Infiltration homogeneous for concert grand piano

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Homogeneous infiltration for concert grand piano
Joseph Beuys, 1966
Photo Adagp , Paris 2007
Link to the photo
(please note copyrights )

Infiltration Homogeneous for concert grand, the greatest composer of our time is the Contergankind was an art action by Joseph Beuys in 1966. A relic of this performance , which is assigned to the art direction Fluxus , is a sculpture of the same name in the Center Pompidou-Metz . The core of the sculpture consists of a concert grand piano sewn into felt . Through this metaphor and the performance developed around it, Beuys believed he was portraying the essence of a disabled person in its expressive power. At the same time, he wanted to show artistically that a thing or a being that is silent can still produce a statement or, as Beuys said, there is an “inner tone” of itself.

performance

On July 28, 1966, a concert by the American musicians Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik took place in the cleared auditorium in the main building of the Düsseldorf Art Academy in front of 508 people . Suddenly Beuys interrupted their playing and began to push a Bechstein grand piano, previously sewn into a gray-brown felt blanket and onto which a Greek cross made of two red rags was sewn, into the auditorium. This turned out to be difficult because the wing was heavy and the door was narrow. After setting up this object, Beuys sewed on a second red cross and stuffed beeswax plugs into his ear canals . Then he took a small toy car , which was an ambulance and also had red crosses, out of his jacket pocket , and moved it to and fro under the wing. Then he took from his jacket a clockwork toy made of sheet metal , which a small duck showed. After the tin duck was reared, Beuys also let it run under the piano with its mechanically flapping flights. She made quack - quack - quack - quack until after a short time she fell over motionless. Afterwards Beuys step of a two-part blackboard and wrote with chalk on the top of the words IN THE ROOM OF CHILD CONTERGAN penetrated HELPS HIM THE MUSIC OF THE PAST . To these words he added two question marks , one line below that another five question marks. He then pulled up the second part of the blackboard from below and wrote the words DAS LEIDEN / DIE WARM / DER SOUND / DIE PLASTICITÄT on it . On the upper part of the board he drew a cross cut in half and marked it with the number 508 . After these actions, the piano was pushed out of the auditorium again; the action was over.

Preparations and later advice from Beuys

As the Beuys student Johannes Stüttgen later described, Beuys had already developed the basic features of the performance through a concept he called the “nude score”. The paper consisted of drawings and words. Deviating from the action listed, the “nude score” also included the term TIME FULFILLMENT for the second part of the school blackboard . After the action, Beuys uttered the sentence “The greatest contemporary composer is the Contergan child.” This sentence, which - like the word CONTERGANKIND on the school blackboard - referred to the victims of the thalidomide scandal uncovered in 1961 , added to the title of the performance . His main title Infiltration Homogeneous for concert grand pianos he later explained as follows:

“ Yes, I didn't use the piano there, but used the automatic sound generator downstairs, like the croaking duck. (…) No, I didn't produce any notes on the piano because playing the piano had isolated itself and I was isolated from the piano. That was the sense that a different tone was produced there, an internal tone. (…) The sound as a continuum, as a time element, but not a physically audible thing. Only continuity and homogeneity. "

“ I provided the piano with a skin. A piano also has an inner workings. The layer of felt slows everything that pushes outwards. "

“ ... but when you have the isolated instrument in front of you, that you experience the non-sound as a sound, that's the point. It has a certain proximity to an animal. It has a skin, and inside there is a life of the soul, let's assume, a sound, even if the animal doesn't scream. The animal always has a soul tone, actually a person too. So this tone as a non-physical tone, that was what was meant. "

" Infiltration - homogeneous describes the character and structure of felt, so the piano becomes a homogeneous deposit of sound with the potential to filter through felt. "

" The sound of the piano is trapped inside the felt skin. In normal sense the piano is an instrument used to produce sound. When not in use, it is silent, but still has a sound potential. Here, no sound is possible and the piano is condensed to silence. "

In the following sequence, Beuys revealed that when referring to the contemporary thalidomide scandal, it was nevertheless a more general statement about suffering and disabled human life:

“ The life, the warmth, the filling of time. That was such a typeface. In analogy to the idea of ​​the interior tone. So the greatest composer is the one who suffers. Who can't do anything anymore. What do people produce in their lifetime, in relation to composition, or to works or to expressions. It was once said that someone who also has a physical resemblance to such a sewn-in piano, that such a trunk being can no longer express itself in the activities of people in its work, but that it makes its contribution through its pain. So there was an extreme position related to: what is a person's life, or: what is his product. Many people are clever and intelligent, some are also beautiful and can run very quickly, some are also capable of great external works, but what about people who cannot express all of this when they meet a fate that suits them prevents this type of production. That was the idea, and the thalidomide was exactly the date. "

Prehistory and connections

Beuys, who had learned to play the piano in his youth, worked as a visual artist for a long time on the relationship between objects ( plastic ), sound , hearing as well as imagination , memory , empathy , intuition and association (“symbolic charging” of objects). He shared this interest with a number of other actors in a movement that had formed in the United States at the beginning of the 1960s around John Cage and George Maciunas under the name Fluxus . Around the same time, the French Yves Klein dealt with the connection between a sound and a non-sound in his symphony monotone - silence (1960). Klein's performance Le Vide (“The Empty”), which consisted of the mere arrival of invited guests in an illuminated exhibition room without pictures, had already shown in 1958 that there was actually no emptiness, but an event with certain imaginations about an expected exhibition of pictures.

For a series of events organized by the Fluxus movement in Wiesbaden in 1962 , Beuys developed ideas for an earth piano , but these were never implemented. One idea consisted of a pit that should have the empty shape of a concert grand piano; According to another variant, he wanted to shape earth with a binding agent into the positive volume of a wing. Both variants would have evoked and merged in the viewer ideas about pianos and pits or earth. Beuys was interested in the effect of a sculpture and an action. He developed the term “interior clay” for this.

When he had the opportunity to make artistic contributions to the Festum Fluxorum Fluxus event , which took place in the auditorium of the Düsseldorf Art Academy in February 1963, he performed the Siberian Symphony 1st movement on the first evening, which included a piano and a school blackboard were used. By playing the piano himself, Beuys made short excerpts from two compositions by Erik Satie heard as part of other activities - including the inscription on the school blackboard and the partial evisceration of a hare on it . On the second evening, during a break in action, Beuys suddenly stepped onto the stage, which was equipped with a piano and a school blackboard, and placed a mechanical tin toy on the floor. This action was called a composition for 2 musicians because the figures on the tin toy represented two musicians and - driven by a spring - had made sounds with their musical instruments for around 20 seconds. The title Komposition für 2 Musikanten elevated this contribution to a “composition”, although Beuys had only started and set up the tin toys. Beuys left the piano untouched during this action.

A few days later, however, in March 1963, Beuys went to his piano action as part of the Exposition of Music - Electronic Television in Wuppertal , during which he smashed an Ibach piano with an ax on the opening evening and battered it with shoes. As Beuys' later remarks on this point, he saw the piano as a “traditional form of art”, the destruction of which would make the “future shape possible”. The focus was not on the destruction, but on the creation of new forms of experience and sound in an expanded form of piano playing.

On July 20, 1964, Beuys again used a piano as an artistic medium in Aachen as part of the Festival of New Art . In the Auditorium Maximum of RWTH Aachen University , he worked on a piano with detergent from the brand OMO and rubbish from a wastepaper basket by putting these things in the piano case. He played the changing sound of the piano to the audience by pressing the piano keys. Then he picked up a drill and drilled holes in the object. When he melted fat to add it to the resulting sculpture, angry students intervened. One of them hit Beuys with a bloody nose. This led to an unplanned course of the action, because Beuys refrained from further editing the piano, picked up a crucifix and held it up in an evocative gesture - a scene that made him known nationwide in one fell swoop through a photo of Heinrich Riebesehl .

An action that also belongs in the prehistory of Aktion Infiltration Homogen was the performance DER CHEF THE CHIEF Fluxus Gesang , which Beuys performed on August 30, 1964 in Copenhagen and on December 1, 1964 in the René Block gallery in Berlin . During this action, Beuys rolled himself up in felt and then lay on the floor as a "seemingly dead creature" for eight hours, combined with two dead rabbits placed at the head and foot of the felt roll. Using a microphone and a loudspeaker system that was set to extremely loud playback, Beuys emitted "amorphous" noises at irregular intervals, including primarily a sound reminiscent of the roar of a deer. In this action, in which a sound body covered by felt appeared, the felt already functioned as a symbol of storage and isolation.

Further development

In 1968, the performance Infiltration Homogeneous for concert grand pianos resulted in the installation Infiltration - Homogeneous for concert grand pianos, which was curated by the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf as part of the Prospect '68 exhibition . The grand piano wrapped in felt was sold in 1976 by the Rudolf Zwirner Gallery to the Center Georges-Pompidou in Paris, after having been with Anny de Decker in Antwerp from 1968 onwards . In 1979 the grand piano was shown with other Beuys objects in the Beuys retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York . Due to damage, the felt skin of the grand piano was repaired in 1976 and replaced by Beuys in 1984. The damaged old felt cover has since been exhibited next to the object as Die Haut . The Center Georges-Pompidou acquired the ensemble in this form in the same year. The installation in which the grand piano was presented there was designed as a museum in such a way that it enabled a discourse on Beuys' idea of ​​the "audible sculpture". The plant has been in the Center Pompidou-Metz since 2013 .

Another work that appeal to infiltration homogeneous for grand piano leaned is that 1975 by Beuys created object Infiltration Homogeneous for Cello , a sewn-in felt cello , on its front Charlotte Moorman applied at a same performance two red of felt in the shape of a cross. With Beuys' permission, Moorman had already performed the performance Infiltration Homogen for cello at the 4th Festival of Avant Garde in New York City on September 9, 1966 .

literature

  • Mario Kramer: Sound and Sculpture. The musical aspect in the work of Joseph Beuys . Dissertation University of Hamburg 1993, Häusser Verlag, Darmstadt 1995, ISBN 3-8955-2008-X , p. 47 ff. ( Table of contents, PDF )
  • Jürgen Geisenberger: Joseph Beuys and the music . Dissertation University of Eichstätt 1999, Tectum Verlag, Marburg 1999, ISBN 3-8288-8022-3 , p. 80 ( Google Books )
  • Uwe M. Schneede : Joseph Beuys: The actions. Annotated catalog raisonné with photographic documentation. Verlag Gerd Hatje , Ostfildern-Ruit 1998, ISBN 3-7757-0450-7 , pp. 112-117

Web links

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Johannes Stüttgen : Social sculpture begins with hearing . Excerpts from a speech at the Beuys Congress 2000, edited and introduced by Enno Schmidt. In: die Drei , Heft 1, 2001, p. 25
  2. ↑ Jürgen Geisenberger: Joseph Beuys and the music . Dissertation University of Eichstätt 1999, Tectum Verlag, Marburg 1999, ISBN 3-8288-8022-3 , p. 81 ff.
  3. ↑ Jürgen Geisenberger, p. 83
  4. ↑ Jürgen Geisenberger, p. 69
  5. ↑ Jürgen Geisenberger, p. 71 ff.
  6. ↑ Jürgen Geisenberger, p. 76
  7. ↑ Jürgen Geisenberger, p. 200
  8. ↑ Lighthouses , website in the portal centrepompidou-metz.fr , accessed on September 16, 2015
  9. ↑ Geraldine Norman: Material challenge: Knickers on the line by Ay-O, a Beuys cello wrapped in felt - Charlotte Moorman, cellist and performance artist, left some extraordinary mementoes of the avant-garde . Article dated June 20, 1993 on independent.co.uk portal , accessed March 20, 2016
  10. ↑ Ingeborg Ruthe: The cello in a felt jacket . Article from December 15, 2014 in the berliner-zeitung.de portal , accessed on March 20, 2016
  11. ↑ Jürgen Geisenberger: Joseph Beuys and the music . Dissertation University of Eichstätt, 1999, Tectum Verlag, Art History Series, Volume 1, Marburg 1999, ISBN 3-8288-8022-3 , p. 84 ( Google Books )