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Press Release
Performance & video installation
ACTION FANTASY - A piano performance and serial video installation by Emanuele Becheri for Gallery Weekend Berlin
Artist:
Emanuele Becheri (b. Prato, 1973)
Date:
2015 April 30, May 1 and 2
Time:
every day at 9 PM
Location:
KühlhausBerlin
Luckenwalder Str. 3
10963 Berlin
More information:
Darius Bork, press office KühlhausBerlin, +49 176 55198148 / [email protected]
Drew Hammond, [email protected]
Johann Strauss
Emanuele Becheri
Organized by Drew Hammond.
Luckenwalder Str. 3 • 10963 Berlin • [email protected]
Action Fantasy
Emanuele Becheri’s new work for Gallery Weekend Berlin integrates a noise concert with the installation of a series of
the artist’s video works that reinforce themes underlying his noise performance. These in turn contravene ideas implicit
in the earliest noise concerts of Italian Futurism a century ago, works that remain among the most paradigmatic
expressions of Modernism.
The disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the cataclysm of the early twentieth century, and the subsequent
defeat of the lesser ape of its imperial ambitions in Fascist Italy in 1945 belies another rupture between two aestheticosocial dimensions: the apotheosis and decline of the Romantic opera house culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna, and the
birth of the Noise concerts (intonarumori) of the Futurist, Luigi Russolo in 1913-1914 that accompanied publication of
his manifesto The Art of Noises (L'Arte dei Rumori )(1913).
Despite the repugnant associations that Futurism would acquire a generation later under Fascist patronage, Russolo’s
work revealed noise to be the Modernist medium par excellence because noise, by its nature, literally could achieve
that to which plastic media could only symbolically aspire: genuine auto-referential autonomy.
During the sixties, when Adorno lectured in Vienna and published a repudiation of his own earlier views affirming the
necessity of traditional musical structure in Quasi una fantasia (Suhrkamp, 1963), the Vienna Actionists were among the
most prominent artists of their generation to integrate noise with their conceptual program, a tradition that culminates
decades later in Peter Weibel’s seminal noise concert first presented at the Donaufestival ‘Krems Brûlée’ on 25, April,
2013: The Noise of Origin—The Origin of Noise, a summa which, by means of trans-medial performance, prompts a
reconfiguration of the history of noise theory so as to encompass the present age of digital virtual reality.
Also conscious of the analogy between noise’s auto-referential character and intrinsic properties of digital virtual reality
to transcend traditional mimetic representation with self-generating noise and form, Emanuele Becheri’s performances,
on the one hand, propose to destroy noise’s auto-referential character by exposing it is as the source ex natura of
classical mimetic representation in music. On the other hand, the artist uses the paradigmatic traditional medium of
Classical recital (the piano) in order to effect this operation. In this sense, the interaction between the instrumental
medium and the conceptual aim generates a cyclical tension in which the artist uses the medium of tradition in order to
generate noise whose conventional aesthetic properties repudiate traditional musical tonality and structure, in order to
compel noise to a status as source of traditional Classical music. And the evocation of musical form most suited to such
a juncture is that which derives from improvisation: the fantasy or in the Italian incorporated into Western languages as
the vocabulary of music: fantasia.
“My work is linked to the piano because the piano is linked to fantasia. This is a process of approaching the classical
through the instrument of the classical. The classical has a nature that is unfaithful to nature; the only way to escape this
confusion is by means of a chaos that is more important.”
On these grounds, the artist regards his utter lack of training in music or the technique of piano playing as a necessary
precondition for his enterprise: “To attain the classical without any technical knowledge, without any knowledge of the
instrument is an oxymoron. Therein lies the mystery of the creative act.”
The contra-mediatic features of Becheri’s noise performance find their analogy in his approach to the video projections
that accompany and follow it. The artist employs a relatively lo-res digital video recording technology that implicitly
transforms it into an analog medium through several means. The lo-res quality, together with the lighting technique is
remote from the high definition and extreme light sensitivity we have come to take for granted as a sine qua non of the
medium. Here, there is no digital manipulation of the image. Any visual effects are “in camera,” including the editing,
which usually is non-existent since, for the most part, he shoots the works in real time. In no instance does the length of
a video exceed the maximum length of a standard 35mm film reel.
In this sense, even prior to any consideration of the content of the projected images—these aspire to the status of “pure
gesture” characteristic of the artist’s work in other media—the viewer confronts a digital medium employed to represent
an analog medium in a way that compels reflection on the artificiality of the digital video whose original raison d'être
democratize the faithful recording of events.
“I wish to make a mockery of our mediatized condition (mediacità),” saysBecheri. In that case it is only natural that he
would use media in order to do it.
- Drew Hammond, Berlin, 2015
Luckenwalder Str. 3 • 10963 Berlin • [email protected]