»… Play-rew-forward-stop …« audio-video music serie 3.3

The audio-video music series will continue at the Palazzo Cini at San
Vio from October to December, when it will come to a close. The
remaining two short series, entitled after the forward and stop
buttons on video players, are intended to convey a powerful impression
of the plurality of passions, of the “forward” and “stop” in artistic
research, which may be represented by Virgil’s sprawling beech tree (sub tegmine fagi): an uncontrollable manifestation of the hypertrophy of the sense organs trained on beauty.

Venice, Palazzo Cini at San Vio
17 October 2009, 5.00pm

Third session: VESPERS


I
Alvin Lucier

Vespers (1969)

The
composition is built on the work of a group of performers equipped with Sondols
(a “sonar-dolphin” or echo-location device designed to capture not only the
legendary song of the dolphin but also to pick up environmental physical
presences and locations with the microphone – a blind machine that is all
ears). The movement of the performers and their devices in the space of the
action transmits an image available to be listened to by a potential audience.
What is heard tends to render the temporal space of a building (if we imagine
the space of a church at twilight, we get vespers).

“In
Vespers the musical experience comes from the special ‘meaning’ that the sounds
give to the space in which they are performed. This ‘meaning’ of space is
something we have not been invited to appreciate before. Also in the equation,
and equally important, the sounds, as what we have come to the concert to hear,
do not have any musical meaning apart from their relationship to the space. In
Vespers the music is not heard even in imagination except in the performance.”
(Lucier)

II
Matthew Barney

No Restraint (2007)
A
film by Alison Chernick

With
Matthew Barney, Björk, Barbara Gladstone, Jacques Herzog and Richard Flood

The
film captures a Japanese day in the life of Barney (the filmmaker-sculptor of
the Cremaster cycle) and his wife the Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk while
at work on his major film Drawing Restraint 9. This is an attempt at a fantastical documentary
based on the experience of treating 45,000 tons of petroleum jelly, a factory
whaler, Japanese rituals etc. The plot of a very special love story emerges:
the fusion of two land characters, mammals, in the process of being transformed
into whales. The operation pursues the ideal project of a film sculpture
supported by very high-definition fictitious narrative devices.

Matthew
Barney is a highly original artist on the international scene. In various
cultural fields he has created an artistic language which is unique in its
kind.
His
conceptual and aesthetic work blends fragments from all mythologies produced in
the history of mankind, ranging from the most classic ancient legends to
anomalous unknown myths and the contemporary and the weird. He has thus given
shape to a new omnivorous hybrid cosmogony.
In
the early 1990s Barney began work on his epic Cremaster cycle, a film project
elaborating his own visionary mythology which in a decade has built up a cult
following.
His
films are art videos which overflow into various genres, while other arts are
involved in their long gestation. In fact his films give rise to works of
photography, architecture, design, sculpture and fashion, which then take on
their own independent life.
Barney
was born in San Francisco in 1967.