24/10/2017 Review: Anri Sala's The Last Resort 'an exemplary work of public art' http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/review-anri-salas-the-last-resort-20171016-gz28qw.html 1/6 Entertainment SUBSCRIBE LOGIN News Sport Business World Politics Comment Property Entertainment Lifestyle Travel Movies TV Guide TV & Radio Music Books Art Stage What's On in Sydney Video Historians can never agree about the so-called "Age of Enlightenment". The narrow definition has it beginning with the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and ending with the French Revolution in 1789. The long version begins somewhere in the late 1600s and fizzles out in 1815 with Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. As the dates are disputed so too are the achievements of this era in which science and philosophy made such advances. We used to think of the Enlightenment as a landmark in the history of civilisation, but increasingly it is viewed as a Eurocentric movement that inspired imperialist attitudes toward the rest of the world. The dual nature of the Enlightenment is explored in the 33rd Kaldor Public Art Project: Anri Sala's The Last Resort. The combination of a spectacular location (the rotunda on Observatory Hill), and a brilliantly conceived installation, makes this one of the most memorable of all the Kaldor projects. Review: Anri Sala's The Last Resort 'an exemplary work of public art' John McDonald SHARE TWEET MORE The combination of a spectacular location (the rotunda on Observatory Hill), and a brilliantly conceived installation, makes Anri Sala's The Last Resort one of the most memorable of all the Kaldor projects. Photo: Christopher Pearce Auckland FIND OUT MORE Advertisement Home / Entertainment / Art OCTOBER 20 2017 SAVE PRINT SHARE SIGN-UP /
Transcript
24/10/2017 Review: Anri Sala's The Last Resort 'an exemplary work of public art'
Artist Anri Sala tells a very Sydney story – by getting rid of narrativealtogether
/ 7 0
By Jason CatlettPosted: Thursday October 26 2017, 4:44pm
BLOG ART
LOVE ITq0 SAVE IT,
Many works of art tell a story, as well as being stories in themselves. The Parthenon Marbles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles)told the early history of ancient Greece, and the marbles’ own di�cult history continues today(http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/news_and_press/statements/parthenon_sculptures/trustees_statement.aspx), drawing evermore attention. When presented with a masterpiece, we crave narrative from it; if it tells of no events by itself, we ask about it: what madethe Mona Lisa smile?
Many artists try to interest you in their stories. Anri Sala deliberately keeps narrative out of his artworks, yet many of his methods andmaterials are historical. Invited to create a new work in Sydney by Kaldor Public Art Projects (https://www.timeout.com/sydney/blog/an-acclaimed-international-artist-is-taking-over-sydneys-observatory-hill-062617), he studied the city’s history and decided to place hisinstallation, titled The Last Resort (https://www.timeout.com/sydney/art/anri-sala-the-last-resort), in the Federation-style octagonal timberbandstand constructed in 1912 on Observatory Hill. “The work still carries my interest in political and social history, but it is embedded inthe structure of the work,” he says. “Nothing is there to produce narrative.”
The obvious external structure of The Last Resort consists of 38 snare drums suspended neatly from the rotunda’s ceiling. The pairedloudspeakers concealed artfully inside each drum could tell many a tale, but they speak only in sound-shards, rattling and reminiscingphrases of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major, as rearranged by Sala’s sound designer Olivier Goinard (a long-term collaborator) andperformed by the Munich Chamber Orchestra.
Photograph: Steven SiewertAnri Sala with his Kaldor Public Art Project: The Last Resort
(/sydney/search)
13/11/2017 Artist Anri Sala tells a very Sydney story – by getting rid of narrative altogether
Mozart didn’t call for any percussion when he wrote the celebrated piece in 1791, soon before his death. The low murmur of snare drumsevokes many incongruous associations: an approaching army, an impending thunderstorm, and Maurice Ravel’s 1928 orchestral dancemasterpiece Boléro. Sala and Goinard similarly used the piano concerto for left hand by Ravel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJTUUKAdZDU) as the raw material for a highly successful video installation at the 2013 Venice Biennale(http://moussemagazine.it/55vb-french-pavilion/), where he mixed two separate performances by different pianists. It sounds surprisinglygood.“You can enjoy it for what it is,” says Sala, “but one can re�ect on where music for the left hand comes from: the First World War.”
Many of Sala’s other collaborations with Goinard adapt concert hall favourites in response to speci�c sites. Sala compares developing TheLast Resort to “reverse archaeology”, where artefacts are created and rearranged according to historical records as well as aestheticgoals. During periodic breaks from the orchestral score, the drums rustle according to weather reports from a ship’s journey to Australia in1839.
What Sala is studiously avoiding after all his study of history is producing a discernible story. “I don’t work with narrative,” he states �atly.Even in his 2008 video work Answer me (https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/26/anri-sala/images-clips/52/), which situates within adisused NSA listening station a “borrowed narrative” of a couple breaking up, his focus is on non-responses, on (in his words) the“awkwardness of silence in between”.
It's remarkable that an artist whose primary medium is video, and whose raw materials are often chronological records and time-basedcomponents, should produce works where nothing much seems to change. He is a sculptor of shards and gaps. The core of his worksseem to be things that are not present nor even directly referenced.
And yet The Last Resort is successful: it allows re�ection on the life of Mozart, the creation of a British colony around Sydney, and itseffect on the �rst inhabitants of that land.
Back in 1770, when James Cook landed at Kurnell, Mozart was an opera-writing teenager touring northern Italy with his father. By 1776 hewas in resentful servitude to the Archbishop of Salzburg, churning out under-appreciated masterpieces, when a group of unpatrioticcolonials in Philadelphia declared that all men have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When the First Fleet arrived in 1778,Mozart was having a tough year, but managed to complete his last symphony.
“It was a period of �ourishing high ideals, which I cherish myself,” says Sala. “But what do they mean when Europeans are pursuing theirhappiness in America or Australia to the detriment of local populations? I wonder whether this new certainty, with all its emancipatingqualities, at the same time provoked a blindness towards the culture and way of living on the other side of the world?”
Neither Sala nor this artwork really answer such questions, which they raise subtly over many layers, few of which will be noticed by thetypical visitor. He is at peace with that, accepting that his gentle ruminations will, like Mozart and Voltaire, be unevenly distributed anddifferently received.
Anri Sala: The Last Resort at Observatory Hill, SydneyPhotograph: Pedro Greig
13/11/2017 Artist Anri Sala tells a very Sydney story – by getting rid of narrative altogether
Anri Sala has created for Sydney a masterpiece that, as much as a Michelangelo sculpture, rewards prolonged and informed considerationyet will please and satisfy almost everyone who gives it even a few seconds of cursory attention. “I’m not interested in being demanding,”Sala says. “You don’t need to know all these things to establish contact with the work.”
Kaldor Public Art Project 33: The Last Resort (https://www.timeout.com/sydney/art/anri-sala-the-last-resort) is open every day until(and including) November 5 at the Observatory Hill rotunda.
Read Time Out Sydney’s guide to The Last Resort (https://www.timeout.com/sydney/blog/time-out-sydneys-guide-to-anri-salas-the-last-resort-101717) – and check out our hit list of the best art to see this month (https://www.timeout.com/sydney/art/the-best-art-this-month).
ADVERTISING
ADVERTISING
By Jason Catlett
You might also like
Elsewhere on the internet
Recommended by (https://www.outbrain.com/whatis/default/en)
Black Star Pastry has a newcake and it’s Goddamn…Blog
If you've got the plebiscite blues, these artists have the cure (/sydney/blog/if-
StaffWriter
The Sydney Morning Herald
Print this article | Close this window
Anri Sala's The Last Resort transforms Sydney'sObservatory Hill RotundaRichard Jinman
Published: October 5 2017 - 4:30PM
Anri Sala can not remember exactly how old he was when he saw the painting that set him on the path tobecoming an artist, but the feelings it evoked are still distinct. The work was Not To Be Reproduced by theBelgian surrealist Rene Magritte. A man in a black jacket stands in front of a large mirror, but somethingis wrong; the laws of physics have been suspended. Instead of his face the man stares at a reflection of theback of his head.
"It was an image I simply couldn't understand and I couldn't get it out of my head either," Sala says. "Anartist that I knew told me, 'don't push it – it doesn't need to be understood straight away. Let it come toyou'."
Sala was born and raised in Albania – a communist state until 1992 – so he was lucky to see the Magritteat all. Most Western art was banned under the regime of Enver Hoxha, the repressive head of state whokept the small south-east European country under his thumb for 40 years. "You had to pick your friendsvery carefully because there were so many spies," Sala says. "I was aware of that even as a child."
His mother's job opened doors that were shut to most Albanians. Valdet Sala was the director of theNational Library and she gave her curious son the key to le font noir (the dark store) where banned books– everything from Orwell's 1984 to the book containing the Magritte – were kept. When Albania'scommunist leaders were finally ousted, Sala moved to Paris to continue his studies. But the legacy of hisyouth was a conviction that the freedom to make art free from censorship should never be taken forgranted.
We meet in his studio, a big light-filled space on the first floor of a building on the banks of Berlin's RiverSpree. There are fine views of the river and the elegant pre-war buildings of Charlottenburg, the part ofthe German capital he now calls home. Sala, 43, seems uninterested in vistas or small talk. He sits withhis back to the light and regards me with hooded eyes. His watchful demeanour is paired with a utilitarianstyle – jeans, navy T-shirt, cropped hair, sparse beard – that suggests the process of conceiving art leaveslittle time for frippery.
John Kaldor, the Australian art collector and philanthropist who has commissioned Sala to create a workthat will be installed in Sydney's Observatory Hill Rotunda, describes him as "the most intellectuallyengaged artist I have ever met". He is certainly intense, preternaturally focused on the minutiae of hiswork and not easily moved to laughter. His conversation is peppered with art words like "rupture" and"corruption" and when he explains the ideas underpinning his work you have to run to keep up.
"I'm interested to push the limits of a sense until it starts taking the quality of another sense," he says. "Soyou can see reason and hear light, for example."
All this focus and intensity produces extraordinary work – mostly video but also photography andsculpture – that has earned him an international reputation and some of art's top honours. In 2014 he beatfour nominees, including the Turner Prize-winning British artist Gillian Wearing, to win the biennialVincent Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for contemporary art in Europe.
Sala's video works are surprisingly accessible: beautiful, spooky narratives that frequently substitutemusic for words. His suspicion of language and determination to replace it with something else, can betraced back to 1998's Intervista (Finding the Words), the film that put him on the art world's radar. Itrecords his mother's shocked reaction when he shows her a film of a speech she made to a congress of theAlbanian Communist Party in 1978. "It's absurd!" Valdet says when she is confronted with the banaldogma she spouted as a 32-year-old activist. "I just can't believe it!"
Sala's conclusion is that his mother, a smart, articulate woman, was rendered inarticulate by the dogmaforced upon her by political and historical circumstances. It sparked a revelation: language cannot betrusted. "It is untrustworthy because a lot of the meaning is embedded in the syntax," he says. "It can bepatronising and manipulative and codified. It [Intervista] made me aware of that and eager to open otherwindows by using other means of communication and other senses."
His more recent videos often use music – everything from the Clash's 1981 anthem Should I Stay orShould I Go to free jazz and a Ravel concerto – as a substitute for words. He also has a fondness forlocations redolent of the broken dreams of the 20th century. In Answer Me (2008), a woman desperatelytries to engage a man in conversation in the domed interior of an abandoned Cold War listening station inGermany. He answers her by playing a cacophonous drum solo. Le Clash, a piece from 2010, turns theBritish punk band's biggest hit into an eerie melody worthy of a slasher movie when it is played on abarrel organ outside a boarded up punk rock venue in France.
Possibly his most audacious work is 2005's Long Sorrow. To make it, he hired a massive crane andsuspended the American saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc 80 metres above the street in front of a massive1960s apartment block in west Berlin. He then asked the extremely nervous musician to improvise amelody because it "emphasised the idea of free will" and "contrasted with architecture which is neverimprovised".
The making of Long Sorrow illustrates how far Sala will go to realise his artistic vision. Yet he recountsthe shoot with little emotion, as if hanging a jazz musician outside the 25th floor of a housing block inBerlin is an everyday occurrence. He admits he had some arguments with Moondoc over the length oftime the saxophonist was left dangling, but it all worked out in the end. Certainly Long Sorrow is atriumph, a film that is surreal, provocative and, well, kind of funky.
Whether you appreciate Sala's "unrivalled capacity to excavate the sullied dreams of modernism", as onecritic put it, or simply dig the visuals and music, is completely up to you. "My work operates on differentlevels," he says. "You can stay on the level of pleasure, but if you scratch it more there are other levelsthat can bring more understanding. But they're not mandatory – I do not impose. I try to take them [theother meanings] away from the content and put them in the syntax, meaning there is this idea ofcorruption, this rupture between intention and outcome." He shrugs. "There is always something more toexcavate."
His latest excavation will take place in the century-old bandstand on Observatory Hill and music is at theheart of the project. Sala has recorded a new version of Mozart's Clarinet concerto in A Major, K. 622,replacing the composer's original tempi with the wind conditions recorded in a log kept by a Scottishmigrant who made a six-month voyage to Australia in 1838. In Sala's version of the concerto, recorded bythe Munich Chamber Orchestra, light breezes and stiff winds replace adagios and allegros. "There areeight different kinds of winds described in the log and the only time it [the altered score] sounds likeMozart is when there is a good wind," he says. "The music will be buffeted by nature. I wanted to includeanother will besides the will of the composer, a force majeure, something that overtakes the will of thecreator."
The choice of Observatory Hill is significant: it played a crucial role in meteorology, astronomy, shipping,navigation and time-keeping in the early days of settlement. And the clarinet concerto is carefully chosen.The piece was finished in 1791, just three years after the arrival of the First Fleet. The Last Resortimagines Mozart's masterpiece, a potent symbol of the enlightenment, making the long journey toAustralia and being distorted by external forces as it crosses the oceans.
"The piece was Mozart's last and one of the masterpieces of Western music in a time that correspondswith many great things," Sala says. "But on the way [to Australia] it becomes corrupted and at themoment of first contact with Aboriginal civilisations those ideals become nightmares in some ways. Thecorruption [by the winds] is analogue to the corruption of those enlightenment ideas."
The concerto – or rather its second movement – will be played through speakers hidden inside 38 snaredrums suspended upside down from the roof of the rotunda. Each drum contains two speakers: a lowfrequency one that triggers a pair of sticks attached to the surface of the drum (it will appear to be playedby a ghostly drummer) and a tweeter that plays the mid-range and high tones. Why are the drumsinverted? It is partly a nod to European notions of Australia being "upside down" and partly a reference tothe flying foxes the artist saw hanging from trees during a previous visit to Sydney's Royal BotanicGardens. Standing beneath the field of drums, visitors will have the sensation of a meteorologicallydistorted orchestra playing above their heads.
"It's about letting something go and seeing what happens to it," Sala says. "This project brings togetherthe written score of Mozart and the score of the weather. I didn't want to hurt the music. I wanted it tobecome something else."
If that all sounds a little confusing, don't worry. As Sala's artist friend said all those years ago, 'don't pushit – it doesn't need to be understood straight away. Let it come to you'."
The Last Resort is at the Observatory Hill Rotunda, Sydney, from October 13 to November 5.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/anri-salas-the-last-resort-transforms-sydneys-observatory-hill-rotunda-20171002-gysqht.html
Most Read Articles
The Sydney Morning Herald
Lisa Wilkinson quits Today Show and joins Ten in shock move
HSC English exam prompts ugly outbursts on social media
Revelation of cosmic secrets triggers a 'frenzy' of science
Teacher fatally stabbed at bus stop tried to flee
If Trump strikes North Korea there is only one outcome
The Age
'This world has lost a gem': Police confirm human remains found at Anglesea are those of Elisa Curry
Lisa Wilkinson quits Today Show and joins Ten in shock move
John Kaldor opens unique sound and sculpturepublic art projectLinda Morris
Published: September 29 2017 - 1:06PM
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's delicate Clarinet Concerto in A Major, premiered in October 1791, twomonths before the composer's death.
It's a seminal piece of musical expression from the Age of Enlightenment, created during a period ofpolitical and social revolution in Europe, just three years after the First Fleet sailed into Sydney Harbour.
A rearrangement of the concerto's second movement forms the soundtrack for a unique sound andsculptural installation, The Last Resort, soon to open on Sydney's Observatory Hill.
Celebrated French artist and filmmaker Anri Sala has altered the tempo of the original Mozart score tomimic the changes in wind and weather, fair and foul, of Scotsman James Bell's 1839 voyage to Australia.
One musical bar represents a day aboard the sailing ship Planter, through hurricane, fair winds and deadcalm.
Arts patron and collector John Kaldor has been pushing the boundaries of contemporary art since hebrought Christo and Jeanne-Claude to Australia to wrap Little Bay in 1969.
This, his 33rd public art project, is no less experimental and experiential. The reinterpreted concerto willbe piped through 38 snare drums suspended from the ceiling of the observatory's rotunda.
Audience members will be invited to stand beneath the drums or sit on a nearby picnic rug as therhythmic music, invoking wind, wave and sail, washes over them.
"When the wind is very strong it picks up, when it's in the doldrums, when there is absolutely no wind, itstarts stretching longer," Sala said.
"It will be like standing under a whole orchestra which is suspended upside and one – depending on whereyou are standing – in the middle or in the wings, you are under different parts of the orchestra."
Observatory Hill was selected for the installation because it was first signal station, Sydney's highestelevation point and a place of encounter between white and Indigenous Australians.
"It's very different for an artist to do an exhibition project in a gallery, in a white cube, than to do aproject in the open air with a great view and this is what I enjoy most, that we place the project in alocation where people fall upon the art," Kaldor said.
"People who go to a gallery have a specific destination in mind but when we create a project in an unusualsetting a setting that's not an art setting people encounter art without any preconceptions."
Kaldor was introduced to Sala a decade ago by Jessica Morgan, then a senior curator at Tate Modern.
At Kaldor's invitation, Sala visited Sydney and Melbourne in 2012 and undertook extensive research intoAustralia's Indigenous and colonial past to create The Last Resort.
The project was delayed when Sala was chosen to represent France at the Venice Biennale in2013 but according to Kaldor, "What Anri has created for us was really worth the wait".
Sala, who was recently commissioned to create an immersive installation for the Seawall House onTeshima Island, Japan, said audience members can either take from the installation a music experience orexplore more deeply the legacy of European enlightenment and Europe's colonial ambitions onIndigenous peoples.
The Last Resort is the largest outdoor art project Sala has undertaken.
A program of talks, musical performance, children's and family art workshops and school visits have beenprogrammed around the installation, which opens on October 13 and runs until November 5.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/john-kaldor-opens-unique-sound-and-sculpture-public-art-project-20170928-gyqcji.html
Most Read Articles
The Sydney Morning Herald
Lisa Wilkinson quits Today Show and joins Ten in shock move
HSC English exam prompts ugly outbursts on social media
Revelation of cosmic secrets triggers a 'frenzy' of science
Teacher fatally stabbed at bus stop tried to flee
If Trump strikes North Korea there is only one outcome
The Age
'This world has lost a gem': Police confirm human remains found at Anglesea are those of Elisa Curry
Lisa Wilkinson quits Today Show and joins Ten in shock move
Tech giants living in fear of 'doing a Microsoft'
If Trump strikes North Korea there is only one outcome
Make no mistake: Wilkinson's exit is a blow for Nine
Brisbane Times
Lisa Wilkinson quits Today Show and joins Ten in shock move
Ex-Powderfinger member to bring $40 million live-music venue to Brisbane
Rain boosts SEQ dams with a week's worth of drinking water
Baby in critical condition after being slashed in the face in Brisbane
Message in a bottle: the musical blow-in makingwaves in SydneyPeter Munro
Published: June 26 2017 - 12:31AM
The breeze on the morning of Monday, February 18, 1839, blew light and lovely across the ocean. Aseaman speared a porpoise and hauled it aboard the sailing ship Planter, cutting up its carcass and fryingthe steaks in front of passenger James Bell. "I tasted it and compare it to nothing that I ever before tasted,"he wrote. "It had a strong rancid taste, and smelled something like fish saturated in train oil."
The young Scottish migrant's six-month voyage to Australia was rife with such lurid tales; of mutiny,menage a trois, drunkenness and death. But above all else, his focus remained fixed on the wind.
Every day of his diary documents the ebbs and flows of air currents, fair or foul. A "stiff breeze" onTuesday, November 27, 1838. A "dreadful hurricane" on Thursday, November 29. "Dead calm" onSunday, February 24.
The 21-year-old clerk's account of such elemental vagaries has helped inspire the 33rd Kaldor Public ArtProject, which brings together music, the wind and waves in a rather curious way.
"The winds were the hope and the engine that brought the ship to Australia; the most important factor ofsurvival," says Albanian-born artist and filmmaker Anri Sala. "The wind is a record and recognition of thejourney. It is this moment where you lose control of your own fate."
Describing his sound and sculptural installation, which opens at Sydney's Observatory Hill on October 13,takes some doing. The artist's starting point for The Last Resort was Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A,which he completed in 1791, two months before his death.
Sala rearranged the Adagio specifically for Australian audiences, by replacing the composer's tempomarkings with Bell's daily descriptions of the wind on his journey down under. He recently recorded theresult with the Munich Chamber Orchestra. The sound is vibrant, tempestuous, bizarre.
A reference in Bell's journal to a "light breeze" slows down the original score. A "stiff wind" makes themusicians pick up the pace. A gale makes them play like the clappers.
Sala compares the music to a message in a bottle that has washed ashore in Sydney. "I was interested inwhat happens if you take a musical masterpiece and make that journey across the seas," he says. "Thewinds, the waves, the water currents take it one way and the other ... The only moments where it soundslike Mozart intended it to are moments that correspond with a favourable breeze."
He chose the Clarinet Concerto in A because it was finished only three years after the arrival of the FirstFleet, in 1788. "On one hand, you have one of the masterpieces of the Enlightenment. But theEnlightenment also brought on a dark period for other civilisations, such as the Indigenous population inAustralia," he says.
"The Enlightenment brought a lot of light into western civilisation, but it was also blinded towards its
His artwork will be installed within the century-old rotunda on Observatory Hill, the most elevated pointin Sydney. "It is a very British architectural piece but it is also an important Aboriginal site, from whereone could control the landscape."
The music will play via speakers hidden inside 38 snare drums suspended from the ceiling, which willbeat along in rough time to the music. Anri came up with the idea on a previous visit to Sydney, afterseeing a colony of flying foxes in the Royal Botanic Garden. "They were hanging there like these hugedark bags."
Arts patron John Kaldor visited Observatory Hill last week to discuss his eponymous project, which hestarted in 1969. He stood inside the octagonal rotunda, watching a woman in a wedding dress pose forphotographs. The sounds of the site were traffic, construction works and noisy minors – not at all likeMozart.
"This whole pavilion will become like one piece of sculpture, one big instrument," Kaldor says. "It isdifferent from having an exhibition at a gallery. There is the noise from the Harbour Bridge. At lunchtime, there are dozens of people here exercising ... They will probably look at this artwork and think whatthe hell is this."
Previous Kaldor Projects have been set along the cliffs at Little Bay, within former brickworks at SydneyPark and on Bondi Beach. "I call ourselves 'art gypsies' because we always go from one place to the next,"he says. "People find them who don't necessarily have the art gallery as a destination – they just fall on theproject.
"You encounter all sorts – some will like it, some will say what is it and some will say it is a piece of shit... You can just imagine what people here will think about this one."
The Last Resort is at the Observatory Hill Rotunda, Sydney, from October 13 to November 5.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/message-in-a-bottle-the-musical-blowin-making-waves-in-sydney-20170623-gwx4hx.html
Most Read Articles
The Sydney Morning Herald
Lisa Wilkinson quits Today Show and joins Ten in shock move
HSC English exam prompts ugly outbursts on social media
Revelation of cosmic secrets triggers a 'frenzy' of science
Teacher fatally stabbed at bus stop tried to flee
If Trump strikes North Korea there is only one outcome
The Age
'This world has lost a gem': Police confirm human remains found at Anglesea are those of Elisa Curry
Lisa Wilkinson quits Today Show and joins Ten in shock move
It’s Mozart, but not as we know himArtist Anri Sala in the rotunda at Sydney Harbour’sObservatory Hill with his installation The Last Resort.Picture: News Corp
The Clarinet Concerto in A major that Mozart completed in the final months of his life is one of the best-loved pieces of classicalmusic. It was first performed by Mozart’s friend, clarinet virtuoso Anton Stadler, in October 1791, and contemporary accountsnoted the similarity between Stadler’s playing and the human voice. We may imagine the humanity expressed in the tender melodyof the middle Adagio movement, the clarinet’s interplay with the orchestra, and the pleasing symmetry of the music’s classicalstructure as emblematic of the European Enlightenment: the rising tide of intellectual inquiry in the 18th century that would banishsuperstition and introduce what Kant described as “the courage to think without someone else’s guidance”.
Now imagine, as French-Albanian artist Anri Sala has, the arrival of this European intellectual culture on a far and largelyuncharted southern land. With an eye and an ear for historical coincidence, Sala has noticed that the premiere of Mozart’s concertoin Prague in 1791 coincided with the first years of British settlement in Australia, established with the arrival of the First Fleet in1788. He thinks of the concerto as an artefact from the old world that has washed up on these shores.
“I was interested in this idea of what would happen to this masterpiece of the Enlightenment if it was put in a bottle in the sea, andbe under the humour of the high seas, the weather and the winds, and how it would end up,” he says.
Sala’s installation for the 33rd Kaldor Public Art Project is called The Last Resort and presents the Mozart concerto as if it haswashed up in Sydney. The rotunda at Observatory Hill, the highest natural point in central Sydney that overlooks the harbour, hasbeen fitted with 38 inverted snare drums and pairs of sticks. Mozart’s Adagio will be transmitted through speakers installed withinthe drums, while another rhythmic pulse will activate the drumsticks. It’s Mozart, but not as we know him: the music isrecognisable but fragmented, buffeted this way and that by invisible gales and ocean breezes. In the special arrangement of theAdagio that has been recorded for The Last Resort, Sala has replaced Mozart’s tempo indications with markings derived from thejournal of a seafarer whose daily entries each began with a description of the wind.
“All their hopes were on the wind going in the right direction,” he says. “The language is very rich in relation to winds. It gave us avery broad range of descriptions, which resulted in an equally rich range of tempo indications.”
On the day we meet at Observatory Hill, a light breeze is blowing off the harbour. Sala, who was born in the Albanian capital,Tirana, has lived and worked in France for many years; he was France’s representative at the 2013 Venice Biennale. He has notlong arrived from Mexico — he was there when the devastating earthquake struck central Mexico two weeks ago — and issupervising the installation of The Last Resort. The drums are hanging upside down from the rotunda ceiling like the flying foxesthat Sala was astonished to see in the Royal Botanic Garden on his first visit to Sydney.
The view from this elevated setting is spectacular but the artwork is anything but monumental. Indeed, its essential quality isephemeral: the fragmented music that will sound and the vibrations that will animate the drums.
By coincidence, the three-week showing of The Last Resort comes after recent debates about white settlement of Australia and themonuments erected to British colonisers. James Cook’s 1768-71 voyage to the Pacific was motiv ated by Enlightenment ideals ofscientific inquiry: to observe the transit of Venus and to discover the location of Terra Australis Incognita. Sala says theEnlightenment, while advancing the knowledge of Western Europe, also would have consequences for those people caught in itspowerful survey.
MATTHEW WESTWOOD THE AUSTRALIAN 12:00AM October 3, 2017
“Unfortunately … it was also a moment when Western civilisation imposed itself on other civilisations, causing therefore a loss tothese civilisations,” he says. “To me, it is a very intricate and contested moment in the history of humanity.”
Some people regard statues of Cook and Governor Arthur Phillip as symbols of false discovery and dispossession, and would havethem removed or their inscriptions altered. Sala does not venture an opinion about this particular case but he does take an interestin monuments generally and what they represent. There’s a difference, he says, between those that are merely decorative or “part ofthe real estate of a place” and those that are part of its “conscience”.
In Albania, for example, he has documented with his friend Edi Rama, an artist who would later become the country’s primeminister, the transformation with bright colours of ruined socialist architecture in Tirana.
“Monuments built during the communist regime were authoritarian,” he says. “They did not represent the will of the people, theywere the first things people attacked back then, to bring down the monument of the dictator, the monument of Stalin …
“I think we are evolving towards a society where the idea of a monument — what it symbolises, what it represents — is wrong in -itself.”
Monuments, in so far as they represent an ideology or fixed interpretation, are antithetical to much contemporary art unless theyare imbued with subversive or ambiguous meanings. Sala is happy with having The Last Resort described as anti-monumentalbecause it does not so much assert a meaning as invite different interpretations. For this reason he is reluctant to assign a“character” to the solo clarinet in The Last Resort, such as the figure of Cook or the spirit of the Enlightenment. While otherinstruments of the orchestra will sound through separate designated drums, the clarinet will be more mobile and travel differentroutes across the assembly of inverted drums in the rotunda.
“If somebody comes over and does have this interpretation, that’s completely welcome, but it’s not me who assigns thoseinterpretations,” Sala says. “In the end the work has to work organically and musically as an ensemble …
“I am not interested in articulating metaphors but the idea was how to listen to this piece of music, not necessarily as it wasintended by its composer but how it could sound once it has made it ashore, having been corrupted by the weather and the forces ofnature.”
The Last Resort is at Observatory Hill, Sydney, October 13-November 5.
Reader comments on this site are moderated before publication to promote lively and civil debate. We encourage your comments but submitting one does not guaranteepublication. We publish hundreds of comments daily, and if a comment is rejected it is likely because it does not meet with our comment guidelines, which you can read here. Nocorrespondence will be entered into if a comment is declined.
FROM THE HOMEPAGE OSurvey returns on the up again
JOE KELLYThe ABS has released its weekly update on the stats behind the postal vote — and there’s been another huge jump.
J
Labor renewables plan slammedDAVID CROWE, GREG BROWNPoliticsNow: Senior Coalition MPs on the attack in Question Time over Labor’s plan to subsidise renewables.
J
Spicer calls out pay gap sexismDANA MCCAULEYTracey Spicer calls for a dramatic overhaul of how TV executives calculate the salaries of their biggest stars, after Lisa Wilkinson’s dramatic exitfrom Nine.
J
Burrito delivery by droneCHRIS GRIFFITHChemist Warehouse and Guzman y Gomez are the first retailers used to test Alphabet’s new drone delivery system.
Game changer for reliable powerRACHEL BAXENDALEPM says his energy plan ensures Australia can meet its Paris commitments as well as ensuring affordability and reliability.
