Score
Between image and sound
Without any aim to be encyclopaedic, historical or the visual counterpart to a theoretical statement, this exhibition is constructed around a variety of works, which are in dialogue with the topic of moving image and sound. It is a composition of blurred boundaries and reverberating riffs, an interdisciplinary free zone where sound and image, where artists, filmmakers and musicians with radically different disciplines produce works, which echo and resonate with the keynote, and with one another. The title of the show, SCORE, plays with the varied meanings of this word as a way to articulate the diversity of artistic practice surrounding this topic and to redirect the current fascination with sound to the relationship between image and sound. The term score also denotes the way in which the works are arranged and placed in counterpoint. SCORE becomes the compositional idea for the exhibition as well as a linguistic mechanism to describe its own content.
Audiences are growing more conscious of the relationship between the visual and sound components in moving image work. Recent exhibitions and publications have foregrounded the use of sound within the context of visual art. Looking for parallels that help articulate the ontology of sound art, we look to other art forms. Sound and moving image have structural similarities, mainly that they are both time-based media. Practices in sound and moving image have dominated 20th century cultural production with an abundance of cinema, music, and various forms of popular media and their counterparts in the avant-garde, fringe, and underground. The ubiquity of mobile devices and other networked media have infused our daily existences with steady streams of time-based media forms.
Experimental film and the larger arena of experimental cinema, a precursor to video art and more recently, the newer and all-encompassing denomination of moving image, is a field with examples of the film strip being used as an instrument itself. This is illustrated in the array of forms that span from scratch film to poetic, painterly processes of celluloid to structuralist film amongst many, many others. This artistic trajectory calls into play one meaning of score — scratch, incision or cut — referencing many techniques of work that emerge from this canon.
Filmmaker, artist, composer, musician and performer, Tony Conrad, created the installation Yellow TV’s (1973), seeking to create films and film forms of indefinite duration and to go beyond his previous experiments in structuralist film. Creating a meditative space through the “hum” of a continuous electrical sound produced by the amplification of the same light source that keep the light-sensitive panel painting “tvs” running. Conrad’s use of painterly material in Yellow TV’s is also found in the work of Lis Rhodes experimental, cult 16mm film, Dresden Dynamo (1974) as well as in Meris Angioletti’s installation Le Songe Vert. Variation 2 (2014), who both work with applied processes to celluloid. Rhodes’s colourful abstraction of stripes, dots and lozenges in red and blue that dance across the screen is copied onto the optical sound strip of the film, creating a sonic play between sound and image which literally becomes “what you hear is what you see”. Meris Angioletti manipulates slide-film by hand, mixing in colour gelatines to create a multi-projection, orchestration of abstraction, colour and light.
Other tendencies in experimental film are especially similar to video-based practices in visual art when considering found footage, readymades, sampling and techniques of re-appropriation, which also helps to locate many of the works in SCORE. Adaptable material comes in the form of old records, Hollywood films and animations, cinematic masterpieces and cult flicks. In his latest body of video work Martin Arnold appropriates old American cartoons, removing any trace of image that allows for narrative continuity and uses the abstract movements and disembodied shapes as notes on a keyboard or percussive elements of a drum kit. The frames in Arnold’s video become a visual and sonic palette of rhythmic and harmonious sounds and noises. Christian Marclay’s hynoptic and ironically titled Looking for Love (2008) is the recording of a half hour of erratic needle drops as the artist literally looks for the word “love” in songs on old records from the 50s and 60s. The record grooves become analogous for SCORE. Guy Ben Ner’s slapstick Soundtrack (2012) uses as a “readymade”, a continuous 11-minute segment of the audio from Steven Speilberg’s War of the Worlds (2005), restaging the action with his children in his own kitchen. Eugènia Balcells and Eugeni Bonet’s experimental film 133 (1979) reconnects image to sound as the artists attach clips of found footage to a sound effects record they happened upon.
Douglas Gordon’s staggering installation, Feature Film (1999), uses the whole of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo as a starting point for his own film, stages Bernard Hermann’s original score with but captures only the conductor. Consequently inverting the diegesis, the artist merges soundtrack and motion picture into one entity. An entirely acoustic experience is created by Jacopo Miliani as he appropriates the entire soundtrack of Profondo Rosso, Dario Argento’s iconic horror film, presenting it as an experiment of cinema pour l’oreille in order to explore the potential of the audio over image.
Many of the other works in the exhibition resist categorical discussion and instead circle back to the theme of SCORE through poetic tendency, technique, or investigation. Dóra Maurer’s structuralist film Kalah (1980) is constructed as a musical counterpoint between abstract forms and music, a collaboration between herself and the musician Zoltán Jeney. In Manon De Boer’s Presto, Perfect Sound (2006), the image of a recording of a Bartok Sonata for violin is cut accordingly to a pre-edited sound mix, playing with the inversion of the traditional dominance of image over sound in cinema. Ragnar Kjartansson spins a performance recording into an installation with God (2007), where the imperfect “human loop” of the voice contrasts the linear perfection of the recording device. The image of the performers from both of these works echo one another and reverberate back to the conductor from Gordon’s film, a spectral orchestra that never meets in time within the exhibition space.
Annika Larsson’s two-fold installation of Animal and A Score for Animal (2012) extends the dialogue of score away from the projected image. Larsson and collaborators compose music for her enigmatic film portrait of “fursuiters”. She also creates an abstract printed score for what the music could be. Keren Cytter plays with acoustic possibilities within narrative structure in Rose Garden (2014) as a way to turn dialogue into notes and complex arrangements of multi-phonic word plays with disorienting results.
The poetic, sculptural and reflexive works of Anna Franceschini, Diego Santomé and ZimmerFrei offer a meditation on the mechanical sound of the apparatus. In Anna Franceschini’s silent Nothing Is More Mysterious. A Fact That Is Well Explained, the circular movement of the camera has an own intrinsic musicality, recalling Marclay’s records. The vertical scroll of pianola’s perforated paper recalling a disembodied film strip in space. ZimmerFrei’s sculptural 3D viewers, on the contrary, freeze the moving image and extend the temporal space through composed sound. Diego Santomé’s Cinemàtografo (2010), a projection of itself, has only the soft ticking sound of the projector’s motor, circling back to Lis Rhodes’ description of her own work, “what you see is what you hear”.
Manuel Saiz’s Specialized Technicians Required: Being Luis Porcar (2005) brings some of the overarching themes of SCORE back into focus. Paradoxically delineating the dimensions of cinema and contemporary art, he creates a work where sync sound and image will never meet.
Through their affinities and differences, these works resonate with one other, constructing an unexpected geometry of relationships that structures the exhibition itself as a score, where rhythm and pitches of image and sound cull the potential of the architectural nature of MARCO’s panopticon.
Sarra Brill and Anna Cestelli Guidi, Exhibition Curators
