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Cycle: Explicit silence
Actual
Curated by: TRES
08/10/2009 - 08/09/2010
The title of this season's programme refers to a way of understanding silence that subverts the semantics of the term to turn it into a clamour. It also points to the deliberate, positive gesture that dissociates silence from abstraction to transform it into an action or a fact that is very close to renunciation but without giving in to it, that seeks to denote its presence and is content to watch itself from its own abyss. Thus conceived, silence functions as a metaphor for the paradigm shift, escaping from the often limiting meanings given to it by tradition and by cultural behaviour. It is a silence that adjoins words but does not oppose them, in the same way as it does not oppose sound, action, light or movement.
Silence is a phenomenon whose openly contradictory nature turns it into the paradox par excellence and into that slippery term regarding which Bataille wrote: "Of all words, it is the most poetic and the most perverse: it is itself the proof of its own death." As a consequence of this condition, silence is a chameleon-like concept, essentially polysemous and non-absolute, that transcends the merely physical or acoustic, and whose meaning varies radically depending on its context.
The search for silence, for "the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate" that Susan Sontag wrote of, has been a constant premise in contemporary art ever since it focused on exploring its own limits. From Kasimir Malevich, Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein to James Lee Byars, Michael Asher, Robert Barry and Juan Muñoz, contemporary artists have postulated silence, reduction, nothingness, pause, absence, disappearance, invisibility, emptiness, non-action or renunciation, without having exhausted them. In art, silence is still today a frontier, an absolutely free territory, hardly explored and yet to be mapped.
Cycle exhibitions
Mayte Vieta
08/10 - 08/12/2009
Mario García Torres
17/12/2009 - 21/02/2010
Tom Kotik
04/03 - 25/04/2010
Sophie Whettnall
06/05 - 27/06/2010
Sirous Namazi
Current exhibition
Tom Kotik
Architectures of Silence. 04/03 - 25/04/2010
The Czech-born artist Tom Kotik (1969), who lives in New York, will be presenting Architectures of Silence, a series of works dealing with both the physical aspects of silence and the materials that allow it to be constructed, as well as with the socio-political implications suggested by the concept of silence itself.
Kotik constructs a discourse on the dynamics of power and repression, and on the strategic and often perverse uses of silence, with works that explicitly suggest silence by combining the idea of "absence", implicit in the term, with the physical "presence" of a silence that becomes highly material.
Rational Impulse (2004) is an interactive sound sculpture formed of two sound-proof boxes that have been designed for rock-music to be played at top volume without more than a slight murmur being heard outside. When the viewer opens the boxes, a deafening blast of music from Kotik's own band, The Mighty High, fills the space. Closing the boxes, which takes place in two phases, creates the interesting effect of muffling the sound or the almost physical sensation of "constructing silence".
Untitled (for Jan) (2007) converts sound into a silent yet tactile experience. The piece consists of a music stand fitted with loudspeakers that reproduce a soundless music whose inaudible frequencies cause the compulsive movement of the membranes.
Kotik's most recent works are totally devoid of amplification and loudspeakers and focus on the use of certain particular materials - a strategy that the artist calls the "politics" of silence. The attempt to refer to silence without using any kind of sound is reflected in his small Soundstudies (2007), made with professional sound-proofing materials, and also in the more recent Felt Drawings (2009), which actually help absorb the acoustic energy from the space through large pieces of felt cut in the shapes of different types of amplifiers for bass or electric guitar. This is how Tom Kotik manages to transmit silence through form and to make sound art without using sound.
 
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