Marian Zazeela obituary

It was said that, following their marriage in 1963, the artist Marian Zazeela, who has died aged 83, and the composer La Monte Young never spent a day apart – each day for them consisting of 33 hours and 36 minutes, thanks to a decision to live their lives according to a calendar in which the 168 hours of the conventional week were divided between five rather than seven days.

The most enduring of their creations was the Dream House at 275 Church Street in downtown New York. There, on almost any day for the past three decades, those who climb the narrow staircase to a room on the third floor have found themselves, after observing a request to remove their shoes and perhaps dropping an optional $5 bill into a donation box, in an environment like no other.

Lying or sitting amid cushions, visitors are washed in Zazeela’s beams of magenta light reflecting off four metal mobiles hung from the ceiling, while being bathed in the high-volume sound of multi-layered drones of infinite duration, their 32 pitches – selected by Young according to the principle of prime numbers – spanning the range of human hearing and issuing from a set of speakers fed by a concealed sine-wave synthesiser. Few emerge unimpressed by the experience.

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Zazeela was born to parents of Russian-Jewish origin in New York, where her father, Herman Zazeela, was a doctor and her mother, Helen (nee Heyderman), a schoolteacher. From the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan she went to study painting at Bennington College in Vermont, graduating in 1960.

In Paris that year she met and married Marc Schleifer, a journalist. When they returned to New York, he edited a short-lived but influential arts magazine called Kulchur, whose contributors included Zazeela alongside the poet Robert Creeley, the painter Franz Kline and the poet-playwright LeRoi Jones.

Her paintings were shown in New York that year, but she was already moving on. As a member of the downtown art scene, where her friends included members of the Fluxus movement, including Yoko Ono, and the percussionist Angus MacLise, an original member of the Velvet Underground, she was coming to the conclusion that conventional painting no longer had much to offer an adventurous spirit. She designed the set for a stage production of Jones’s novel The System of Dante’s Hell, appeared in Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures in 1963, and was one of the many subjects of Andy Warhol’s series of Screen Tests in 1964.

By then she had divorced Schleifer and met and married Young, who had recently arrived from California as an avant-gardist fast outgrowing his roots in jazz and contemporary classical music.

First they assembled a group called the Theatre of Eternal Music, which also included MacLise, the composer Terry Riley, the Welsh viola-player John Cale (also a future member of the Velvets), and Tony Conrad, who played the violin. Using mostly strings and voices, the group began their early exploration of the properties of endless superimposed drones, employing psychotropic drugs, including LSD and grass, as part of the process, accompanied by Zazeela’s early light shows.

Young and Zazeela were soon to become entranced by the work of Pandit Pran Nath, the Indian master of Kirana singing. In 1968 they heard his first album, Earth Groove: The Voice of Cosmic India, and two years later they met him on his initial visit to New York. By the time he returned to settle in the city and establish his Kirana Centre for Indian Classical Music, they had become his disciples, accompanying him in a concert of morning ragas at Town Hall in 1971, playing tamburas.

Inspired by his music and his philosophy, Young and Zazeela abandoned western tempered tuning. Instead, they applied strict mathematical analysis to the relationship between the notes of the scale, expressed through the use of long held pitches that were, Young explained, inspired by the noise of the wind whistling through his family’s wooden cabin during his childhood in Idaho and the hum of a nearby electricity substation. Meanwhile Zazeela turned away from paint towards the manipulation of light and colour.

Together they conceived installations aimed at flooding and altering the senses. The Dream House, where they also kept an aquarium containing several turtles, was first open in Church Street between 1966 and 1970. They revived it in 1993, supported through several iterations by the Dia Art Foundation.

Young was unusually protective of his music and their recordings together were intentionally few and far between, generally disseminated via obscure labels in small editions. They included The Black Record, as it became known, released on Edition X in 1969; Dream House 78’ 17”, which appeared on the Shandar label in 1974; and The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath (Just Dreams, 1999).

Zazeela’s artwork, including graphic designs containing her distinctive Arabic-influenced calligraphy, was exhibited during her later years at venues including the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Tate Liverpool, the Venice Biennale and most recently at Artists Space in New York.

She is survived by her husband and a sister, Janet.