P420 MILAN GRYGAR. Via Azzo Gardino 9, Bologna (it) Tel

Transcription

1 MILAN GRYGAR

2 MILAN GRYGAR. SOUND ON PAPER I came to the certainty that what prevails in the world is correlation: sound is connected to the visual and the visual cannot exist without sound. Everything a human does is connected: visual and acoustic phenomena complement one another. Milan Grygar For about half a century, starting in the mid-1960s, Milan Grygar has developed a body of work whose premise is the inseparable character of two senses occidental art has often seen as distinct: sight and hearing. His works have an essential connection with sound: they record its transpiring in visual form, or constitute a more or less detailed score through which to produce it. The artist tells us that the start of his path of visual-aural research dates back to a precise episode, in Drawing with an unusual tool (a small stick dipped in ink), he realized that in the silent studio the tapping and tracing of the tip on the paper created an elaborate rhythm. Later, having recorded the sound on tape, it seemed just as interesting to him as the drawing that had generated it. This was the beginning of the series of Acoustic Drawings, works in which the criterion of visual composition (to trace abstract signs on a sheet of paper) and the meaning of the audio composition (the creation of given sounds in a given order) intertwine, both contributing to the final result. It is important to emphasize that in this cycle of works the transcription of sound in visual form happens in keeping with indexical modes, i.e. not using conventional, stylized symbols (like traditional musical notation) or forms that evoke sound by analogy (as in an important current of abstract painting), but through a trace, a direct imprint: in this case, that of the inked objects on paper, still or in movement. Movement, in particular, has an essential role here. It is movement that intuitively connects sight to hearing, image to sound: it is thanks to movement that a line or a patch of ink (which, by the rules, record not a sound but a form, that of the object that has produced them) can be presented by the artist and read by the viewer as a trail of sound; it is their transpiring in time, continuous or interrupted, that (also) transforms them into recordings of an acoustic event. From this standpoint, the Acoustic Drawings are more comparable to vinyl records than they are to musical scores, where the grooves have recorded a sonic vibration through the material action of a stylus; and perhaps it is no coincidence that these drawings were born in a moment in which all sound recordings, on tape or disk, happened in keeping with the same principle, that of the etching of a sonic vibration through a mechanical instrument on a material medium. There is a link of a conceptual order between the Acoustic Drawings and the sound recordings on vinyl of their transpiring made by Grygar at the time (like, for example, Akustická kresba / Adagio, the record released in 1969 by the artist for the label Supraphone). The movement, the action, in short, the performative component of the Acoustic Drawings, has not been limited by Grygar to the private, solitary space of the studio (or the recording studio). Starting at the end of the 1960s, Grygar did performances in which he drew in real time, in front of the audience, with a range of different tools including all sorts of objects, particularly spring toys dipped in ink, whose autonomous movement on the paper introduced an element of controlled chance in the drawings and of playful spectacle as well. The available video recordings of these performances make you wish you had been there: standing in front of a table, in the guise of an «illusionist, musician and choreographer,» Grygar extracting his singular drafting tools one by one from a top hat staged enchanting little acts in which sound and vision, intent and chance, action and its trails all intertwined. From an aural perspective, these were micro-concerts in which the solo instrument of the first drawings gave way, as the artist himself puts it, to a «polyphony,» a multiplicity of sounds and rhythms that coiled together and overlapped. Starting in , Grygar has explored an opposite, complementary path with respect to that of the Acoustic Drawings. To introduce it, we can return to the comparison with vinyl records: the record is not just a material trace of sound, but also an instrument to reproduce that sound at will, over and over again. While the Acoustic Drawings make visually manifest a sound that has already transpired, other works have been conceived as a sort of score, from which the artist himself or others, using heterodox or traditional instruments, can produce the sound compositions. The first works produced in this vein were the Ground Plan Drawings, dashboard-like surfaces on which Grygar traced the outlines of the objects to utilize (a hammer, a top ) and indicated with numbers, letters and conventional musical signs the order and way in which to use them to perform the composition. These are works that establish a dialogue with the Fluxus instruction pieces, performances based a sets of directions someone puts into practice, and with the large current of musical scores based on visual indications of sounds of the neo-avant-gardes.

3 Both directions lead back to John Cage, to his idea of composition (and of its physical analog, the score) as a structure capable of coordinating and overlapping different media, different meanings, different roles. This was the idea Cage transmitted in his course at the New School for Social Research in New York at the end of the 1950s; it is no coincidence that his students included certain artists (like Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, George Brecht and, last but not least, Allan Kaprow) who were shortly to become outstanding figures of Fluxus. The first Ground Plan Drawings, with their rather simple forms and precise instructions for use, have been followed in Grygar s career by many other drawing-scores (the Score-patterns, the Color scores, the Architectonic scores...) whose general tendency, if one can be found, is that of gradually becoming less descriptive and more abstract, freed of determinate instruments and roles and instead striving to outline an idea of overall structure of the composition, leaving an increasingly large margin of interpretation for the performer. One of the highest points of this process of abstraction is undoubtedly reached with the Acoustic/Plastic Drawings, compositions on paper (with a fixed size of 88x62.5 cm) based on straight and curved parallel lines, drawn with such precision as to appear to be done by mechanical means. Inside a regular, predictable structure (usually the classic orthogonal grid), the artist introduces discrepancies: the lines change color (red instead of black), orientation, position with respect to a pre-set scheme, creating optical effects of vibration, virtual relief, etc. Grygar thinks of these austere geometric works as possible scores. «The line he has stated, regarding a subsequent and related series, that of the Linear scores is an imprint of energy, an orientation in space, on the surface and also in time. It is a duration.» Musicians who want to use the Acoustic/Plastic Drawings as scores are entrusted by the artist with the development of a criterion to effectively translate the lines in space into sounds in time; the composer and musicologist Erhard Karkoschka, for example, who has made a composition from one of them, Drawing for Continuous Sound, accomplished this with software. The crucial point, in any case, which must be kept in mind for any audio interpretation of the Acoustic/Plastic Drawings, is the irregular character of the grid, its turbulence and fractures: these irregularities give dynamism and unpredictability to otherwise static compositions. The artist defines the drawings as «loosened structures,» and more than one critic who has written about Grygar s work (Jean-Yves Bosseur, Hana Larvová) has heard an echo, in this expression, of the «crippled symmetries,» thus made dynamic, that provide the title for one of the last works of the great American composer Morton Feldman. Feldman shared the focus on the dialogue between sound and sight: many of his compositions are dedicated to painter friends of the New York School (Franz Kline, Philip Guston); one piece in particular, the austere and metaphysical Rothko Chapel (1970), was written in relation to the nondenominational chapel in Houston for which Mark Rothko painted fourteen large, nearly monochromatic canvases. Grygar s work undoubtedly fits into this artistic lineage of dialogue between the senses, which attempts to compensate for the widespread tendency to separate and specialize them. More precisely (as we mentioned at the start, regarding the Acoustic Drawings, and now emphasize again as a conclusion), he belongs to that small, exclusive squadron of innovators who have tried to establish not just a relationship of analogy, but a truly reciprocal interchange between sight and sound. Inside this squadron, Grygar has a place of honor. Simone Menegoi SOURCES Linda Sedláková (ed.), Milan Grygar, Gema Art, Prague 2009 Jean-Yves Bosseur, Milan Grygar. Antiphonies and Musical Scores, exhibition cat., Museum Kampa - Jan and Meda Mladék Foundation, Prague 2011

4 Acoustic drawing, , mixed media on paper, cm.73x51

5 Acoustic drawing, , mixed media on paper, cm.73x5

6 Acoustic drawing, , mixed media on paper, cm.73x51

7 Acoustic drawing, 2001, ink on paper, cm.31,5x45

8 Acoustic drawing, 2001, ink on paper, cm.31,5x45

9 Drawing for Seven Tones, 1980, ink on paper, cm.88x65,5

10 Linear Score, 1976, ink on paper, cm.88x65,5

11 Linear Score, 1979, ink on paper, cm.88x65,5

12 Linear Score, 1984, ink on paper, cm.88x65,5

13 Linear Score, 1985, ink on paper, cm.88x65,5

14 Linear Score, 1989, ink on paper, cm.88x65,5

15 Sound Plastic Drawing, 1973, ink on paper, cm.88x65,5

16 Sound Plastic Drawing, 1973, ink on paper, cm.88x65,5

17 Sound Plastic Drawing, 1974, ink on paper, cm.88x65,5

18 Untitled, 2013, watercolor on paper, cm.40x32

19 Untitled, 2013, watercolor on paper, cm.40x32

20 Untitled, 2013, watercolor on paper, cm.40x32

21 Untitled, 2013, watercolor on paper, cm.40x32

22 MILAN GRYGAR (1926, Zvolen, Slovakia) MOSTRE PERSONALI / SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2017 Antifona,, Bologna IT Milan Grygar, Light, Sound, Motion, Fait Gallery, Brno, CZ 2016 Milan Grygar, Sound on paper, ZKM, Karlsruhe, DE 2015 Konkret, Milan Dobes Museum, Bratislava, SK The Visual and the Acoustic, Prague City Gallery, Prague, CZ 2014 Milan Grygar, Vizuální a akustické, Billek VIlla, Prague, CZ Milan Grygar, Sound on paper,, Bologna, IT 2013 Milan Grygar, Galerie Závodný, Mikulov, CZ 2012 Milan Grygar, Galerie Zdenek Sklenar, Prague, CZ Light, Sound, Movement, Today Art Museum, Beijing, CN 2011 Milan Grygar, Galerie Zdenek Sklenar, Prague, CZ 2010 Milan Grygar, Drawings and Sound, Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, PL 2008 Milan Grygar: Antiphons, Galerie Zdenek Sklenar, Prague, CZ 2007 Milan Grygar - Paintings , Galerie Zdenek Sklenar, Prague, CZ 2006 Milan Grygar, Moravska Galerie, Brno, CZ 2001 Milan Grygar, Severočeská galerie výtvarného umění v Litoměřicích, Litoměřice, CZ Performance Drawings - Milan Grygar, The Drawing Center, New York City, US 1992 Milan Grygar, Gallery of Modern Art Roudnice nad Labem, Roudnice nad Labem, CZ MOSTRE COLLETTIVE / GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2017 Why Patterns?, De Vleeshal, Middelburg, NL Eye Ichnography, ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN, Prague, CZ 2016 Kunst in Europa , ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, DE Turning Pages / Modern book culture in the collections of the Olomouc Museum of art, Zapadoceska galerie, Pilsen, CZ 2015 Circuit Olomouc/Olomouc semiofficial art scene during normalization, Muzeum Umeni, Olomouc, CZ Accidental Sounds, Loudwing Museum im Deutschherrenhaus, Koblenz, DE

23 Modern and post-war art,/contemporary art/photography, Galerie Pecka, Prague, CZ Modern and post-war art,/contemporary art/photography, Galerie 5. patro, Prague, CZ John Cage/Milan Grygar: Chance Operations & Intention, Ludwig Museum im Deutschherrenhaus, Koblenz, DE Grygar/morellet/scaccabarozzi,Galerie Zaloudek, Prague, CZ The Fragments Of Sets, Fait Gallery, Brno, CZ 2014 The Olomouc Domain, DOX, Centre for contemporary art, Prague, CZ Konkret, Milan Dobes Museum, Bratislava, SK 8 european concretists, Galerie Žaloudek, Prague, CZ 2013 Lapidary, Galerie Jaroslava Fragnera, Prague, CZ Sounding the Body Electric, Calvert22, London, UK Prague Biennale 6, Prague Biennale, Prague, CZ 2012 Concrete: The Small Format, Galerie St. Johann, Saarbrücken, DE The Manes Association Of Fine Artists Today / Dnešní Mánes, S.V.U. Mámes - Galerie Diamant, Prague, CZ The Freedom of Sound. John Cage behind the Iron Curtain, Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest, Budapest, HU Cartografías contemporáneas, CaixaForum Barcelona, Barcelona, ES Cartografías contemporáneas. Dibujando el pensamiento, CaixaForum Madrid, Madrid, ES Disjecta membrane for John Cage, Galerie výtvarného umění v Ostravě, Dum umeni, Ostrava, CZ Weiss Und Andere Farben, Galerie Franz Swetec, Dusseldorf, DE Membra Disjecta For John Cage: Wanting To Say Something About John, DOX - Centre for contemporary art, Prague, CZ Sounding the Body Electric. Experiments in Art and Music in Eastern Europe , Muzeum Sztuki Lodz, Lodz, PL Biennale de Lyon - La Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, FR 2010 SchauLager - LagerSchau 2., Galerie St. Johann, Saarbrücken, DE Czech Dream - Lucid Dream, DOMINIK ART PROJECTS, Krakow, PL 15 KÜnstler Positionen Konkreter Kunst Heute, Galerie Grewenig Nissen, Heidelberg, DE 2009 Arbeiten auf Papier konkret. 40 Jahre Galerie St. Johann, Galerie St. Johann, Saarbrücken, DE Works on Papers, Galerie St. Johann, Saarbrücken, DE Slunce Orientu - Regional Art Gallery, Oblastni Galerie v Liberci, Liberec, CZ re-connaitre, Paksi Képtár, Paks, HU Concrete Art Connection - Konkrete Kunst aus Mitteleuropa, Galerie Artmark, Vienna, AT Emil Filla a Milan Grygar, Galerie Zdenek Sklenar, Prague, CZ The Act of Drawing, Vivid, Birmingham, UK The Manes Association Of Fine Artists, Slovak Union of Visual Arts, Bratislava, HU Positionen Konkreter Kunst heute, Landesmuseum Mainz, Mainz, DE Listování Moderní knižní kultura ve sbírkách Muzea umění Olomouc, Muzeum Umeni Olomouc, Olomouc, CZ Verein Bildender Künstler Manes ( ): Geschichte und Gegenwart des Tschechischen Kunstvereins, Saarländische Galerie - Europäisches Kunstforum e.v., Berlin, DE 2008 petersburg...-jahresausstellung 2008, Galerie St. Johann, Saarbrücken, DE INTRO 518 NOW 69 NOW* NOW 180 BONUS Q TRACK!, Karlin Studios, Prague, CZ Moderní a poválečné umění, současné umění, fotografie, galerie 5. patro, Prague, CZ Moderní a poválečné umění, současné umění, fotografie, Leica Gallery LGP, Prague, CZ

24 2007 Frisch gestrichen peinture fraîche, Galerie St. Johann, Saarbrücken, DE Prague Biennale 3, Prague Biennale, Prague, CZ 2005 Résonnances, Centre de la Gravure et de l Image imprimée, La Louvière, BE 2004 Look Light/Ejhle světlo, Prague Castle Riding School, Prague, CZ 2003 Works on paper from Museum Kampa collection, City Gallery Prague/Galerie Hlavního Města Prahy, Prague, CZ Umění je abstrakce, Moravska Galerie, Brno,CZ Un jardin secret - Collection Monique Dorsel et Emile Lanc, Centre de la Gravure et de l Image imprimée, La Louvière, BE minisalon, Centre tchèque de Paris, Paris, FR 2002 Field of phenomena - solitude of matter/pole jevu - samota vec - Moravska Galerie, Brno, CZ Corps et traces. La création contemporaine tchèque, Musée des Beaux, Arts de Nancy, Nancy, FR Homage to the Creative Team - First Part of the Jan and Meda Mládek Collection, Museum Kampa, The Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation, Prague, CZ Minisalon, Museum Puri Lukisan, Ubud, Bali, RI ANIMA - ANIMUS - The Brno House of Arts, Brno, CZ Minisalon, Galeri Nasional Indonesia, Jakarta, ID Monochromie, Czech Museum of Fine Arts; Ceské muzeum vytvarných umeni v Praze, Prague, CZ Object / Object. Metamorphoses in Time, Moravska Galerie, Brno, CZ 2001 Object / Obejct - Metamorphoses in Time / Metamorfózy v čase, Czech Museum of Fine Arts, Ceské muzeum vytvarných umeni v Praze, Prague, CZ 2000 Actual Infinity / Aktuální nekonečno, City Gallery Prague / Galerie Hlavního Města Prahy, Prague, CZ 1999 Crossings, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, CZ... And What Collections /... a co sbírky. Přírůstky Muzea umění Olomouc za léta , Muzeum Umeni Olomouc, Olomouc, CZ 1997 Art When Time Stood Still, Gallery of Visual Art in Cheb, Cheb, CZ Arta Concreta, The National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest, RO Between Tradition and Experiment / Mezi tradicí a experimentem. Práce na papíře a s papírem v českém výtvarném, Muzeum Umeni Olomouc, Olomouc, CZ Art When Time Stood Still, Moravska Galerie, Brno, CZ 1996 Minisalon, University Art Gallery at UMass Dartmouth, New Bedford, US Minisalon, MFA Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL L\ art Au Corps / Le Corps Exposé De Man Ray A Nos Jours, MAC Musées d Art Contemporain Marseille, Marseille, FR Minisalon, Florida Gulf Coast University Art Gallery, Fort Myers, US Art When Time Stood Still, Czech Museum of Fine Arts - Ceské muzeum vytvarných umeni v Praze, Prague, CZ minisalon, McKissick Museum, Columbia, US

25 1995 Minisalon, UNM Art Museum - University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, US Minisalon, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Cedar Rapids, US Minisalon, Indianapolis Museum of Art - IMA, Indianapolis, US Minisalon, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, US 1994 Minisalon, World Financial Center Courtyard Gallery, New York City, US 1993 Minisalon, Aux anciens Abattoirs de Mons, Mons, BE Minisalon, Beaux-Arts Mons (BAM), Mons, BE 1992 Minisalon, Galerie Nová síň / The New Hall Gallery, Prague, CZ In the Void / V dimenzích prázdna, The East Bohemian Gallery / Východočeská galerie, Pardubice, CZ 1991 Performance Art / Umění akce, Exhibition Hall Mánes - Czech Art Fund Foundation, Prague, CZ Performance Art / Umenie akce - Museum of Art Zilina, Zilina, SK In the Void / V dimenzích prázdna, Gallery of Modern Art Roudnice nad Labem, Roudnice nad Labem, CZ In the Void / V dimenzích prázdna, Galerie umění Karlovy Vary, Karlovy Vary, CZ 1990 Kunstenaars uit Oost-Europa, SMAK Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, BE 1989 Expression In Czech Visual Arts, The East Bohemian Gallery / Východočeská galerie, Pardubice, CZ 1988 Aspecten van Kunst: Armoede Toeval Vergankelijkheid, SMAK Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, BE 1987 Tussen de ruimte, SMAK Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, BE 1986 Chambres d amis, SMAK Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, BE