|
Regensburg, Germany, July 28, 2004
If the materiality of art is stripped away, something akin to aesthetic energy must remain. The object-character of the art, with its formal
wealth, is the shell. Its true nature is to engage feelings and thought processes. And just as each energy is also the aesthetic variant, it is
imperishably inherent to the art. In each case it always alters only its form, it moves from humans into materials and back again.
Jeff Talman's room-sound installations are particularly close to this process. He tracks the characteristics of permanent audio frequencies in
very different spaces, whether they are cathedrals, cellar vaults, castles, museums or everyday functional structures. In the case of the
SONALUMINA-13 project, synthetic constructions of aluminum plates are the areas for resonance of sound waves and, in addition, light
waves. It is easy to explain what physically happens here. Each room, dependent on size, form, material, surface finish and climatic conditions
(warmth, cold, humidity and the resulting air movements), has an individual singular sound. This lies close to what we perceive as silence if all
external noises are filtered. With highly sensitive electronic devices the artist samples the room tone and creates from it his soundspace
installations, which can also be perceived as sound sculptures. Using a computer, these modulations can be made visible as graphics and colors,
and can be printed out. The immaterial sound becomes the striking, fantastic-mysterious image composition.
During his expanded European tour, Jeff Talman, with this process, recorded the "genetic fingerprint" of famous cathedrals such as those in
Prague, Milan, Cologne, Freiburg and Regensburg. In the exhibition SEVEN SPACES, the artist presented a soundspace installation developed from
these and the resulting computer printed visualizations, in the Hamburg gallery Holzhauer in summer 2004.
The technical subtlety with which the apparently inaudible is made audible, is however, only the way to the psychological and mental processes,
which first constitute art. "The work of art first emerges in the mind as the mind explains the work to itself." This is one of the basic tenants
of modern art. We find this idea, however, already through the German Enlightenment thinker Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 1781). He said,
"Only in thinking an artwork both can be present and can unfold its effective force."
Rooms constructed by humans contain lives. They give them protection, but in addition they can also limit, restrict, indeed keep imprisoned. Here
destinies play themselves out. Rooms, over centuries, often gather the history of humans. If one assumes that each human entity has an aura of life
energy, then it is not difficult to believe that remainders of it are still present and share in the sound-energy of each room. The song of the
space is that of the persons who went in and out. In sacred buildings this vision is particularly urgent and vivid: what worries and desires were
not brought close to God here? What was not prayed for or implored of? For what, on the other hand, was thanks not given? Through artifacts such as
SONALUMINA-13 it is the creative energy of the artist himself that is transported, as an intellectual-spiritual freight, along with the physical
conditions.
Jeff Talman, who studied music and composition, goes his own way with his room-tone installations. He reaches out, not simply through an existing
medium, to gain new insights and realizations through art. His work is an attempt to find his own intellectual-spiritual position in life and to
critically reflect, as a humanitarian, on human relationships. For art indeed does not just depict the truth about life. It is always only the
search for the truth. And this calls for a language to be remembered, a melody to be given. And here Jeff Talman succeeds with ingenuity. The
German Romantic poet Joseph von Eichendorff (1788 1857), expressed in a poem what Jeff Talman does with the modern electronic means of
acoustic recording and reproduction, and what the original task of art is and will remain:
A song sleeps in all things,
Which dream there on and on,
And the world will rise up to sing,
If you can just find the magic word.
Originally printed in the Sonalumina-13 visitor's guide, September 2004
|
