Une proposition de Sébastien Cliche

L’oreille dans l’œil
03.01–04.07.2007
Gallery

Artists: Alfonso Arz ápalo, Gwenaël Bélanger, Patrice Duhamel, Nelson Henricks, Caroline Lathan-Stiefel, Nelly-Ève Rajotte, Uniform

Musicians: Artist of the Year, Galerie Stratique, Jackie Gallant, Diane Labrosse, Jérôme Minière, Montag, Van Stiefel

A proposal by Sébastien Cliche

Throughout the twentieth century, artists and avant-garde composers turned from conventional musical notation and elaborated original visual systems. These notational practices, which can be grouped under the term graphic scores, propose new musical concepts while creating bridges between disciplines.

Inspired by this process, we invited artists to create a work/score that questioned the interface between the visual and the sonic. Each score was subsequently entrusted to a musician who appropriated it and offered an interpretation from it. The musical pieces were recorded and are presented in conjunction with the works on exhibit via portable music players.

Going beyond the simple inspiration of one creative work by another, the project strives to be a reflection on the means of representing sound and on the process of interpretation.

From the exhibition catalogue:

(…) We have become used to the union of music and visual arts without even really noticing it. Moreover, our hyper-mediated environment offers us many declinations of this fact, from music videos to interactive artworks. If it would be pointless to replay the history of the many ties between these disciplines here, we can, nonetheless mention that, from the beginning of the twentieth century, such possibilities stimulated the avant-gardes. One need only think of attempts by Kandinsky and Klee to catalogue the equivalences between visual signs and sounds, or of Dadaist and Futurist experiments. (…) A few decades later, other composers were more inclined to see the relationship between sound and image as a means of escaping the rigidity of conventional notation. John Cage, Earle Brown and Morton Feldman, to name just a few, elaborated original visual systems to communicate their music. These new kinds of “notation” did not seek to exactly re-transcribe a piece of music, but rather to erect conditions that would lead performers to re-evaluate their relationship to time, gesture and interaction. These practices are generally grouped together under the term graphic scores. (…)

Inspired by this artistic process, that brings the visual and the sonic into an interpretive relationship with each other, we invited artists to develop visual work with the knowledge that it would subsequently be “read” like a score by a musician. Behind this premise lies our intention to explore the interface between disciplines while avoiding their assimilation into a single audiovisual work, leaving to the viewer the possibility of establishing for him- or herself the connections between the two media. The artists’ responses to the challenge of the graphic score have been various, each of them privileging certain musical parameters and providing a greater or lesser number of directives. The projects were presented to musicians in mid-stream. These meetings allowed for stimulating exchanges and often sent the artists back to their studios with a better idea of how their “compositions” were received. Even if some undertook more sustained contact with the musicians, this project was not, properly speaking, a collaborative work. The accent here is on the creation of two distinct works, but linked through an interpretive relationship. Obviously, in this laboratory, the participating musicians are more than mere “executors”. Far beyond any strict convention, this kind of decoding is necessarily subjective. Thus, in reference to the interpretation of his score December ’52, the composer Earle Brown spoke of a “composed performance” instead of a “performed composition”. The musical pieces for this project were made in this spirit.