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Massimo Bartolini
Massimo Bartolini
Massimo Bartolini
Massimo Bartolini
Massimo Bartolini
Massimo Bartolini
Massimo Bartolini
Massimo Bartolini
Massimo Bartolini
Massimo Bartolini
Massimo Bartolini
Massimo Bartolini

MASSIMO BARTOLINI. HUM

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Dates: 
1 March 2013 - 19 May 2013
Place: 
First Floor
Hours: 
Tuesday to Saturday (including bank holidays) from 11am to 2.30pm and from 5pm to 9pm. Sundays from 11am to 2.30pm
Production: 
Fondazione Musica per Roma
Curator: 
Anna Cestelli Guidi


PRESENTATION


Massimo Bartolini’s show HUM, curated by Anna Cestelli Guidi, inaugurated a new exhibition project of the Fondazione Musica per Roma devoted to the art of sound. This exhibition pays homage to Glenn Gould (1932-1982), and includes two new sound installations —HUM, and Singing North— constructed around two Gould’s pieces: the humming of the Canadian musician in the second recording of the Goldberg Variations (1981); and the contrapuntal radio documentary The Idea of North (1967), an interview programme produced by Gould on the geographic — and philosophical — concept of the North.

Lettura, a performance created specifically for the MARCO’s venue, pays tribute to Gould by reading aloud The Loser, the renowned novel by Thomas Bernhard. It will also take place during the opening Phonology of noise: the voice as sound object, live streaming aural transmission of experimental sound artists from the website of Radical Matters - Editions/Label series.

WORKS EXHIBITED


Hum
, 2012
Recording, one-off, on 12-inch vinyl record picture disk format. Produced by Fondazione Musica per Roma. Edited and published by Radical Matters - Editions/Label. Voice: Nicholas Isherwood, mural painting, record player, amplifier, speakers

Singing North, 2012
Audio recording composed and executed by Nicholas Isherwood, microphone, stand, speaker, audience, drawing 500 x 270 cm

Lettura, 2013
Person, mp3

GUIDED TOURS


The staff members in the rooms are at visitors’ disposal for any question they may have or information they may need about the exhibition, as well as for the usual guided tours:

  • Every day at 6pm
  • Customised visits for groups by appointment. Please call 986 113900

OPENING on Friday, 1st of March


During the opening events, ADEGAS GALEGAS cordially invites our guests to a wine tasting, 2011 D. Pedro de Soutomaior

CATALOGUE

On the occasion of this exhibition, Fondazione Musica per Roma & Magazzino Arte Moderna, Rome, have published a catalogue which includes an audio CD of the two sound works, and a DVD recording of the baritone Nicholas Isherwood playing HUM.

HUM. Catalogue, CD, DVD

Published by: Fondazione Musica per Roma & Magazzino Arte Moderna, Rome, 2013

Summary


Massimo Bartolini’s show HUM, inaugurated the new exhibition project of the Fondazione Musica per Roma devoted to the art of sound, One Space/One Sound, a periodical project of three exhibitions a year for the AuditoriumArte venue.

Sound has always played an important role in the work of Massimo Bartolini who here presents HUM, an exhibition that pays tribute to one of the most brilliant and visionary personalities of the 20th century: Glenn Gould (1932-1982), on the occasion of the celebrations which took place in 2012 as an homage to the artist’s birth 80º Anniversary and the 30º Anniversary of his death.

Massimo Bartolini’s two installations —HUM, and Singing North— are constructed around two Gould’s pieces: the humming of the Canadian musician in the second recording of the Goldberg Variations (1981); and the contrapuntal radio documentary The Idea of North (1967), an interview programme produced by Gould on the geographic — and philosophical — concept of the North.

Gould’s famous humming from the 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations, the HUM, is transformed here into an autonomous vocal score interpreted by the baritone Nicholas Isherwood. Bartolini’s sound installation, specifically adapted to MARCO’s first floor galleries — the walls are painted with colors corresponding to the G Major tonalities, the dominant theme in the Goldberg Variations — transforms the exhibition spaces in a surprising and unexpected way, creating an atmosphere of intimate beauty that only comes to life in the presence of voice: a bodiless voice which, stripped of the ego of the artist's presence, now finds its ultimate meaning in the presence and interpretation of the audience dience.

With respect to the radio documentary piece, the cooperation between Bartolini and Isherwood has resulted in the installation Singing North. Here, several fragments of Gould’s original text —philosophical and poetical descriptions on the Northern Canadianss isolated life— are recreated and used as a libretto.

Lettura, a performance created specifically for the MARCO’s venue, pays tribute to Gould by reading aloud The Loser, the renowned novel by Thomas Bernhard. It will also take place during the opening Phonology of noise: the voice as sound object, live streaming aural transmission of experimental sound artists from the website of Radical Matters - Editions/Label series. A selection of works by artists that have been experimenting with the voice since the late 70’s. This recording is available at MARCO’s library.

With this exhibition, MARCO, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vigo, takes another step in a tendency of projects related to the art of sound. This interest has been reflected in several exhibitions such as ‘The Invisible Show’ (2006), ‘Escoitar.org’ (2007), or Loreto Martínez Troncoso’s solo show within the series ‘Entering the Work’ (2011), as well as the presence of sound works and installations in numerous projects or group shows produced by MARCO.

Artists

Massimo Bartolini


Massimo Bartolini (Cecina, Italy, 1962)

Solo Exhibitions (selection 2010-2013)

2013        Studio Matters + 1, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edimburgh, UK / S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium

2011        Basements, Galleria Massimo de Carlo, Milan, Italy; Serce na Dloni, Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu, Torun, Poland (curated by D. Denegri)

2010        Dews, Institute for Contemporary Art Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria (curated by I. Boubnova); -2+3: La collezione di Museion (with S. Arienti), Museion Bolzano, Italy (curated by F. Carazzato and L. Ragaglia)

Group Exhibitions (selection 2010-2013)

2012        Etchigo-Tsumari Triennial, Tokamachi, Japan (curated by Art Front); Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (curated by C. C. Bakargiev); TRACK, Ghent, Belgium (curated by Philippe Van Cauteren and Mirjam Varadinis)

2011       Yokohama 2011: International Triennial of Contemporary Art, Yokohama, Japan (curated by Akiko Miki); Terre Vunerabili, Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Italy (curated by C. Bertola); Sotto quale cielo?, Museo Riso, Palermo, Italy (curated by D. Bigi); The Edge of Becoming, Palazzo Fortuny, Venecia, Italy (curated by A. Vervhort, R. Martinez, D. Ferretti)

Curatorial text


“Sound has always played an important role in the work of Massimo Bartolini who here presents HUM, an exhibition that pays homage to one of the most brilliant and visionary personalities of the 20th century: Glenn Gould.

It is not so much Gould the musician that interests Bartolini, as the non-conformist Gould, a man who abandoned a dazzling career at its peak, shutting himself off completely from the world in the great North to ‘communicate only through the recording studio’. It was Gould’s way of pursuing a theoretical and speculative course centered on a non-presence, on the transmission of thought as pure voice, by experimenting with the potentialities offered by the new electronic media, from the technique of montage to the recording of radio broadcasts.

The new technological procedures of the recording studio allowed this visionary Canadian artist to achieve that ‘global embrace beyond time and space’ that his friend Marshall McLuhan had written about in his pioneer essay on the new electronic media Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, published in 1964, the same year that Gould left the stage. At the same time technology enabled him to enact the ‘death of the author’ theorized in those years by French post-structuralist thought and to ‘free’, in the words of Roland Barthes, the text/work from its traditional association with the author/artist and seek its ultimate significance in its destination, in other words the reader, the listener.

Massimo Bartolini’s two installations are dedicated to Glenn Gould’s ‘love affair with the microphone’ – as it has recently been defined – but more in general to the idea of the recording, both as presence and distance communication. The installations are constructed around the evocative power of the Canadian musician’s voice in the second recording of the Goldberg Variations and in the contrapuntal radio documentary The Idea of North.

What Bartolini stages in HUM is a bodiless presence, pure sound: the empty space, transformed into a synesthetic ambience painted with colors corresponding to the G Major tonalities, the dominant theme in the Goldberg Variations, only comes alive through the murmuring, the senseless phonemes marking the rhythm of the musical phrasing. Gould’s famous humming from the 1981 recording, the HUM, is transformed into an autonomous vocal score interpreted by the baritone Nicholas Isherwood: powerfully evocative pure sounds animate the space, break up and are recomposed in memory, in the perception of the listener. Meanwhile the ecstatic smile of Jagannath – the form of Krishna associated with sleep and the night – with wide-open eyes, continues to turn hypnotically on the vinyl of the picture disk, creating the same effect that the Variations played by Goldberg must have had on the sleepless count for whom Bach composed them.

Similarly, Singing North, the collage composed and interpreted by Nicholas Isherwood, who used the original text of the 1967 broadcast as his point of departure, takes Gould’s contrapuntal idea in this piece to the extreme, leaving the individual imagination and perception to freely unfold before a white wall that literally sings, the ideal neutral surface to receive the projections of the spectator/listener.

The process of recording, as the absence of a narrator in person, permits the story to unfold without faces, or figurative constraints. The absence of the subject becomes thus the premise for something that can be shared by all, making possible that embrace with the world, with a global community consisting in the coexistence of voices, able of projecting the listener into a shared dimension, unhindered by compromises with authorship and authority: the North perhaps, as indicated by Gould, with its mythical image of utopia and freedom, drawn by the artist as a memo on one of the rays of the great green map.”

Anna Cestelli Guidi
[Curator of the exhibition]

Curator

Anna Cestelli Guidi


Anna Cestelli Guidi
trained as an art historian in Rome and Berlin, focusing on the transformation of theory, exhibition practice and the museological structures of the 60s and 70s. In 1997 she published a work on documenta, La documenta di Kassel. Percorsi dell’arte contemporanea, which remains the only historical survey of the exhibition written in Italian. She has worked in a range of institutions in Spain, including CGAC of Santiago de Compostella, MACBA and the Fondazione Metrònom in Barcelona. Since 2005, she is the Director of the visual arts program at the Fondazione Musica per Roma at the Auditorium in Rome. She produced the “Fluxus Biennial” (2010-2011) and curated the performance and concert series that accompanied the exhibition cycle. In addition to the variety of exhibitions she has curated at the Auditorium, she created the monthly project Sound Corner and the yearly exhibition program One Space/One Sound.