Allora&Calzadilla in Paris: when the introductive text overwhelms the work on show

We publish here the real essence of the current solo show by Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla in Paris: the fundamental unsigned text that introduces the two films projected, “3” and “Apotomē” which end to be – we must say – just a background of a bright constellation of knowledge. One should be able to experience and question all the interesting sparks collected in the text that, however, have only been precariously linked by the film: the Venus of Lespugue, mathematician and chaos theorist Ralph H. Abraham, cellist Maya Beiser, composer David Lang, elephants Hans and Parkie, vocalist Tim Storms and so on. The real objects of art are, in this case, out of the show.

 

The film 3 takes as its subject the Venus of Lespugue, one of the world’s best known Upper Paleolithic Venus figures, sculpted in mammoth ivory. There are many hypotheses surrounding the Venus’ paradoxical or “peculiar ideal” of beauty due to her exaggerated proportions that could be read almost as deformities. Some theorists take the Venus to be related to intensified fertility, life creation and regeneration, while others relate her symbolic role to prehistoric religion and propose her as a deity or goddess, still others look for signs of a “realistic” representation of the physical population, while still others assign an erotic function.

In the artist’s research into the field of biomusicology, they came across yet another speculative hypothesis about the possible “meaning” of the Venus of Lespugue’s famous curves. Ralph H. Abraham, a mathematician and chaos theorist, and William Irwin Thompson, a social philosopher, critic, and poet, argue that “the linear measurements taken from the Venus of Lespugue closely match the diatonic scale of the Vedic Aryans, also known as the Dorian mode of the ancient greeks.” Taking this theory by Abraham and Thompson which the authors call the “Canon of Lespugue” as a point of departure, Allora & Calzadilla decided to make a film that attempts to portray, in visual and musical terms, a process of transcription of the Venus figure into music, using the proportions of the statue as a musical scale. They asked composer David Lang, to write a score, based upon these rules for solo cello1. For the film, cellist Maya Beiser performs David’s composition to the original Venus of Lespugue. This musical experiment took place in the ancient bifacial stone storage room of Musée de L’Homme2. The artists chose to title this film 3, finding a formal parallel in the curves of the Arabic numeral and the Venus figure. Second, 3, refers to metaphysical or sacred dimension of Number understood by the Pythagoreans to be the principle of all things. The last unit of the archetypal triad paradigm, three, represents harmony- both as a musical and arithmetic correlation. However, as the ancients eventually discovered in their efforts to find an absolute, immutable system of order, (and not unlike those of the classicists of 17th century onwards which gave birth to institutions such as Natural History), there were sounds, and hence arithmetic ratios and thus realities that were in-measureable and irreducible.

Taken together the films in this exhibition, Apotomē and 3, explore the relations between proportions & disproportions, harmony & dis-harmony, commensurable & incommensurable relations

Apotomē takes as a starting point, a historic attempt, set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, of man trying to communicate and create new relations with animals held in captivity- in this case two elephants, affectionately named Hans and Parkie (or Marguerite), that arrived at the Museum of Natural History in Paris in March 1798 as spoils of war.

That same year, on May 29th, a concert was performed in the Jardin de Plantes to the elephants. This experiment was organized by musicians (and not scientists), to see if human music might elicit a reaction in  non-human forms of life. The very concepts of man, life, & nature and the boundaries between them as defined by relations to war, captivity, slavery, and other forms of social and political domination and control emerged in this period. To this mix is the added question of music, as a possible inter-species metalanguage- a proto-linguistic, nonsymbolic and affective trans-human mode of communication whose basis is biological and evolutionary.

Apotomē is centered on the bone remains of the two elephants, currently in the Zooteque- a vast subterranean storage facility housing thousands of animal specimens. In a parallel research, the artists came across vocalist Tim Storms, a man with extraordinary vocal gifts. He has the world’s deepest voice. It can reach notes as low as G-7 (0.189Hz). That’s a remarkable 8 octaves below the lowest G on a piano. So low, in fact, that only animals as large as elephants are able to hear them.

Apotomē is an experiment of another kind, involving Tim Storms singing to the elephant remains in his unique vocal range, songs from that original concert such as: “Iphigénie en Tauride” (1779) by Christoph Willibald Gluck; “O ma tendre musette” by Pierre Alexandre Monsigny; to the Revolutionary anthem “Ça ira”, among others.

The film is titled Apotomē, an archaic greek word referring to an arithmetical division of musical sound by the Pythagoreans. An interval of a semitone in the Pythagorean scale that is slightly greater than half, this arithmetical musical ratio, doesn’t lack in exactitude, on the contrary, its quite precise. It’s an excess of human sensation. The normal voice cannot produce it, nor can the ear detect it. Apotomē is an irrational remainder or residue, literally meaning “what’s cut off”.

July 17, 2015