Since their formation in 2000, the artist duo blablabor, consisting of Annette Schmucki and Reto Friedmann, has been dedicated to the creation of radio art. In their work, the radio is not just a medium but is present in all its functions, both technical and cultural: a transmitter of voices, of language, a form of communication. From recorded sound pieces to site-specific installations and performances, they have explored this medium and its possibilities.
The collection of short audio pieces presented by Radioart this summer will be divided into three different islands, each exploring different aspects and themes of the duo's oeuvre. But unlike previous appearances on Radioart's digital stage, there will be no translation of the pieces' linguistic content. It might seem that German is the main language of blablabor for the listener of these works. But, blablabor explains, "music is our mother tongue", a statement we at Radioart want to respect and emphasise; that the semantic content of language is not necessarily the only key to understanding. Instead of translations, a text will be published in conjunction with each collection of audio pieces, in an attempt to find a way into their language, into listening, and thus introduce blablabor to a new audience.
In 2014, blablabor created the audio piece in sieben worten, a 49-minute work that uses the biblical creation story (Genesis 1:1 - 2:4a) as compositional material for the piece, which in turn is about the creation of language. According to the creation story in the Bible , God created the world in seven days, and therefore blablabor selected seven words from the Bible text, with which they divided the piece into seven parts. In connection with this, blablabor also made three shorter audio pieces entitled beim namen genannt, geht in ordnung and und es war gut, which are condensed reworkings of the theme and material of the longer piece.
How is language created? Two of the most prominent characteristics of spoken language are that it communicates information, and that the information is communicated by means of sounds. The relationship between the sound (form) of words and their meaning is often considered arbitrary (following Ferdinand de Saussure's semiotic theory). However, this has not prevented artists from exploring the onomatopoeic aspects of language, as artists from the Dadaists of the early 20th century to the Concretists of the 1950s and 1960s have challenged this assumed arbitrariness. When the sound of the word is prioritised over its semantic content, it takes on an almost alien quality. These artists, working with language as a material, start from a point from which the words are on their way to their existence as a symbol with semantic content, without really having reached it. In a way, it is an exploration of the creation of language.
In the three short audio-pieces presented here, it seems that blablabor approaches the subject with an awareness that language is constantly being created, every day, in the present. In beim namen genannt, the focus is on the process of naming. What does it mean to be called by name? It may seem that we as humans have a need to name the condition in which we live, as a first step in a communicative process, and as a way of relating the surroundings to ourselves and to itself. In this audio-piece, the verb heiße (is called) is set up as a boundary between the unnamed and the named: Das kriechende Fingerkraut heiße Potentilla Reptans. The creeping cinquefoil is called Potentilla Reptans. The naming process organises external reality into the language. Something becomes something when it is given a name. In the garden of the audio-piece it is plants, garden tools, but also grammatical terms that are given names:
Der grammatische Terminus heiße Nomen.
The grammatical term is called a noun.
Another recurring feature of these three pieces is that the voices are constantly accompanied by instruments. The instruments mimic or respond to the rhythm and tone of the voice, sometimes becoming a musical reflection of what is going on in the voices. In the piece geht in ordnung this has a particularly striking effect. The voices string together two-syllable words in a relatively steady pulse, accompanied by a trombone and a drum. It sounds like an organisation of words, but the organisation is neither semantic nor syntactic; the words end up in what could be a phonetic order. After the first word in the order has been pronounced, the sounds begin to be switched out, the word gradually changes, finally bending to such an extent that both grammatical and linguistic boundaries are crossed. Here the instruments anchor the listener to the originally spoken word. By repeating the same notes and rhythm, they serve as a reminder of where the voice began. And while the idea of a coherent language has dissolved here, a new, sonic uniformity is created. This is where the blablabors' claim that music is their mother tongue shines the brightest. They emphasise that all the world's languages have something in common: they are sounding.
The German writer Walter Benjamin writes in his essay On language as such and on the language of man that: ”The incomparable feature of human language is that its magical community with things is immaterial and purely mental, and the symbol of this is sound.” In both Benjamin and blablabor, there is a relationship to language that is at once spiritual and pragmatic. An awareness of the structures of language combined with a mystical gaze, which in Benjamin's case is associated with a God, and in blablabor's case is associated with music.
In und es war gut, the last piece of the collection, language exists as a state. It describes a setting, perhaps the same garden as in beim namen genannt, with a gaze that notices details and a voice that sometimes even expresses the occasional imperative: Lasse die grünen Tomaten nachreifen. Let the green tomatoes ripen. However, this statement, und es war gut (and it was good), which is the title of the piece, is never spoken aloud. We return to the biblical story of creation, where the expression is repeated when God sees what he has created. In blablabor's piece, this phrase does not necessarily have to be read as an evaluation of the created, but rather an affirmation that it is there. Language, like God in the creation story, has the ability to create worlds. The spoken words are linked together, sonically or in terms of content, to form a web. Such a web can be an aural piece,
like those created by blablabor, which reflects our reality and at the same time shows new possibilities in how we can listen to it. Language is both created in, and creates the world it expresses.
References:
Benjamin, Walter, Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen [On language as such and on the language of man], trans. Edmund Jephcott
Comments