Yes, the sculpture is singing to you
It’s probably the strangest musical you’ll see or hear this summer.
Something deliberately unsettling is going on with “Early Awnings,” a weirdly Arcadian installation at the Blaffer Art Museum by German artist Henning Bohl and his collaborator Sergei Tcherepnin, who lives in New York.
While it has no live actors, a chorus of unseen, eerie voices emanates from a set that might make you squirm, as if you’ve stepped into a video game whose rules aren’t clear.
It’s partly the color palette.
The seven metal awnings of the title hang like artifacts plucked from a medieval cottage and are painted in muted turquoise, green or brown. Drawings made in black on gratingly yellow paper line the walls underneath the awnings, each one a scene in some mysterious, abstract graphic novel. On the moss-green wall-towall carpeting, suggesting a minimalist’s courtyard, sits a bistro table topped with a watering can containing a bouquet of outrageously oversize red “flowers” inspired by alphorns, wooden instruments from Europe’s alpine regions.
Bohl said he’s treated the entire space as a painting. He painted the “flowers” red because that’s what the composition seemed to need. It’s also, like the yellow paper, a “signal” color, “like a firetruck,” he said.
It all comes together in an unexpected way — sonically. A gothic-baroque-folk score of nine songs by the artists plays through the flowers, while interludes emanate from the awnings.
Bohl said awnings sparked the show. “I saw them on houses and thought they were beautiful. They signify a house but also are detached — such weird, in-between objects. And in a gallery, they’re totally arbitrary; they have no function at all,” he explained. “Then I had the idea to use them as voices because they are so theatrical. I started to think of them as characters.”
The 43 drawings of Bohl’s series “Kadath Fatal” evolved from his fascination with cone shapes that previously manifested as delicate mixed-media sculptures.
In Germany on the first day of school, children receive paper cones to mark “the transition into institutional education and a world they basically stay in for the rest of their lives,” Bohl said. The shapes also reflect the tall, spiky cornets worn by medieval maidens. He adopted them like self-portraits after a friend told him the hats were called “hennens” — “which is like my name but without the g,” he said.
“These things come up, and I really like to embrace them. I always like it when I lose control of aspects of my work, when it gets so many layers of meaning it’s beyond what I can see.”
In this installation, the shapes he’s drawn appear to fly through space or float above surreal islands of “Cubist cheese,” as Bohl said, on their yellow backgrounds. The drawings read like strips of graphic literature, inspired by the illustrated cosmic-horror novels of HP Lovecraft. They project a keen sense of terror, estrangement and fear.
Bohl also looked to Aubrey Beardsley’s “The Yellow Book,” whose creepy illustrations he has loved since he was 15. “I like how there are different moods in one picture. The action is very light, but he depicts it as very dramatic,” Bohl said.
His own drawings — like the music— are repetitive, slightly manic and mysterious, leaving viewers to develop their own narratives.
Some of the songs have lyrics but are still abstract, Bohl said, “and we tried to layer them so much that it’s not like you’re following a text. It’s more like putting words into the space to see how they resonate and change what you see.”
During recording sessions that began last year in Florence, Italy, the artists “played” the metal awnings like instruments, adding guitar, harpsichord, serge modular synthesizer and keyboard to the mix. Then Tcherepnin “spatialized” the harpsichord, assigning different notes to the awnings.
“It’s as if the room becomes an instrument, as if the awnings are part of one harpsichord that circulates,” he said.
The score lasts about an hour, running in a loop with no clear beginning or end. “Somebody who really loves it might sit on the carpet and stay. But we also made it so that if you stay for 12 minutes you get a little bit of every type of music we’ve got there,” Tcherepnin said.
Bohl said the drawings function the same way. “If you just walk past them, they’re like a film, but you can also approach each drawing in a very detailed way.”
Blaffer director Claudia Schmuckli, who commissioned “Early Awnings,” loves the multilayered experience Bohl and Tcherepnin have created by combining sound and two- and three-dimensional objects. The full-room installation “becomes a platform for story telling,” she said.
She’s planning public programs that will include an original play by adjunct professor Dana Kroos, to be performed within the space in early September.