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This piece was the last of 15 works produced by Galerie Ecart for Close Radio, a program of radio art that ran on KPFK between 1976 and 1979. Inaugurated by John Duncan and Neil Goldstein and later curated by Nancy Buchanan, Paul McCarthy and Linda Frye, Close Radio provided a venue for experimentation by some of the most significant practitioners of conceptual and performance art of the era, including Eleanor Antin, Chris Burden, Alison Knowles and Ant Farm; it was also a crucial document of the avant-garde wing of the West Coast punk scene, featuring bands like Monitor, X, and the L.A. Free Music Society. Galerie Ecart’s Close Radio broadcasts introduced listeners to some of the leading lights of European Fluxus, including pieces by Ben Vautier and Maurizio Nannucci, but this final submission was the work of the core Ecart performance group - John Armleder, Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner. The group had come together in the early 1960s while its members were still teenagers, taking part both in drawing and in rowing classes together. Armeleder remembers that Luc Bois, who taught them to draw, and Pierre Laurent, who taught them to row, were mentors to the group, who regularly trained together on Lake Léman. Thus, Rowing from One Point to Another on Lake Geneva documents an activity that was deeply embedded in Group Ecart’s artistic project.

John Armleder remember the recording session thus:
It was the time of alternative radio. We had done a series of live broadcasts of various lengths. Once we did a concert with Giuseppe Peri. Our best program was on a day we had gone rowing. We simply put the microphone on the boat, we didn’t speak. As a result, all you heard for an hour was the sound of the oars. I also did some things with Bleu LagunE, and performed a piece by Christian Marclay. There were many people doing this type of thing. From A-Sides A cosmology of audio editions by artists around the Arc Lémanique region, Lauren Schmid et Roxane Bovet (eds.) co-éditeur HEAD-Genève.

Written by Bill Corrigan, Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2025.