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Vexations | A musical approach of Satie’s Vexations Artists: Andy Warhol, Maider Fortuné, Hans Op de Beeck, ceasar Vrettos In early 1893, at a cabaret named AubergeduClou, in Monmarte, Erik Satie met Suzanne Valadon, a young French painter. They fell madly in love, a love that lasted only six months and which would be the composer’s only known romantic relationship. When Suzanne decided to break up the relationship, Satie went through a difficult time psychologically, seeking to empty his soul and mind from the emotions of extreme pain and abandonment that was inevitable to follow. It was during this time that he composed Vexations, as a way of self-punishment but also as a unique type of self-therapy, a piece that was never published while he was alive. This piece of work is based on a short subject without meters, a thing unheard of at the time. The indication «Très Lent» clearly suggest a slow tempo, based on which the piece lasts approximately a bit over a minute. Nonetheless, the header of the piece asks for its repetitions 840 times providing at the same time specific instructions: “In order for anyone to play this motif 840 times, it would be good to prepare beforehand in the deepest possible silence, remaining austerely still”. That way, the total time spent in the execution of this piece exceeds 14 hours.
The effort to justify the selection of the number 840 as the repetition number, if one was to take also under consideration the composer’s aversion to mysticism and esotericism, gave grounds to various opinions. Indicatively we mention that 840 is the product of the sequential numbers 4, 5, 6 and 7, each of which has its own rich symbolic meaning. On the other hand though, the case of this number being a totally random selection cannot be wholly excluded. Additionally, analyzing some elements of this work from a mathematical point of view (selected sections, systems, tertian harmonies, total number of notes in the piece, the number of letters in the title and the instructions etc), one discovers that the resulting numbers match completely with the initial numbers of Édouard Lucas’, the famous French mathematician, well known mathematical sequence (1842 – 1891). (1, 3, 4, 7, 11, 18, 29, 47, 76, 123, 199, 322 etc)
It is worthwhile to note even Satie’s somewhat enigmatic instructions about the performer’s preparation in silence and immobility, elements traditionally at odds with the overall music process. It is not random that in his instructions, the main point of focus is not the element of repetitions but exactly this appropriate psychological preparation, which in essence was what Satie was looking for in his other works as well.
First performance Vexations was first heard thanks to the great avant-garderepresentative JohnCage (1912 – 1992), who, on September 9th 1963, organized and participated in the piece’s performance by a group of pianists in New York’s PocketTheatre. He himself knew about this piece since 1949, the year when it was first published. It is a given that Satie’s influence on Cage was great, and 4’33” is the greatest proof, whose aesthetic foundation can and ought to be sought mainly in conceptual goals akin to Satie’s.
This 1963 performance was followed by many others around the words, usually by one performer only, while it is customary to see this piano performance attached to a broader visual performance. The occasional attestations by performers and audiences about Vexationsconverge impressively concerning the success of Satie’s iconoclastic enterprise. Despite the psychological “dangers" (hallucinations, immersion, etc), the physical tiredness and the overall practical difficulties in its performance, Vexationsis more than an "athletic” type" enterprise: it’s an excuse for soul searching and experiencing an unusual relationship with time, a communion with a regenerating inner state, which, by overcoming a typical and forced repetitiveness, reaches a deeper level of self-cognition.
In order to satisfy the practical need of counting the repetitions in the performances that take place from time to time, different techniques have been employed, often of symbolic nature. An hourglass, the sand of which represents Satie’s ashes, three pears on which the performer pins 840 pins (direct reference to Satie’s work Trois Morceaux en forme de poire – Three pieces in the shape of a pear), as well as practical solutions such as using a personal computer to count.
In the first performance ever to take place in Greece, the performer used 840 numbered staff papers. Each time that a performance round is completed, the performer would throw the sheet next to the piano resulting, in the end, in a pile of staff sheets surrounding the piano and hence visualizing the duration of the piece.
Titos Gouvelis
Bridges between visual arts and music
Vexations, the fruit of an erotic disappointment and a means of self-punishment of a composer in love, was destined to function, despite Satie’s intentions, as a meeting point of artists who would leave their mark in Art during the second half of the 20th century. Andy Warhol was present at the first historic performance of 1963 by John Cage. Upon returning home Warhol created the landmark work in his filmography, the film Sleep. Three years later Nam June Paik, considered the grandfather of video art, and the cellist Charlote Moorman, the artist with whom he performed and taped the most landmark performances in the history of video, performed Vexations on July 17th 1966 in the Forum Theater Berlin.
Satie’s Vexations remains for decades hidden until John Cage, one of the founders of modern music, made its discovery. The element that attracts Cage the most, and which makes this piece as the precursor to modern music, is the scheduling and thus its conceptual character, given that the artist is not focusing in the piece’s form and consequently the piece is completed through the audience’s intellectual participation. Special importance is not given to the music form itself but to the experience, that of the performer but also that of the person in the audience. Following the logic of conceptual art, in the piece's fulfillment, the composer doesn't demand the performer’s maximum artistic skill, as this piece is fairly simple in writing.
The continuous repetition, touching the limits of what we would call impossible, as well as the possible boredom and tiredness that this piece can instill to the audience are elements the directly reference the founding principles of eastern philosophy. Cage saw in Vexations elements related to the Buddhist philosophy, a philosophy close to his heart. Having being influenced himself by the teachings of Buddhism, he applied in his work some of the basic principles of this philosophy. Silence and total emptiness are basic motifs in the monumental piece 4’33’’, also known as the sonata of silence, which is directly connected with the Zen philosophy. Nam June Paik realized these influences; he recognized in Cage’s musical creations elements in tune with his homeland’s traditions.
From 1958 onwards, Cage starts mentoring Nam June Paik’s, the Koran artist who will leave his own distinct mark on the second half of the 20th century by creating video art. The founder of Video Art was foremost a composer and not a visual arts artist. Having completed his doctorate on the works of Arnorld Schoenberg in 1956, this multifaceted composer couldn’t limit himself in the typical limits of each art and continued to experiment by adding performance elements in musical performances. In 1959, when he performed for the first time the Hommage à John Cage: Music for Tape Recorder and Piano in Dusseldorf, he didn't hesitate to get off stage and cut Cage’s tie off. At the same time, Nam June Paik is attracted to television. The power of this new medium as well as the electronic image per se is what captivated him. In 1963, the year of Vexations’ first performance, Paik acquired 13 television receivers and started to experiment the same way that Cage was experimenting on prepared pianos, by tweaking the cathode ray tube using magnets and creating minimalistic, for the most part, pictures. The appearance of the legendary portable Sony Portapak videocamera two years later will mark officially the birth of video art.
In essence, Paik created a bridge between music and visual arts. The video is born out of the communion of these two arts using performance as their vehicle. All this is happening during the 60s, a period marked by a creative orgasm in the realm of arts. The basic elements characterizing artistic creation during that period are liquidity of boundaries, experimentalism and break away from the norm. Performance, land art, installation and, of course, the video are the fruits of this fertile period.
Music and video, arts in time Despite the fact that video is theoretically in the realm of visual arts, it’s essentially an art in time (that’s from where the expression “time based media” originated). Since its core characteristic is duration, video is a visual art unfolding in time. And it’s exactly there that it meets up with music.
Satie spreads a musical phrase through time and extends it in perpetuity through repetition. The 15 hour long performance of this piece gives birth to such a particular time experience both for the performer as well as for the person sitting in the audience.
In Sleep (1963) Andy Warhol encapsulates and reflects real time. With the camera still, using gros plans, he films a sleeping man for 6 hours. During the shoot, each time that the film ended and had to be replaced, the artist would change the filming angle. The result is a series of frames that balance between movement and immobility as well as the only thing that happens is that the handsome sleeping man changes slightly his posture during his sleep and his chest moves with each breath.
Sleep along with Kiss are Warhol's two important films which he created in 1963, the time he acquired his first 16mm Bolex movie camera silent. Similarly to this last film was the film Empire (1964), which is comprised by a steady 8 hour long frame showing the Εmpire State Building and through the only thing that happens, the grandiose passing from day into night, the artist used the cinematic medium to reflect real time. Through such works of experimental nature, lacking any type of story, action or story-telling, Warhol created in essence a new cinematic norm.
The audience’s experience cannot be described in terms of a classical cinematic show. It is almost impossible to stay for all 6 hours, sitting in a viewing room focused on the film, in very much the same way that it’s almost impossible to have people stay for 15 hours in an auditorium attending a performance of Satie's work. These two artists suggest works that break away from the molds of conventional music or respectively of the typical cinematic experience by disorienting the audience who seek a way of living and coexisting with these works.
In Totem (2001), Maider Fortuné dilates time through a slow moving repeating motif. The audience watches a monochromatic 10 minute cinematically aesthetic gros plan of a little girl's face that is skipping rope. The pulsing repeating movement is dilated and finally deconstructed through a slow motion that gradually slows down the speed of movement.
Through picture slowdown, Fortuné performs a movement anatomy through time. The rhythm change gives different content in the viewing image. The girl's face is gradually decomposed bringing, just for a few seconds, to the surface the contour of her skull. As the picture becomes slower, and her facial expressions are distorted, the girl's juvenile innocence gives way to a scary and unfamiliar picture. Totem makes a direct reference to Douglas Davis’ 24 Hours Psycho, a piece of work-reference to the use of slow motion in video art, in which the artist slows down the same titled movie by Hitchcock so that it lasts 24 hours.
Hans Op De Beeck in Staging Silence (2009) recreated visually an inner dreamscape of thoughts and memories. Using miniatures of objects he created patterns that function as background scenery. The audience watches all stages of creation: composition, decomposition, recombination through two hands that carefully make these sceneries by creating scenes of exceptional aesthetics. We see the materials get transformed: the lamp becomes the sun, the decorated tower, which is in essence a castle and after being eaten is transformed into ruins, paint brushes that carefully sweep the snow. Places without time or places without a locale, free from any trace of human presence, one succeeding the other and each organically connecting to the next as the new space maintains elements of the previous one. The use of microscopic materials and the hand creation process, with the artist's hands, touches the limits of poetry and s a reference to childhood. The piece of work resembles an effort to bring forth and reconstitute childhood experiences, pictures and places that left their mark on us, by transforming them in frames of exceptional aesthetics.
Christina Vatsella
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