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

Lou Mallozzi

Professor

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

How might an artist¿s practice change if they were to adapt it to a radically new context of presentation? Our touchstone is the work of musician Miles Davis (1926-1991), who made a radical shift from all-acoustic ¿cool¿ jazz to an electro-acoustic hybrid (later dubbed ¿fusion¿) in 1967. By examining the social, technological, and material contexts of this shift that exceed questions of ¿style,¿ we see similar crisis-point strategizing by other artists such as Philip Guston, Kara Walker, and David Hammons and we can interrogate our own practices in a shifting cultural environment that often pressures artists¿ identities.
Through readings, screenings, and dialogues with visiting artists and scholars, we will examine Miles Davis¿ career, and extend this to examining that of other artists in other contexts, such as Philip Guston, Kara Walker, David Hammons, and others from a wide range of media, disciplines, and perspectives.
Students will be asked to purposefully and radically shift their own practice (even momentarily) to a different format, medium, presentational platform or target audience while consciously and critically maintaining their core being. The outcome will be a publication and/or public presentation of new student work and research.

Class Number

2380

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

1898

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

1193

Credits

3