Sounds of Europe
April 16 - Sounds of Europe is a platform for field recording. It’s BLOG travels to a different European country every month where a local organisation or artist is responsible for maintaining it. At present the BLOG is curated by the German label gruenrekorder. They invited me to present PLACES_IN_TIME | Petersberg 2010 | The 4 Seasons. In addition to that, I invited four students from my Sensory Awareness class at the Institute for Music and Media to contribute excerpts from their "Logbooks of the Senses".
Cherry tree
April 13 - Waiting for visitors - bees welcome!
Hawthorn and larks
March 28 - Larksong and the sweet fragrance of blooming hawthorn bushes on a walk through fields and vineyards.
Cherry tree
March 26 - Every year comes spring. And every year it comes as a surprise: It’s power, it’s resoluteness and it’s beauty. Same same but different.
Frankfurt Lab
March 23 - "The Frankfurt LAB is an artistic «Lab of Modernity», an environment for conducting experiments, which do not lend themselves to the organisational and spatial constraints of theatres and concert halls. New forms of representation and communication are beeing developed as a spontaneous and flexible response to the pressing issues of the day." (Frankfurt LAB) We see Heterotopia by The Forsythe Company. The soundtrack comes from Dutch composer Thom Willems, who - since the mid 80s - provides most of the music to Fosythe’s pieces . Heterotopia is supposed to be "a meditation on the nature of translation and the failures that attend its efforts". The work is described best in the words of the performing artists: "Schukrrr fnasstan kebbl wong! Hurrkok pessn fleggefkor offn schechtelmir bueno bueno!"
Time to see
March 6 - (Almost) spring!
"Nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small. We haven’t time - and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time." (Georgia O’Keeffe)
So what?
February 26 - Captivating documentary about Andy Warhol in two parts on arte by American documentary filmmaker Ric Burns (the brother of Ken Burns, the inventor of the Ken Burns Effect). ”Andy Warhol is a four-hour pop-culture extravaganza that will retool what you think you know about the famed and oft-parodied soup-can painter." (Kristian St. Clair) In the first part of the film there is a sequence with photographs of the artist lingering on a bed. A mesmerizing voice over quotes what is seemingly one of the artists most important insights: "I was walking in Bali and I saw a bunch of people in a clearing having a ball. Because somebody they really liked had just died. And I realized , that everything was just how you decided to think about it. Sometimes people let the same problems make them miserable for years - and they should just say: So what? That’s one of my favorite things to say: So what? I don’t know how I made it through all the years before I learned to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it. But once you do - you never forget."
Distribution
February 15 - Now available at gruenrekorder:
PLACES_IN_TIME | lake>creek>ocean
PLACES_IN_TIME | Tansania/Zanzibar
PLACES_IN_TIME | Montepulciano
PLACES_IN_TIME | norwayfjords
Cherry Tree
February 14 - Snow. Just enough to outline the branches - not enough for a snowball fight.
As time goes by
February 12 - Good read: A Visit From the Goon Squad, new novel by American author Jennifer Egan. Constantly changing the point of view she tells the story of music producer Bennie Salazar and his mates: They write music, play music, produce music and want to sell music. The story starts in the late 1970s in San Francisco and is basically about the passing of time. "The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL."
Morning Light
February 5 - Sunday, 7:30 am. At home. Looking east towards the rising sun. A colour gradient like the backdrop in a play by Robert Wilson. - 11°C (breathing in hurts in the nostrils). A light easterly breeze carries a constant hum.
Wise man speaks
January 28 - After eight years: Old Ideas - the latest album of master poet Leonhard Cohen.
I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit
But he does say what I tell him
Even though it isn’t welcome
He just doesn’t have the freedom
To refuse
He will speak these words of wisdom
Like a sage, a man of vision
Though he knows he’s really nothing
But the brief elaboration of a tube
Rooster
January 21 - Following an invitation by my old work mate and friend Tina MacHugh, who since many years is a lighting designer for theater and ballet in London, we went to see Zeitblicke in Essen’s Aalto Theatre. They show three different choreographies: Petite Mort by Jiri Kylian, End-Los by Patrick Delcroix and Rooster by Christopher Bruce. Tina did the lights for Rooster, which was originally premiered in 1991 and since then is shown throughout the world. It is performed by ten dancers to eight of The Rolling Stones’ most memorable hits: Sympathy for the Devil, Paint It Black, Ruby Tuesday, Not Fade Away, As Tears Go By, Lady Jane, Little Red Rooster and Play With Fire. The dancing ist great and the lighting - well - superb! Thank you, Tina!
World Class
January 19 - Visiting an exquiste exibition at the museum kunstpalast in Duesseldorf: The Duesseldorf School of Painting 1819 - 1918. More than 400 paintings “demonstrate the high quality and diversity of the artists involved in the Duesseldorf School”. My favorites are among the works of the landscape painters: Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, Carl Friedrich Lessing, Hans Gude, Oswald Achenbach, Albert Bierstadt, Hugo Muehlig and first and foremost the Russian artist Iwan Iwanowitsch Schischkin.
Cherry Tree
January 8 - Full moon rising.
music film installation
January 4 - The Museum for Modern Art in Frankfurt (MMK) shows video installations and other works by Douglas Gordon. The scottish artist, who - since 2010 - is a professor at Staedelschule, Frankfurt’s art academy, is considered to be "among the most important as well as the most influential artists of his generation". His latest work is intitled k.364. It is the Köchel catalogue number assigned to the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. "After hearing this work of chamber music in Poznań (Poland), Gordon organized another performance of it with Avri Levitan (viola), Roi Shiloah (violin) and the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra of Polish Radio. The musicians’ journey from Berlin to Warsaw by way of Poznań and the performance of the symphony in Warsaw account for the major proportion of the film. The two musicians’ conversations on their way to Poland reveal that their pasts, and those of their parents, are complexly interwoven with German-Polish relations, and above all with the history of the Polish Jews during World War II." The installation features two large projection screens, two mirrors (reflecting the screens) and various loudspeakers. The film has a duration of 67 minutes. The visitor is supposed to walk through the installation.
New Year’s Walk
January 1 - The journey is the reward.