Spencer Gerhardt: Ticking Stripe Book Launch
Karma Bookstore
New York, NY 10009
In conversation with painter Matt Connors and writer Philip Ording, composer and mathematician Spencer Gerhardt presents Ticking Stripe, a collection of essays linking notions of continuity and construction across the boundaries of math, minimalist music, and contemporary art. Gerhardt offers new, and deeply informed interpretations of musical minimalism and the 1960s avant-garde, viewed through the lens of trailblazing artists such as La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Catherine Christer Hennix, Henry Flynt, and Tony Conrad.
Ticking Stripe pairs the spirit of L. E. J. Brouwer—a mathematician who brilliantly, and controversially, sought to reconstruct the continuum in his own philosophical terms called intuitionism—with the ambitions of pioneering minimalists who combined continued constructions, idealized processes of introspection, and conceptual world-building with a host of philosophical, scientific, and spiritual concerns. Informed by his own work as a professional mathematician and composer, Gerhardt explores the depths of these disparate traditions, finding unlikely areas of commonality. Spanning more than two decades, these essays feature rich historical explorations of minimalist music, writing on contemporary art, and work in logic and algebra, all approached with clarity and technical aplomb.
Spencer Gerhardt is a composer and mathematician. His music engages constructive, introspective, and romantic traditions. For more than twenty years, Gerhardt has written solo piano music, piano-based songs, and works of minimalism. He studied raga with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, piano performance with Sung-Hwa Park, and has collaborated with artists such as Thomas Ankersmit and Charles Curtis. Gerhardt has a record forthcoming on Blank Forms Editions. Gerhardt is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Mathematics at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on algebraic groups, often viewed in connection with problems in finite group theory and representation theory. Prior to his work in algebra, he studied logic and philosophy in the Brouwerian tradition at the University of Amsterdam, where he received a Master of Science. Gerhardt has written about art and music in this context, in particular the philosophical underpinnings of minimalism.
Matt Connors (b. 1973) lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. He was included in the 2022 edition of the Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It's Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Other institutional exhibitions include: Goldsmith CCA, London (2024); Lismore Castle, Waterford, Ireland (2022); Le Consortium, Dijon (2018); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2015); MoMA, New York (2014) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2013); MoMA PS1, New York (2012), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (2011). In 2015, Matt Connors was a resident at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. In 2012, he published the award-winning book A Bell is a Cup.
Philip Ording is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Science at the Pratt Institute. In addition to teaching mathematics at Columbia University, the City University of New York, and Sarah Lawrence College, he has worked as a consultant in art and design studios throughout New York since 2003. He is author of the award-winning book 99 Variations on a Proof (Princeton, 2019) and coeditor of Simplicity: Ideals of Practice in Mathematics and the Arts (Springer, 2017). His research and writing appear in the American Journal of Mathematics, Journal of Knot Theory and Its Ramifications, Cabinet, Bulletins of the Serving Library, American Mathematical Society History of Mathematics series, and elsewhere.