"I consider my work to be a perpetual choir of beckoning gestures that transcribe the formal limitations of mere visual encounter…. The relationship of music to art for me is an inverse muscular communion wherein sculpture is as transient as music and music approaches the visceral suggestion of matter.
—Terry Adkins
Pressed against the chest, the mvet is often played to accompany songs, poetry, rituals, or philosophical discussion. It is a traditional West African string instrument, primarily used in the Bikutsi genre of dance music that emerged in Cameroon in the early 20th century, notable for its rigorous 6/8 rhythm. It typically consists of a wooden cylinder that measures one to two meters long, to which a resonating element is attached on one side, with a central bridge anchoring four to five strings on the other. Terry Adkins’s iteration of this subject is deeply rooted in one of the principle aims of his practice, namely his ongoing attempt to forge an intuitive link between music and art, reversing the essential characteristics of each discipline to make sculpture more ethereal, and music more concrete. Taking on the overall ovoid shape of the namesake instrument, Mvet Majestic II (1989) suggests both the aural and the archetypal; the sawtooth edges that nearly interlock imply mechanical movement, suggesting histories of labor and industrialization, while the scale, symmetry, and orientation of its elongated forms situate the work in the legacy of a high modernist milieu
(Constantin Brancusi’s polished ovals come to mind). Adkins had been working primarily in wood since 1986, when he moved to Zürich to participate in a residency facilitated by Projekt BINZ 39 and P.S.1, Institute for Art & Urban Resources, New York. The present work is formally similar to others produced in these years, yet the brushy gold acrylic elevates its implications to the spiritual realm and anticipates his move to more diverse media. Twinning and doubles are a major trope that spans Adkins’s oeuvre, and often refer to, in his words, the “cumulative power of repetition.” An homage to the monumental legacy of African music—not just in the United States, but throughout the world—Mvet Majestic II, like the instrument itself, transforms common materials into a reification of ancestral power and grace. "