Map–ref–41°n 93°

Map Ref. 41째N 93째W

Page 2

BOND Libretto and performance by Michał Libera, Michał Mendyk and Daniel Muzyczuk Sounds: Terry Riley, Pierre Schaeffer, Edgar Varèse, Iannis Xenakis OVERTURE All three of us, as we sit here, we’re bound together by objects.

A collection of various paints.

Seven bars made of plywood.

Number of pins.

Bay of charcoal.

Black on black.

Small imprint, few curves and letters, forming a name: Philips.

A long piece of magnetic tape.

It’s like a market. But we’re not selling things. We’re doing the payment. Don’t worry, you don’t need to do anything. Just open your ears and relax. It’s all for the one who walks with us, although he left, long time ago. His name is Michał Mendyk

Page 3

ACT I: FIGURE / BACKGROUND

This international show we’re just about to open investigates the border between art and reality. This question was addressed lots of times already but never reached a satisfactory answer.

The title 41°N 93°W is borrowed from a pop song by a British band Wire. The exhibition also draws inspiration from such philosophers as Baudrillard, Deleuze, Debord and Virilio as well as contemporary world with fast internet connections, warfare technology and finally — entertainment industry, which all have one thing in common: they are built on spectacle. We believe that artists try to make sense of it by abstracting from the patterns built in mainstream media, interpreting hi-tech solutions provided by the state experts and appropriating the messages they find. This leads to creation of new codes and these stand for the main conceptual territory we are addressing in the exhibition.

Page 4

I’ll give you an example of how these new codes work. Think of aerial cartographers whose job is based on making photographs and then spending hours on deciphering them. Essentially what they do is nothing but analyzing pictures, so it is legitimate to apply art theory to their practices. First they treat images as non-figurative and flat. Only this allows them to see through a whole pile of pictures and decide which objects should be brought to attention. A factory here, an anti-aircraft system there. Only when the figures are recognized as points of attention they can forget about the background. Of course the whole life is in the background so to do their job they have to repress it. When this abstraction procedure is done, the most tricky part begins: distinguishing real objects from their doubles. What are the doubles? We all know that on the other end of the process, there are enemy forces which employ skilled set designers to build structures that resemble reality. And they become reality which is represented in the cartographers pictures. I mean buildings raised by set designers are real in the image, just like they are real down there, but they are just empty. This type of work that cartographers do is based on constant change of focus. In seconds they have to change from seeing the detail to the bigger picture; they go from abstract images and repressing reality to reintroducing reality which sometimes itself is abstract, so they go from abstract to reality to abstract to reality to abstract to reality…

The introduction of virtuality is an outcome of this process.

The virtual appears with the condensation of singularities.

By the way — a condensation is also a primary feature of the metaphor. But what does all that have to do with art? And in particular — the art we are presenting here?

Take a look here. This gold and silver curtain is in fact the wind itself. It is moved by a fan. It is sounding. It should be considered a metaphor, a piece of stage design which sole role is to bring to mind certain natural phenomena. But above all it needs us and our ability to tell a difference between an abstract

Page 5

Page 6

metaphor and the real thing. It was born out of two lines from Cornelius Cardews’ score: “The wind blows dust in the tigers’ eyes” and “Amy dreams of the wind, which then comes and wakes her” Two different ways of communicating. One based on obscuring the vision, while the other resembling an illumination. The first takes place during the day, while the other happens at night, when the shapes of things are more sharp while their texture becomes opaque. The meaning of a phenomenon comes from partial blindness. Basically, to understand what the imagery of this piece is showing you, you need to make yourself blinded, you need to go from day vision to night vision because the last one is the art of abstraction.

We will see more “clearly” — pardon my irony — what is at stake while thinking about this Malevitch work from 1985. It is a painting but it is not a piece of art. It is a copy. But it is still stuck in the vocabulary developed to speak about abstract art.

But don’t get mislead — this is concrete. There is reality behind it and the reality is abstract art. It represents reality as observed by the the copyist — the reality being an abstract painting treated as an object.

The thing that interests us in the exhibition is: how do the codes change, when the reference points become abstract? We tend to think about referentiality as a process that takes us back to something concrete. But it can as well take us to something abstract, which becomes part of reality… Consider a case from a different realm: finance. Since the Bretton Woods international agreement signed in 1944 dollar had a fixed rate of exchange with gold and because of Marshall Plan and American loans for European countries heavily damaged by WWII dollar became a standard currency to settle balances with other currencies. The stability of postwar order was guaranteed by real objects — the reserve of gold. Two shocks are connected with Richard Nixon. The first was literally

Page 7

named shock and was connected with the decision to cease the policy of fixed rate of dollar and make it a fiat currency. The second was the Watergate scandal, which was largely based on unlawful installing of eavesdropping devices. Money became abstract while the political use of tape became obvious and concrete. We found it fascinating — money, relation between abstract and real all coming down to the tape — the actual magnetic tape…

While the connection between those two seems mock, the connection between dismantling of the Bretton Woods system and rise of conceptual art seems more likely. Let’s assume that both Nixon shocks were orchestrated by the CIA, while the nascent of concept art was the effect. We can see both actions undertaken by wind as imagined by Cardew here. The daytime obscuring the view could be the economic one, while the nighttime illumination was the Watergate effect that was first meant for the presidents eyes, but became a common knowledge.

Constant re-framing and change of focus.

The paradox is that clarity and fidelity are the in fact contradictory. The first could be a feature of tele-detection (or even echolocation), while the second is a desired property of cryptography. Possession of key to the code is fully sufficient to read the message. In tele-detection the work is not that simple. Arriving at clarity requires training and physical structure that reinforces the properties not perceived otherwise. Cryptography is flat while tele-detection is spatial.

Again — the tape gives us a hint about it. Let’s imagine that in the legendary tape-composition Étude aux chemins de fer Pierre Schaeffer presented something more than just an example of musique concrete. In a way it is nothing but a flat tape recording, on tape. With a certain sound system, few devices and a specially constructed space the sound of the piece becomes propagated as if you would be in the places where the noises were recorded. Moreover, by pushing some

Page 8

buttons and moving a bit you can focus on a conversation that is going on in the distance. The words are important, but more important are the measurements, because by just recovering a lost conversation we would arrive at something that would be just another style of cryptography. The point is that you can rebuild the train station with just the data on the cassette tape. But there is more. Since this is a collage of sounds taken from different places you can make models of some different stations, or maybe even different cities, or if the data is rich enough you can stop at the point where you have a virtual map of the entire Europe. We learned it all from Michał Mendyk, the third of us, the famous Polish musicologist and economist.

The lesson is that we always wanted to decode tape music as something fixed on tape, while the real goal was to see it as spatial and not temporal structure. What is abstract is full of useful information, just like this painting is a map of a certain black building on a white lawn whose exact location is 41°N 93°W. Mendyk sensed something more. When leaving he gave us a tape, paints and pins which are all a hermetic message on hermetism, that was supposed to depressurize and reveal the plot that brought in musique concrete among other things, like banking operations becoming more abstract, new ways of censorship, conceptual art and Watergate. He had to deliver the message in this specific way because he had to present the proofs and illustration as well as he needed a certain melody that could speak instead of abstract relations. We fill the space created on tape that is supposed to house a new community of those enlighten enough to desire the act of destruction of the taped music.

Page 10

ACT II: CRYPTOGRAPHY / CAMOUFLAGE

Now, since you’re part of the community, we can continue. But stay calm. Nothing here can harm you. We have heights and planes. We have wood and fire. And we have seven trajectories on a horizontal plane.

First, we take the grey one — here, the propagated sounds die out 4 to 7 times quicker than the other ones.

When you realize that Train Etude by Schaeffer is actually part of Train Brutes operation, the methodology emerges plainly. It’s just here. Look around. Or just feel it. It is in the preface to Mathematical morphology in tele-detection by Michał Mendyk.

A weird book. It has as much to do with music as electronic compositions with CIA. It’s not easy. But we’re not here for the theory. We have the diagrams and drawings exposed as films and objects. A transposition of abstract nature into real life. Art. — So we move to the pink and violet — sounds travelling in two directions, delimiting the area and embracing all the other trajectories. The longest sounds, the driest ones.

Page 11

I quote the preface by Michał Mendyk: “Today’s mathematics is deeply indebted in music research of the late 50 -ies. It was not later than that, when two most efficient methods of interpreting new music were implemented. One was cryptography. The other was tele-detection. Cryptography — in its fullest depth — should be traced back to composing methods of Iannis Xenakis. Tele-detection on the other hand — to Edgar Varèse. The first one is all about computing and mathematics.

The second brings distortion and topography”.

— Next: the yellow line. It takes the sound to the heart of the matter — but don’t forget, this one is heavily reverberated from underneath the floor and tends to be less comprehensible.

The space we’re looking at is bound as a contract. A business relation. Not between Xenakis and Varèse but between the two of them and the third one: Le Corbusier. He is the employer.

He is the commissioner and he is the one who brings them together to prepare what he calls Poem In A Bottle for EXPO 1958 in Brussels. You may ask: what is poem in the bottle about? It’s not easy to say, cause you can’t hear the words of Le Corbusier, not only the contractor but a librettist as well.

— Now: the small yellow one. A curve in a trajectory. A crack in reverb. A bend in the contract.

Varèse and Xenakis work in an odd place. It’s not simply an electronic music studio. It is Philips Research Laboratory and each word of the name counts. It is a laboratory so Varèse and Xenakis analyze all the tiniest bits of grammar in a libretto delivered by Le Corbusier. It is a research so Varèse and Xenakis come up with a revolutionary form to present the message in the bottle. It is Philips so the poetry stands for a greater strategy.

— Two red lines. They are the messy ones. They go across all the other sounds you hear and they twirl and they just mix everything up.

Make the libretto even more tacit. To understand the ciphering majesty of Varèse and Xenakis, you need to recreate the delays

Page 12

Page 13

and reverbs and the directions twists of the actual pavilion filled with 325 loudspeakers and designed according to the scheme you see here. Or feel. They are all derived from the ancient Zoroastrian patterns standing for charcoal and a particular process of transposition: condensation by burning it down. “You need to mix it down to the tape.” This is the task of Xenakis — to burn down the libretto devised by Le Corbusier to a flat magnetic tape and keep the message in the shadow because the interest of Philips is not that people understand it but that people keep on listening.

— And finally you have the seven vertical bars — the third dimension. The space. Tectonics. Horizontal planes on top of each other. The peaks.

You get to the words through a completely different rhythm of the piece than the one you know from the tape. The rhythm follows the space in EXPO pavilion and not the flatness of the magnetic tape. The rhythm itself is where the libretto is ciphered. Relax and listen. Listen and get the rhythm. Get the rhythm and hear out the words. This is how you travel from Poème électronique by Varèse to the original Poem in a Bottle by Le Corbusier.

*

— Genesis. Since the very first moment of establishing the company, Philips is proudly developing A New Economy.

— Spirit and Matter. The economy will bring together new forms of materiality which will result in a fully virtual flow of spirit — a magnetic tape.

— From Darkness to Dawn. Magnetic tape will pave the road from the dark times of objects to a bright horizon of pure exchange relationships.

— Man-Made Gods. The tape is not the end — it will create the need independent from itself and precious for each and single man in the world.

Page 14

— How Time Moulds Civilization. Thanks to time only — time only — Philips will succeed in creating a fully new civilization — a new civilization our children will praise.

— Harmony. The exchange system designed by Philips will bring all man together — regardless of race, citizenship and gender.

— To All Mankind. Take our tapes and live out the better future.

Page 15

ACT III: TELEDETECTION / DEBT

“For years I was tormented by guilt at having left the country for which I’d fought. I left my friends—some were in prison, others were dead, some managed to escape. I felt I was in debt to them and that I had to repay that debt. And I felt I had a mission. I had to do something important to regain the right to live. It wasn’t just a question of music— it was something much more significant” I always wondered… why guilt? Why was he tormented by guilt? 20 years I spent asking myself this question. 20 years… Something clicked one day when the sound engineer of a Poem in the Bottle Willem Tak blurted this out: “Mercurial effect — mysterious stereophonic effect — at a certain point you feel the sound inside you.” Well, coincidentally, the entire operation by Philips was called “Mercurial Effect.” So let me share a bigger picture with you. In short, it was an imperceptible insemination in the audience that Le Corbusier was after, and a misleading, universal dissemination of the tapes that Philips wanted to achieve.

Page 16

Ok, it’s all complicated. But the backbone is simple: to produce and spread the small objects to literally everybody in the world. Simple and innocent — black on black, most of them with a tiny Philips inscription on the cover. Imagine this, in the 50 -ies.: this was a completely outrageous idea! Absolutely unachievable. Everybody gets a gift from Philips and praises it. Welcoming. Crazy simple. A gift to a world community.

Of course — they knew from the beginning that people will get suspicious.

Who? Simple. The wise ones: secret service and intelligentsia. How to pacify them? Also simple: Philips involved CIA and let them use the tapes for their own purposes — to cipher the codes. And they gave money to the uprising of the underground music culture. Of course the music was irrelevant. But it was important to keep it abstract. So that the content could be at the same time used to communicate between secret services and to build a community of fans with the ideology of sound as such so that they never try to resolve the puzzle of abstract sounds. So everybody’s happy and the business goes on. But all these Black Sabbath stories about subliminal messages, reversing the tapes and hearing the real content — all that bullshit was just a cover! It was just to turn away the attention from the real thing.

What they really wanted was to create a debt. The feeling that comes with a tape — the feeling of being given something, the feeling of a need to reply, to react, to prepare the counter-gift. You know what I mean?

Everybody who ever heard Velvet Underground tape wanted to start a rock band…, right? This is no more about the money — you know. This is about bonds and debts. Why do you fund hospitals in Burkina Faso?

For the poor African kids? No. You just make them feel they owe you something. Full stop. That’s all. And that’s the invention of Philips.

I understood all this in Oxford, in 2011. I met this guy John Simpson, the editor of Oxford English Dictionary who eliminated the word “tape recorder.” That’s when Philips was meant to have its ultimate victory. The tape put people in debts and then disappeared. No trace.

And the debt is still being paid. It wasn’t about the tape at all — and they knew it from the beginning. It wasn’t about reality. It was about virtuality. The real thing is not on the tape, and the real thing is not the

Page 17

tape itself — the real thing is the virtual. That’s what comes from the tape — and through it — and now gets emancipated from it.

Read Xenakis carefully, again and again, and you’ll get everything you need to know. Now his own problem was that he wasn’t really treated seriously in the project, neither as an architect nor as a composer. He was perhaps the only one who got it right but couldn’t fight it. The only thing he did was of symbolic and not real importance. He composed the interlude, the famous Concrete PH. It was an anti-thesis of everything you heard and saw from the other two. Simple, straight, plain.

And — not by coincidence — it was all derived from burning charcoal.

Why? Well, let me only say for the ending that one of the charcoal’s features is filtering out surplus of mercury in your organism. It clears your body. It is a healing game against this construction that you’re looking at and is called a Philips Pavilion. Concrete PH for abstract and imperceptible mercury effect.

Page 18

Page 19

Map Ref. 41°N 93°W

Interrupting my train of thought Lines of longitude and latitude Define and refine my altitude when two curators are handed a tape,

they embark on a journey that will lead them through a series of questions that seem to mock at the first glance. The seemingly dated medium is proof of a conspiracy that starts in the depths of avant-garde artists’ manifestos, goes through catacombs of electroacoustic studios and ends in apexes of abstraction-based money flows.

Their fellow travelers (artists: Céline Condorelli, Goldin + Senneby, Igor Krenz, Kazimir Malevich and Noviki) supply them with hints that point to the hidden message of the tape itself and the recording technology as such. No need for corpses in this crime story. They are replaced by a multitude of sparse information that questions the common meaning of abstraction and the way it turns into something concrete. Or is it the other way around?

The show is an opera. The libretto serves as the guided tour and the music as one of the objects or architecture of the show. This ensemble points Page 20

towards a renewed meaning of abstraction as uncannily unstable and political. The objective is to challenge the politicized nature of art by means of fiction and staging.

The exhibition shows four works that point towards something much larger then themselves. Two of them question the structure of the field of art. Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square on White 1985 is a copy, not a work of art. It contains everything that was already in the original, and much more thanks to its secondary nature. Moreover it is not a piece of abstraction, because if we think about it as a painting, it depicts reality, which is an original. In this way it is based on a similar act that we can observe in the next piece.

Igor Krenz found a scientific book written in Polish, entitled Morfologia matematyczna w teledetekcji (Mathematical Morphology in Teledetection, 2010) and bought a pile of copies. The show then made it its task to embody, in the form of sculptures and videos, the diagrams, graphs, and images in the book. These images, extremely abstract for those not educated to decipher them, were given objective, material reality thanks to artistic practice. The videos were based on blurry images used to make points about remote sensing, but their aesthetics had much in common with structural film. Based on the book’s diagrams, Page 21

the sculptures were close to the geometrical, minimal, abstract art of the 1960s. Everything made the viewer feel like being in a familiar sort of art show (especially in a time of nostalgic revivals). But Krenz didn’t stop at this obvious stage: His pile of copies became “catalogues” that were resold at the exhibition. This operation self-reflexively pointed out the frequent illegibility of art writing and the hermeticism of art itself, as seen from the point of view of outsiders.

This time figurative schemes were turned into pieces of abstract art by the sole materialization and act of presenting them in a specific context.

Céline Condorelli’s piece Structure for communicating with the wind is a real object, a metaphor and a sound device. A piece of architecture that divides the space and creates a certain atmosphere. But it is something more: the curtain is the materialization of a passage from a word-based music score by Cornelius Cardew This aspect leads to the final piece, a video by Goldin + Senneby The Discreet Charm. It stages a miniature theater piece on abstraction of banking system in an art gallery. The speaker frequently gives obvious suggestions that what he is actually discussing is in fact the creation of value in the art world. The last piece serves as the introduction of the method.

They all become characters in a story that unfolds in Page 22

an opera by Michał Libera and Daniel Muzyczuk. It tells a well-known story of the 1958 Brussels Expo Philips Pavillion by Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis and Edgar Varèse in a new way, which points towards the hidden objectives of the project and its unexpected and disastrous consequences which can be observed in such distant regions as economic debt policies and contemporary art discourses.

Page 23

Team: Objects: Céline Condorelli, Goldin + Senneby, Igor Krenz, Kazimir Malevich Words: Daniel Muzyczuk, Michał Libera Spirit: Michał Mendyk Sounds: Terry Riley, Pierre Schaeffer, Edgar Varèse, Iannis Xenakis Binding: Noviki Special thanks: Agnieszka Pindera, Krzysztof Skoczylas, Suzanne Treister

Partners: