Manifestos 4 by Charles Gaines

This set includes 3 vinyl records, 1 CD, and an exclusive 24”x 24” poster.

Artist Charles Gaines transforms the original text of the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred and Harriet Scott historic decision, which decreed that people of African ancestry were not U.S. citizens, and therefore could not sue for their right to freedom. Federally sanctioning white supremacy, the ruling has long-stood as one of the court’s most disastrous decisions, irrevocably altering the course of the country’s social, cultural, and political evolution.

The arrangement for Manifestos 4 is generated by a rule-based methodology, transcribing letters ‘A – H’ from the courts decision into their equivalent musical notes (with the use of the letter ‘H’ representing the code used in early Baroque tradition for B-flat). Despite the essentially random, arbitrary relationship the resulting composition has to the original content and history of the source texts, the music’s complicated chords, elaborate melodies, and intricate timing give new inflection to the texts in profound and unexpected ways.

A pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, Charles Gaines’s body of work engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms. Using a generative approach to create a series of works in a variety of mediums, he has built a bridge between the early conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent generations of artists, pushing the limits of conceptualism today. Gaines lives and works in Los Angeles.