CURATING

For his multi-voiced exhibition, Rainer Oldendorf is taking over the three floors of the Stapflehus, generously provided by the Kunstverein in Weil am Rhein. The exhibition architecture, developed with furniture from his own collection, serves to present not only his own works but also those of invited artists, mostly friends, such as Henning Christiansen, Andreas Maria Fohr, Dean Inkster, Frédéric Lormeau, Marianne Maric, John Murphy, Patrick Neu, Pierre Soignon, Hinrich Sachs, Milica Topalovic, Carl Emanuel Wolff. An special guest is Gustave Fecht. She lived in Weil am Rhein from 1790 until her death and maintained a pen-friendship with Johann Peter Hebel until his death. His surviving letters reveal an intimate, never fulfilled love for her.

The exhibition setting as well as its surroundings in Weil am Rhein will serve to film the 15th episode of Rainer Oldendorf's picaresque film series "marco". The eposodes are a veritable "work in progress" ("marco 14" took place during documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens). The series draws a fictional portrait of a certain Paul since his involvement in left-wing politics in the 1970s. Marco Gallo, a friend of Rainer Oldendorf since his youth, plays Paul since "marco 1" in 1995.

Rainer Oldendorf's artistic practice can be seen as a totality of film, video, photography and architecture, his exhibitions in the consequence as polyphonic sculptures. In this case, an essential part is the involvement of friends and acquaintances around him in their roles as artists, lecturers, performers, students, gallerist, curator, camera team and research group. Their coming-together during the days of preparing, reflecting, mounting and dismounting the exhibition at lectures, seminars, concerts, the film shoot and the finissage, including discussions, strolls, shared meals, visits to wine bars etc. flow into his exhibition which is no longer a place of representation but a tool for the production of participation and networking, both internally and externally.

More than a hundred years ago, pioneers from various directions set out on expeditions into the hitherto unexplored realms of sonic phenomena and processes, previously the exclusive domaine of musicians. Driving force was the visual artists, but also visionary poets and musicians, even architects and engineers. Leaving all corsets of rules behind, everything in this context was worth exploring: all possible notations (even directly on a record or ephemeral traces in sand), all types of making sound (even by machines or dogs), all forms of staging (even in a desert or completely drunk), and of course all acoustic effects (even silence or ear-splitting crashes). It was a liberation of sounds and a liberation of thinking. A reality broke through, pulsating with life, which enlarged and simultaneously shattered the well-defined harmony of allegedly superior forms and styles of the established Western music system which had lost contact with the modern world.
Disonata features some two-hundred recordings, paintings, collages, prints, instruments, sculptures, scores, models, manifestos, photographs and films. It spans a period from the late 19th century with the first silent pieces and the transformations by the Futurists and Dada in the light of the technological and ideological revolutions;until until the we-are-doing-it-our-way attitudes of the punk and post-punk scenes in the 1980s. Between these two poles unfold a wide range of very diverse projects. They include the Philips Pavilion from 1958 with its spatial multimedia spectacle as well as a multitude of sound projects with explicit or loose links to groups and movements such as Lettrism, sound and visual poetry, Art Brut, CoBrA, kinetic art, New Realism, Fluxus, Zaj, Conceptual Art, and Pop Art. Their approaches range from corporal noises to electronic synthetizations, from optophonic poetry to technical inventions, from pure ideas to multimedia events, from intimate encounters to spatial multimedia compositions.
Main- and subsidiary paths within a chronological organization reveal relations and overlaps, but also discontinuities. Within resonate the individual nuances of the sounds which are of an essentially unclassifiable nature. In this sense, the exhibition can be understood as a veritable disonata: a composition which reflects, extends and surpasses canonical forms. The sounds are free to resonate in full variety between us and the space. Receiving them with open ears and eyes, we will realize that we perceive and interpret our world to a very large extent acoustically, probably even more than visually.

Artists: Alphonse Allais, Erik Satie, Erwin Schulhoff, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Francesco Balilla Pratella, Luigi Russolo, Dziga Vertov, Hugo Ball, Raoul Hausmann, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Pierre Schaeffer, Edgard Varèse, Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis, Isodore Isou, Maurice Lemaître, Jean Dubuffet, Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, Pol Bury, Brion Gysin, François Dufrêne, Henri Chopin, Ilse Garnier, Françoise Janicot, Bernard Heidsieck, Mimmo Rotella, Katalin Ladik, Guy Schraenen, François and Bernard Baschet, Yves Tinguely, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Mieko Shiomi, Joe Jones, Robert Filliou, La Monte Young, George Maciunas, Tadeuz Kantor, Walter Marchetti, Juan Hidalgo, José Luis Castillejo, Esther Ferrer, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys, Vladan Radovanović, Józef Robakowski, Chris Burden, Robert Morris, Ulises Carrión, Hanne Darboven, Andy Warhol, Dan Graham, Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon and more.

The collection of artists’ books of the Serralves Museum, curated by Guy Schraenen until his death in 2018, is one of the leading collections in Europe. Represented are all types and tendencies of this art genre, which emerged in the late 1950s when artists invented the concept of the ‘artist’s book’, a new and revolutionary way of dealing with the space of the book and with the diffusion of ideas and works.

On the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, the three-chapter exhibition Game, Set, Match will present major publications by visual artists of all horizons. It will highlight three main investigative fields within the universe of artists’ books: while chapter one deals with the tautological notion of the artist’s book as book, chapter two reflects on the book as an artwork in its own right, equivalent to a painting or a sculpture; chapter three focuses on works that exist at the interface between book and object. Altogether, the presented works are examples of how artists metamorphose the ordinary aspects of the book. Rather than destroying its ideas, they give new life and perspectives to it.

On occasion the opening, Ricardo Nicola, curator of the Museum Serralves, hosted a conversation between João Fernandes, deputy director of the Museum Reina Sofía Madrid and Maike Aden, curator of the exhibition.

The exhibition brings together hundreds of vinyl records, covers, objects and graphic works, created by visual artists as well as by poets and some musicians. The works belong to the internationally most important and most comprehensive collection on Sound Art, the Sound Collection Guy Schraenen, which is part of his Archive for Small Press & Communication, now held by the Centre for Artists’ Publications at the Museum Weserburg Bremen, Germany. The show is divided into various sections that range from the avant-garde movements of the beginning of the 20th century such as Dadaism and Futurism, to sound experiments after 1945 by the Lettrists, Sound Poets, Beat Generation, Fluxus, Zaj, Conceptual Art. Presented are also groups of records by artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys, John Giorno, William Burroughs, Roman Opalka, Hermann Nitsch, Hanne Darboven, Allen Ginsberg, Laurie Anderson, as well as singular works by Yves Klein, Tom Wesselmann or Karel Appel. The relationship between visual arts and rock and pop music is highlighted with the records of the Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground or the Beatles, but also more recent groups such as Kraftwerk, Black Flag or Sonic Youth; artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Franck, Peter Blake or Raymond Pettibon have transformed them into icons.

A listening table, specially designed for this exhibition, allows visitors to access sound samples by almost all works of the collection.

Furthermore is presented a selection of music clips by artists. Chosen are works by visual artists who have found a freedom of creation in this short format which allows them to mix provocations, humour or diversions while echoing our time.

In a specially arranged movie space, the public can also watch the documentary Vinylmania which leads through the fascinating facets of the vinyl record. Enthusiastic collectors, DJs, musicians and artists all over the world can be met. Guy Schraenen speaks about his passion for records and covers by artists.

Curators: Sylvie Zavatta (for the part "Clips by Artists"); Maike Aden (for the part "Sound Collection Guy Schraenen").

Link to the collection:
Sound Collection Guy Schraenen including artist biographies, a glossary and hundreds of sound samples