Sound of Music I’m thinking of The Sound of Music–the political undercurrent of this film. How music is used in the moments of crisis–during a Nazi concert as a ruse to escape through the mountains. I’m thinking of how easily Austrian folksongs of joy and love match the kitsch, Nazi ideology. I’m thinking of Julie Andrews and the domestic revolution her singing inspires when she takes over as nanny. I’m thinking of the fine lines between hate and joy, I’m thinking of complexity, gibberish, pseudo-science; the millennial grammar crisis on our hands, and the extra-curricular in art. I’m thinking of ‘fashion, duh’ and decay, I’m thinking of the burgeoning tolerance for intolerance. I’m thinking of Herbert Marcuse and Anaïs Nin, of their writing on polymorphic sexuality and its counter-cultural ramifications. The artworks considered in this piece–part of the year of the Oomph series from P/////AKT–are analyzed from the vantage of my own broader interest in artistic, popular, and classical culture. It’s best to explain my interest in art as a reflection of my extra-curricular experience of cultures of living. I suspect, for instance, that my brief stint as a furniture mover in the Netherlands resonates strongly with how I conceive of form and materiality in sculpture. It made sense to me that what I experienced as a concern for formal sculpture in P/////AKT’s shows would mirror the direct environment’s modus operandi, reflecting both the conditions for labour in the Netherlands–its never-ending building project–and how (non)life gets staged for (or by) the spectator-listener-passerby. The order of the building site, its stacked and piled materials, the interior grids of steel and concrete, comprises this country’s formal mythology of Herculean taskforces to be performed in order to remain above water. The analogy between artist and builder is, I suppose, as good as any other, but stresses deference, and might soften the loud furore that is often made around an artwork’s genesis. Cut. In Ricardo van Eyck’s Pilot (Oomph part I), the space resembles a facsimile of a construction site. You recognize a fondness for the builder’s nitty-gritty, an ecology of the worker’s habitat. R. showed me a filterless rollie cigarette he’d cached within a cubbyhole of plasterboards, like a relic. Van Eyck exemplifies an aspect of shows at P/////AKT prior to the Oomph series; artists like Evita Vasiljeva, Dan Walwin or Leyla Aydoslu (Oomph part V), have builder’s minds in which the objects could be mistaken for left-behind tools, or simply anomalous forms of industry. Dan Walwin’s elaborate metal installations frame videos of Dutch water lands titled with poetic constructions like ‘Cess, jel ever terrass’ (2014), ‘sound Valley status’ (2019), poems in arcane surrealist swamp-tongues–titles that act like sonic scores for their surroundings. The sounds of words are crucial. ‘I don’t need the words I need the sound, sound, sound, sound, sah-ah-own’ sings Carly Rae Jepsen who reverberates the Symbolist decree of sense over meaning: art not for art, the feeling goes… but something real… ‘a taste of your lips’ ! Paul Verlaine mirrors Jepsen’s sentiment: ‘De la musique avant toute chose / (…) et tout le reste est littérature’. Verlaine made the sound of words his credence, something that pop music has taken to heart. Literature, le reste, is apocryphal, footnotes! Perhaps Verlaine–in keeping with pop music’s synthetic animations: ABBA’s accented English sang as it was (mis)heard on the radio, like melted phonemes over discobeats–sensed how the urgency of the simply said could hit home when animated by machines for making music. Jepsen and Verlaine share a candid bareness of words, almost rustic if it weren’t so heavy with elegance and feminity. ‘Soyons scandaleux sans nous gêner’ is the type of plea that won Verlaine universal acclaim, from sin-riddled Catholics to romantic atheists. Verlaine’s techniques for writing included seeking consonance over alliteration or rhyme, and altering words genders to imbue them with a dreamy, dance quality. Words must sing in order to be (re)animated. Cut. Summertime, 2019. Pedro Barrateiro’s writing, performance, and presence all use voice in a monologued stream of words. After seeing his show at P/////AKT, he spoke at an event at De Appel autobiographically as in his many scripts and films, a form of auto-theatre. I remember at one point his line of thought seemed to reach an impasse: ‘you can’t buy the experience of an artwork’! The perceived exasperation drove home the sense of a stale crisis in which the artist and collector linger. A crisis is a difficult or dangerous situation. In books it is the decisive moment for better or worse. Nothing left to say, just action. ‘A little less conversation / a little more touch my body’ sings Ariane Grande anticipating the departure from language as a necessary course of action. The song ‘Into You’ instrumentalizes her vocal range; a heavily syncopated breath for bass, and a chorus of adlibs turn the song into an orchestrated plea for silence using all means necessary for the ‘oomph’ to happen. ‘Sometimes giving a kiss to someone is a form of silencing the other person, a way of owning that person,’ says Barrateiro in the video work The Inverted Journey (mirror). The kiss as gesture has meanings beyond affection, as a stage direction it works the drama... His voice has been modulated with voice software into an exaggerated bass in order, I’m told, to play with his naturally feminine voice. Not unlike AG, a theatre of proliferating selves emerge from his writing. While his work references theatre through masks and acting, he applies the metaphor of theatre to its governance of reality rather than as a medium in itself. As Adrian Kear has argued, the operation of ‘theatricalization’ does not ‘originate from the theatre’s stage at all, but comes from the act of seeing: rendering the seen into a scene irrespective of the ‘actor’s knowledge or consent. Kear’s argument centers on theatre’s role in containing and limiting theatricality. By investigating theatre’s instruments for staging, Barrateiro explores human interactions in terms of their deceitfulness. The history of theatre, or the theatre itself become the loci for investigating how we are being staged, and what goes unseen: ‘how to wear a mask’? What is not theatricalized: the ‘crisis’ or non-seen moment between mise-en-scènes, when we dissent from playing our self? P/////AKT’s art cosmology is rational. It operates upon principles of order and logic without recourse to a telos. It is reflective of the country’s building ethos at large. The Greek God of poetry and creation–Apollo–is reimagined as a nameless construction-worker in overalls operating a machine, dragging it back and forth like an ancient farmer with their plough. An aesthetic concern for labour is the praxis of socialism and art in which building is an exercise in seeing too. The tradition of socialist architecture is deeply entrenched within the city of Amsterdam through the idealism of its architects, yet social housing is the butt of a joke, a spectre of the past in an endlessly pressing housing crisis. It is crucial that contemporary artists, local or not, can reflect on the nature of the surroundings and their uncertainty: here today, rebuilt tomorrow. In P/////AKT art is given the space to grow without stating the overall purpose or urgency. Oomph stands for the very power of art to do so: to speak beyond language or the body and through our unconscious. The anomalous event is sought after through a consistent formula: solo presentations to think anew the space’s nice proportions, its garage-from-the-future, cubic delineations. . . At times, however, the form art takes is self-giving. The performance during Mickey Yang’s Closed Eyes, Marijn Ottenhof’s Ghosts in the Machine sampled electronic rhythms interlaced with spoken word, looped and jungled beats, conjuring a faux club-ambience within the gallery. Juxtaposed with Mickey Yang’s hyperreal assault on advertisements, the oomph felt ironically turned in on itself. Washing art at the machine’s trompe l’oeil setting: artifice comes to resemble itself too much and gets mistaken for source material. The emancipatory politics on offer dissipate. Cut. Unrehearsed calligraphy is approached in Katja Mater’s show, Dear Sides, the penultimate show in the Oomph series (part IV). Her handmade fonts, projected in film conjured the experience of text as seen from the dyslexic reader. The experience of reading being redefined through palindromes, and barely legible letters reading like dancing cryptograms. As I’m typing this I question my own education, my grammar, and syntax in search of futurity. In the Roman Silver age, writers like Gregorius van Tours tore up the rules of Latin grammar–unable to distinguish male and female syntactic constructions. His punk poetics were symptomatic of the turbulence of the times: the collapse of the empire, Gothic invasions, and a very viral Christianity. Relearning how to read and write within modified alphabets seems a valid pastime for myself, notwithstanding art viewers in search of sensory and sense-making politics ! On one of the wetter evenings, I arrived at the gallery during a performance by Gerard Herman amidst the works of Leyla Aydoslu, both hail from Antwerp and Ghent respectively. The former sang jolly songs of online romance–‘ik heb je naam op google ingetikt’–among other things, and was mechanically assisted by a tinny, playbacked back-up band. In between GH’s phlegm-ish singing stood LA’s living organisms: a two-inch clay layer upon the floor decked out across the space in that ochre-tinged, claymated orange, like a soft, rooftile coloured plateau. Adjacent to this, DNA-like slabs of paper-maché were framed in mid-air as if emerging from the wall. The clay rug bore large puddles, and its positioning enhanced the well-proportioned space. I once saw a middle-aged male art critic burst into tears at the sight of Isa Genzken’s ellipsoids. These wooden spears in bright lacquered colours are tribally eloquent, elongated elliptical mysteries; IG’s sculpture conjures notions of esoteric order imposed upon the arts in 20th century Germany and Austria, like Rudolf Steiner and Wilhelm Reich who in radically different ways sought for principles of order beyond science–to quantify the aethereal especially in relation to its experience. A building without any corners–Steiner’s concept for the Goetheanum–is a pain for house-decorating in its total commitment to bendiness. His modernist dreams aren’t everyone’s utopia. Otherwise, consider Wilhelm Reich’s design for the orgone accumulator, a metal box one can sit inside insulated with steel-wool, designed to concentrate and intensify the healing properties of orgone–a universal healing energy that could avert the user’s fascist propensities. Reich died in a US prison after having fled the Nazi’s. These architectures propose freedom to the inhabitant. IG’s ellipsoids contain tacitly the energies of modernist organic architecture. Her later work is even far more explicit and physical in their unbridled architectural fantasies. The ellipsoids, however, are silent repositories made before the storm. ‘Love is more than telling me you want it’ sings Jepsen in The Sound. The same holds true for meaning, the purpose of an artwork beyond it’s vision or futurity: a political and rhythmic purpose–what the artwork needs! Although the question of what an artwork ‘should’ do need never arise, its poetics can be made tangible and instruct the addressee by driving home their vision, tapping into our feeling. What is opaque about feelings or intuition? In Jepsen’s case, a love song masks her own poetics, her artistic means of production. And, If a love song can contain a manual on how to make music, will the reverse not work too; are essays on, say, politics not compounded ruses for love songs and instructions for intercourse?
Daniel Vorthuys, 2020
I encountered this concept in Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, which derives from Freud’s theory of a pre-mature unfocused libidinal drive. Marcuse contrasts production through the libido with the state of unhappiness that we encounter in the 20th Century social and economic conditions for labour.
‘Let us be scandalous without shame’. My translation.
Adrian Kear, How does Theatre think through Theatricality? Part of Thinking through Theatre and Performance p. 286-310
I encountered the orgone accumulator last December when it was featured in the exhibition orgonomics curated by Padraic E. Moore at Garage, Rotterdam, 2019. For this exhibition, Kenneth White built a replica of Reich’s invention together with Peggy Ahwesh, Keith Sanbourn, and Soyoung Yoon. The word ‘orgone’ is probably an amalgam of org-asm and -one as in ‘ozone’.