We’ve deliberately kept in the artistic guff at the bottom of the page as an example of how to rob music of its vitality. Come on! Anyone who doesn’t check the details of this event, with its ranks of guitarists playing for seven hours, and immediately want to go, should do more walking along isolated cliffs. It’s an unknown amount of people, playing no-idea-what guitar music, in a gorgeous art space, for seven hours (Jendreiko has been part of a 24 hour installation at a Supersonic festival of yore). I dunno, maybe I’m on my own here. But beautifully batty ideas and groups with a stupid amount of people in them fill me with happiness, as do one-off happenings that you have to turn up for to experience. Although 11am’s a bit early, so I’ll see you at lunchtime.
Christian Jendreiko
Gottesrauschen (God’s White Noise): Action for Players, Guitars and Amplifiers
Sat 26 Nov, 11.00am – 6.00pm
Free
“Observing myself playing the guitar from a sculptural perspective brought me to the idea to concentrate on shaping the motoric aspects of my playing-motions instead of playing a piece of music. When you take your instrument and start to play you bring your body into the action. You can listen to your body, to your motions and you can listen to the way you move.” (Christian Jendreiko)
For the Arnolfini edition of Gottesrauschen (God’s White Noise): Action for Players, Guitars, & Amplifiers, a large number of untrained and trained musicians, artists and friends around Bristol will perform in the gallery space over the course of seven hours. This performance, for an indeterminate number of guitarists and amplifiers, takes its cue from a passage by the idealist Friedrich Schiller on man’s relation to sensual and formal compulsions – “For all beauty is ultimately but a property of movement”.
God’s White Noise will unfold over a day at Arnolfini, with guests free to enter, circulate, and remain in the gallery space as long as they wish.
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Düsseldorf-based artist Christian Jendreiko is known for realizing actions with large ensembles in novel, site-specific settings. He views these actions as “an alternative to what is usually called making music,” in that each movement or gesture made by the members of the ensemble is not determined by musical values. Instead, Jendreiko specifically seeks to reconsider acoustics as aspects of how body and mind, thinking and acting, hearing and seeing are connected. He emphasizes the need to recognize inner motivations – or mind-body-feedbacks – and move in accordance with them. A wholly democratic, decentralized approach characterizes Jendreiko’s actions. Combining the assembled performers in non-hierarchical fashion, he transforms groups into social sculpture. As he puts it, “my actions are about the relation between us and things and for a couple of hours or days my actions are a testing ground for alternate lifestyles.”
Jendreiko’s actions have been performed at galleries and art institutions throughout Europe and in the USA. His compositions and sound pieces are included in the permanent collection the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Kunstverein Düsseldorf has recently published HETEROLOGICS a volume of his writings and artwork, and Munich based record label Apparent Extent will release a comprehensive box set of his recordings in October 2011. As a member of the artist collective hobbypopMuseum, Jendreiko has presented exhibitions internationally since 1999.
