Today Helmut Lemke launched Listen Backwards to Advance (LBtA) in
Bury. For the whole of 2017 he will work from the starting point of an archive of all his previous work
to move his practice forward. He has moved everything that has anything to do with his artistic activities into the basement of the Fusilier Museum, opposite the Bury Art Museum – a process of creating a public archive, investigating a 40 year career in sound
art as a durational public performance. It examines a European sound art
practice through rigorous investigations of past work. This project unpacks one
person’s creative practice and collaborations across Europe.
LBtA will be performed in two stages – a research and development stage
from Jan to June and a second stage where he will follow questions that have
been identified in the R&D stage.
The R&D and critical investigation will be public for 5.5 months in
Bury Art Museum (Jan-17 - June-17) investigating and questioning issues that
have determined and driven his practice.
As a performative event and ongoing exhibition he will create a publicly
accessible Archive (1977-2017): Objects, Photos, Videos, Sound Recordings,
Writing, Publications, Drawings, Sound Machines.
He will:
- · Hold a series of PUBLIC consultations and round table discussion to focus on elements of practice,
- · Catalogue previous work and documentation,
- · Reconstruct installations as temporary experiences,
- · Perform extracts of work,
- · Invite experienced practitioners and thinkers (1 individual and 1 panel per month) to:
- · exchange knowledge and experience
- · define relevant historic steps and developments in sound art
- · extrapolate and critique significant chapters of his artistic journey.
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.
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.
