In 1981 after a victory followed by over three years of struggle a record that documents the activity of 29 women who fought for equal rights in their company called “Heinze photo druck und papier” in Gelsenkirchen was pressed. The workers union published the record radio broadcast of the reports on the struggle, songs sung by the women and other voices that made this event.
Gal tracked down three of the women who took part in the struggle. The result is an installation made of a video showing the “heinze frauen” (The “Heinze women” as the press use to call them) listen to the record and reacts to the memories that the sound activates, a record player with the record and a film that was shot by one of the colleagues following the case court victory in Kassel in 1981.
The electronic composition Gal made on the EMS Synthi 100 at Radio Belgrade is based on the artist’s brain wave activity during cycles of sleep. Interlaced within the electronic sound are voices reading dreams.
These dreams found in historical sources were told by individuals who were subjected to various conditions of political oppression across histories and geographies.
Furniture music, or Musique d’ameublement in the original French, is a style of composition written by the French com- poser Erik Satie (1866–1925) from 1917 onwards. It is consid- ered the first “ambient” or “easy listening” music, designed to be played in the background rather than as a centrepiece. The name refers to the fact that the pieces are intended to “furnish” the room without attracting too much attention.
In 1980, the American composer John Cage (1912–1992) responded to Satie with a composition titled Furniture Music Etcetera. Particularly influenced by the idea of background music in his famous silent work 4’33”, especially Muzak (easy listening music played in office buildings), Cage used the piano parts from Satie’s furniture music and his own work Etcetera from 1973 to form a new composition for two pianos. The score consists of a timetable indicating which pianist is to play excerpts from either score. Durations are given, while dynamics, tempo and specific choices as to material are left to the performer.
In Gal’s work, the piano parts from the furniture music and Etcetera are each pressed onto a vinyl. The two record players built into the furniture sculpture are connected by a voltage control system. Each turntable motor is triggered by short dynamic sound events – known as transients – made by the piano on the other record. The piano pieces cause each other to play according to random automated elements. The composition thus reaches a new level of indeterminacy and becomes a new piece played by the furniture itself.
The curtains that divide the exhibition space are props from the concert scene with George Antheil from Gal’s film Three Works for Piano (2020). The geometric pattern comes from Marcel L’Herbier’s film L’Inhumaine (1924), which is primarily famous for its experimental approach to the medium of film and the involvement of numerous avant-garde artists in its music and set design. While L’Inhumaine met with criticism and incomprehension upon its release, its significance for film and art history is recognized today, particularly its synthe- sis of the various arts. The film also includes scenes from a concert at which dissonant compositions by George Antheil were performed and caused riots among the audience of extras – another source of inspiration for Gal’s film and the reconstruction of Antheil’s concert in Budapest.
Fotos: Daniel Sadrowski
Dani Gal, LAUTFIGUREN, Museum Ostwall, MO_Schaufenster #36, Dortmund
The thirty-five brass shapes are enlarged replicas of Eduard Sievers’s “Personal Curves” from 1915. The Leipzig phoneti- cian and linguist Sievers (1850–1932) developed a method known as “Schallanalyse” (sound analysis) to reproduce the original voice of an author and to capture the musical charac- teristics inherent in a given literary text.
As a way of representing different voice types, Sievers created a series of brass wire shapes that he called “personal curves”. These were based on observations by the musicologist Gustav Becking, who developed the curves from movements made while conducting; they are also known as “Becking curves”. These visualized curves, also referred to as “optical signals”, were then used in an experiment: several people read a text by Friedrich Schiller aloud while holding a brass wire in each hand. A phonograph was used to record the vibrations of their chest and larynx, which supposedly corresponded to Schiller’s original tonality and emphasis due to the brass forms. The question of whether such linguistic theories can be proven remains unanswered.
Historical Records is a collection of commercially produced vinyl records that documents recorded political events of the twentieth century. The collection contains over 700 LP’s of speeches and interviews of those who were in power, others who objected to this power, of war and peace agreements, human rights struggles, and other radio broadcasts of the events that shaped history from the invention of the phonograph to the fall of the Berlin wall. The project examines how recorded political events turned into a commodity, and what role sound documentation has in the interplay between personal and collective/national memory.
The work refers to one of the key moments of post cold war American foreign policy – the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the apprehension of General Manuel Noriega. During Christmas 1989 Noriega had fled to the Vatican Embassy, whereupon the American military installed speakers and ‘blasted’ the Vatican Embassy building with Rock songs like Guns N Roses, “Welcome to the Jungle”, or Billy Idols, “Flesh for Fantasy”. This military operation was the ‘blueprint’ for dealing with future conflicts on many strategic aspects – one of which was the militaries control over the media.
a golden brooch object which is a replica of a clip-on microphone typically used in documentary films and interviews. It bears the title of a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge from 1798. This poem, which gives an account of the experiences of a homecoming mariner, was mentioned by the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi as an example of the necessity of reporting as a witness for those who can no longer do so. In this sense, the object signifies the moment of transference between witness and listener and the juncture between oral testimony and aural document.
Lifta, a former village on the outskirts of Jerusalem, represents the tragedy of the Palestinians.
Their homes and culture, once a booming and wealthy village with more than 2500 inhabitants, had to flee in the 1948 Arab Israeli war. The abandoned village was at first settled with Jewish refugees from Yemen and Kurdistan, who on their part had been expelled from their Arab home countries as a result of the founding of Israel. However, Lifta was later partially deconstructed by blowing holes into the ceilings of buildings in order to prevent the return of Palestinians. In contrast to most Palestininan villages Lifta was never entirely destroyed, several plans to rebuild it as a neighbourhood and turn it into a luxury resort, have failed.
In close reference to Gordon Matta-Clark’s practice, and with a reversal of his title „Reality Properties: Fake Estates“ (1973), photographs, historical documents and news clippings ensemble a diverse illustration of a history where politics, economical interests and concerns of cultural identity are represented in architecture and structural characteristics. Using various techniques of printing and reference to sources, „Reality Estates: Fake Properties, Lifta“, does not create a linear narration of historical events or try to provide a specific political or moral point of view – it much rather functions as a lose assemblage of material that on one hand illustrates the diversity of the conflict itself. However on an abstract level, the work uses the purely formal character of the found architecture – holes in ceilings while the supporting walls seem stable. This gesture acts as another reference to Matta-Clark‘s work, with the distinction that these holes are the result of strategical and political destruction, rather than sculptural decisions made by the artist.
The phrase Sono vietate le discussioni politiche (Italian: Political Discussions Are Prohibited)
refers to signs with the same message as they could be found in Italian bars in the 1930’s.
An architectural model used as a prop in the film “As From Afar”. The sculpture is simultaneously a miniature of the Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp and a model for a set, for a night scene in a fictional film.
Multiple frottage drawings of a grave stone of a British military drummer who died during the British colonial invasion to Palestine in World War I – the last war to use drums as an active battlefield instrument. Through the act of repetition in frottage making, and the repetition of hanging the multiple drawings in a sequence, the installation gives a sense of rhythm created by drumming. The title refers to the basic patterns used by musical drummers and takes its origin from military drumming.
At the beginning of the transcript of the 5th conversation between Morton Feldman and John Cage, the transcriber writes that in the middle of the paragraph the tape is damaged for 15 sec. Because of the damage, or the missing part, one can read the paragraph as a loop with a new meaning. I created a loop, a digital voice reading as Cage, with a break in the middle. The two are talking about the musician Edgar Varese who coined the term ‘organized sound’, as opposed to music. The damaged tape becomes a part of the composition in relation to the three composers and their conversation.
Krapp’s Last Tape is a one-act play, written in English in 1958, by Samuel Beckett. The play consists of a cast of one man and a tape recorder. The plot takes place on Krapp’s sixty-ninth birthday and, as has become his custom, he hauls out his old tape recorder to review one of the earlier years – in this case the recording he made when he was thirty nine and makes a new recording commenting on the events of the previous twelve months. The play is structured as a monologue/dialogue between Krapp and his voice recorded on tape. He listens and comments. Through the recordings Krapp reviews his own past, and slowly the audience understands that he has nothing left but his past as his voice on tape.
The play was adapted as a sound performance. The theatrical set of objects: Krapp’s desk, chair, the stage and the tape recorder were amplified using contact microphones – a type of microphone that amplifies vibrations into sound. When Beckett directed the play himself he instructed the actor to try to become one body with the machine, saying: “Krapp no longer owns the memories on the tapes. His mind is no longer capable of holding onto them”. Taking a musical approach to the play, the text is used as a musical score, while the objects are the instruments played by the actor, and the actor’s amplified movements become a sonic composition that is no longer attached to his body, but returns as a playback to the stage. The character’s behaviour conducts the way it will be heard by the audience. However loud audio feedback occurs, and the character becomes irritated by what is created by his own body – an analogue action that is his reaction to his recorded voice from the past.
A collection of Current Affairs Photos from different newspapers and magazines between the 70’s until today runs parallel too a collection of statements made by visual artists in interviews through the same period of time. Two slideshows play next to each other; one shows the texts the other shows the images. The viewer confronts the two as connected, obliged to impose a new meaning while, by confronting the texts and the images together. The news photos are being decontextualized from their reality and the artists statements are being observed in relation to images of “real” events.
Zen for TV And The Birth Of The Palestinian Refugee Problem
The work derives from a controversy around the classic Hebrew novella Khirbet Khizeh by Israeli author S. Yizhar published in 1949, in which he described the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their village by the Israeli Army during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The story became a bestseller, was included in the Israeli high school curriculum in 1964 and adapted into the television film in 1978, titled “Khirbet Khizeh”.
On February 15th, 1978, the film should have been shown on the Israeli TV. 90 minutes before the showing of the film it has been cancelled by the Minister of Education and Culture due to its content shedding doubt on the Zionist narrative. The unprecedented cancellation of a TV show through the government prompted protests against censorship from a coalition of artists, authors, lawyers, parliament members, journalists and TV technicians. However, the public polemic for and against airing the film became a fight for the freedom of information rather than an argument about the content of the film.
As result of this, TV newsmen vented their feelings by letting Israeli screens go dark for 50 minutes- the length of the controversial film, on the day after the Minister’s order.
The installation consists of three unsynchronized elements: The original sound track of the TV film Khirbet Khizeh was translated into English and adapted into a radio play with professional actors, combining it with an interview with film’s director Ram Loevy. The piece is played through a surrounding sound system. As a graphic translation of his audio work, the artist also adapted the optical soundtrack of the mentioned film, shown on a black and white television monitor. The visual result is a thin, moving and horizontal line. Among other references, this video projection relates to Nam June Paik’s Zen For TV, 1963, which shows astatic, white line running vertically across a black TV screen. Paik adapted his work into a second version where the line runs horizontally in 1976, the year the production of the TV film was started. For the presentation, I will show the video part of the work with the direct referens to “zen for tv” by paik witch is part of monuk collection.
Installation view Statement Art 41 BaselInstallation view, Statement Art 41 Basel, CH 2010Installation view, Statement Art 41 Basel, CH 2010
A record player, which is connected to motion sensors, installed in a space. When sensing movement in the room the sensors send signals the record player, which starts to spin according to the speed and frequency of the visitors. The record used to create the sound is a „ Architecture Regarding the Future of Conversations “, which documents interviews with famous Western 20th century architects. The movement of visitors in a given room activates and manipulates the record while the speakers play the resulted sound in the space.
I.E. (id est– latin) means “that is” or “in other words.” Every word in the Oxford Dictionary has one or more example sentences that demonstrate how the word should be used in a sentence. The sentences cover every possible topic in culture so when they are taken out of context, the examples appear to be fragments of a story, a dialogue or references out of another text. The work is a random slide show of all the example sentences in the dictionary (over 70,000). When projected in a space, new assosiations emerge between the sentences and authorship can be generated by the viewer.
