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26/3/2009

Anlage

Galerie Mario Mazzoli, Berlin

In its first collective exhibition, "Anlage", Galerie Mario Mazzoli will present sound installations by four established electronic musicians:
Agostino Di Scipio, Michael J. Schumacher, boris d hegenbart-matsui and Douglas Henderson.

-The title of this exhibition, Anlage, points at what comes before the form -what causes it, what generates it. It is a word that marks a fundamental principle, a starting point for development; it also denotes the initial clustering of embryonic cells that serves as a foundation from which an organ develops [-] Each of these artists is concerned with the mechanisms and the interactions that give shape to their sound constructions. Stretching through memories, leaving a trail, thinking about that trail, considering various angles and not just stopping on immediate responses.- Daniela Cascella

Galerie Mario Mazzoli specializes on contemporary artworks that make sound a crucial element of their structure. Accordingly, it also includes acoustic and electroacoustic compositions in its catalog in the form of original scores (signed manuscripts) with recordings, thus extending the concept of collecting art to works normally relegated to the ambit of concert music. Along with the regular exhibitions, Galerie Mario Mazzoli will host contemporary music concerts and seminars.

When we think of a "realist" artwork, we usually think of a representation of something that we can find in real life: something that is not the product of abstraction or imagination, and that exists or has existed in the same state in which the artist has decided to portray it in. With regards to music, one could see how certain compositional strategies were recently brought about with the effect of introducing a certain dose of realism in an art that had lost any direct relation with the way we experience reality. There is of course nothing realistic about a classical symphony, a motet, or even the music of an "opera verista". There is, on the other hand, a certain amount of realism in Olivier Messiaen’s Le Réveil des Oiseaux in which the author utilizes transcriptions of bird calls as structural elements; there is a great deal of realism in a John Cage piece utilizing sounds from kitchen tools, or in an excerpt of musique concrète from Pierre Schaeffer. Indeed, all these authors have contributed in making us meditate on the artistic potential of real-life sounds.

The presence of real-life sounds, however, is not sufficient to deem a musical work "realist." In order for a piece to be intended as realist, it has to be grasped, as a whole, as a direct representation of reality. In these sense, the works of Anlage cannot be seen as examples of musical realism. These works are not sonic landscapes. They are not direct representations of real objects. They are not simply providing us with a fragment of something that we have or could have seen or heard. They do, however, exist in close connection with real life. Indeed, they enact some of the processes that contribute to our very understanding of what surrounds us. They are intended to make us question our ability to apprehend reality as a collection of clearly defined, fixed phenomena. They portray the reality of the unconscious, of the instinct, of man’s ability to receive multiple simultaneous inputs and evolve accordingly, as opposed to his ability to morbidly focus on the most obvious of these inputs. Like real "reality," what is portrayed here is a dynamic reality; a prototype of our everyday experience intended as a nexus of continuous interactions; not a static one, a snapshot that can only be an incomplete representation of real life. Indeed, these "protorealist" works do not represent life, they create life, and then give it to us very directly, each dragging us into a sonic environment that forces us to reinterpret our own perception of reality. A closer look at each work of Anlage will show us how each artist achieves this goal in a very personal manner.

"Stanze Private"

Agostino Di Scipio's "Stanze Private" seeks to build an ecosystem: a self-sustaining system of life, upon which all agents, including ourselves, exert a fundamental albeit unpredictable influence. With "Stanze Private" Di Scipio invites us to become part of his sonic ecosystem and to contemplate its evolution, while witnessing the unpredictability of nature, along with our inability to exercise full control over external phenomena, to seclude ourselves from unwanted influences, to establish our "privacy." As the composer himself explains, "Stanze Private" operates as a self-organizing, self-regulating feedback system, a multi-levelled entity that copes somehow with what happens (sonically) in the surrounding. It has its own behaviour, but that is constantly being shaped by the surrounding. However, the surrounding is not something separate from the system entity itself. The acoustic energy it leans on, and lives on, is mainly the background noise in the room as it naturally resonates (and is filtered by) a number of much smaller rooms (glass vessels). That creates a unique, very localized sound world, in a blend of pure sounds and harsh, distorted events. Visitors are never in the presence of the work "as such", their mere physical presence alters the work dynamics. The small rooms are transparent to the eye and to the ear, but the relationship of seen to heard, of vessel to room, of sound to environment, is not obvious. Visitors are assigned a voyeuristic role, and a statement is suggested that all observation and enjoying of art includes this voyeuristic element. Only, this time the observer is not separate from the observed, the mere physical presence hearer affects what is to be heard."

"Enemies"

Michael J. Schumacher’s "Enemies" is about awareness. Schumacher asks the audience to reflect on the sonic world that surrounds them, luring them into a confrontation with the sounds that surround their every-day reality. Here too the subject is not a real object, but a real process, that of evolution of experience. Schumacher presents a plethora of sound samples – consisting mostly of field recordings and instrumental sounds – that are constantly rearranged around the twelve sound sources in the room. Such treatment does not allow one to recognize a clear pattern, melodic or rhythmic, leaving it to the audience to discover or create a relation between them, and between the sounds and the audience themselves. This approach reveals a particular attention towards the physicality of sound, which Schumacher intends as "a presence outside one’s body that affects his/her relationship to the space he/she is in." It is an awareness of the separateness of sounds from one’s body, of the way they create their own space, and just like our awareness of reality this is subject to change, depending on one’s position in the room and on one’s entrances into the ever-changing sound space. This ephemerality of awareness and experience is a very important part of "Enemies". Indeed, Schumacher is interested in the idea of an optimal experience that results from many factors coming together at a specific point in time. To him, "any profound experience is ephemeral, and "Enemies" points directly to this temporary nature of experience, which is true of all art, but which is something that has become somewhat obscured as the focus has turned to the art object."

Image: Douglas Henderson, See, we rise

Media Consultans
Philip Krippendorff
Marienburger Str. 16 10405 Berlin tel. 030 / 44010685 fax 030 / 44010684 mail@artefakt-berlin.de

Opening on March 27th. 6pm

Galerie Mario Mazzoli
Zimmerstraße 13, Berlin
Opening Hours: Tuesday- Saturday, 12:00pm - 6:00pm
free admission

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