Spencer Gerhardt: Ticking Stripe Los Angeles Book Launch

Jan 18, 2025, 3 – 4pm

Spencer Gerhardt: Ticking Stripe Book Launch – Los Angeles

In conversation with musician-turned-writer Mayo Thompson, 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.

Mayo Thompson is best known as the frontman of the enigmatic Houston-based experimental rock unit Red Krayola (or Crayola, where permitted by copyright law), which he founded in 1966 with Frederick Barthelme and Steve Cunningham, often playing with a revolving crew of musicians known as “The Familiar Ugly.” While Thompson would leave Houston behind—moving to New York in the early seventies to work as an assistant to Robert Rauschenberg, and later settling in London—he revived Red Krayola in various guises over the ensuing decades, producing six albums with Art & Language and, later, a number of records on Drag City. Though his polymathic, sixty-year career has yielded accomplishments too numerous to name, a few highlights convey his impressive range of mediums and collaborators: Thompson has produced countless classic post-punk records with Rough Trade; worked on the soundtrack to Derek Jarman’s The Last of England with Tilda Swinton and Albert Oehlen (who also joined the Red Krayola); exhibited visual art at Greene Naftali, Galerie Buchholz, House of Gaga, and the Whitney Biennial (via Skype); and taught critical theory at the Pasadena Art Center College of Design. In recent years, he has returned to writing fiction, publishing the noir novella Art, Mystery in 2018 and its sequel, After Math, in 2023.

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