Since
the 1970's Helmut Lemke has developed site-specific concerts, performances and
installations. His endeavours have taken him to concert halls and outdoor
markets, to Galleries and Museums and to the frozen seas off Greenland , to Function Rooms of Pubs and to International
Festivals. He has presented his work all over the globe, collaborating with
other Sound Artists and Musicians, with Dancers and Scientists, Visual Artists
and Architects, Poets and Archaeologists, Performance Artists and Wildlife
Rangers. He has experienced many audible sounds as well as those made audible
through creative interventions, and fundamentally come to understand the
site the sound requires.
Through
these investigations into sounds, some obvious, some familiar, some to be
found, he has become a Cageian presence, not in the sense of musical or poetic
lineage but as the value proposition conduit for a contemporary insight into sound
itself. Lemke has observed that sound is behind you when you gaze toward the
horizon: he places us in that moment, and constructs for us the awe of our relationship
between the sound he unveils and the phenomenology of presence in that
environment. This pursuit and representation of the fundamentals of sound is
driven by his conception “über den hörwert”, a Marxian analog of the surplus
value of hearing. His aim to represent a specific environment through its sounds
at a specific moment requires listening
with all senses. Accepting the impossibility of resonating the actual sounds
heard in the moment he heard them, he constructs a conceptual aural present. Lemke talks about the tools he uses to
communicate sounds heard to non-witnesses of the original, the
remarkable articulation of his line, - raw and skeletal - poetry, visual
poetry, onomatopoeia, soundpainting, photography and sound recordings, uncovering
the democracy of microphones. He
states his attempt to describe, to reproduce the experience of sound itself,
its thickness, the ontology of being in sound, but this is not accurate: in fact, he becomes
the act of hearing. In the offering of his approximations, objective
and subjective improvisations, Lemke evokes memories of sound, and more, posits
the second hearing, ours, in a new existential space, as a synesthetic osmosis.
His quiet declaration of inwardness tunnels us into him and our ears are replaced
by his. To know of the source of a sound helps to imagine it. Lemke is the
source of the sound because whether or not his listeners really hear what he has
drawn, written and document, verification lays in his trust in the audience’s
willingness and capacity to absorb the inspiration and imagination of being. Reflecting
declarations of purpose from Lawrence Weiner, William Carlos Williams et al., Helmut
Lemke makes art useful to us, we can cross the bridges he has made for us.
The
Palazzo Bembo approximation is a
remarkable opportunity for a duplicate experience. In the unique of the
Venetian city soundscape, we experience Lemke’s hearing of the site in the
site. By stopping to hear and becoming the well, catching all of sound, Lemke
has made himself the disembodied microphone, the universal hearer/ signifier of the sounds in the forest that no-one
is there to hear, the
teacher, the artist, the beekeeper.
