[ artistic practice as metaphorical sculpture ]
«when you start you have just this one project — the very first hunch about what you think you’re interested in. When you do more works the body of work becomes a kind of critical mass»
British classical violinist Charlie Siem joins this interview from a wood paneled study in London, England, where he has returned to see family amidst a program of performances. Meanwhile, Dutch architect Anne Holtrop – «the boy who didn’t want to be an architect» – joins from his four-by-four as he off-roads on the way to his studio in Muharraq, Bahrain. From these disparate settings, they discuss the working relationship between musician and instrument, architect and material – with Siem poetically likening artistic practice to a metaphorical sculpture the artist has a sense of duty to refine, polish and chip away at.
The two practitioners find common ground in their respective relationships to instrument and material, which are represented throughout as «acutely sensitive and deeply responsive». Never static, these relationships speak of French essayist Roland Barthes’ Material Gestures – the title affectionately chosen by Holtrop for his studio group at ETH Zurich, where he teaches as an associate professor.
Defined as the movements that communicate or express an idea, sentiment, feeling or instruction, American artist Richard Serra’s VERB LIST presents a beautiful summary of the material gestures, manipulations even, that can be applied to matter: to crease / to fold / to bend / to twist / to tear / to chip / to split / to cut / to splash / to knot / to flow / to curve / to rotate and so on. In conversation, Siem and Holtrop explore these gestures as they relate to their individual practices. From the awkward asymmetry of playing the violin and the imprints left behind by the previous owners of Siem’s historic 1735 Guarneri del Gesù violin (which was once owned by the King of Prussia), to the time demanded for the casting of concrete, gypsum, aluminium and glass and the days, even weeks, during which the materials employed by Holtrop assume a fluid form, appropriating the molds or surrounding landscape in which they are cast.
Charlie Siem
Anne Holtrop
[ to refine, polish and chip away at ]
AH 02
CHARLIE SIEM The role of the instrument is that you lose the physicality and become one with the object to channel the music through. The violin is a particularly awkward instrument in the sense that you’re very one-sided. There’s a lack of symmetry that you have with a piano or cello. It’s coming out of your neck, so there are many challenges to make it organic, to make it physically part of you. It almost grows out of your voice box, imitating the human voice through this mechanism of metal strings, horsehair bow and the technique of holding the strings down with the left hand and using the bow speed and the pressure of the bow hairs to make the sound resonate through the box of the violin.
ANNE HOLTROP A good friend of mine plays the viola so I recognize how this instrument is attached awkwardly on one side of the body, which I find to be beautiful in your description.
As an architect, I employ materials that change their state of matter: that are fluid, that set and harden or that can be melted and, from their solid form, become fluid. Gypsum is a material that is very easy to cast and sets quickly, whereas with glass it may take weeks to cool down. It really demands the element of time in its transitional phase, and we can use this time in the way we form things. I don’t like things that appear static or were never somehow informed, or formed, by time. They seem kind of conceptual or abstract. I like the opposite. I like that we can see the traces and gestures in the materiality as a record of time.
When casting materials you need something to form them in. Not only the material itself, but that which it appropriates its form from. I work with the conditions of a site, casting concrete directly on site so that you’ll see these imprints of the soil and the sand that is present there in the building. The site is not fixed or stable, it is constantly changing – casting is a record of that. I like that the surface is touched. It’s changed, it’s influenced. There is a crudeness to it.
CHARLIE SIEM Over the last three hundred to four hundred years, the violin has had this tradition of great violin makers who have made instruments that have then gone on these long journeys through changing world orders, the instruments themselves almost more fascinating than the players. There’s this connection between a violinist and his or her instrument, because – as I was saying before – on the one hand you want to be at one with the mechanical tool, to absorb it into your physicality, but on the other you are tapping into something that is much older than you.
A violin is an inanimate wooden box. But it’s also not, because what happens when you play an instrument for a number of years is that you infuse your identity, your particular way of playing, into the fibers of the body of the instrument. The ghost of a player is left in the grain of the wood as a result of how much pressure they put on the strings, the particular way they vibrate the strings, and how that emanates throughout the body of the instrument. Every player – if they play the instrument for long enough – leaves an imprint. So, when you play the violin, you have this great challenge of also reckoning with the many players before you. I play a violin that is almost three-hundred years old and very many grand names have played the instrument before me, so I have to somehow collaborate with these energies and then master my own way of playing the instrument. It’s not scientific, it’s energetic. The instrument has its own way of responding and it might not listen to me. It still doesn’t at times. There are times when it just closes up and, whatever I do, it just doesn’t want to release the sound. It really is a dance between me and the instrument. It’s not just an object that I can pick up and use, it’s acutely sensitive and deeply responsive. I could say that it’s the climate, humidity, temperature – these more scientific and physical elements – but actually it’s more than that. There would be completely no reason why it should be at times closed, at times open, or that at times a voice should emerge that comes from somewhere unidentifiable.
ANNE HOLTROP Before material I am mostly concerned with space. To be able to construct space, you need to be able to materialize.
You need to construct walls, floors, et cetera, to build up the condition of the space. The materiality informs the way space can be constructed, in the sense that the material is not innocent. It has its own characteristics, the way it behaves, the way it forms, and why not take that as a driving force? At my studio, we are more like a laboratory for material experiments and investigations. That someone else actually builds for you, is a very big difference from the artist because, most of the time, the artist has a more direct involvement in the construction of the work. The problem with posing these kinds of questions of experimentation directly to a contractor is that they get worried, upset even. To be able to have already found a lot of solutions and answers to technicalities – as well as the poetics – in my own studio means we are much better at communicating with producers and contractors. Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida wrote about how he considered space in a way very fast moving matter, and matter in a way slow moving space. I think it is beautiful how he put the two, in their material aspect, together.
CHARLIE SIEM The daily practice of playing the violin structures my life, it gives me a sense of integral purpose. Even if I’m not performing, the relationship I have with the violin day-to-day gives a sense of discipline. From playing scales to Bach or Paganini, it is a balancing process that I would find very difficult to live without. I visualize it in my mind as a metaphorical sculpture to which
I have a sense of duty to refine, polish and chip away at. If I neglect this process there will be a big void – it’s more than meditative, it’s deeply structural.
ANNE HOLTROP Everyday you could consider your life to be different. As I said, my studio is like a laboratory so it makes a lot of sounds and noises all day long. It’s not a technical intent, per se. It’s much more immersive in the sense of physicality, the bodily relationship to material and the construction of space. To endlessly reengage with or redo the same thing, it brings richer experiences forward. Other life matters beg it not – I have family, I have weekends, I have teaching obligations – if I could choose, I would be in my studio everyday.
I like that I relocated to Bahrain, in the sense that I like to be in an arid environment as the materiality is so present. There is no vegetation covering it, which sounds for most people like the most horrifying thing, but
I like bare rocks and sand because these are materials that we can directly build with.
I find it appealing, the relationship between this reservoir of material that we can see in the landscape and that it is just a different arrangement of it that makes a building.
The light is also blazingly strong here. It brings out matter and space in beautiful ways. If I was to go back to the Netherlands now, I would be better able to work with the light. There, we would always complain about the absence of light – that becomes the preoccupation. Here, I would always open the curtains and tell my wife, «Look, it's sunny today». After a year, I figured that is the daily condition.
CHARLIE SIEM I started my career with a very open-mind, which has lead to all kinds of unusual performances and experiences I hadn’t necessarily imagined. It’s the life of a nomad. You don’t know where you’re going to be invited. You don’t know what direction your career is going to take. Every year is a bit different, I travel to new places, play different repertoires, work with different people – not just musicians, but dancers, photographers and filmmakers. It’s a playful and childlike existence that I’ve lived.
The first major concert that I played was in in Rio when I was fifteen. I played the Bruch violin concerto and it was the first time that I was invited to play in a professional, public concert, with a full orchestra behind me.
It was so different to what I was used to and had studied here in London. There was such an energetic warmth from the audience, from the conductor, from the musicians. Whenever I have gone back to South America I have had that sense of responsiveness from the audience. I went to play Brahms violin concerto in Monterey. It was an outdoor concert for ten thousand people in a square. There were all these people listening in thirty degree heat humidity – not at all an ideal performance environment – but there was this palpable human warmth that was so inspiring.
I also went to Cuba to play with The Royal Ballet in Havana at the invitation of a ballet dancer who had choreographed a piece for a solo violinist and three ballet dancers – again, people would go to the ballet and be mesmerized. There was this absolute chemistry.
ANNE HOLTROP My start has become a well known story of the boy who didn’t want to be an architect. I wanted to be an artist, but I ended up in engineering school. I studied building engineering and then I studied architecture. After I finished my studies I thought,
I am free, I can do what I want now finally. I started working for an artist, Krijn de Koning, who I worked five or six years for. It was like finally ending up at my goal, but also quite a reality check, of course – my idealized notion of what an artist is, and then what the artist is. There were a lot of things I learned, but one thing that really helped me to start my own practice was that I didn’t need a commission, a client. I could just start. The drive could just come from myself and I could just explore what I thought architecture could be about. That was one of the biggest gifts that the artist gave me.
There is always a level of dependence.
You need to be able to make a living, but it should never be the driving force. I believe more in my own intrinsic forces. The better that I am able to formulate these, to express these, the more precise the engagement with the client will be. I cannot ask a client at the start of a project: «Please, tell me exactly what you want». That wouldn’t work, and the client would also never be happy. It’s easier when you have already started, because you can always show something you have done before, but then what you have done before must be something that you really believe in, not something you just did because you saw that at the time the client was excited about it. You should follow your own beliefs and try to define them as precisely as possible with whatever means you have.
That is the best way to have a relationship with anyone outside of yourself and therefore create a certain independence from a client. I am not completely dependent on this person – and I can have a better mutual relationship with a client because of this.
CHARLIE SIEM With the violin, there’s a set repertoire and certain concert series are artistic directed, so they’re going to want these key pieces from the canon. If they say: «We want Mozart», I might not have thought about playing the Mozart concerto for years and then actually that is an opportunity for me to rework my interpretation of the Mozart concerto – or whoever it might be – and go on stage and deliver it. There’s Mendelssohn, Bach, Brahms, Beethoven violin concerto programs and if I’m invited to play one of these standard pieces,
I’m always going to say yes, because it’s a challenge to play these pieces as a solo violinist. They’re works of genius and there’s a heroic element to going on stage and performing a Tchaikovsky or Sibelius violin concerto. That being said – programming and deciding what to play also comes from a personal place of where I am at with myself as a human being in that particular moment.
ANNE HOLTROP There’s not a singular work. It’s all about how the total work builds up. When you start, you have just this one project – the very first hunch about what you think you’re interested in. When you do more works, the body of work becomes a kind of critical mass. It becomes a way to criticize what you are doing at that moment. You don’t want to do the same thing either, so you try to escape that weight. It is this kind of entanglement with the previous work. We recently took out our previous work, all the models out of their boxes, crates and storage space, and we opened them up again so that we could revisit them, see them, and have them present. This is also why I think the work is independent from a commission, independent from a client. Of course the work addresses things – from the wishes of the client to the agendas we are interested in exploring – but the work also depends on its own existence.