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the museum goes live 2016
the museum that messes with your mind!

For the first time in Australia.

On 27th October 2016 at Carriageworks, Sydney
The Rosenberg Museum was exhibited as part of The Performance Space LIVEWORKS Festival Sydney 26th October- 6th November with 8 LIVE SHOWS and over 800 EXHIBITS featuring ENSEMBLE OFFSPRING and TESS DE QUINCEY.
The museum was open from 10.00 and the performances lasted 30 minutes at 18.30 every day.

Videos taken when the museum was live are available here and here. Some of the artefacts on display when the museum was in exhibition mode are available here.

Installations of The Rosenberg Museum have been featured all over Europe in its 30 year life, now it's finally home. The museum is the creation of violinist, composer, artist, inventor, writer, Jon Rose and houses a cornucopia of violin iconography - a cabinet of curiosities highlighting violin stories that are musically other, historically twisted, or culturally critical.

Amongst the collection is featured a robot violin played live by very wealthy Wall Street traders, a player piano transcription of a Las Vegas casino where extremely poor people lose the rest of their money, a bowing machine, an automatic string quartet powered by Robbie Avernaim's SARPS, Cor Fuhler's Keyolin, a plethora of home-made instruments including The Fence, The Plectraphone, The Traveling Monochord, the 6 String Downpipe, the Bowing Wheel, The musical Coffin, a replica of Paganini's penis, an abandoned electric organ, the ultimate book of music criticism 'rosenberg 3.1', and violin iconography that is profound, humorous, bent, and often transgressively challenging.

The museum also celebrates a retrospective look at three Jon Rose projects - the world renouned Great Fences of Australia, The Pursuit Project, and The Relative Violins including a reconstruction of the triple neck wheeling violin.

Great Fences of Australia- multi-media project mapping Australia
Jon Rose plays The Anna Creek Fence, Central Australia

The Pursuit Project- bicycle powered home made instruments
violcycle

Palimpolin- jon rose with interactive violin bow
jr close up galapagos club New York 2010

Jon Rose is the major philosopher and cosmologist in a violin-centric world. Through his work he has fashioned totally new ways for violinists to think of their bows and their instruments. He has given listeners freshly made dimensions to contemplate. When I think of Jon, I'm reminded of Leonardo. He has fearlessly and fancifully explored all the currently known parameters of the violin and discovered many previously hidden ones as well. Jon has led the way in using the violin as a tool to explore life. If all he had ever done was to give us the sounds and the image of the violinist bowing barbed wire fences throughout the world, it should be said that his work has placed the violin front and centre as a force for renewal and regeneration in a tired world

David Harrington, Kronos Quartet, San Francisco, 8 March 2012


The Rosenberg Museum is an obsessive monument to the violin in all its guises; as a musical instrument, as a visual and sonic object, as an iconic cultural artefact, as a symbol of taste, class and power. This institution resists any convenient definition: It could be seen as either a fiction built out of facts, or an actualisation of the manifold virtual possibilities of a string instrument, and though it once nominally resided in the town of Violin, Slovakia, it really inhabits a conceptual rather than a physical space. Fundamentally, the Rosenberg Museum is an expression of its creator Jon Rose's idea of the violin as an unfinished experiment, a counterbalance to conventional attitudes towards what a violin should look and sound like.

Erkki Veltheim, violinist, Composer, The Museum Goes Live Catalogue 2016


Credits:

Concept and realization: Jon Rose

Curated by Jeff Khan, Holly Williams, and The Performance Space.

Big thank you to the following Musicians:

Claire Edwardes, Robbie Avenaim, Zubin Kanga, Cor Fuhler, Julia Reidy, Erkki Veltheim, Noam Yaffe, Hollis Taylor, Mary Rapp, Clayton Thomas, Alister Spence, and Butoh dancer Tess de Quincey

the museum goes live coffin video 2016
Tess de Quincey performing the amplified coffin

at the Museum Goes Live
The Rosenberg Museum, Sydney 3/11/2016



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