Marco Fusinato

Born 1964, Melbourne, Victoria, Lives and works Melbourne, Victoria

There is no authority but yourself.

Marco Fusinato exemplifies Hal Foster’s ‘artist–as–archivist’ model of contemporary practice. Fusinato mines his own identity: drawing on family history of the anti-fascist Veneto partisan movement during WW2 and the political discourse of the post-war Italian Communist Party combined with his experience of growing up in the 70s in the familiar sprawl of Australian suburbia where his musical interests were fed by the British anarcho–punk bands, CRASS, The Clash and the Sex Pistols and American No Wave groups: as the basis from which to explore and interrogate his artistic and cultural terrain. 

Art School fed his interest in the post–war avant-garde of Fluxus and conceptual art, introducing him to musicians such as John Cage and Cornelius Cardew as well as stimulating his interest in recent European history of radical groups of the late 60s and 70s – Red Brigade in Italy and Bader–Meinhof in Germany – that period of heightened Cold War tension in Europe combined with internal instabilities within the democratic union. Fusinato appropriates this political and artistic radicalism and re–contextualises these strands in his dual modes of noise music and visual art practice. 

His recent exhibitions have drawn on his personal archive of radical political pamphlets (Noise and Capitalism 2010), avant–garde music scores (Mass Black Implosion 2008), grainy newspaper photographs of political protesters (Double Infinitive 2009). Prior to taking up the ISCP residency, Fusinato is creating a noise–numeracy–installation for the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art based on the mis-information of global statistics. 

The ISCP residency will allow him to further develop the theme of Mass Black Implosion – where he takes an avant–garde score and carefully traces each musical note back to a single point perspective, a kind of event–horizon beyond which all music collapses into a black hole of singularity – through access to the musical archives of John Cage and other avant–garde musicians, held in New York libraries. The residency will also allow time for him to reconnect with New York’s experimental music scene. 

Text by Dr Anne Sanders, art historian and writer based near Canberra, who writes regularly for art magazines, journals and exhibition catalogues. 
 
2012 Australia Council for the Arts and Anne & Gordon Samstag ISCP Residency, New York 

Artist's website: www.marcofusinato.com