the Collector: Sound of Music

From 20 January until 30 March 2008, Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, the Netherlands, will be presenting the exhibition Sound of Music, as part of ‘The Collector’. This exhibition is the upshot of a joint project by FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais (France) and Marres. The exhibition will centre on works from the FRAC collection, supplemented with other loans. Sound of Music addresses the impact of new technologies and the relationship between digital images and music.

In the past, Marres already offered various reflections on the notion of ‘The Collector’ with such exhibitions as Die Dinge, Négritude and La Collection Imaginaire. Where Die Dinge emphasised the opening up of collections and the issue of collection mobility, Négritude further discussed the collection as identity, while La Collection Imaginaire questioned the position of the collector. With Sound of Music, Marres focuses on yet another aspect of ‘The Collector’ by reinterpreting a museum collection within the context of a presentation institute for visual arts and design. Thanks to the work by Mark Leckey that will be on show, Sound of Music also builds a bridge between the Die Dinge exhibition – in which John Cage’s chance-based method was used as part of the exhibition model – and the next exhibition to be organised as part of 'The Flâneur’.

Digital images and digital music have become an integral part of our daily environment. But even long before the current technical possibilities, artists already interlinked the domains of images and sound. As far back as the first decades of the 20th century – an era that produced such prophetic composers as Debussy – visual artists were using musically inspired elements of composition and structure, signs and codes, rhythm and dynamics, nuance and harmony. Music became, first and foremost, a reference for artists who wanted to liberate representation itself and had in mind a more abstract way of working. Erik Satie was not, as Man Ray said, ‘the only musician of his time to have eyes’, but he did write musical history with his ‘musique d’ameublement’; scores with graphical notation, text and instructions for set design. In the 1960s, these ideas were elaborated by John Cage and La Monte Young, both affiliated with the Fluxus movement. Music was detached from its score, its perception was the focus of performances, happenings and installations – and sound art was born.

Sound of Music offers a differentiated route along a hybrid track of sound sculptures (Angela Bulloch, Cerith Wyn Evans), design (Achille & Pier Giacomo Castiglioni) and graphics (Jeremy Deller, Scott King). This covers both the pioneers (John Cage) and their successors (Pierre Huyghe), as well as the youngest generation. Organised around multi-disciplinary labels, the contemporary music scene resounds in the different works.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, available at the Marres Bookstore.

the Collector:
Sound of Music
Kurator: Hilde Teerlinck

Künstler: Art & Language  (Terry Atkinson & Michael Baldwin), Robert Barry, Angela Bulloch, Ellen Cantor & John Cussans, Achille Castiglioni & Pier Giacomo Castiglioni , Francois Curlet & Michel François, Jeremy Deller, Pierre Huyghe, Scott King, Vera Molnar / Francois Molnar, Dennis Oppenheim, Allen Ruppersberg, S.M.S. (John Cage, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela), Cerith Wyn Evans, La Monte Young, Anton Corbijn, Mark Leckey, Rainier Lericolais, Christian Marclay, Susan Philipsz.