Le beau contrôle

The Beautiful Control

Kulchur Pieces # 8

CR 83. Year 1983

Le beau contrôle Jochen Gerz Cr 83 003 Web

Et quand nous revenions, que nous avons laissé la pluie derrière nous, cette même réverbération nous rattrapait: la pluie, le son de la pluie sur l'eau, le calme intarrissable comme un beau contrôle.

The sound. Like the beating of a gong in a Buddhist temple, he adds the coordinates of time to those of space. Silence becomes audible in the intervals. This is however not the real time of the inconspicuously trickling droplet, nor that of the viewer, but rather an autonomous, abstract, artificial time precisely defined in the studio. Time itself?

Hans Gercke 1984. Translated by e_CR editors

I have always wondered why, when writing about Gerz, Japan or East Asia are mentioned so rarely. Not only the special way of combining text and image, writing and making, reading and seeing has something to do with Far Eastern culture, but also the way he deals with very few and very simple, elementary things, whose presentation must however be extremely precise, and finally also the emphasis on the unity that is revealed in the (apparent) contradictions between things.

Hans Gercke 1984. Translated by e_CR editors

Categories

Installation

40 wooden telephone poles, l = 5 - 6 m, d = 30 - 42 cm, galvanised gutter, l = 4,2 m, water, cassette recorder, cassette, wall text

Water drips from the ceiling into a gutter suspended above a pile of wooden poles stacked up irregularly. The rhythmic sound of the dripping water is amplified. The water falls from the gutter onto the poles and drains off.

Exhibitions

Châlon-sur-Saône 1983. Heidelberg 1984

Bibliography

I: Ludwigshafen 1984, pp. 21, 194-203

II: Feeser 1984. Heybrock 1984, p. 68. Red. 5, 1984. Syring 1984, pp. 166-167. Besson 2, 1985, p. 48. Feeser 1985, pp. 80-82. Pohlen 1985, p. 346. Red. 1, 1985. Wagner 1985, p. 16. Schwarz 1991, pp. 68-69, 71

V: Bischoff 1987, pp. 55-56

Access general bibliography

My name is Jochen Gerz