Anthony van Gog

It’s oddly quiet in Anthony van Gog’s studio. Somehow you would expect the subwoofers he made to fill the space with sound, vibration, air displaced by a powerful bass. The subs’ enclosures are far from perfect, most are cracked or deformed, they’re more like objects, sculptures, shapes, props. Some hang from the ceiling, wrapped in locks and chains. Still, they would work if you plugged in the power. Van Gog is a performer who incorporates the subwoofer’s rumbling sound into his pieces. He plays with the intangible physical presence of the sound, the way it resonates with the body. The ceramic subwoofers may appear on stage one day, but Van Gog is eager to experiment more to see how ceramics might fit his practice. He’s intrigued with clay, its inherent shapelessness, its close relation to life and decay, apparent in the death masks he also made. Van Gog built moulds from plywood to serve as the press-moulds for his subwoofers. This allowed him to produce in series but also to adjust the form as he went — thinking through new shape and dimension/relational possibilities. He worked with casting and plastic clay bodies, experimented with terra sigillata and, through a book he found in the EKWC library, became interested in saggar-firing. This interested prompted his further glaze research — and he went on to experiment with different combinations of pigments and oxides applied in purposefully less controlled ways.