Pictures Reframed
Previewed last week in Risør, a small fishing town on the south coast of Norway that plays host to an annual chamber music festival, Pictures Reframed was a collaboration between South African-born artist Robin Rhode and Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes. The project comprises a staging of Pictures at an Exhibition, Modest Mussorgsky’s well-known piano suite that was written in 1874, inspired by a posthumous show in St Petersburg show of more than 400 works by his friend Viktor Hartmann. The suite depicts an imagined tour of an exhibition, each section title alluding to a specific picture by Hartmann. Berlin-based Rhode’s installation comprises a single-channel film at the back of the stage, though Andsnes is surrounded by five angled screens positioned around the piano. Each of the 35-minute suite’s ten movements – as well as the main theme – are matched by a film or series of stills, around half of which depart from Rhode’s signature stenciled wall-drawings, taking in graphic sections and archive-style black-and-white footage. For the late-evening preview (it only got dark for a few hours) Andsnes, who is artistic director of the festival, performed the piece to a packed house in a disused fish factory by Risør’s harbour. (No footage on YouTube yet, so the clip below – of Evgeny Kissin – will have to do.)
In recent years you wouldn’t have had to look too far to find artists providing visuals for high-profile, newly commissioned pieces – though the results have been mixed. Tal Rosner’s computer-generated abstractions for last year’s premiere of Thomas Adès’ piano concerto, In Seven Days: Piano concerto with moving image, were pretty weak – a distracting screensaver across six screens. Similarly mural-like, Julian Opie’s LED screens for the Royal Ballet’s Infra (2008), a Wayne McGregor-choreographed piece scored by Max Richter, were more successful, though left one wondering what could have been if a more exciting artist had been involved. The impetus for these concert-hall-sized projects is often suspiciously commercial – no automatically bad thing (the costs are enormous), though compromises are often obvious. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the more successful classical/art pairings of recent years – in London, at least – have been commissioned by visual art organisations. Heiner Goebbels’ Stifter’s Dinge, commissioned by Artangel last year, and Tate Modern’s 18-hour performance of Satie’s Vexations (below) – backed by Warhol’s Sleep (1963) on loop – both come to mind. (The latter piece restaged a 1963 performance of the piece which was organized by John Cage – John Cale was one of the performers and Warhol claimed to have been the only member of audience to make it all the way through.)
Pictures Reframed was commissioned by Lincoln Center, New York (where the piece will premiere this November before being toured worldwide), an institution that was also responsible for commissioning Bill Viola to to produce a typically grandiose work version of Tristan und Isolde. (I suppose that Viola is one of the few people that wouldn’t have any qualms with tackling Wagner.) Rhode and Andsnes’ collaboration is certainly better considered and perhaps more attentive than the Viola project. The pair met in Munich two years ago, and the collaboration apparently began with Rhode showing Andsnes Hans Richter films and Fernand Léger’s 1924 Ballet mécanique (below).
Certain aspects of the project carry the fingerprints of record-label involvement though: the title, ‘Pictures Reframed’, feels inaccurate, given that the piece is more concerned with resituating, even unframing, Hartmann’s original pictures, taking them out of the gallery context and expanding them from pre-revolution pictures in Constructivist-inspired films. The film opens not in an exhibition, but on the street, with Promenade, an early section of the collaboration that was shown separately at Who Saw Who, Rhode’s Hayward show last year.
In the short work, the format of which recurs throughout, matched with Mussorgsky’s main theme, Rhode’s trademark black-suited street performer enters the screen upside down, appearing to juggle clusters of rhomboids chalked on the walls with his feet. While Rhode claimed to have not been interested in ‘breaking the code of Hartmann’s pictures’, clear formal correspondences with the originals are maintained, though given a personal twist. ‘Il Vecchio Castle’, for example, Hartmann’s picture of a five-sided castle, becomes ‘Medieval Castle’, a digital fantasy on a building in Cape Town; a section in catacombs corresponds with ‘Ink Strikes’, in which Pollock-like dashes of paint serve as illuminations. Others are more problematic: Mussorgsky’s ‘Two Polish Jews’ section – inspired by Hartmann’s sketches from Warsaw ghettoes – is accompanied by a series of black and white bank logos.
In collaborations such as these there is often a fraught relationship between performance and visuals – when I saw Adès conduct In Seven Days he was wearing headphones, at times frantically trying to sync the players with the visuals via a click-track. At Risør this was ably solved by an musically minded technician who sat off-stage, manipulating Rhode’s films to keep time with Andsnes; while the performance resembled a musical accompaniment, it was actually the opposite. Despite this smooth synthesis, several parts of the visual element posit an antagonistic relationship between the original and the new version: the work finishes with a spectacular scene in which a grand piano is drowned in a rush of water. You wonder about quite how smooth the working relationship between the pianist and artist actually was.
Pictures Reframed is not a big risk for either Rhode or Andsnes. The suite has been attempted by so many others – orchestrated by Ravel, played by Duke Ellington, even surviving a version by Emerson, Lake & Palmer – a new iteration is neither sacriligous nor quite a novelty. It is too much to say that this will make anyone reassess their opinion of Pictures at an Exhibition or of Rhode’s work. (The reputation of Andsnes, who has been performing for more than 20 years, is pretty solid). It remains a brave undertaking, though, and one that doesn’t equate the concert hall environment with grandiosity.
Previewed last week in Risør, a small fishing town on the south coast of Norway that plays host to an annual chamber music festival, Pictures Reframed was a collaboration between South African-born artist Robin Rhode and Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes. The project comprises a staging of Pictures at an Exhibition, Modest Mussorgsky’s well-known piano suite that was written in 1874, inspired by a posthumous show in St Petersburg show of more than 400 works by his friend Viktor Hartmann. The suite depicts an imagined tour of an exhibition, each section title alluding to a specific picture by Hartmann. Berlin-based Rhode’s installation comprises a single-channel film at the back of the stage, though Andsnes is surrounded by five angled screens positioned around the piano. Each of the 35-minute suite’s ten movements – as well as the main theme – are matched by a film or series of stills, around half of which depart from Rhode’s signature stenciled wall-drawings, taking in graphic sections and archive-style black-and-white footage. For the late-evening preview (it only got dark for a few hours) Andsnes, who is artistic director of the festival, performed the piece to a packed house in a disused fish factory by Risør’s harbour. (No footage on YouTube yet, so the clip below – of Evgeny Kissin – will have to do.)
In recent years you wouldn’t have had to look too far to find artists providing visuals for high-profile, newly commissioned pieces – though the results have been mixed. Tal Rosner’s computer-generated abstractions for last year’s premiere of Thomas Adès’ piano concerto, In Seven Days: Piano concerto with moving image, were pretty weak – a distracting screensaver across six screens. Similarly mural-like, Julian Opie’s LED screens for the Royal Ballet’s Infra (2008), a Wayne McGregor-choreographed piece scored by Max Richter, were more successful, though left one wondering what could have been if a more exciting artist had been involved. The impetus for these concert-hall-sized projects is often suspiciously commercial – no automatically bad thing (the costs are enormous), though compromises are often obvious. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the more successful classical/art pairings of recent years – in London, at least – have been commissioned by visual art organisations. Heiner Goebbels’ Stifter’s Dinge, commissioned by Artangel last year, and Tate Modern’s 18-hour performance of Satie’s Vexations (below) – backed by Warhol’s Sleep (1963) on loop – both come to mind. (The latter piece restaged a 1963 performance of the piece which was organized by John Cage – John Cale was one of the performers and Warhol claimed to have been the only member of audience to make it all the way through.)
Pictures Reframed was commissioned by Lincoln Center, New York (where the piece will premiere this November before being toured worldwide), an institution that was also responsible for commissioning Bill Viola to to produce a typically grandiose work version of Tristan und Isolde. (I suppose that Viola is one of the few people that wouldn’t have any qualms with tackling Wagner.) Rhode and Andsnes’ collaboration is certainly better considered and perhaps more attentive than the Viola project. The pair met in Munich two years ago, and the collaboration apparently began with Rhode showing Andsnes Hans Richter films and Fernand Léger’s 1924 Ballet mécanique (below).
Certain aspects of the project carry the fingerprints of record-label involvement though: the title, ‘Pictures Reframed’, feels inaccurate, given that the piece is more concerned with resituating, even unframing, Hartmann’s original pictures, taking them out of the gallery context and expanding them from pre-revolution pictures in Constructivist-inspired films. The film opens not in an exhibition, but on the street, with Promenade, an early section of the collaboration that was shown separately at Who Saw Who, Rhode’s Hayward show last year.
In the short work, the format of which recurs throughout, matched with Mussorgsky’s main theme, Rhode’s trademark black-suited street performer enters the screen upside down, appearing to juggle clusters of rhomboids chalked on the walls with his feet. While Rhode claimed to have not been interested in ‘breaking the code of Hartmann’s pictures’, clear formal correspondences with the originals are maintained, though given a personal twist. ‘Il Vecchio Castle’, for example, Hartmann’s picture of a five-sided castle, becomes ‘Medieval Castle’, a digital fantasy on a building in Cape Town; a section in catacombs corresponds with ‘Ink Strikes’, in which Pollock-like dashes of paint serve as illuminations. Others are more problematic: Mussorgsky’s ‘Two Polish Jews’ section – inspired by Hartmann’s sketches from Warsaw ghettoes – is accompanied by a series of black and white bank logos.
In collaborations such as these there is often a fraught relationship between performance and visuals – when I saw Adès conduct In Seven Days he was wearing headphones, at times frantically trying to sync the players with the visuals via a click-track. At Risør this was ably solved by an musically minded technician who sat off-stage, manipulating Rhode’s films to keep time with Andsnes; while the performance resembled a musical accompaniment, it was actually the opposite. Despite this smooth synthesis, several parts of the visual element posit an antagonistic relationship between the original and the new version: the work finishes with a spectacular scene in which a grand piano is drowned in a rush of water. You wonder about quite how smooth the working relationship between the pianist and artist actually was.
Pictures Reframed is not a big risk for either Rhode or Andsnes. The suite has been attempted by so many others – orchestrated by Ravel, played by Duke Ellington, even surviving a version by Emerson, Lake & Palmer – a new iteration is neither sacriligous nor quite a novelty. It is too much to say that this will make anyone reassess their opinion of Pictures at an Exhibition or of Rhode’s work. (The reputation of Andsnes, who has been performing for more than 20 years, is pretty solid). It remains a brave undertaking, though, and one that doesn’t equate the concert hall environment with grandiosity.
