‘Listening to Adam de la Cour’s Harem’
The swirls, lines and marks become sounds: fingers run over guitar strings producing an audible cord, the visual trace of the conductors baton as it beats out time. Adam de la Cour’s drawings are, in part, the depiction of choreographed movements in space that make a noise, even if it is silence bordered on each side by an audible presence. In De la Cour’s work I stop seeing an arrangement of marks on a page but envisage what these marks and gestures will, or could be, and sound like. They are sounds in my consciousness. Serge Tisseron states in ‘The Spatial Development of the Manuscript’ that “the earliest drawings are not guided by a visual exploration of space but by an exploration of movement.”i The drawings in Harem are not visual but an exploration of gestures, a score of unfixed choreographed movements that make sounds.
Recently I met someone who only listened to music live which caused me to reflect on my own appreciation of music, one that is mediated through a storage device, an object. My Ipod contains an expansive space, and this space never escapes its container, even when it is played, because when I plug in my headphones I go inside the sound box and noise happens around me in its own generated landscape; I exist within the sound-scape, within the objects space. This internalisation and immersion of listening is in opposition to drawing and live music in which the movement is inseparable from the sound/mark. When looking at a trace I recreates its making. Tisseron states that “[i]n writing as in drawing, the “thrown-out” gesture conjures a trace, a line. This “line,” which seems tied to his movement, is used by the inscriber to pull back that thought that has been cast out in the act of inscription.”ii In drawing, the casting out of thoughts allows for the creator/thinker to think another thought, it allows for time (the succession of thoughts) itself to progress.iii Seeing drawing enables a belief that the past thoughts/moments can be recaptured.
Adam de la Cour’s paper based works contain parts of Manga comics removed from their original narrative. Reading them I see onomatopoeia, a crash, a smack. De la Cour says that “Manga are noisy” iv he listens to them through seeing. In Japan they read from right to left. I raise my hand and move it across an imaginary page in order to comprehend that way of reading. De la Cour states (in reference to the performance of his drawings) that “the narrative […] was originally designed for right to left/top to bottom reading (as in traditional Manga) it can be approached in any way the performer wishes, even in page order.”v When we fragment frames of a comic and re-contextualise them, they still have a narrative quality attached to them. They are part of a great whole. They have a next and a before. The re-contextualised frame causes the other drawings around it into part of the progression.
How the musician/conductor interpret the musical score changes, fashions and trends occur in this subjective annunciation of signs and shared codes on the page. The performance is a one off, not truly replicatable. When the drawings/scores are performed (another author producing their own response to what they see/read) the mark/sound is again cast out onto the space/page. The making and the mark/sound are reunited.
P. 33 Tisseron, Serge, ‘All Writing Is Drawing: The Spatial Development of the Manuscript.’ In Boundaries: Writing and Drawing, Yale French Studies No. 84, (Yale University, New Haven, 1994,) p. 33
Op cit p. 36
In reference to discussion with D. Gamez on his book What We Can Never Know: Blind spots in Philosophy and Science, (London, Continuum 2007)
Adam de la Cour, ‘Harem: The Object as Score’ supporting text accompanying exhibition Harem, (C4RD, London 2007)
Adam de la Cour, supporting text
