"Over a period of two years, I worked with the cellist Christopher Mansell
using an exchange of drawings and improvisation to produce a series of
musical texts. These were thought of as a hybrid possibility: between
literal text and musical text, as compositional ideas for painting. The
fusion of the sounds of letters and those of notes has led to further
work with Lore Lixenberg in developing the music as songs which relate
to textual themes that existed in my paintings.
In performance, the music from the paintings retains a trace of substance:
the paintings' minimal involvements with surface edge, layering, and with
slight shifts and variations in appearance as repetitions occur. However
there are tensions: the absorption of the eye in a visual sensation does
not necessarily correspond to durational absorption in an audible sensation;
also the inertia of the silence of paintings bears no relation to the
dynamic silences of music.
Music as motif for painting emphasises the event-ness of visuality. To
use painting or drawing as music counters the nostalgic aspiration that
they can 'capture' a moment in time, by shifting the terms of how they
will be remembered. When reading musical notation, as the image of each
note is seen then played, its visible sign disappears into an acoustic
memory, or thought, of how the note sounds. Seeing music as surface but
thinking of its sound poses a question, for the viewer - of whether the
memory of that surface will be visual or aural. The aural memory creates
different narratives for the values of painting's visibility."
Joan Key, March 2001
Joan Key pursues these ideas in an essay on Anton Lukoszevieze's work
with Jayne Parker, in Jayne Parker, Filmworks 79-00, Spacex Gallery, Exeter,
2000.
Work from the collaboration with Christopher Mansell was shown in British
Art Show 5. Joan Key is represented by Richard Salmon Gallery, London. |
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