STOCKHOLM NEW MUSIC
As a non-native who moved to Sweden
as a grown-up, I am always surprised at the open-mindedness of
the Swedish music establishment toward new art forms, which at
times clearly exceeds the degree of curiosity its visual art counter-part
is willing to afford. Nam June Paik, for example, was first introduced
to the general Swedish public in 1966 at the Museum of Technology
as part of "Visions of Today" symposium, organised by
Fylkingen, an artists' run non-profit organisation in Stockholm
with contemporary music as their main focus. The archives of the
organisation show the actual introduction of Paik even precedes
that date by five years, to 1961 when he performed "Action
Music" at a Fylkingen concert. Though this may come as no
surprise to those who are familiar with the history of early Paik
as a composer, it is significant to remember that even at the
time of "Visions of Today" exhibition (one year after
his first solo exhibition "Electronic Art" at Bonino
Gallery in New York), he was still viewed as an outsider by the
Swedish art establishment who considered his work too unconventional.
Ignored by the visual art world, Paik and his work found far deeper
acceptance in the music lovers of Sweden who recognised the significance
in the "new-ness" Paik was just about to bring into
the stale visual art scene. (*)
Stockholm New Music Festival, led
by the classical guitarist Magnus Andersson as its artistic director
and funded by the Swedish Institute of Concerts (a state institution
promoting new music), places itself in this tradition of audio-visual
link in the Swedish cultural scene. Along its 2006 theme "Place
and Space," the festival included two sound-installations
by the artists whose names are normally more familiar to the visual
art scene than that of music: namely, Christina Kubisch and Janet
Cardiff.
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"A History of Archives"
by Christina Kubisch. Site-specific sound installation
at Rönnells Antikvariat |
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Christina Kubisch, who belongs to the
first generation of sound artists, made her site-specific
installation "A History of Archives" at Rönnells
Antikvariat, the oldest second-hand bookshop in Stockholm.
Established in 1929 and with its extensive and exclusive
collections of academic and rare books, Rönnells Antikvariat
has a history of serving libraries and other state institutions
both domestically and abroad during the post WWII period.
Rich catalogue lists of books which came into their possession
during its 78-year-long history still exist, making the
store into an unique archive of book history. Kubisch for
her "A History of Archives" wired up one section
of this historical shop with electric cables, creating an
electro-magnetic field filled with audio information. The
sounds, readings of the catalogue archives of the shop by
various people, are then picked up by custom-made magnetic
sensor coils in the wireless headphones worn by the public,
whose various positions induce different voices softly whispering
into their ears the subjects, authors, titles, years and
even prices of books from various time periods. Being in
a space of our own motion and sound, walking through the
corridors between bookshelves filled with second-hand books
at Rönnells becomes as if encountering ghosts from
the past; an encounter with those unknown with whom we share
our love for books, sometime on familiar subjects and titles
and at other times on completely unfamiliar territories.
As the visual information (the books on the shelves) merges
with the audio information by the thread of "book"
and "text", Kubisch's electro-magnetic field emerges
almost like a 4th dimension in which our concept of linear
time evaporates diffusing our sense of past, present, future.
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Janet Cardiff, an established visual artist whose audio-walks
are probably best known, was introduced for the first time
in Sweden with her 2001 work "Forty-Part Motet".
Motet is a music term originated in the Medieval period,
describing a number of choral compositions in the Western
music tradition. Cardiff, whose work often focuses on our
experience of simulacra, took the 40-part 15th century motet
"Spem in alium" by the English composer Thomas
Tallis and extracted each part to be recorded separately.
With each voice assigned to one speaker, 40 speakers are
then placed in an oval out-line, inside which is the walkway
for the public. Then the installation-concert begins, with
40 speakers recreating the beauty of renaissance chorus
toward the centre of the installation, executed via sophisticated
calculation by her partner George Bures Miller. As you walk
freely, listening to separate speakers on the way, you are
able to listen to each voice almost separately from the
rest and the speaker almost turns into a person, a distinguished
individual. The stark contrast and distinctiveness of each
voice is striking as they amazingly form a harmonious whole
of the music piece together. Cardiff, by transforming the
centuries-old music into our present-day sound-installation,
succeeds in revealing something fundamentally human: the
delicate balance we experience between our desire for togetherness
and our basic need for individuality. Its essential experience
is sensual, almost seductive with Tallis' composition, but
underneath it hidden in the emotional beauty of musical
tone is the intellectual undercurrents that give rise to
thoughts on our human nature.
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(above):"Forty-Part
Motet" by Janet Cardiff (photo: courtesty
of the artist and Stockholm New Music) |
(below): "Forty-Part
Motet" by Janet Cardiff at Konstnärshuset |
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LARM-NORDIC SOUND ART FESTIVAL
A little more than a year later
from Stockholm New Music, another sound-focused festival called
LARM took place in the heart of Stockholm. Whereas Stockholm New
Music Festival continued with the Swedish tradition of the music
establishment's openness with new names in the art scene, LARM
was a manifestation of the trend into the opposite direction.
LARM was created by four visual artists (Maria Bjurestam, Maria
Hägglund, Mona Petersson and Liv Strand), and is a good indication
of the new international trend (i.e. visual artists' interest
in sound and music) that has been around for more than a decade.
Unfortunately its title "Nordic
Sound Art Festival" can be somewhat misleading, since the
festival focuses on female artists who incorporate sounds in their
works in a much wider range than the term "sound art"
normally permits. The result is a nice smorgasbord of videos,
music performances, sound installations, EAM concerts and radio
programmes, all of which are linked together by three criteria:
"Nordic (either by birth or residence)," "Women"
and "Sounds."
LARM's decision to define "Nordic"
by birth or residence is something new in Nordic countries, which,
unlike USA, have been slow in accepting non-natives into their
own. In Stockholm, for example, it is a common practice that galleries
intentionally exclude works by artists with immigrant backgrounds.
LARM's decision to be inclusive opened up opportunities for many
artists who would otherwise be excluded from the category, thus
making the festival despite its Nordic criterion international
as well as providing a more adequate reflection of the present
day "Nordic". For example, Natasha Barrett is an internationally
renowned UK composer who lives in Norway. Her "Trade Winds",
here shown as a 16 channel sound installation, is a beautiful
EAM work, in which a spoken tale by a Norwegian sea captain is
interwoven in its highly suggestive rich texture. Other such examples
include the installations by Camille Norment (USA/Norway) and
Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski (France/Finland) that explore potentials
of sound and interactivity as well as the supercollider-programmed
electronic harp performance by Emi Maeda (Japan/Finland).
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Steina Vasulka, "Violin
Power," Kulturhuset (photo: LARM) |
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One of the participants of the festival
was the video legend Steina Vasulka, born in Reykjavik but
a resident of USA since the '60s. In the field of video
art, Steina and her husband Woody together hold a special
position for two reasons; firstly, several key developments
in the language of electronic video through their disciplined
experimentation and exploration of video signals; secondly,
promotion of electronic art through their foundation of
the Kitchen in New York in 1971 which quickly became an
alternative scene to the established art galleries. They
also assisted the curator David Bienstock to organise "A
Special Videotape Show" at Whitney Museum, a ground-breaking
show that had a huge impact on the acceptance of video as
an artistic medium.
Steina, a classically trained violinist, performed "Violin
Power," a real-time audio-visual interactive work,
in which projected video images are constantly altered in
a controlled manner by her violin performance. On the screen
are the artists whom she carefully selected for her video:
the painter Doris Cross (as "Lilith", incorporated
into "Violin Power" specially for LARM), Michel
Waisvisz, the director of STEIM whose Crackle Box is probably
best known and here with the instrument The Hands, the legendary
voice performer Trevor Wishart, the Japanese modern dancer
and choreographer Saburo Teshigawara, and Steina herself.
As she attentively weaves video sequences of her artists
by playing the violin, the intention becomes clear: it is
not a mere audio-visual interactive performance but a performance
whose interactivity is designed to conceive a dialogue between
the artists on the screen and the violinist Steina. At one
point, the dialogue even involves present-day Steina and
thirty-year-younger herself (captured for her original "Violin
Power" 1978). Visually involving video-signal experiments
she and her husband tenaciously sought over the years, "Violin
Power" also serves as a tale of these artists and their
works, a glimpse into the history of art and performance.
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Norwegian artist Maia Urstad is one of
the few festival participants whose activity truly falls
into the category "sound art." In her "Radiokonsert
(Radio Concert)," sampled radio sequences from the
world are sent via local FM radio transmitters to 30 portable
radios, spread over the concert space and each held by a
person in the audience. As she sends out her live-mix of
multi-track compositions, the radios are turned into wireless
speakers and their interaction with one another produces
interesting patterns of multi stereo effects. Throughout
the concert, the sound of voice characteristic to air transmission
and typical radio crackles and white noise together fill
the room, with higher waves of sounds appearing sometimes
far and sometimes near, transforming the concert space into
an ocean of sounds. Transferring her compositional focus
from temporality to spatiality, it almost appears as if
Urstad, a visual artist by training, envisions the concert
room to be a huge canvas on which she action-paints with
various sound colorations. The work, a miniature model of
the radio world where people tune into different languages
in different time zones, works also as a reminder of our
present-day cityscape whose passages are filled with transmitted
sounds from the radios and TVs which others turn on for
their joy. The remote connection of transmission is revised
here into the physical connection of the city, a space we
share with others through its soundscape. The presence of
uncalculated sounds that derive from the use of radio speakers,
such as interference by cellular telephone signals with
radio transmission and unforeseen sound distortions from
variations in speaker quality, also distinguishes her work
from many others, for which more often than not the high-tech
clean sound aesthetics of EAM is still the norm. Not a high
technological work, it uses no special custom-made device
nor programme; yet Urstad's "Radio Concert" stimulates
our intellectual curiosity through its deliberate study
of our sound world we take for granted. It is a great example
of not only sound art but also how well-conceived low-tech
art can be. |
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(above):Maia Urstad
transmitting "Radio Concert," Kulturhuset
(photo: Maria Bjurestam) |
(below): audience holding
radios in "Radio Concert," Kulturhuset
(photo: Maia Urstad) |
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CROSS BREEDING
The grey area of the audio-visual
cross zone has been one of the most vital fields in art for many
decades; Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, John Cage, Brian Eno and Ryoji
Ikeda, names of those who have crossed between the two fields
are many. By bringing down the old barriers, they've established
new fields of activities that do not fit into the clear-cut division
of music and visual art. In addition, cross breeding of values
from different genres has enriched our world by making us aware
of new exciting ways of seeing and listening that go beyond the
classical languages of music and fine art.
Establishment of a language of a
genre constantly embodies the risk of producing skillful experts
at the cost of excluding others whose values and focuses produce
approaches outside the mainstream discourses. For example, in
the process of film becoming a fusion of theatre and moving image,
other filmic languages experimented by Legé, Man Ray, Vertov,
Len Lye (to name a few) in the early days of cinema and later
by Joseph Cornell, Stan Brakhage and Fluxus and other experimental
film-makers have almost been excluded from the notion of what
we normally perceive as "film"; instead these hybrids
of art and moving image have been incorporated into the field
of visual art and their works are today shown mostly at art halls
and museums, somehow a paradoxical and ironic situation considering
film's reproducible nature.
Language dictates our thought process.
Inasmuch as we need language to understand and communicate with
each other, it behooves us to be aware of the danger that language,
in its most staleness, inevitably stifles creativity and imagination.
The fruits of the audio-visual cross zone of the last four decades
are a wonderful reminder of the importance in looking at things
differently and doing things the "wrong" way in order
to free ourselves from the mental imprisonment the power of language
imposes.
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