SCANNER - 19 avril 2011
Salle des concerts, Cité de la Musique, 20.00, 24€ - 20 €
"L’ennui est comme un zoom impitoyable sur l’épiderme de temps. Chaque instant est dilaté et magnifié comme les pores du visage." Charlotte Whitton
"If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface : of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it." Andy Warhol
Le musicien britannique présente Warhol’Surfaces* pour la première fois en France. C’est à la voix d’Andy Warhol dans ses interviews que s’attache Scanner, passé maître dans l’art du détournement des sons. Il fait émerger les espaces vides, les hésitations et les respirations pour construire un univers sonore inouï à partir de la banalité d’un simple « euh »… Des images projetées accompagnent la performance, donnant à voir l’expression warholienne de l’ennui et la fascination du détail.
* disque paru en 2003 sur Intermedium records
British sound artist Robin Rimbaud traverses the experimental terrain between sound, space, image and form, creating absorbing, multi-layered sound pieces that twist technology in unconventional ways.
Scanner has been interested in the idea of the ‘sound polaroid’ for some time, capturing the sound of a person or a place for a particular moment, trawling the hidden noise of the modern metropolis as the symbol of the place where hidden meanings and missed contacts emerge.
For this project Scanner takes interview material with Andy Warhol from the early 1970s as the starting point for a soundtrack which attempts to take something very ordinary and make it extraordinary. Andy Warhol really believed in empty spaces. He constantly explored trivial moments : zooming in on surfaces in his pictures, offering fragile parts in his films, including all the “uhms” in his writings ; catching the person exactly as he is manufactured at that very moment. He especially liked boredom, repetitiveness, copies, details. In answering a series of simple questions, Scanner has dug around inside the material to bring out unusual acoustical moments, expressed in Warhol’s choice of words, his breathing, his pauses between words. Dissolving the words, he transforms the artifice of Warhol’s voice and interview technique and explores the eloquence and omnipresence of the idea of boredom surrounding the pop artist.
For the closing part of the performance Scanner will perform Five Views of an Onion where he will systematically read a list of every artwork of Warhol over a composition of keyboards and electronics, building up into a massive catalogue of language, sound and memory.
As Warhol himself might have said about the work, “ Gee, uhm, it’s really up ‘there’.