MARX / 2002
IHT-article "Text Tones"
Breaching borders in Linz
Sights and sounds of 'Text Tones'
By Henri Gallow (IHT)
Saturday, June 28, 2003
LINZ: With an extensive and subtly nuanced presentation
of a work spanning more than four artistic disciplines, Austria is paying
homage to its "adopted" native children, the group of artists TEXTxtnd.
Oliver Augst, Marcel Daemgen, Michaela Ehinger and Christoph Korn founded
the half German, half Austrian-born group, in 1998. Since that time they
have been involved in many different projects on specific themes. The media
used are very different, they cover: radio plays; performance art; CD releases;
installation; film; web projects; theater; scripts. They have performed at
many international festivals for contemporary music, performance art and
media art in Europe and the USA. Their recent work "electronic music
theater", in collaboration with the Austrian composer Thomas Désy
from ZOON Music Theater, is on view at the Ars Electronica, September 10.
The Linz performance involves a seminal work not on view at other venues: "Text
Tones" of 2003, an installation of six sound-sculptures can be regarded
as a metaphor for their mature achievements.
At first glance, the viewer registers no more than sleek white pedestals
supporting horizontally mounted aluminum tubes, but the true spirit of the
piece unfolds as an acoustic collage. Concealed microphones record the random
sounds generated in the exhibition space, store and mix them and replay the
results to a "percussion" accompaniment of miniature hammers striking
the pipes. The elegantly minimalist form, the layering of acoustic
signals and the interactive aspect of the piece are principles that engaged
the members of TEXTxtnd as lecturers and authors, as well. It is no coincidence
that what emerges from "Text Tones" is a musical composition, an
endlessly varied electronic sextet, not unrelated to the works of John Cage.
"Text Tones" exemplifies the interdisciplinary spirit that characterized
the group of artists' life and work. Born in the 1960s they learned English
on the streets of Frankfurt as their "mother tongue". They moved
effortlessly between many cultures. "Home," as one of them once
somewhat wistfully remarked, "is wherever I'm working at the time." And
the work often involved the crossing of established borders - between the
technological world, for example, music and fine arts.
Their work would eventually be joined by modern ballet dancers, cacophonous
orators, visual artists and musicians from the famous Ensemble Modern.
The experimental spirit animating such works never dimmed, yet at no time
was there a sense that the artists cultivated new themes and new tools for
their own sake. Instead, they served a larger humanistic vision that repeatedly
sent their creators into the borderlands between electronics and philosophy,
sculpture and semantics, physics and poetry.
In the 1990s, when TEXTxtnd experienced their creative coming of age, the
old artistic idioms and isms were being vigorously challenged. In music,
Sven Väth was launching his enigmatic "techno" aesthetic and
the so-called DJ culture appeared. The academic old kind of composition turned
to a zero point of importance while Madonna was monumentalizing the trivial.
TEXTxtnd shared the irreverent spirit of the day, while remaining detached
from its fashionable excess. What they did, in a sense, was to fuse the pop-culture
traditions of the New World with a German spirit of intellectual reflection.
That uncommon fusion, furthermore, was not simply a product of the group
of artists' controvery with the German/Austrian society. A remarkable series
of 59 recordings, dating from 1981 but rediscovered and released only recently,
makes clear that later themes were all present and accounted for even in
the apprentice years.
These remarkable compositions are a lyric-grotesque, eerie-ironic, mythic-monstrous
blending of themes: love and lust, mutilation and metamorphosis, magic and
spirituality
In works employing laborer choirs, industrial noises and machines, the social
dimension of this interdisciplinary oeuvre is obvious, but beyond such literalness
there is an underlying deep musicality in almost all the built works. This
may express itself in the rhythmic flow of the speaking voice or in song.
But always it is the viewer's presence that triggers the performances.
"Text Tones" points to the humor so central to TEXTxtnd's vision.
It is kind of the moderating agent in what often seemed the senseless babble
of the world, which the artists so yearn to coax into harmony. It is also
an essential aspect of their deeply felt humanism.
Henri Gallow is a critic and free-lance curator in Hanau, Germany.
International Herald Tribune
Video-Clip "Der heimliche Aufmarsch"
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