"..-les formes-les jauses-.."

december 17, 2005.

" -- le carré rempli de deux triangle concerne sete image : si on calcul sete image avec sèle-ci: ils ni à plus de triangle dans un carré mes deux carré dans un triangle mais si on fait sette image sa change tout : car ils y à deux triangle avec deux carré dedans et si ils ni à pas une sele jause avec de chose dedans se nest plus noctanbuler mes un tèratopére.
quan on dit que se dessin ne veut rien dire sest vrai : se ci sappéle le calibaire quamme le sébulaire qui est comme sa : quand sété image et conserné à séte image : elle et superieur à lautre mes si on la conserne dans lautre sens : lautre et et supérier. quan un ron se met dans l'histoire sa change tout mes si ses pour montraits disqurait ils fo faus étres cent se qui et beaucoup -- "

par : Gersande

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No-Budget Foundation(s)

december 13, 2005.

On his travels through Europe roaming dutch soundician Rinus van Alebeek meets, records and performs with many a sound-artist, musician and/or sonic explorer, that - like himself - devote themselves body and soul to their work and art, with astonishing energy and dedication. But with hardly a penny - let alone a euro - in return ...

Well, I guess this must be but too familiar sounding for many of the practicing sonic explorers among the SoundBlog's regular viewers ... as for most of us, there's usually indeed but this one budget: no-budget.

It inspired Rinus to create The No-Budget Foundation(s), which - for starters - is a blog with 'reports, travelogues and money stories', written by Rinus and guests.

"The initial idea was and still is," Rinus writes in an introductory mail, "to make it  a legal organization one day. Its main aim is kind of Robin Hoodian, namely to ask from the rich and give to the poor. The letters to the 'rich' get published on the no-budget foundation blog: at the moment you'll find two examples."

There's some great ideas here ... Like the no-workshop, turning around - and indeed turning right - the scheme of an upcoming danish workshop, during which, in return for a subscription fee of 500 euros, visual and sound artists may work together on projects, guided and instructed by a team of curators.
The no-workshop, on the other (and so much better!) hand, will enable 'art professors, art critics, curators and museum directors', upon payment of a similar inscription fee, "to exchange ideas with soundicians, get involved in their social environment and witness their creative process" ...

Also part of the No-Budget blog are Rinus' Hamburger Chronicles. Four installments on line at this moment, and they make for fine reading ... :

"Judith had driven a hitchhiker to Weimar [...] He told her that he was a tailor. He traveled with his sewing machine and a suitcase. When he arrived in a new town, he would ask for a job. If there was, he would stay, if there wasn't, he would go on.
Judith thought this would be a nice idea for musicians.
It is. Just read on."

from: Wandering years

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Dada Beau-bo

december 07, 2005.

Been wandering - last sunday with the family, and once more, but alone, this wednesday afternoon - through the dense grid formed by the 40+ smallish square and rectangular numbered 'exhibition cells' holding the 1500+ 'items' that together constitute the Dada show currently on at the fifth floor of the Centre Pompidou here in Paris ... And both times it felt like I was visiting a classy antiquarian books & papers fair; or - turning a corner - like we were at the sightings just hours before the start of another 'auction of the century'; or (other corner) on a (admittedly somewhat luxurious) flea market; or at ...
I mean, it's good! ... Abundantly rich in content, without pretending to be 'complete'. And respectful of the 'elusiveness by nature' of Dada, that 'something/anything' happening 'somewhere/anywhere' in the western world, some eighty years ago, which has proven itself as influential as it was short lived.

Equally good - no, even better - is the encyclopedic exhibition's catalogue. Printed on fine (52g, 'free journal style') paper, you get a quite manageable 1000+ pages collection of 2000+ reproductions spread out over 150+ 'lists' and articles, that have all been put in strictly alphabetically order. (You will stumble upon the 'Introduction' about halfway: at page 512 ...)

There's an awful lot of, about and with Duchamp, both in the catalogue and as part of the exhibition. I for one am pretty happy with that. Even though it is somewhat ridiculous that for the unavoidable merchandise one apparently could not come up with anything better than L.H.O.O.Q. printed on cups, plates and sweaters ... (Sure I know that an 'expo' of this size and scale cannot be without all sorts of 'business', but still ... Would anyone actually buy stuff like that? ... [ Come to think of it, that's a funny reflection on my part, now isn't it? ... Considering something intuitively so much not done on second thought sometimes to me appears as an important enough reason to actually retrace my steps, go back and do it ... ;-) ])
Also at the exhibition itself - of course - one gets one's dose of Duchamp's mustached and bearded Monna Lisa's, including the 1930 remake that became part of the art collection of the french Communist Party (:-) ! [ i love that detail ]) ; and, prominently placed on a largish black platform in the middle of the 'Picabia/Duchamp' cubicle there's (the remake of) the white urinal (the Richard Mutt's 'Fountain'). That, like so much more here on show, have become so very anecdotal. Guess you can imagine the high school, art school and other classes standing around the urinal; with a guide or a teacher pointing out many a possible interpretation of the ceramic's lines and curves, and explaining - probably - how a pretty minor incident at a 1917 NY exhibition managed to have such an impact on our arts' history... And with the students staring at the pot, and diligently sketching and scribbling away in their notebooks. All of them, but a couple of obstinates that do sense that all of this is ... well ... hi-story, and that with the years passing 'ideas' like the L.H.O.O.Q. and the 'Fountain' by far and large have joined the ranks of icons of 'western art'. Duchamp himself 'shaved' his Joconde in 1965, and Brian Eno was but one among many that attempted and succeeded in using Duchamp's 'Fountain' on show for what it originally was made for. [ Eno applied a particularly devious technique for his 'act', as related in his A year (with swollen appendices). ]

Apart from the crowds, Duchamp's motorized 'Rotatives' are among the very few things that make some moderately interesting noises up there on the Centre Pompidou's fifth floor. 'Dada@Beaubourg' is an event meant almost exclusively for viewers; for contemplating, quiet viewers. (Many of the documents and works presented though still somehow manage to emanate a spirit evoking 'provocation', 'bruits' and 'spectacle'. But here all the noise, the stampings and clappings have been smothered, with 'hi-story' leaving but an endless stream of print on yellowing pages ... kept now safely behind glass, from where they can do no more 'harm', with no longer much to provoke ... just to be reflected upon; to be worshipped, almost ... it is this that I sense so very strongly here: it's the 'curators' worship' of these artifacts, most of which originally were merely means to an end ...)

Though clearly considered in the context of the expo to be of but minor importance, the exhibition does include some 'dada' related sound and music.
Here's the full list of 'sources sonores' as it appears in the catalogue (including, when available, a link to a corresponding sound file at ubu.com):

• L'amiral cherche une maison à louer - Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco & Richard Huelsenbeck
• Weh' unser Kasper ist tot, Der Pyramidenrock, Die Wolkenpumpe - Jean Arp
• Karawane, Totenklage, Gadje beri bimba - Hugo Ball
• Erratum musical - Marcel Duchamp [also see: The Music of Marcel Duchamp]
• Phonèmes - Raoul Hausmann
• Phantastische Gebete - Richard Huelsenbeck
• Musique d'ameublement - Erik Satie
• Ursonate - Kurt Schwitters [ and here is the Ursonate score ...]

Among the 40+ cells, three are specifically dedicated to sound. Two of these form a longish narrow and dark corridor, in two separate parts. Each of them contains three separate sound sources, looping: the first one sounds about where you walk in, the second one in the middle, the third where you walk out.
You can sit, in the near dark, on a wooden bench stretching along one of the walls and listen.
In the first 'sound corridor' Duchamp is in the middle: an Erratum musical; not the early 'three voices' one, but the one associated with La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même. You hear the pretty minimal (single sounding piano notes) 'Seven variations on a draw of 88 notes', as recorded by Stephane Ginsburgh, playing a Bösendorfer, a couple of years ago (CD released by Subrosa (unclassical)).
The second corridor has Erik Satie's Furniture Music as its centre. Playing is a recording from 1993 by the Ensemble Erwartung directed by Bernard Desgraupes.
In both corridors this central ('instrumental') sound source is flanked by 'classic dada voice/tonal poetry'. Apart from the pretty obvious and 'safe' selection, this is not bad at all, in principle, and the recordings would 'mix' well. Were it not that the volume of the sound coming from all of three sources in both corridors is so very low that the overall result is that of a mere ambient sonic whisper ...
Now these are curious decisions ... playing these recordings in the dark, and at such a low volume ... is it to remind us visitors that indeed here we are in art-church and should worship? It is just that most of this work is so very far from being whispered, from being about 'meditativeness', or about stillness ... on the contrary, I'd say, this is noisy stuff. I'm not asking for an overtly loud playback ... just a normal volume would do ...

The 'simultaneous poem' L'amiral cherche une maison à louer of Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck got its own, separate room, that you enter coming from the 'Cabaret Voltaire' cubicle. It is white, with strip lighting for skirting boards; and empty. The 'room' presents a very recent interpretation, by Gilles Grand, commissioned especially for this exhibition. The 'simultan' room has 58 loudspeakers hidden behind its walls, and uses a WFS system for the sound projection.
Nice room, and clean. Very clean. Clini-cally clean.
The WFS sound projection is fabulous, even though, again, it's not nearly loud enough. (And it's not just me, for I saw many a visitor creeping up to the white clothed walls to lend a closer ear to the sounds leaking in from behind ... )
But there is something utterly fascinating occurring here. Standing and listening inside Gilles Grand's so clini-cally white and empty sound projection room, we un-seeing witness an interpretation of the simultaneous poem originally performed in march 1916 in the Zürich Cabaret Voltaire. And we witness it from an 'outside' that is both in space and time ... (say, as if from within a 'time machine' (?)); the fine sound quality (so very 'realistic') together with - again - the low volume makes that unbridgeable 'distance' between us and the performance even more blatant: it's not just that we are physically excluded, no, we are eavesdropping - outside, secretively peeping in. The happening, the 'spectacle', is on the other side, behind walls, impenetrable ... silently listening one does get a sense that out there something pretty exciting is/was going on; but it's not for us, no. We are and stay on the other side ...

Thus Gilles Grand's room almost perfectly illustrates what of course we should have known from the start: that for ever we must remain separated from what - if anything - all this Dada actually was about.
Separated by impenetrable walls.
'Time' pulled them up ...

[ The Dada exhibition in the Centre Pompidou continues until january 9th, 2006. It then moves (february 19th until may 14th) to Washington and (june 16th until september 11th) New York. ]

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