Topolski Emerges from Basinski As Basinski Summons Andy

There was and there still is, for me, always a form of music, a component, a company of notes that was a facet of Andy Topolski’s work that was not within his artwork on paper, on the flatness of his art upon the wall. This atmosphere occurred at his openings. They were both showings and hearings. Sounds interacted with his art. The sound compositions were a metaphor. They were like his artwork, and they developed the idea of intermedia (a combined whole of independent parts). The spatial and ambient sounds and the space between or above and below the sound were Topolski’s cosmos, his nebula, in the process of becoming.

From those most beautiful and pronounced constellations of absences in his visual artwork would manifest a fully realized shape in the artwork. As in physics one spot’s gravity created a place, a thing, a rest, where the searching eye could locate itself and then venture out from there, gaze out at what is really a well ordered whole of Andy Topolski’s creation. Topolski’s indistinct imagination allowed the emergence of a shape. The shape is really not the purpose but a prelude to the matter about it. The proposition was that his art was where the art wasn’t and also where it is at the same exact instance. Andy’s imagination pulled pieces into complete forms. It is, I think, about emergence and a continuum of emergences. Take a look at a simple speck and you have an earth, a recognizable home, one of many somethings, a place from which to engage the multiplicity that Andy Topolski’s work suggests is in presence everywhere.

—Michael Basinski

Michael Basinski is a poet, artist and the curator of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection of the University Libraries, SUNY at Buffalo.