists, and linguists include Sarah Hennies, Christine Sun Kim, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Mendi and Keith Obadike, Alessandro Bosetti, Norie Neumark, Clarice Lispector, The Last Poets, Jeanne Favret-Saada, Roland Barthes, Jaap Blonk, Pamela Z, Mladen Dolar, Douglas Kahn, Sarah Nooter, Frances Dyson, Gregory Whitehead, Daniela Cascella, F. T. Marinetti, Timothy Donaldson, Alfred Wohlfson, and others.

All speech acts and vocalizations -- and the way those are listened to by others -- carry with them a panoply of cultural, gendered, historical and political implications, overtly or covertly. Thus, the topic is inherently one that embraces discourse on diversity, inclusion, identity, and power relations.

Class Number

2007

Credits

3

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

2301

Credits

3 - 6