"Listen Profoundly – this formula, which is as much an injunction – an invitation to a sound, spatial and temporal experience – as it is a spiritual quest – a questioning of listening – is the common denominator of the three installations presented in the context of this exhibition. These two words are found in quotation marks on the twelfth board of the collection XXX Anecdotes and Drawings by Morton Feldman.
Morton Feldman, Heiner Goebbels, Ulf Langheinrich – three artists in search of sounds and meaning, provide us with three remarkable incantations, all dedicated to exploring that which we see and hear.
Sound and visual Installations
Morton Feldman
XXX, Anecdotes & Drawings, 1984
Ulf Langheinrich
Land IV, 2011
Heiner Goebbels
Genko An 69006, 2013
The macLYON is also presenting, for the opening of the exhibition and the Biennale Musiques en Scène, Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 (1983). This exceptional concert, notably for its unusual length, can be enjoyed in a convivial atmosphere. Sitting comfortably on deckchairs and poufs, listeners can take advantage of readings and a coffee break in order to make the most of this lengthy evening.
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Listen Profoundly – this formula, which is as much an injunction – an invitation to a sound, spatial and temporal experience – as it is a spiritual quest – a questioning of listening – is the common denominator of the three installations presented in the context of this exhibition. These two words are found in quotation marks on the twelfth storyboard of the collection XXX, Anecdotes and Drawings by Morton Feldman.These thirty storyboards are ‘improvisations’ on the theme of the ‘future of local music’, and were inspired primarily by the work of Mark Rothko. They were acquired by the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon in 2003 and constitute the first part of this triptych.
Two sketches appear on the same storyboard – one square, the other round, evoking the two windows of the Genko Buddhist temple in Kyoto, a source of inspiration for Heiner Goebbel’s sound and visual installation, Genko-An.
The two windows in question look out onto the same garden, but the perceptive disturbances caused by their respective forms – the square window is called the ‘window of confusion’ and the round, the ‘window of enlightenment’ – provide the composer with the opportunity to develop Gertrude Stein’s catchphrase: ‘To see something / To hear something’ by playing on the hiatus between sound and visual experiences of the same material in two distinct spaces.’
Ulf Langheinrich sheds further light on the immersive dimension of the same phrase. Working on digital illusion, Langheinrich attempts to highlight this ‘specific beauty with a mathematically strict monotony, unique to digitally created and processed material’, by combining in his digital melting pot recordings of waves on the shores of Accra in Ghana on the one hand, and waves of particle-system formulas and fractal-noise calculations, on the other.
