Essays
Eva Roscher about the "Blid and Klang" Installation : Idiosyncrasy
Notes on the painting ‘Idiosyncrasy’ by Astrid Rieder, based on the music of Bela Bartók’s pantomimic one-act play - ‘The Wonderful Mandarin’The correlation between Astrid Rieder’s picture and Bartok’s music lies in the contrast and not in the similarity of the artistic material used: Bartok’s is an ardent, expressive music, while Astrid Rieder makes extremely sparse use of form and colour. Both depictions have in common the absence of compromise and a background of similar thoughts:They concern the problems of oppression in every form, the right of each individual to freely develop their special gifts, and also criticism of the homogenisation of entire groups of people who thoughtlessly pursue short-lived trends in order to have ‘fun’. The usage of extreme and opposing material in art and music looks to distinguish itself from a neutral, indifferent consumption of art, and therefore has an arousing impact on our currently pluralistic society.
Essay about the "Bild und Klang" Insallation: SAR
Harry LehmannImage and Sound in an Ecclesiastical Realm
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<!--[endif]-->Is it possible, in our post-modern culture, for religious art to still exist? This question occurred to me when the artist Astrid Rieder first told me of her project: she wanted to create a sound installation by melding her painting, SAR, with Helmut Lachenmann’s third string quartet, GRIDO, in the Salzburg Kollegien church. Does a painting become an altarpiece simply because of the religious motif it depicts, such as an angel? What happens to a piece of secular, modern music when it is played in a church? Does modern art transcend simply by being carried into a house of God? Or is the church transformed – into a multifunctional concert-hall with gallery?Now we see – an angel hovers above our heads. Its grey outline appears faint against the luminous white background. Initially it is not possible to distinguish any contours in this overly-bright painting. It appears like a quadratic window in a nave, through which a white light presses itself upon us. As soon as one sinks into this white quadrangle, its veil is lifted. First one recognises the diagonals that separate the picture into two halves: seen from here, a triangle in the lower right with the shadowy angel, and a triangle in the upper left with three strange, green, shimmering letters: S-A-R.The angel holds a staff in his left hand, one wing extended out behind him. His grey, shadowy figure is entirely covered with a fine white film, as if dusted with feathers of down. He is only visible in the lower section of the picture. His figure is interrupted by the diagonal: half his head, one shoulder, one arm, disappear in the titanium-white field of letters. SAR, as we discover from the title, is an abbreviation for ‘scoop and run’, the cry of paramedics who find a person following a deadly accident: one thinks of a train accident, a car accident, a terror attack. In such a life-threatening situation there is only one hope of saving the critically injured - to bring him as quickly as possible to the emergency room of a hospital, a sterile, white-tiled cell in which the dead are either called back to life or remain on the other side. Scoop and Run – to gather up and carry away, so goes the slogan – if one has no time to tend the critically-injured on-site, instead of giving first-aid one must resort to the final form of assistance. In this moment, when, in the here and now, the cry of SAR rings out, Archangel Michael makes an appearance. The patron saint of all soldiers, invalids, traders and seafarers, crosses the border running diagonally through the picture. As soon as he has left his realm and floated into our world of accidents and catastrophes, he becomes invisible. The visible depiction of the invisible has eternally been the great theme of all past religious art. In addition to this, what makes this picture modern is that doubt in the existence of this guardian angel is also portrayed. In the meditative light of the church we recognise his apparitional form and watch as, at the moment where he enters our lives and hurries to our aid, his figure disappears. Can a picture that feeds disbelief in such a way be a religious picture? Is this white icon suitable as an alter-piece, as it has here – as if being trialled – been displayed? This question becomes even more important when one considers into which world of sound this archangel will float. Helmut Lachenmann’s music doesn’t include the obvious religiosity of Johann Sebastian Bach, but arose roughly 40 years ago from a revolutionary program: namely, a radical societal review in the medium of art. This fate must be written deeply in the world, such is the origin, if it can sink into the barbaric Second World War, the Holocaust and the Gulag. Hope is salvaged by a deep intervention in the consciousness of humanity itself, the manner in which it perceives the world. But how can music achieve this?One would have to assume that art, as it is, encourages doom in the world. Art obstructs direct access to itself, in all of its forms, its beauty and its suffering, by its own cultural pattern. Music is also guilty of this. The template of our perception, with which our experiences are poured into societal forms, is, for Lachenmann, tonality. He understands tonality as the basic framework of all traditional music, with its rhythm and harmony, its entire sound apparatus. Music would need to, so the thought goes, first of all get rid of the entire ‘aesthetic apparatus’ that gives us an incorrect audio-impression of the world. Such an annihilation of the total framework is most impressively achieved when it is performed on such classic instruments as a violin, viola and cello, and in such a conventional form as a string quartet. It becomes most obvious on the instruments of high-culture, that one and how one is annihilating the framework. For the composer it is about saving the empirical, tonal experience with their so-called concrete instrumental-music. That is why sounds are to be heard that remind us of concrete, acoustic, natural-phenomena – a whistling, scratching, whimpering, creaking and knocking – and no harmonic or rhythmically-ordered sounds of strings. In order to make such non-tonal noise-sounds, the instruments must be used in a non-traditional manner: by knocking the bow on the wooden body of the instrument, scratching or wiping the strings. Everything is permitted except for one thing: the pure, traditional, unbroken, musical sound. What does one hear when such ‘negative’ music resounds? A single note no longer creates an expectation of the note to follow, no harmonic framework holds neighbouring musical events together, no universal rhythm keeps track of time or allows the listener to anticipate the next beat. Instead, the musical events stand adjacent and disconnected, and recreate themselves in each moment, ex nihilo, as it were - out of nothing. The figure of the angel is only visible upon very careful examination of the picture. Similarly, the musical figures can only be understood when, with heightened auditory sensitivity, one delves into the white-noise of this music. The string quartet that we shall presently hear stems from the idea of a listening experience beyond the tonal system. It is entitled ‘GRIDO’ which translates from Italian as ‘the scream’. How does one hear this scream when it resounds in a church? How does it penetrate our ear when our eye is fixed upon the picture in which the angel crosses the border between salvation and catastrophe? Which imaginary story is spun between the picture and the music when the aesthetic universes of SAR and GRIDO penetrate one another?GRIDO is a quartet approximately 25 minutes long. It begins in an extremely high pitch with flautato sounds where the stringed instruments are bowed so close to the bridge that they sound like metallic flutes. Instead of melodies, one now detects constant musical lines that are either drawn, straight as an arrow, from the deepest to the highest pitches, or in a zigzag from the highest audible frequency to the lowest threshold. Dispersed individual tones fall into the taut, acoustic space like shooting stars. Now and again the clouds of cacophony meld into a thick carpet of sound, from which sparse droplets of noise splatter. Finally, everything melts together in a single harmonic, spectral sound. During an exchange of musical lines and expanses, the first minutes of the quartet ebb away. Generally, Lachenmann’s music converges with the fine arts. It contains all the basic forms of an imaginary musical geometry: tone-points, sound-lines, and noise-planes. Individual musical figures appear in the silence like pencil-scribbles on a piece of white paper. Traces of the traditions of music can be found on the background of these new listening experiences: a line of melody comprised of three, four notes, reverberates, a rhythmic fragment or a harmonic sound materialises suddenly, as if purified of all the story’s ballast. For the listener, this noise-music gains a graphic character. Abstaining from harmony leaches the colour out of the music – like an etching in grey tones – alternating between black and white. One hears, the longer one listens, the hatchings with which the composer’s sounds are formed. The tangible relationship between Lachenmann’s music and Rieder’s art comes, to say the least, from the light-dark technique used in the diagonally-split angel, alluding to the Grisaille technique. After about ten minutes the music abandons these sounds and the tension rises to a single, terrifying noise. The violin bows scratch violently across the strings, as if the gates to hell had been opened. A glance at the white icon shows which hour has just chimed: SAR – Scoop and Run. It must sound murderous when a person is fighting off death. All life is extinguished when three, four minutes later, the stringed instruments only produce single tones until every noise is swallowed in the deathly silence of a General Pause. But this composed finale is not yet the end of the music. As there is a second half to the picture, so too there is a second component of the quartet, which resounds after this General Pause. In contrast to the first part, the harmonic sound expanses now gather a larger presence. The single sounds create stationary interference and vibrate in the church nave. The associative observation of the picture tells us that the archangel must appear to the critically injured in the robes of such spectral sounds. At the finale one hears the GRIDO, the scream: a short, ascending, scratching, inhuman noise, out of the guts of the violins, that abruptly falls again. A cry out, a plea for help. Who is going to believe this story, you may now be asking. When various works of art are displayed together in a church, in my opinion they also wish to be experienced together. The ear shows the eye what it cannot see; the eye shows the ear what it cannot hear. It is due to exactly these rhapsodic experiences that profane works of art obtain a transcendence which they would not have been able to reach outside of a sacral space. This is what I believe – and so at the conclusion of my work I return to my initial question – religious art is, like all modern art today, experimental. Image and music are really searching for belief rather than possessing belief. They light up the space of our existence and remind one or other of us that even in the most desperate situations in life, everything is possible – by God. For further reflections of the author on the topic of the societal function of art and religion in the modern age see: Harry Lehmann: Die flüchtige Wahrheit der Kunst. Ästhetik nach Luhmann, München: W. Fink, 2005.
contact: www.harrylehmann.neth.lehmann@ngi.de
Preliminary Notes from Ulrike Guggenberger, art historian of the Mueum of Modern Art , SalzburgAstrid Rieder passionately desires to probe into and utilize human kind´s capability to bring together art, mind and spirit through a common experience, and to weld it into a cathartic experience. In her personal work Astrid Rieder ties together painting, literature and music, and thereby multiplies the expressiveness of her paintings. Metaphorically this deep seated wish expresses itself through her use of the diagonal, which, in many of her paintings, unites the horizontal with the vertical. Her diagonals do not divide the space of the painting, but rather stand for the cross-over of the distinctive disciplines. On a scholarship in Frankfurt in 2004 Astrid Rieder comes across an intense tone of red, reminiscent of rusting iron, found in Frankfurt ´s port, that fascinates her: Mennige. This colour, a lead oxide compound, starts the very personal tale of her usage of the diagonal within the cosmos of her paintings. From within her paintings acute-triangles, kept in the colour Mennige, emerge from a white ground. She denotes her works with „Mennige D1“ in ascending order. From now on her work is characterized by a partition of the canvas in two triangles. The diagonal thereby created connects the adjacent corners, in a way eliminating their disconnectedness. Assuming that this manner of composing a painting takes places spontaneously in the creative process, the composition’s success derives from the paintings accordance of form with content. Within art history, triangle and diagonal are common elements. Specifically during the Baroque period the diagonal gains in importance. It is in this period that the transition from feudalism to capitalism was consummated, based on a vibrant sensuality and yet founded on a bed rock of deep religious beliefs. In the Fine Arts these sociological and intellectual tensions find their expression in the metaphor of the diagonal. There, as opposed to Astrid Rieder ´s work, it is not found in it ´s pure and straight form, but rather more defines the composition in it ´s basic structure. The diagonal in Rieder ´s compositions creates two equally spaced wedges, symbolizing elements of contrast, uttermost tension and contradiction. Simultaneously these wedge-formed triangles exist in a space of precision and straightforwardness thereby introducing a sense of calm and clarity into the painting, compensating for the contradictions. The fusion of vertical and horizontal that exist in Rieder´ s paintings was a characteristic style element of 20th century artists like Piet Mondrian as well as of some „Bauhaus“ members, that undertook to cleanse art from unnecessary clutter. Astrid Rieder ´s personal proximity and sensitivity to music, literature and painting seems to have an inspiring effect on the artist and induces her to fuse various expressive art forms together. She pursues and implements this passion consequently in her workshops, performances and installations.In the course of her profoundly coordinated cross over sessions, those moments occur, that Friedrich Schiller so aptly described „...the higher the degree that a creation aspires to, the more so the specific boundaries of it ´s genre disappear; it thereby acquires a broader character, and in it ´s highest form the various art forms would resemble their effect on the mind.“ In that context it ´s worthy to point out that characterizations of melodic, poetic, harmonic, lyrical composition are used interchangeably for both painting, music and literature. Arnold Schönberg describes in the Almanach „Der Blaue Reiter“ an interesting phenomenon that he realises about himself: „...that quite a few of my Lieder have been finished, enamoured by the initial sound of the first textual words without further giving any attention, while in the delirium of composing, to the continuation of the poetic occurrences, in fact without even capturing them to the slightest, only realising a few days later that I should inquire what the poetic content of my Lied was. To my astonishment I then found that I have never done more justice to the poet than when, led by the first immediate contact with the initial sound of the poetry, I anticipated everything that, as a necessity, had to follow that initial sound.“Equally so Wassily Kandinsky talked about an inner sound in context with his paintings, when in 1911 he created his first abstract oil canvas, after attending a concert of Arnold Schönberg. Astrid Rieder traces that inner sound, mutual to all art forms, within the context of her art. In all her expressive works since 2004 a square, more rarely a rectangular shape is the medium, as in her creation „Idiosyncrasy“. The word idiosyncrasy, probably best translated with „personal characteristic“, is written in clearly decipherable letters in one of the two, now triangular shapes, brought into existence through the diagonal.Adjacent one finds several, identical pictograms, or images of human skulls. Radically minimalist, not a brushstroke too many, none too few, no exaggeration, but a strong message in letters and pictures, the brushstroke light but exact, the colour monochrome. The partition of picture and letters creates a highly explosive tension, only reined in by the diagonal, which puts intellect and emotion onto their proper places. „The last day“. Helene Cixous, a French poet, wrote a text describing the consuming, insistent and attracting force of love which finds it ´s fulfilment in the last day of life, in death. The composer Wolfgang Seierl transformed that strongly felt desire into a piece for soprano and viola. Astrid Rieder combines the music and lyrics in a painting titled „Infatuated“. The term and the painting are juxtaposed. The pictorial part does not exhaust itself by the texture of the colours, but fuses split glass and resin on the canvas. Equally brittle and transparent, glass is formed through an extended melting process by high temperatures. Split by an accidental process into small pieces and then fused again it possesses a strong symbolic force, standing for continuity and transformation. Between the definition „Infatuated“ and the haptic material a dialogue ensues.„What it feels like to be alive“ is the term for a performance, to which Astrid Rieder invited 80 menbers of a company at the ARGE Salzburg in 2005. During the performance, pulsating life was projected on a screen using red and slimy lumps of colour and oil pastels. A perfect example of Astrid Rieder ´s free employment of different media.And again it is pieces of music that instill in Astrid Rieder the wish to translate to a picturesque medium. For years Astrid Rieder has cooperated to that effect with the noted pianist Eva Roscher.
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