Parasophia 2015: Susan Philipsz

MOVING IN PLACE
By Andrew Maerkle


The Three Songs (2015), site-specific sound installation at the Kamogawa Delta, Kyoto. Commissioned by Parasophia: International Festival for Contemporary Culture 2015. Photo courtesy Parasophia: International Festival for Contemporary Culture 2015.

Born in Glasgow and currently based in Berlin, Susan Philipsz is one of the most recognizable contemporary artists working with sound today. However, it would be misleading to call her a sound artist. Drawing upon her background in sculpture, Philipsz uses sound to draw out the spatial, historical and social resonances of a site, whether it’s a group of bridges in Glasgow or the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford or an exhibition space like the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin. She often records herself singing songs that relate thematically to the characteristics of the site, from folk songs to pop songs and political anthems like “The Internationale.” Unaccompanied by backing instrumentation, and unaltered in post-production, the simple, human voice both focuses the attention of the viewer and merges with the surrounding environment, eliciting a heightened awareness of how sound shapes space and space shapes sound.

Philipsz is presenting her latest work in Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015. Entitled The Three Songs (2015), the work is a four-channel sound installation using three bridges crossing the Kamogawa Delta site in Kyoto. Additionally, an older work, The Internationale (1999), is installed outside of the festival’s main venue, the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

ART iT met with Philipsz at the opening of Parasophia to discuss her practice in greater detail. Her work remains on view in Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015 through May 10.

Interview:

ART iT: I happened to speak with Shinji Kohmoto about his preparations for Parasophia 2015 at a relatively early stage in the process, and on that occasion he told me a story about how, years ago, he had encountered The Internationale (1999) at an exhibition somewhere, but had never learned who the artist was that made the work. However, the experience stayed with him, and he continued searching until he found you and was at last able to put work and artist together. This story seems emblematic of your work and the way that it plays across the dimensions of memory and experience, and not just sound or space. To begin, could you talk about this aspect of your practice? To what extent do you consciously work with memory, or even forgetfulness, too?

SP: As a song, “The Internationale” has strong associations. My work is ambiguous because I sing it in a somewhat wistful way, and there is only a single voice, where usually there would be many people singing together – as I myself did at demonstrations. So the work could be interpreted as a clarion call to political action, but it can also be interpreted as a lament for something lost. In that sense I think this work in particular triggers specific memories.
But, especially when it’s stripped down to its bare essentials, the human voice is something everyone can identify with. When I use my voice in my work, I never clean it up or add anything in post-production, so it could be anyone’s voice. People often tell me it reminds them of being sung to as a child. I’ve worked with everything from classical opera to pop songs and folk songs, but whenever it’s stripped down to just the bare voice, people ask me things like, is that a Scottish folk song? And I say, no, it’s Radiohead. I don’t change the tempo or anything like that. I sing the song as I remember it in my mind, but without the musical accompaniment, it seems slower or different to listeners.


Installation view of The Internationale (1999) at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art as part of Parasophia 2015. Photo ART iT.

ART iT: Could you elaborate on how you arrange the songs each time? Are you literally trying to recreate them as they are, or do you feel you end up interpreting them somehow?

SP: I try to stay as true as possible to the original song, which includes leaving silences where the instrumental passages are, as I did when I sang the entire Ziggy Stardust album. I know the entire album by heart, so in my head I was leaving silences for the instrumentation, which created these pregnant pauses. I also often record the ambient sounds in the room, or the sound of my breathing. Similarly, when I use other people, like musicians, I want to capture in the recording the physicality of the making of the work. You feel Dmitry the Russian cellist as he’s dragging the bow across the strings – his breath, his arm as it crosses the bow. The presence of the person is there.
More recently, I’ve been working with deconstructing compositions by different composers, recording each tone in the composition separately on its own track, which is then played back from its own speaker, and this is an extension of that interest in the physicality of sound, building upon what I’ve done previously with my vocal works.

ART iT: You actually have a series of these “deconstructed” works, which I understand as a way of drawing parallels between the architectonics of music and of space.

SP: Yes, there’s a trilogy of works, the most recent of which, Part File Score (2014), I made for an exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, using the work of the 12-tone composer Hanns Eisler. The Hamburger Bahnhof building was formerly a train station, and it has these 12 incredible, steel archways, which inspired the work. I’ve always been interested in how sound can define a space and its architecture, and draw attention to the space in a new way. You might have passed by a place many times, but with the addition of sound you notice it differently. So with Hamburger Bahnhof, I wanted to strip the space back to the bare architecture, combined only with sound, in order to make people think of it as a train station again.
Eisler’s biography is another key element of the work. Eisler had to flee Germany during the war, going to New York and then finally ending up in Los Angeles, along with other émigrés like Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann. It was an incredible time, and many of the émigrés were absorbed by Hollywood. Eisler embraced his life in Los Angeles, while his lifelong collaborator, Bertolt Brecht, hated it. But his story is interesting because he not only had to flee Germany from the Nazis, he was also hounded in the US by the FBI, who thought he would infiltrate Hollywood with his communism. They compiled a massive file on him over a six-year period, and although they never found anything conclusive about him, they made it difficult for him to live, and he was forced to leave.
I worked with three film scores by Eisler that in a sense chart his life. The first is Prelude in the Form of a Passacaglia (1926), written for an abstract animation by Walther Ruttmann. The second is 14 Ways to Describe Rain, for the Joris Ivens film Rain (1929). And the third is a piece that was meant for Charlie Chaplin’s film The Circus (1947). I recorded each of the 12 tones from each score separately, matching the 12 arches in the space. For example, on one track, the violinist plays an A, and then silently follows the music until the next A, and then there’s a single speaker playing only that track. Each tone is separated, so when you experience the work, you get the sense of the sound moving through the space. It was an investigation of themes of movement and displacement, which came through in the physical making of the work, and were reinforced by the site of the former train station.
The first work I made in this way was my project for documenta 13, Study for Strings (2012), which was based on a piece by the composer Pavel Haas. Under the Nazis, Haas was taken to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where many musicians, artists, poets and writers were sent. While there, he wrote an amazing study for strings which was featured in a propaganda film intended by the Nazis to present the camp in a positive light to the Red Cross. The Nazis filmed Haas and his orchestra playing the piece, but as soon as the filming was completed, they destroyed the score and sent the musicians to Auschwitz, where almost all of them were killed. However, the conductor survived and was able to put the score back together. I recorded the score, but used only the two voices of the cello and viola, so in my version the music sounds very broken and dismantled, and the intervals of silence where the other instruments would play suggest the absence of the other people in the orchestra. The work was installed at the end of the platform of the Kassel Hauptbanhof, which was next to a major munitions factory during the war, and the sound came at the viewers from far away.
So distance and separation, or hearing something from a distance, are also recurring themes in these works.


Above: Part File Score (2014), 24-channel sound installation, installation view at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Photo Nick Ash. Below: Study for Strings (2012), 24-channel sound installation, installation view at Kassel Hauptbahnhof, Kassel as part of dOCUMENTA 13. Photo Eoghan McTigue. Both: © Susan Philipsz.

ART iT: Actually, I wanted to ask about how you approach silence. Even with a fairly straightforward work like The Internationale, it’s not like the song is on constant repeat. It plays, and then there’s silence, which is in fact the better half of the experience of the work.

SP: With something like The Internationale, I like the element of surprise in public space when people either wait in anticipation for the sound to start, or they happen upon it unexpectedly. When people tell me about their first encounter with a work and how they felt, they often describe the exact moment when the sound came on, and often, strangely, they describe the weather just at that moment: “The sun burst through the clouds, and then I heard your voice.” So perhaps their senses are heightened because of the wait. The silence is for that reason, really.
And then, with regard to how the absence of the other musicians changes the compositions in my deconstructed tone pieces, the silence works almost like a redaction. Like in the Eisler piece, I made additional works by superimposing the scores upon these heavily redacted FBI files, which are declassified now and can be obtained by anybody, but have all this blacked out text. So that’s echoed in the absence of the other musicians.

ART iT: Returning to the idea of memory, when I recall the works of yours that I have seen previously, there’s a synesthetic quality to them, which maybe comes from the way they disperse throughout the entire space where they are presented. For example, with the work you contributed to the exhibition “Quiet Attentions: Departure from Women” at Art Tower Mito in 2011, Did I Dream You Dreamed about Me (2007), I remember all these contingent details about what was going on in the courtyard, but I can’t recall the melody of the song. In memory the sound gets converted into different sensory inputs.

SP: I think it’s interesting that it can do that, and make you aware of the place you’re in. When I sang over the PA system of the supermarket, for the work Metropola (2004), people were looking around, wondering whether they should be listening to something so private in such a public space, but then all of a sudden you become aware of the person standing next to you, or the architecture of the building. In Münster, where I made The Lost Reflection (2007), people thought of the bridge where I installed the work as an ugly, brutalist structure that they would never want to spend time under, but they said my work transformed the location into a kind of magical place.
Or people say that they would never have noticed the place without my work. When I did the Art Angel project “Surround Me: A Song Cycle for the City of London” (2010-11), the sites I chose in the city center were places you wouldn’t normally visit, because during the week all the offices and cafés are open and the area is full of traffic, while at the weekend everything’s closed, and eerily silent. I was drawn to the city center because of the architecture, and the history, and the acoustics. When I was looking for sites in central London, I went on a weekend, and at first I thought it was strange that nobody was around, but then I began to notice things, like the “Gherkin” building standing next to a 14th-century church. It was a great place to work.


Above: The Lost Reflection (2007), two-channel sound installation. Installation view at Torminbrucke, Münster, as part of Münster Skulptur Projekte ’07. Below: From “Surround Me; a Song Cycle for the City of London” (2010), various locations, City of London. Both: Photo Eoghan McTigue, © Susan Philipsz.

ART iT: In London you were looking at similar music to what you are using here in Kyoto, namely songs by the composer Thomas Ravenscroft (1588-1635). Do you think of music as a kind of time travel? Of course you could read a play by Shakespeare and have access to what people were thinking or feeling at the time, but it’s also a fiction, set in ancient Athens or exotic Venice, and distorted by the author’s projections of other places and times. With music, though, you can get a powerful sense of immediacy when you realize you are singing something that was being sung and heard 400 years ago.

SP: There are always reasons why I choose particular songs. In “Surround Me,” I was thinking about how London was formerly a walled city, which you can still see when it’s empty: there are bits of wall that remain. And the market place and stock exchange are in the same place today that they were then. In researching that time, what struck me was that the voice is so prevalent in the writing, as in Shakespeare, too. But what most interested me was the writing about the street traders, and this cacophony of the streets. Because there was nothing to mask the voice, in order to work there, you had to figure out a way to almost harmonize with the other traders. This was really inspiring for composers of the time like Ravenscroft. So that was what got me looking closely at those songs, and then I kept coming across the same themes of water and tears in all the songs I found. At the time it was fashionable to be melancholy – there was a book of melancholy that was a very popular reference for people.
So it is fascinating to think that someone was singing these songs. Some of them are simple rounds and others are complex madrigals with overlapping parts. And, again, there are the water themes. In the heart of the city where the Bank of England and the stock exchange are, the water imagery was particularly resonant to how we talk about money through words like currency, liquidity, cash flow. I discovered a lot of really interesting songs from my research.

ART iT: Through your new installation at the Kamogawa Delta site in Kyoto, The Three Songs (2015), you establish a parallel between early 17th-century London and the dawn of Kabuki theatre on the banks of the Kamogawa. What I felt at the site is that the sound creates a sense of simultaneity or unity between one side of the river and the other, between then and now, here and there. You realize that different spheres of experience or awareness are sharing the same space, whereas without the sound you might be inclined to say, Well, that’s the opposite side of the river.

SP: That’s interesting. When I was doing my research on Kamogawa, I learned that it was an almost sacred place, where you would cross from one side to the other between life and death, and it also marked the end of the city, where the hills begin. I had forgotten about the symbolism there, but what you say about these simultaneous experiences is something that I think can happen with my work precisely because it’s not a trained voice. Whereas a trained voice or live performance might captivate you and transport you to another place, the untrained voice leaves room for you to be grounded in the present moment, your surroundings and the other ambient sounds. You have this simultaneous experience of being very present in the place you’re in, and your sense of self is heightened.


Views of The Three Songs (2015) as installed at the Kamogawa Delta site. Clockwise, from top left: The west side of Kamo Ohashi Bridge; the Demachi Bridge; the Kawai-bashi Bridge; and the east side of Kamo Ohashi Bridge. All: Photo ART iT.

ART iT: The title is The Three Songs, but the work is actually a four-channel installation. Why is that?

SP: The three songs refer to three dances, but the fourth one isn’t a dance. It’s a grievance about being poor and destitute. One of the things I notice under bridges in every city is that they are places where the homeless people gather, so this fourth voice addresses that in a way. For example, one of the lyrics goes, “The cramp is in my purse full sore.” I mean, this is old English, and I myself am not even sure what some of the words mean. In any case, it all becomes abstracted when the different voices overlap, and the meaning of the words gets lost. It’s more to do with the rhythm and how that chimes with the rhythm of the people and the water and the different overlapping flows.

ART iT: One last question: the PA system is an interesting formal apparatus. I know you use different kinds of speakers in different contexts, but what keeps you returning to the megaphone speaker?

SP: They’re great, especially for voice. They’re directional, so you point them in a direction and it controls the sound to a certain point. And they’re very durable. One of them fell into the river, but we took it out and it worked perfectly. So that’s mainly why I tend to use them in outdoor locations. And of course they are the kind of speakers you might see in a place like a train station, so they had a special resonance in Kassel, for example, which because of the munitions factory there was the most-bombed city in Germany during World War II, or they can have nautical associations in another context. It depends on where I place them, but they seem to work in many different contexts. And, sculpturally, they’re just nice objects.

Susan Philipsz: Moving in Place

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