Newton

The LP NEWTON by Cesare Pietroiustif is the fourteenth release of XONG collection – artist records, produced by Xing. The release is on white vinyl, in a limited and numbered edition of 150 copies.

NEWTON is a sound work conceived by Cesare Pietroiusti, an artist interested in micro-events, paradoxical situations, behaviour and minor gestures that make up our daily life. NEWTON is an epic of the fall, experienced, suffered and observed by the artist himself. For about two months Pietroiusti recorded with a Lavalier microphone connected to a small portable recorder, which he mostly kept attached to the waistband of his trousers, the sound produced by all the falling objects caused, directly or indirectly, by him. “Things that slip out of the hands, things that fall because they are caught in the movement of other things, things that one trips over or bumps into, things that are badly placed somewhere, things that are unseen. In all cases they are accidental and unplanned falls, due to clumsiness, errors of judgement, distraction, haste. Events that refer to whatever objects: coins, clothes, tools, keys, bottle tops, etc.,” and which the artist defines micro-traumatic because “despite their disarming and ordinary banality, they remind us of our subjection – which is both adaptation and contrast, use and failure – to the force of gravity”.
The record contains, on side A, the sounds of the falls, isolated and recomposed in the form of a suite, while, on side B, they are accompanied by a verbal description of the accident that has just occurred, made ‘on the spot’. An ostinato that engages the listener in a well known and unavoidable experience as Newton’s law of universal gravitation.

Cesare Pietroiusti is an Italian artist based in Rome. He has a degree in Medicine and graduated with an essay on Psychiatry. He is the co-founder and editor of the artist-run space Jartrakor in Rome (1977) and of the magazine Rivista di Psicologia dell’Arte (1979). Pietroiusti has always been interested in paradoxical or apparently irrational situations commonly considered “too insignificant to become the basis for analysis or representation”. He is also a curator and initiator of many collective projects, including the Oreste projects (1997-2001), the conference How do I explain to my mother that what I do is useful? (Link Project, Bologna, 1997), and Oreste at the Venice Biennale (Biennale di Venezia, 1999). He is co-founder of Nomads & Residents, New York (2000), curator for the CSAV, the Advanced Visual Art Course at the Fondazione Ratti, Como (2006-2011), MFA Faculty, LUCAD, Lesley University, Boston (2009-2016) and NABA, Rome (2021-ongoing), and lecturer in Visual Art workshop at IUAV University, Venice (2004-ongoing). As a member of the collective Lu Cafausu, he is co-founder and president of the Lac o Le Mon Foundation, San Cesario di Lecce (2015-ongoing). Since 1977, he has exhibited, alone or with others, in official and alternative, private and public spaces, in Italy and abroad.