Statement
Every human being is an artist (Joseph Beuys)
Every artist is a human being (Martin Kippenberger)
Art is where art is (Jonathan Meese)
Man is the animal that speaks - Brigade Commerz, the new Audio Arts Archive, is searching for this perturbing intensity of the spoken word. The staged monologue not the dialogue is the new form to absorb this energy sent by the artist as human being. In a visually dominated culture the hearing sustains its position as a domain of liveliness, often irritation, of seductiveness! You can lend your ear. In the acoustic medium, in the cosmopolitanism of hearing – through the precision antenna of one’s hair cells – the invisible, which is lost by the eye (uncanny, other, strange) can become true again. The hidden interior beyond the apparition, beyond the phenotype, becomes evident.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, new modes of making emerged in art that engaged with language and ideas. At the same time sound pioneers like William Furlong and Barry Barker started to store talks, performances and music. This first Audio Arts Archive was made possible by a new technology of sound storage – the cassette tape – and a political utopia – the social sculpture: Artists and art as a creative network; the artist as architect of the social organism.
In the 1980s Martin Kippenberger had already undermined this utopian paradigm of a community of artists with a complex of polemical ideas. To some, his work seemed to consist of one-liners and Kippenberger himself a clown, but for many young artists this was a real alternative and one way of overcoming the engaged positions of former generations. Today this devaluation of the artist culminates in Jonathan Meese’s idea of a hermetic revolution and the dictatorship of art.
Brigade Commerz – Audio Arts Archives is the contemporary format of a sound storage close to the visual culture, an artists voice portal, deploying the possibilities of digital technology and the internet. The audio engineer as creative human being is replaced by the worker who does his service, the brigadier. The Brigade with its military planned economy dimension in being contradictory to commerce - the word ‘Commerz’ contains within it Schwitter’s MERZ - stressing the complexity of the archive, and its commitment to ambiguity and crudity.
The acoustic space opened up by the voice of the artist – timbre, rhythm, idiom - creates a distinct medium, a different form of expression, which completes the “work” in a totally surprising way.
“The sound recording of the missing being will touch me like the delayed rays of a star”, as Susan Sontag once said, or to paraphrase Roland Barthes, the transformed energy of the recorded voice touches me, like a trace of the real.
Every human being is an artist (Joseph Beuys)
Every artist is a human being (Martin Kippenberger)
Art is where art is (Jonathan Meese)
Man is the animal that speaks - Brigade Commerz, the new Audio Arts Archive, is searching for this perturbing intensity of the spoken word. The staged monologue not the dialogue is the new form to absorb this energy sent by the artist as human being. In a visually dominated culture the hearing sustains its position as a domain of liveliness, often irritation, of seductiveness! You can lend your ear. In the acoustic medium, in the cosmopolitanism of hearing – through the precision antenna of one’s hair cells – the invisible, which is lost by the eye (uncanny, other, strange) can become true again. The hidden interior beyond the apparition, beyond the phenotype, becomes evident.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, new modes of making emerged in art that engaged with language and ideas. At the same time sound pioneers like William Furlong and Barry Barker started to store talks, performances and music. This first Audio Arts Archive was made possible by a new technology of sound storage – the cassette tape – and a political utopia – the social sculpture: Artists and art as a creative network; the artist as architect of the social organism.
In the 1980s Martin Kippenberger had already undermined this utopian paradigm of a community of artists with a complex of polemical ideas. To some, his work seemed to consist of one-liners and Kippenberger himself a clown, but for many young artists this was a real alternative and one way of overcoming the engaged positions of former generations. Today this devaluation of the artist culminates in Jonathan Meese’s idea of a hermetic revolution and the dictatorship of art.
Brigade Commerz – Audio Arts Archives is the contemporary format of a sound storage close to the visual culture, an artists voice portal, deploying the possibilities of digital technology and the internet. The audio engineer as creative human being is replaced by the worker who does his service, the brigadier. The Brigade with its military planned economy dimension in being contradictory to commerce - the word ‘Commerz’ contains within it Schwitter’s MERZ - stressing the complexity of the archive, and its commitment to ambiguity and crudity.
The acoustic space opened up by the voice of the artist – timbre, rhythm, idiom - creates a distinct medium, a different form of expression, which completes the “work” in a totally surprising way.
“The sound recording of the missing being will touch me like the delayed rays of a star”, as Susan Sontag once said, or to paraphrase Roland Barthes, the transformed energy of the recorded voice touches me, like a trace of the real.
Jeremy Deller
Jonathan Meese
Martin Kippenberger
Otto Dix
Liam Gillick
Jake and Dinos Chapman