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Maelstromsüdpol
'Erich Wonder
Erich Wonder
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'Heiner Goebbels
Heiner Goebbels
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'Heiner Müller
Heiner Müller
Idea, production: Erich Wonder
Quadrophonic audio-piece: Heiner Goebbels
Text: Heiner Müller
INTERSPACES/AFTER-IMAGES
ERICH WONDER Stories no longer tell themselves
As I have been concerned mainly with outward appearances by profession, pictures have always been significant points of reference as centres of friction of the apparently opposite, as places of refuge, as it were. The red room in the Hamburg exhibition "Inszenierte Räume", for instance, was a continuation of the red picture by Mark Rothko, was the step from painted space into the movement of a different time, the step from painted space into the narrative modes of "different" stories that can no longer be made visible by illustrative means.
Pictures – a gate for entering dreams, history, and imaginary voyages. Immersion in colour, colour as fictitious space, leaving everything behind, casting overboard the concept of "interpretation" as an outmoded, meaningless concept, colour tries to tell stories without making them conspicuously visible. Great stories are created in the minds and are not being illustrated.
Stories need to be seen. They are being told with fast "after-images", to be seen when eyes are being closed quickly after having been exposed to glaring light for some time. The "after-images" disappear gradually and take the viewer into dark, strange worlds. We dive with an imaginary submarine, we drop, we glide, float, dive into submerged cities, into spaces that cannot be painted, that create a third alternative beside a maximum of illusion and most extreme abstraction. Telling stories without interpreting them, a picture, a place, a flight, simultaneously, everything is possible – the viewer is not confronted with the "final solution"; he or she is included in the action, becomes part of the scene. The viewer must be able to see after a first few glances. It is the desire not to illustrate a theatre performance but to take up language and pictures and movement so as to go through it again in one's mind later, perhaps weeks later, and to experience this feeling of happiness. Inventing anew what has been heard, thought and seen before and living with it.
It is never the clear-cut lines that are interesting but the disruptions, the controversies, the reflections. Extreme opposites may produce something new, fresh, alternative – in one's mind. Extreme tension between maximal stillness and utmost movement turning into great deliberate stillness. Tarkowski's night trip in "Solaris", driving on highways in borderlands, consisting of continual immersion-emersion-immersion-emersion, the night flight through a thousand tunnels, through a thousand light wells, immersion in seas of light. Endless interplay of glaring light traps and extreme darkness. Never absolute daylight – never absolute darkness of the night. Monochrome rooms attempting to fly. Immersion in gloomy colour expanses – getting lost in them, wallowing in them. Dream or reality are no longer the question. Real stories are no longer the chief motif, they lodge in the interspaces. All that matters is the afterwards, the before, the inbetween. In this perfectly illustrated world the interspaces become increasingly significant and interesting. Places for anarchist fantasies.
So the borderland is the exciting field of the unvoiced, of "what has not yet been told to death". Stories can no longer be told as they were, once upon a time. There is no longer the story. Tales are told in fictitious movement. Reversals have more to tell than stubborn logic. Exteriors become interiors. Interiors happen outside. Movement produces statics. Light produces darkness. A new reality. The viewer becomes creative part of the pictures, once immersed there is no escape, he or she sets out on a journey – a journey through and with rooms as movement. Rooms constantly changing themselves and their environment. Spatial movement as the consistent demolition of the once conceived aesthetic solution. A journey to escape from the ghetto of the frozen aesthetic moment. In the course of this journey a detail may be glimpsed that had not been seen before, a sequence may be formulated, the succession of possible details affirms the pluralism of insights and experiences, and realizing that there is no clear view we are taken to new aesthetic adventures. Stillness stimulates imagination – monochromy stimulates action – the quiet space of the night calls for high-power projection. The apparently static picture is experienced as rotating space. The potential stillness arises only out of movement. Everything is possible on this journey, nothing may be true. Every attempt at uniformity and the quest for harmony pursued by many (artists?) is absurd and unrealistic. Genuine art today exists only in its contradiction.
To dig into the moving pictures at the moments of ultimate happiness and most profound misery to be challenged by them and to hide in them.
Erich WonderADDENDUM
HEINER GOEBBELS In the text of MAeLSTROMSÜDPOL Heiner Müller employs motives from "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" by Edgar Allen Poe. The actual longwinded diary entries used by Poe to corroborate the alleged authenticity of these fictitious adventures are radically being stripped, Müller comes to the point: what remains are the final impressions, in the attractive power of the South pole.
In the acoustic production of this short page of text I was not so much intrigued with the more or less ingenious interlinking of music and language – as I had been in my previous audio-pieces – but rather with the disentanglement of music and language in the relation experience/description. Keeping in mind the PULL which takes Arthur Gordon Pym into the antarctic cataract, I, for the first time also, concentrated on working with one voice (that of David Bennent). It is the same pull which takes the fishermen into the maelström of the Lofoden – a central motif in the other tale by Poe quoted in the title by Heiner Müller. Having been reminded of that story, I attempt a musical/scenic analysis of its narrative strategy and text structure in the concert "LOOKING UPON THE WIDE WASTE OF LIQUID EBONY". Thus the two performances are separate and complementary.
The music composed for the first performance of MAeLSTROMSÜDPOL at documenta 8 last year and recorded exclusively by myself (in quite a hurry), has now been more than rearranged and a completely new recording been made for the performances in Linz and Berlin with the participation of Rene Lussier, Peter Brötzmann and Peter Hollinger.
MAELSTROMSÜDPOL
HEINER MÜLLER the Island of the great bloodshed its inhabitants their customs is it of any use telling about them TEKELILI TEKELILI (that corpse you planted last year in your garden has it begun to sprout will it bloom this year) the southern curtain of mist higher today loses its grey hue the water was gloomy and also looking quite milky heavy surface agitation close to the boat accompanied as usual by a wild flickering at the upper rim of the mist white dust falling on the boat on the water ashen no ashes the mist settles the water is still we ask NUNU why this bloodshed he shows his teeth they are black TSALAL a white animal floating past the water so hot that it burns the hand ashen dust keeps falling the rising curtain of mist changes its outlines a cataract precipitating silently from an enormous weir in the distant sky a white curtain hiding the horizon no sound sudden darkness meanwhile from the milky profundity a radiance a rain of ashes no ashes wanting to bury us OH KEEP THE DOG FAR HENCE THAT'S FRIEND TO MEN OR WITH HIS NAILS HE'LL DIG IT UP AGAIN we are drifting towards the curtain of mist at increasing velocity sometimes there is a rift in the curtain of mist and we look into a whirl of flickering pictures like shreds of Photographies in a fire their objects no longer discernible silent gales blowing through the rift across the red-hot water make it flow in their direction huge white birds against the gale TEKELILI TEKELILI we heard their cries on the island but did not see them had they been smaller before the bloodshed the savage twitches with the beat of their wings on the floor of the boat when we touch him he is dead his skin ice-cold his teeth white we cut into his skin no blood after the second cut his corpse vanishes suddenly in the mist reaching for us now THAT CORPSE we are floating on the cataract a wide opening as if to welcome us the foaming curtain of mist closing behind us larger than man a figure in our path THAT CORPSE YOU PLANTED its skin white as snow something is reaching into my brain OH KEEP THE DOG.
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