fuliguline
On a rainy August evening in 1952, a young American pianist walked on stage of the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. He sat down at a piano and opened its lid, raised his hands to its keys, and remained seated in silence for the next four and a half minutes. The aural experience that unfolded over three ‘movements’ – each movement marked by opening and closing the lid – would later become one of the most well-known experimental musical compositions of the twentieth century. 4’ 33” (Four minutes and thirty-three seconds) was a meditation on music, sound and noise; all three propositioned as a continuum and without beginning nor end.
Almost seventy years later, Michael Kutschbach’s fuliguline (2021), a multi-media response to the living collection of Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, reverberates with similar conceptual energy. Over the course of 2020, the South Australian based artist was invited to observe the daily machinations of the orchestra, not just their rehearsals or the talented musicians and conductors themselves but the architectural space they occupied, their box office, audiences, ushers, cleaners – a full body examination. Fittingly, Kutschbach’s methodology revealed just that; Adelaide Symphony Orchestra is a living organism, a phenomena of co-dependency.
As 4’ 33” sprung forth from mid-twentieth century conceptualism, fuliguline, too, reflects its twenty-first century context. Shadowed by the year that was (and, in many ways, still is), the iterative, screen-based work uses slippages of scale within macro photography to create science-fiction-like universes meets undulating interior landscapes, edging on body horror. The cell is the organ is the body is the symphony. 2020 couldn’t have afforded more attention to the virulent potential of our bodies, and our deeply co-dependent natural and constructed systems of living. And, fuliguline materialises aspects of this: the rhizome, the hivemind, the sym within symphony, collective action, anticipation and synchronicity – that universal inhale preceding the first note. Even its title was chosen onomatopoeically, the way the tongue might flick in the mouth of a flautist.
2020 was also a unique year for noise, or lack thereof. The grinding halt of the pandemic – a kind of global 4’ 33” – enabled our scientists the renewed power to hear the ocean, a first since the advent of the industrial revolution.[1] Deep listening is evident in Grace Marlow’s follow my hand, a phonographic response to Kutschbach’s observations. Rather than the strictures of the stave or traditions of musical scoring, the Adelaide-based artist and writer has used transparencies to transcribe the aural life of the orchestra: a dropped pencil, plucked strings, jarring snares, low whispers, unadulterated harmonies, the rhythmic movement of bodies in space. Under Marlow’s dictation, Kustchbach’s slippages in scale become slippages in time. The layering up of semi-permeable membranes produces a map, not just of sound and noise, and possibly even silence, but of simultaneity. Fuliguline and follow my hand together form one moment and every moment, the record of an instant without beginning nor end.
Belinda Howden, 2021
[1] Tamman, M. “Pandemic offers scientists unprecedented chance to ‘hear’ oceans as they once were”, Reuters, June 8, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-climate-research-i-idUSKBN23F1M3
From the Guildhouse online catalogue:
https://guildhouse.org.au/michael-kutschbach-fuliguline/