Coral Visual

Artists

Johanna Billing, Gabriela Golder, Richard Grayson, Sven Johne, Paul Pfeiffer, Markus Schinwald, Artur Žmijewski

Cooperating Partners

Casa de la Cultura, Ministerio de la Cultura de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Fundación Siemens Argentina und Siemens Stiftung/Kunst & Kultur

Curator

Thomas Trummer (Siemens Stiftung)

Choirs are an unusual theme for visual arts. Are singers, composers, music specialists, and lay music lovers not able to provide greater insight into the history of choir singing, its musical forms, compositions, and quality than the works of fine art? Are choir organizers and choirs themselves not the best ones to convey the vivacity of this art form, its variety, and polyphonic laws of sound? Of course they are. Yet in the observation of purely musical phenomena the aspect of the stagecraft of acoustic performances and their significance go disregarded as an esthetic form. Performances only reveal the motivations of their musical practice to a certain extent. Questions as to how singers join together and form into singing societies are scarcely regarded.

The exhibition "Coral Visual" asks questions beyond the purely musical. Is the choir but one form of musical performance practice or is it also the expression of a collective will? When and why do we sing? From a social perspective it becomes clear that communal singing often always seems questionable. The opportunities where singing is possible as a matter of course - like during childhood - are rare. Other occasions - for instance religious, political, or sporting gatherings where large crowds sing - seem increasingly precarious and violent. It is not by chance that totalitarian systems like to use singing as a means of ritualized and friendly togetherness. It is all the more surprising that a series of important contemporary artists today pick up on this theme. Tracing their tracks and motivations for depicting communal singing is the exhibition "Coral Visual". When visual artists make the choir the focus of their work the normal relationship between image and sound is reversed so to speak.

The presence of music is taken for granted in films, clips, and other time-based media. In the film industry soundtracks form a backdrop to large format and illusion-inspiring image worlds. However, music is always secondary here. Sounds and acoustic worlds are merely flavor enhancers for the visual. Friedrich Nietzsche was the first to respect music both for its emotional power and its historical basis. According to Nietzsche, the choir was not only a musical backdrop and a decorative ingredient in Greek tragedy. Manifested in the choir was also the thread of the plot, a core image of existence.

Now, what is the significance of the image processing of the musical collective in the videos of fine art? Is it the community forming pathos that is portrayed here or is it other motivations that the artists pursue? If music is an intermediate occurrence in which several entities participate then the choir is without doubt the most illustrative form of this dovetailing. This basis in the acoustic world of sound - one that binds attention and action inextricably together as soon as it sounds - becomes manifest in communal singing. Choirs preclude congregation, uniformity, and unity. When we make music together some energy plays off between us. When we see this interplay in visual form we then withdraw from this togetherness, become an independent unit, and form something similar to the commentating choir in ancient theater. We move into a reflective position where singing can be jointly experienced and, at the same time, also observed, where it can be experienced from within and maybe judged from without. The visual choir (Coral Visual) then becomes a social indicator in which the varied events, the acoustic, visual, the scene and the obscene, the audible and the unheard feature as part of an internal counterplay.