“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]