12/03/2024
Snippets from some of my writings for a lecture I am prepping on Surrealism in music, to be hosted in Baltic Film and Media Institute, Tallinn, Estonia.
The Hidden Surrealism Found in the deep workings of Anne Imhofâs music:
In this third dimensional expression of the collective modern subconscious, music flows as a vein of bloodstream throughout the hall in a way that every time the bloodstream or music reaches a certain individual, the individual is activated with a voice of expression
The individual is activated with a voice of self expression that magnifies the truest self in them
While the music could have had a complex voicing or a composition that explains the series of events, the composer has put great thought into the simplicity of the syllables and vowels used
âAah Aah Aah maaah maah maahâ which is the voicing used is something so primordial in nature that it surpasses not just the barriers of race, caste, colour, creed within humanity, but also surpasses humanity itself,
In a way that the voicing used is so congruent with the primary call of most animals, whether it comes to their first calls for their mother or for food or as a way of communicating with their immediate environment
What makes the piece truly surreal in nature is its ability to not evoke superficial forms of self expression within the actors involved, but to evoke a certain kind of action which could only be assumed to be taking shape in the dream state or the subconscious level
Examples of these can be seen throughout the peace as for instance, where the teenage girl is pouring Diet Pepsi at five minute nine seconds, across the wall in the form of paint or more deeply symbolised as pouring the offering of the modern society onto the blank canvas from the carrier or vessel of a person clad in a T-shirt full of skulls
The scene is flanked by two spectator like actions, preceding and succeeding the scene
Whether it be the teenage boy who is sitting on the top of the first floor and enacting eating from a packet of nuts to precede the scene
Or the teenage boy, who is smoking upside down and enjoying his evening round of birdwatching, while he watches diet Pepsi poured down the white walls of modern society
The ease with which the teenage boy seems to be smoking in his upside down posture at five minute 18 seconds,
Symbolises a deeply subconscious state, where he can be incomplete odds with himself, and still go about modern life, pretending that everything is alright.
This I feel symbolises the inner movements of a lot of people who live lives of quiet desperation, in modern environments.
Another noticeable part is how the vowel sound used in the music goes so naturally with the actual act of chewing gum, which people again do casually in the modern society, either as a way of breaking stress, or Iâm just become so habituated to it that they have lost the idea of attaching symbolism to the act itself
This is where the score is so powerful as it is able to encapsulate all of these different elements within the modern society on the subconscious level, and still have a voice for all of them in a way that the music seems to casually score, their deepest polarities
While the space might be 100 years older than when surrealism was invented, I find that this is a clinical detection of what surrealism was eventually intended to portray that the modern man does not deserve art of beauty, but deserve art of a certain realistic reflection which could eventually bring him to a place of inner acceptance from which a higher sense of beauty can be created
In this understanding, I could say that surrealism in this piece is able to transfer the responsibility of art onto the consumer that is the audience, and coaxing them to find beauty by accepting the polarities inside of them
Entdecke Anne Imhofs âAngst IIâ, eine einzigartige zeitgenössische Kunstperformance, die 2016 im Hamburger Bahnhof - Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart stattfand....
