New Viewings #32

Conversation between Augustin Maurs and Clémentine Deliss, April 2021

CD: Let’s talk about the issue of schizophrenia and the human voice. I believe that the controversy surrounding this “transcription of a schizophrenic” comes from the fact that the patient recorded their own voice before meeting the analyst. Later, a transcription of the rant was lying on Friedrich Kittler’s desk. At the time, this raised the question of whether one can simply record a dream and let the analyst listen to the recording, rather than be coerced into a live situation. Kittler replied that the problem with the dictaphone is that it ‘captures’ the voice. I am interested in the notion of capturing the voice both through a recording and through transcribing and performing. For DELIRIUM, your voice goes beyond the act of being recorded and captured, it becomes virtual. What level of transcription does the virtual provide for music?

AM: Music has been described as a virtual world, especially prior to recordings. For me, music is both physical and virtual. However, what interests me here is the use of a technical device to ‘capture’ in order to get rid of one’s voice(s) rather than retain it.

CD: Can one go so far as to say that one should never record the voice? Never transcribe it into notes? Even, that the voice cannot be exhibited?

AM: The way you record something, confers a status and an array of different positionings. Many musicians play, get recorded, and simply want to be as good as possible. Glenn Gould, in contrast, thought about this differently. He felt concert life didn’t make sense anymore. He started producing recordings. These recordings are not documentations, or traces of a concert. On the contrary, they negate the concert institution and its rituals in order to enter into a different – both hyper-intimate and conceptualised – place.

With this recording, I asked myself, was it really the patient who wished to have an aural documentation? Or were they recorded against their will by the doctor? What was the purpose of recording patients in German psychiatric wards in the early 20th century? Where did Kittler get this document from? Was there a prior recording of it somewhere? I have been unable to find out anything, except for the anecdote that the document lay on Kittler’s desk and that he himself didn’t know where it came from. At the start of this work for DELIRIUM was a sheet of music, a transcription of a non-existing recording. My piece is really about the act of passing between media, and the different methods of capturing.

CD: Was this a transcription of a dream? Or a delirium?

AM: According to Kittler, it was a dream. But it might have turned into a delirium. The document is a striking trace of someone who appears to have used singing in order to recollect memories, while maybe hallucinating and entering into another state. However, we don’t know how accurate the transcription is. I would be surprised if the patient truly sang what is on paper. It uses very clear notes as if it had been sung in tune and in quite square rhythms. But why would the patient have sung ‘in tune’? However normative the musical notation is, it can still be articulated in very different ways. While recording my version of the score, I stuck to what had been written almost stubbornly. I tried to sing on a zero-level of interpretation (which, of course, is impossible). I wanted to place emphasis on the alienation of the written document. The alienation of the alienated, if you like.

CD: Have you ever made a work on delirium?

AM: I did actually. A cello piece that was called “Le quatrième délire”.

CD: I’m reminded of Antonin Artaud’s description of the plague, an apt reference to the delirium in which we find ourselves today. Artaud says that the plague is a crisis, which like theatre, either ends in death or regeneration. Theatre, he continues, is evil because it pushes the mind into crisis, exalting its energies, challenging death and purifying life at the same time. There is a theatrical element in this musical rendition.

AM: Plagues and viruses as operatic “bouffées délirantes” perhaps?

CD: The act of recording is also one of remediation. A condition of distress is healed by transferal onto another medium. The other medium cuts into the original, shapes it differently, and takes it further, multiplying meanings. The recording is the remedy.

AM: I guess that is the analogy made by Kittler between the recording device and the therapist or analyst. But the recording is also an act of theft, consented or not.

CD: Your work also takes musical composition into the adjacent sphere of visual art. You have said that music can only emerge in relation to something outside of music.

AM: Yes, in order to make a sound, one needs to identify something non-musical such as ratios, languages, and images.

For example, my Poem-Scores (Partitions poèmes) indicate circular and linear time and are graphic investigations. They are my notes on musical processes. I call them Poem-Scores because they are between notes and abstract compositions. They are not meant to be played or performed – although they could be – but to question the whole idea of notation. This connects to the theme of the schizophrenic. I have an obsession with stains, with the strange opposition between stain and dot. The dot in musical notation is reproducible when making music, but the stain is by definition something that you can’t repeat. It can become something too, like a chord. I wanted to work on several notational systems, both controllable and uncontrollable at once. The stain, to me is the manifestation of the idea of stolen time. I collected stains during the Dilijan Arts Observatory that you curated in Armenia in 2016. These were stains on paper that I found in the Soviet electronics factory that we occupied for three weeks. The stain cuts and breaks the musical narrative of time. A musician can read something into this – these are notes.

CD: Can one exhibit a rhythm? Can we think of sound works as archive?

AM: I am interested in drawing sounds out from the past. For example, Giacinto Scelsi, the Italian composer who died in the 1980s and spent many months in a psychiatric clinic obsessively playing the same note over and over again, allegedly an A-Flat. I dedicated one of my “Toasts” – very short musical pieces – to Scelsi’s A-flat. I have done a few of these Toasts, for instance to humming…

CD: For New Viewings, you are taking this work further with live musical realisations of the Transcription, thereby activating more voices…

AM: Yes, musical live realisations will contribute to further unfoldings of the work.

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Augustin Maurs is a composer who combines performative, collaborative and curatorial practices. His works focusses on the interpretation, the contextualisation of music, and on exploring various musical practices. This includes the search for different techniques, musical-social agreements, chosen sites, found documents and other visual associations – an array of interactive movements that he describes with the term “musicality”. Recent projects have been presented at the Teatro Goldoni in the framework of the Venice Biennial (2019), at the Hamburger Bahnhof, in Berlin (2018), at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin (2018), at the Beishan Broadcast Wall in Taiwan, and at the Busan Biennial (2018), as well as at the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Art (2019). He lives in Berlin.

“I thought about how, as an artist, I can be with the land and work with the land at the same time. I found a bucket, grabbed a shovel and went to my property and dug a hole, filling the bucket with the land. For several years I carried this bucket of earth with me. I would even walk down the street with it in a suitcase.”

Stewart began to devise ways of transporting it. If she could not be on the land, then the land could come with her, with all its history and the shamanistic presence of ancestors now in her care. In moving the land, she would initiate her own transformative archive, a mobile heritage of both familial and spiritual values, to be shared with other artists when she travelled.

“The first time I collected earth from my reservation in Spaxomin, I made it into a Capsule together with a ceramicist in Vancouver. The ceramic shell, made from local clay, literally encapsulates the land where I am from. It was to be exhibited in Seoul. So, I took it with me in my hand luggage on the flight from Vancouver. When I got to Seoul, I met another ceramicist, a Korean artist. He made the second one. This time, it encapsulates the land outside his studio. This was the beginning of my Capsule collection. A third was made in Toronto with another ceramicist. The dirt inside this one is from an Indigenous curator’s garden. Now, in Berlin, I’m looking for a ceramicist to make my fourth one. Like Nine ∞, Capule is also a work on perpetuity. It’s about encapsulating the land in each location, transporting it with me so it can lead to dialogue and collaboration. The bucket is like a pedestal from home. The Capsule is like the urn of a family member. And its impenetrable. There is only a small whole on the top to stop it from exploding in the kiln. Each Capsule stands upright through the weight of the soil. They are very heavy, precious objects.”

Later, in her studio in Vancouver, Stewart made over 1000 tiles from soil she had transported back to the city. These tiles, like archival imprints, were fragile and light. Their morphology and colour depended on where she had dug up the earth and how it had been affected by the elements. In the process of firing, several tiles broke. Stewart began to see how these shards of baked land could work as a water-soluble paint once pulverised. The tiles were also a means of legally transporting earth and by extension human remains on airplanes and across continents.

Meanwhile in Germany, in a small town near Dresden called Radebeul, an annual festival regularly draws together over 800 German enthusiasts who dress up as ‘Indianer’. Bands of grown-up men, smeared with red face paint and wearing leather loincloths and feather headdresses perform group dances, howling and whooping in the lush green fields. Stewart is curious. Their grotesque manifestations become the subject of a long-term inquiry, starting in 2006 when she first travels to the Karl-May-Haus in Hohenstein-Ernstthal and the Karl May Museum in Radebeul. The museum, established in 1988, has counted 8 million visitors to date. As the website explains, the museum’s founding community of “dreamers and Christians” (website description) is looking for “Blood Brothers” to donate funds to its expansion.

In the following conversation, Stewart talks about her encounter with the German Indianer.

CD: How did you meet them?

KB: I’d heard about the ‘Indianer’, a culture club of people in Germany who dress up as Native Americans, but I had no idea how to reach them. My initial plan was to research the fictional characters such as Winnetou and Old Shatterhand created by Karl May, and to visit the museum and home in Saxony. When I got there, I was too late for the Karl May Festival but I decided to stay on anyway. I wanted to see who I might encounter. On the first day, I went to the Karl-May-Haus and met Heike. She became my friend and my connection to the culture club (she wears the pink dress in the video). Heike has been working at the Karl-May-Haus for over 30 years, running the gift shop and giving tours. She has been an Indianer most of her life. When she works at the museum, she doesn’t dress up. She has a huge array of objects that she’s made herself and which are German imitations of the originals.

CD: How did you negotiate her vision of you?

KB: Out of all the Indianers I have met, Heike is quite aware of history and what is happening now across America. She understands that it is problematic for members of the club to dress up and imitate Native people. But she is truly inspired by Karl May and feels that what they do is a way of honouring a culture. We really tried to communicate, but she doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak German! Our conversation was choppy but we got along. She said, “Oh, what are you doing tonight?” I replied, “Ah, I’m just going to go to my hotel room.” She said, “I’m part of a club and I want to bring you along.” I was the first Native person to visit this club. They call themselves the Band of Broken Arrows. I returned to the same area the following year and hung out with Heike. That time I stayed at her house for several days and went to a pow-wow and the Karl May festival.

CD: Did you feel uncomfortable or compromised, looking into their world?

KB: I thought of it as an inverted anthropology.

CD: There are very few accounts in 20th century anthropology that evoke the subjective experience of fieldwork and the interpersonal ambivalence it produces. I try to imagine how you felt. Were you hurt? Did you feel anger? Repulsion?

KB: Yes, of course. I went on an emotional roller-coaster ride. I felt envious of how much they could embrace Indigenous culture, knowing all about these different tribes and much more history than I. It was impressive. But the majority were also naive. I know that Heike has seen my artworks online. She’s aware of what I do in terms of my practice but I’m not sure she fully understands the criticality. I have not spoken to her in a while. Since then, I’ve installed the work onto the floor of the gallery, so that we walk over images of them. I see their debasement to the floor as a critical outcome of my experience there.

CD: Your work highlights the grotesque and racist nature of this kind of imitation and cultural misrepresentation. You are aware of this, but they are not. Were any of them apologetic at any point?

KB: At first all the men surrounded me and asked, “what does she do?” Then later, they were ashamed. You could see it on their faces. As I walked around, most of them wouldn’t look me directly in the eyes or say hello.

CD: Because you’d caught them out, reversed the roles.

KB: I was just there with my cameras and my phone. I didn’t want to teach them anything, or dance for them, or with them. I refused to wear the dress that was gifted to me. I could never do that. It would have been for their pleasure, for them to see me as how they imagine a Native person to be. I didn’t want to play into that, to stand there and perform or pretend.

My work deals with the complexities of remediation: filming the phantasmagorical world of German Indianer, while safeguarding the archive of my community in the Capsules, which contain my land and the earth of the places I move to. Gestures of retrieval are taking place here, as well as questions of land ownership and transmission. The work is fragile. What are the ethics of this process? Is it effective? How does one talk about indigenous sovereignty without becoming emotional?

CD: It certainly generates complex feelings and a very strange psychology. This delirium is the unfathomable temporality of the decolonial process that can know no end.

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Krista Belle Stewart is an artist and member of the Syilx Nation currently based in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited as part of MoMA’s Doc Fortnight (2021), MOCA, Toronto (2021); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2020); CTM Festival, Berlin (2020); Hessel Museum, CCS Bard, Annandale-On-Hudson (2019); Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2019); Nanaimo Art Gallery, Nanaimo (2019); Artspace, Peterborough (2019); SFU Teck Gallery, Vancouver (2019); Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal (2018); Musee d’Art Contemporain, Montreal (2018); Independent Studio and Curatorial Program, New York (2017); Plug In ICA, Winnipeg (2017); and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2017).

For DELIRIUM, Stenram returns to this avatar and recalibrates its static, eroticised arms and legs into those of a female sprinter who appears to be running off track, literally out of the frame of the photograph. Her face combines determined emancipation with the frantic expression of witnessing domestic and corporeal disorder. For Stenram, the trope of the cut-up is a meta-commentary on collage but also on the need to work through the biases and directives targeted at women in mid 20thcentury commercial publishing. This is the suffocating iconology of home life, which can be read in the patchwork bedspread, the patchwork dress, and the patched together person. Our runner is escaping the conjugal bedroom, hurrying toward the caves, while the transfixed eyes of porn actresses look out at the action.

“As with a lot of my work,” she says, “it’s about creating a dynamic or relationship between looking, being looked at, and who is looking at whom,” she says. “Initially I wanted the eyes to appear like those of wild creatures, peering out of the dark. Then I thought they would be stronger if they were camouflaged into the structure of the grottos. You don’t see them at first and then they multiply, and the looking process begins. Your gaze conjoins the multitude of eyes in the picture.”

The sequence, “Cave I-III”, began with the purchase of a second-hand book from the 1970s containing images of Germany’s natural wonders. Stenram connects these outlandish stone-age formations to Plato’s cave, and the agency of photography to dupe vision and conjure up the fabulatory. For New Viewings, Cave II hangs from the gallery wall like a vast magical tapestry. We walk into the underworld through this virtual portal. In the pitch dark of the cave, we see mineral formations that have dripped down through centuries until fluids congeal. Between nature’s limbs are human eyes, barely perceptible yet shining out from cracks in the rock. There is a smell of decay, like leaves of paper rotting or mildew on leather stored in cellars over time. Petrified flesh seeps out of the gallery roof, human organs are grafted onto nature, and arms burst out of tree trunks. Stenram explains, “The arms punch the sky, as if in a joyous mood of defiance. They’re really cheering you on! But they also appear stuck, like stumps. I am interested in the uncertainty of growth and the death angle of the photographic. I also like the fact that the scene is humorous. It reminds me of Claude Cahun’s “Je tends le bras” from 1932 in which you see two arms extending out from a hollow cavity of stone.”

Eva Stenram’s virtual exhibition invites us into a psychological and environmental set. There is one actor, and there is you, finding your trail through the labyrinth, in this inner land of lingams, located on the threshold of animist transformation.

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Eva Stenram studied in London at the Slade School of Art and Royal College of Art. She recently exhibited in Die Biennale für Aktuelle Fotografie, Germany, The Riga Photography Biennale, as part of the internationally touring exhibition A Handful of Dust, and at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles. Her work isin the collections of the Victoria and Albert MuseumandTate GalleryLondon,and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. She was selected as one of the 100 Heroines of contemporary global photography by The Royal Photographic Society (GB, 2019), firstprize winner of The Cord Prize for Photography (GB), finalist of the Aperture Portfolio Prize (US) and the Hyères International Photography Competition (FR) in 2013, finalist of Le Prix Découverte des Rencontres d’Arles (FR) in 2012, first prize winner of The Royal College of Art Photography Alumni Award (GB) and The Man Group Photography Prize in 2007,and first prize winner of The Photographers’ Gallery Graduate Award (GB) in 2003.Originally from Sweden, she currently lives and works in Berlin.

Committed to crossing the boundaries of class and education, Sy has repeatedly exhibited his paintings in the streets of Dakar, choosing the hustle of daily life in working class neighbourhoods. As people walk past his paintings, they become actors set against the extended backdrop of his canvas. The street in his “Musée de la rue” of 2021 is located in a former Chinese settlement in Dakar that, until only last week, was a studio complex he had occupied since 1996. Today the ‘Village des Arts’ is deserted but for a few who resist leaving. The government has restored its control over this feral land. Sy’s Musée points to the end of an era and the museological relics of aesthetic practices. In the virtual context of New Viewings, he questions the perennity of art and its institutions.

Sy is known for his performative style of painting and the variety of media he works with including frescoes and mosaics for public art commissions, metal sheeting, glass, through to surfaces such as butchers’ packaging paper, kite silk, canvas and jute sacking. Connected to gestural abstraction, Sy’s paintings often reveal an indexical trace of the artist’s body, as if he extended the substance of the work into a performative arena. Painting triggers further action and becomes, in the words of Antonin Artaud, “the hieroglyph of a breath”. Movement is incessant in Sy’s renditions of the human face or body. His syntax of curves twirl and loop like vegetal forms and organic configurations. His performance-centered paintings, sometimes executed with his naked feet, generate a complex articulation between the body in movement and its immediate physical environment.

El Hadji Sy (also known as El Sy) was born 1954 in Dakar where he lives and works. As a painter, performer, curator and activist, Sy has shaped Senegalese art and culture significantly for several decades. He studied at the École nationale des beaux-arts in Dakar from 1973 -1977 and belongs to the second generation of Senegalese artists who came after the renowned Senghorian École de Dakar. In defiance of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s cultural régime, Sy painted with his feet for 10 years, refusing to be part of received art historical canons. Since the mid-1980s, he has used empty jute rice bags as a surface on which to paint with mixed media including oil, acrylic, tar and wax. Paintings can be hung across ceilings, placed on floors, as well as on walls. Sometimes he produces stand-alone works on frames, such as could be seen in his installation “Disso-Concertation” for documenta 14.

In the late 1970s, together with filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, dramaturg Youssoufa Dione, and artist-philosopher Issa Samb, Sy founded the trans-disciplinary art collective Laboratoire Agit-Art, where he was responsible for the costumes and visual language of their performances. As a curator, artist, and activist, Sy has been central to the development of a number of artists’ collectives including Tenq and the interventionist group Huit Facettes, that was presented at Documenta 11. Sy’s curatorial work places him at the forefront of models of social engagement and collaborative practices.

A group of El Hadji Sy´s works from the early 1990s is currently on show at Kunstverein Hamburg in the group-exhibition “Carnivalesca, What Painting MIght Be”, curated by Bettina Steinbrügge (extended until beginning of June). His work has been shown at the IFAN Museum of African Arts Dakar, the 31st Sao Paolo Biennale (2015), Ujzdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2016), Documenta 14 (2017), and the Whitechapel Gallery. He has collaborated with many artists and curators including Clémentine Deliss, who has followed his work for 30 years, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Adam Budak, Alison Gingerich, and Peter Pakesch.