Exhibition: Stones & Voices combines video portraits of 50 artists and scientists from different cultures with an installation by Martin Rosenthal made of 100 water-filled bowls and rare Rain Flower stones from the Yangtze. The simultaneously played voices form a walk-in soundscape and meet the silent presence of water and stone. This creates a field of tension between people and nature, technology and material, loud and quiet.

The World, Life, Art

Anyone wanting to find their way around the computer network we call the internet, with its thousands of thematic discussion, storytelling or gossip forums, proceeds by keyword and region. In these “newsgroups”, people exchange views on every conceivable question of our everyday world, from a high scientific level to small talk in the virtual marketplace. Or one navigates the daily growing archives of the World Wide Web, a hypertext system that opens up countless levels and branches of text and image documents to the user and leads them, via pre-programmed “links”, to the places of the network world. Perception detaches itself from the linearity of a single speaker, a single story. On the internet, beginning, end and sequence lose their customary meaning. Zapping through dozens of television channels has similar effects.

Markus Heinsdorff’s idea of a global multivocality of art establishes connections to network communication without ever using the medium of the computer. Through the media preservation of interviews on video and through the staging of simultaneity, a simultaneous, multidimensional tangle of voices arises, which is above all also a scenery of faces. The subject of the videos is not artistic or scientific works, but people who think and speak. Their discourse is contradictory, but their theme is consistent throughout: the world, life, art. Chance is stronger than system in the selection; the inherent dynamic of the flow of speech is more important than its control. Multiplicity is the programme, and the fragmentation of closed conceptions of the world follows as the decisive statement.

Once again on the world of data networks: network communities and computer conferences, role-playing on the virtual stage of collective games, or spontaneous real-time conversations on screen, animate cyberspace with the most varied forms of social life. The fact that, in recent years, artists have increasingly engaged with network structures and the possibilities of global communication shows the need to occupy and reflect upon a network culture often dressed up as technophile, and to understand it as part of, perhaps as a foretaste of, the future of our general culture.

The artistic principle of Voices is to trigger reactions and then to gather and stage, to arrange them. This is not a curatorial principle but rather a delight in defining, through simple framing conditions, dynamic, open systems that develop a life of their own. Global Bridge is a plausible metaphor for this; a “virtual community” in the computer network would be another.

Stefan Iglhaut

Note on a Stone and Many Voices

We think something was there before us. We are not certain.
Grey, round, smooth, firm, hard, motionless.
We see, feel, know, name a something:
a stone, a pebble.
Seeing, feeling, knowing changes it.
It is warm in the hand and glows in the water. For us.
The seen, felt, known stone has lost its autonomy.
It is no longer nature, does not exist in itself and also without us,
but exists for us.
Man has made the stone his tool,
functional, religious, aesthetic.
Rain Flower Pebble, a pebble, a special stone.
Fallen from the sky, laid in the water, fantastically beautiful.
No longer really like a stone, but like an image,
no longer really nature, but art.
We make it so.
What art is, is asked. Everyone has a voice,
everyone answers for themselves. We hear many voices.
The voices are quiet and/or loud,
the answer comes hesitantly and/or spontaneously,
the mood is resigned and/or aggressive.
Art is memory and/or the future.
Art is hope and/or despair.
Art is a mirror of society and/or an expression of the individual.
Art is communication and/or isolation.
Art is revolution and/or regression.
Art needs morality and/or art is amoral.
Art is no longer possible in this world and/or
art is the only way to survive in this world.
We expect too much.
One thing is simple: art is not nature.
Art is not for itself, but for us.
Art did not exist before us, we are the condition of its possibility.
We – it depends on us. We make it.
We see, feel, hear, speak, know, want.
A stone lies quiet in the water.

Gabriele Kübler

The World as a Crossroads

One of the most decisive events of this century is the realisation that there are no universal rules. We owe this realisation to linguistic analysis, which teaches us that language systems are not subject to absolute rules, but that each system develops its own rules, and that exchange is only possible within these particular rules. This is why the linguistic analyst Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his investigation of language, speaks of “language games”. In doing so, he makes it clear that each of these different games is defined by rules that determine the properties and possible use of the games, just as chess is organised by a complex of rules that determines the properties of the pieces and the permitted way of moving them. Without rules, there is no game. And the rules of every game are not grounded in themselves but are the result of an agreement.

Today we know that the same holds true for all other sign systems, including those of the visual arts. That is to say, for art too there are no self-grounded, absolute rules – as modernism still believed – but the respective rules in art, too, are merely the consequence of an agreement, an understanding. And this is precisely what Marcel Duchamp was aiming at when, in 1917, in his scandalous gesture, he declared a simple urinal to be a product of high art. He wanted to show that the value of an artwork in today’s society is not subject to fixed rules, but that what is recognised as an art product depends on an agreement within a group, and thus behaves like a game. This declaration of a urinal as a product of high art was, at the time, a stroke of genius, which was, however, largely disregarded by subsequent developments in art – people continued to act as though there were universal rules – and whose full, far-reaching significance is only recognised today.

Duchamp himself knew what he was doing. He withdrew from art production for the time being, and it is no coincidence that he devoted himself to the true game of chess, which he elevated to the highest art. In 1932, his chess book appeared, bearing the title “Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled”. In it, he describes a playing situation in which almost no pieces remain on the board and victory depends on whether the king can occupy a square in opposition, at a certain distance from the opposing king, or not. Thus both kings undertake a lonely walk across the squares and act as though they were free. Yet every one of their steps is subject to its own rules, and the slightest deviation from these rules is fateful.

In this way Duchamp describes a situation that has now come about in art. There are no longer universal rules for art; instead there is a whole series of games, each with its own rules, which are, however, only valid within the respective game. Art has become pluralistic. And against this background, the project of modernism, too, reveals itself as a game that consisted of rules that were exclusively the result of an agreement made by the Christian-shaped, Western-philosophy-educated white man oriented towards mastery of the world. And it suddenly becomes clear that modern art was a system of exclusivity that blocked all other games that can be gained from the experience of other cultures and that open us up to other games with other rules.

Noemi Smolik