As I mostly write about music for this journal, I tread with caution when covering other forms of art. Theatre and performance art somehow suit being described with musical language; one can comment on the sensation of time, the expressivity of the performer, the cadence of the performance, etc. However, fine art and installation work somehow defies these notions. It can contain all, or a number of them, or none – it’s a different animal altogether.
Tepidly, as a first step, I thought I’d dip my toe through the medium of sound art installation, namely BLUE / For glockenspiel and waiting which I saw in Asbestos Art Space in April of this year. Perhaps it’s an appropriate avenue by which I can begin to think about fine art, as Antti Tolvi’s work does fall very much into the category of “musical”, and so through this reflection I would hope to expand my horizons a little.
The chambered rooms of Asbestos are a familiar invitation to experience something new, on this occasion I’m arriving a little after the official opening. We, my partner and I, step down into the first chamber to a small crowd of people standing around chatting with an assortment of blue coloured beverages in hand, the second chamber is concealed by a curtain.
In the lefthand corner from the door, sits a stool, a glockenspiel and a music stand with Tolvi’s newest composition etched into a Chinese manuscript book. The work is part of an artistic practice that involves creating musical works for stretches of time larger than anyone but the practitioner themselves could be present for. In this case, the piece lasts from the exhibition’s opening till the close in one week’s time. A glance at the score begets a feeling that hearing one of these notes is a bit of a rare event; there’s only 12 notes spanning the 144-hour duration, one every twelve hours, though they are proportioned across the page less regularly. A beater rests like a loaded gun on the glock.
At a circadian rhythm of twenty minutes, a group of four people emerges from the interior chamber of the gallery, as they cross the threshold they are noticeably blinking and orienting the space with their eyes. There is an astonished silence present, which is balanced by excitement of the next four people in-line, who jauntily skip under the curtain to Tolvi’s beckon.
Antti is cheerfully chatting away with people in the room, obsessively manipulating two walnut shells in one hand – he’s fresh back from touring China, it’s a popular pastime over there he tells us. With his free hand he is showing an assortment of documentation from other pieces and performances, a small huddle of us are leafing through a picture slide show of For 15 past – Tolvi’s sardonic jab at academia – a month-long piece where a tone row (a series of notes containing all 12 notes of the chromatic scale) is gradually played, always a quarter past the hour.1 In this documentation of the piece we see pictures of the moments when a note was played, at home on the piano, in a cafe on stylophone, on the street with a mobile phone to name a few.
He explains that it is difficult to document such pieces due to their duration, one can’t really imagine listening to a 744 hour-long track of mostly silence, it’s simply not practical. Hence these pictures reveal the “moments” of the piece which are less about the sound and more lika a structured ritual to carry through time.
Like clockwork, four dazzled and wide eyed people appear from under the curtain. It turns out that it’s our turn to have a go – how exciting! Four of us are ushered into the interior chamber, apprehensive about what is in store for us with BLUE.
This may come as a shock but the whole room is doused in blue light. It’s a deep darkish blue that slightly disturbs the sense of depth – A happenstance glance with the blond gentleman to my right leaves a slightly harrowing image; Irises large as dinner-plates and dark as deep space, hair and skin completely subsumed into monochromatic blue, one surging out of the other. The length of the stare assures me that I am broadcasting a similarly bizarre complexion back.
We sit down, two to a bench. Between us is a spotlight pointing toward a singing bowl on a plinth. I keep glancing at my hands and skin which under this deep indigo reveals freckles and dots previously unaccounted for. Through the soft partition by which we entered this blue-scape, the cheery voice of Antti is heard explaining again about his long duration pieces.
Amongst these sensorial inputs, the piece happens.
I’m using the word “piece” here when I might really change it for “composition” or “symphony” even – at a duration of just 20 minutes the work is a minuscule in comparison to the durational scale of For glockenspiel and waiting, however in the span of these fleeting moments a play of sensation and consciousness awakens this special state of astonishment, one that i’ve seen on the faces of those emerging from the “other side” of the work. Through the dissociative lighting setup, and an ensemble of materials that we assume to have an intuition for, (water, light, sound) Tolvi reveals to us an animate, surging world – there’s no world or creation myth here, nor a haughty referential intertextuality with “the tradition” – it’s simply being, being being.
The sensational experience and surprise of BLUE is far deeper than the experience of a synesthete (someone who hears colour, or tastes sound for example). I don’t think that the colour and the pitch are necessarily connected. The piece rather primes our senses; our bodies’ aural and visual receptors form a melodic line by which we are guided through.
And through to what exactly? Well for me it was about birth, an imagining of what it’s like to become this individual sensing being entering the world for the first time. Indeed the chatting heard throughout the work in the outer room of the gallery, which was casual and pleasant, felt to me as if I were listening from the inside of the womb to the world beyond the suspended state I and my quadruplet siblings were currently disposed to.
We take a step out, this time of the threshold of the gallery. It’s spring, a warm gust blows down Kristianinkatu with a pleasant euchre glow from the low hanging sun. We walk home hand in hand, noticing the reflection of the sunlight bouncing off the sea onto the soft-white-underbelly of Hakaniemi Bridge. As I gaze wondrously around the environment I’m in, I think to myself as if for the first time “Aah isn’t the sky so blue tonight.”
- Akateeminen vartti (“academic quarter”) in Finland means that lectures tend to start at a quarter past the hour. ↩︎
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