Out of Touch

The invite for the launch of the design journal Untapped’s inaugural print issue mentioned a theremin performance, which was reason enough to be intrigued. When I arrived, I found copies of the journal perched on a library cart at the center of Marta, a gallery near the Los Angeles River. They unfolded like flowers, revealing, among other things, a profile of the gallerists. Marta was also playing host that evening to an exhibition of stark, beige furniture pieces called No Life. The chairs and bed, softer than they looked, were convincing enough as “furniture” that they attracted the attentions of bored children; one of the tables became a repository for discarded paper and empty wineglasses.

Those who’d brought dogs were asked to remove them: It was theremin time. The performer, Armen Ra, looked as otherworldly as his device—chrome eyelids, a sculptural neckline, excellent posture. He descended the staircase with the precise and measured timing of someone accustomed to being the center of attention and played Puccini’s O mio babbino caro. One hand mimed a vibrato, the other seemed to pat an invisible drum. The noise of the theremin swooned and dove, more like a woman’s voice than any instrument. When it was over, the spectator next to me mentioned that one of her ancestors had been a pioneering female theremin player.

The instrument is a product of early twentieth-century USSR research into proximity sensors, and No Life listed as its inspirations Soviet prisons, psychiatric institutes, and sanatoriums. I tried to imagine what a Soviet citizen, especially one familiar with such spaces, would think of the assembled crowd: the graphic designers, the content strategists, the stylish children. He would probably have concluded that we knew nothing about suffering.