Making of Conical Intersect - Gordon Matta-Clark
Splitting - Gordon Matta-Clark
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Pierluigi BILLONE - Mani.Matta (for Marimba, Log Drums, Woodblock and Opera Gong)
In my first lesson as a student in Germany, my teacher Bernhard Wulff told me that the basic objective of art was the transformation of non-precious materials into precious materials. Thus, alchemy. In Mani.Matta, Pierluigi Billone pays homage to the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978), whose work often blurred the line between vandalism and art. Matta-Clark, the son of two artists, Anne Clark and the Chilean Surrealist, Roberto Matta, was a trained architect who used his expertise to produce artistic works he termed “Anarchitecture.” Works such as Conical Intersect and Office Baroque entailed cutting massive holes into buildings slated for demolition. In Splitting, Matta-Clark used a chainsaw to cut a narrow slit down the middle of a typical suburban home in the United States. While the cutting up of buildings is commonly considered to be a destructive activity, Matta-Clark’s work shifts the paradigm: he does not destroy or vandalize. Rather, in the tradition of alchemists and the practitioners of détournement, he transforms these buildings and makes art. Similarly, one could describe Pierluigi Billone as a sonic alchemist. When listening to virtually any of his pieces, one discovers sounds hidden within objects that truly seem to be the work of a magician. What at first appears destructive is simply a crucial step in his transformation of a sounding object. Mani.Matta is Billone’s attempt to re-examine a well-known percussion instrument: the marimba. In Billone’s conception, the marimba is not a wooden-textured piano (as it is so often employed), but rather simply a sonic object that is to be critically investigated. The question of the instrumentation (the lowest three octaves of the marimba and bass log drums) had left me curious for a long time until I became familiar with Matta-Clark’s work. The tongues cut into log drums and the tiny spaces between marimba bars recall the narrow slit seen in Splitting. The terracing of the log drum and woodblock “staircase” is its own form of architecture. The violent, tumultuous horizontal and vertical glissandi across all of the instruments connote violence and perhaps nihilism. However, destruction is not the objective – just as Matta-Clark revealed new ways to view old buildings, Billone reveals the hidden voices trapped in this wooden behemoth. Paracelsus lives. Jonathan Hepfer, 2013 |