Collection

Gramophone is one of Bruszewski’s most emblematic installations, and was first shown at the 9th Kraków Meetings in November 1981. The gramophone “prepared” by the artist is fitted with four tone arms, four acoustic amplifiers, and four speakers. Each needle plays music from the same record at the same time, independently from the others.

In 1981 in Kraków, the gramophone played a disc of poetry by Norwid, although the artist felt that Pablo Casals’ string quartet gave the best results. This work was a continuation of Bruszewski’s media experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, which were based on researching the role of coincidence in art, and analysing the relationship between sound and image. Gramophone is part of the artist’s already classic series of generative sound installations, such as Sternmusik (1979), TV-Music (1979) and TV-Hen (1979).