{"id":27209,"date":"2016-01-12T12:36:05","date_gmt":"2016-01-12T11:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/?p=27209"},"modified":"2016-01-12T12:36:05","modified_gmt":"2016-01-12T11:36:05","slug":"vonna-michell-makes-sound-art-in-tokyo-while-getting-lost-in-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/de\/article\/vonna-michell-makes-sound-art-in-tokyo-while-getting-lost-in-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"Vonna-Michell Makes Sound Art in Tokyo While Getting Lost in Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"size--small\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-27144 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/TVMJanMotdocu22.jpg\" alt=\"TVMJanMotdocu22\" width=\"716\" height=\"538\" \/> Perforations I (Wasteful Illuminations), 2015 inkjet print, three used Japanese telephone cards 54,5 x 109 cm (print) Courtesy the artist and Jan Mot, Brussels<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0In the performance work of Tris Vonna-Michell, stories tend to disappear into their telling. That is, there are narratives (with characters, place-names, dates and times) but the structure of the story is only ever glimpsed at through the artist&#8217;s rapid delivery and idiosyncratic use of language. Sentences are strung together in impossibly long threads that fray and double back on themselves. It is as if, in his excitement to get the story out, the artist was simply unable to get the words and events into a coherent order.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWasteful Illuminations: Distracted Listening\u201d is Tris Vonna-Michell&#8217;s current solo exhibition at Jan Mot gallery in Brussels (Vonna-Michell&#8217;s last solo show at the gallery earned him his 2014 Turner prize nomination). Given the DIY aesthetics and outdated technology, which the artist has favoured in the past, what is most immediately noticeable about \u201cWasteful Illuminations\u201d is how sleek it looks. The setting is clean and minimal &#8211; three cubic aquariums (with plants but no fish), some inkjet prints, a few Japanese phone cards on a printed canvas. Everything is in low light. Unlike most of his previous projects, Vonna-Michell is not physically present here, but he speaks via five speakers, spread out through the two rooms of the gallery.<\/p>\n<p class=\"size--small\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-27142 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/TVM-Wasteful-Illuminations-2015-at-JanMot-7.jpg\" alt=\"TVM-Wasteful-Illuminations-2015-at-JanMot-7\" width=\"716\" height=\"534\" \/> Wasteful Illuminations: Distracted Listening, 2015 mixed media installation consisting of multi-track sound work on four loudspeakers, three aquariums on a shelf, inkjet print and a bench 13 min. 8 sec. (sound), 110 x 35 cm (shelf), 31,5 x 25,4 x 25,4 cm (aquarium, each), 59 cm x 108,3 cm (print) Installation view: Tris Vonna-Michell, Wasteful Illuminations: Distracted Listening, Jan Mot, Brussels 2015-2016 Courtesy the artist and Jan Mot, Brussels<\/p>\n<p>In previous projects like \u201cHahn\/Huhn\u201d (2003 &#8211; 2012) and \u201cFinding Chopin\u201d (2004 -) Vonna-Michell&#8217;s stories, though partly fictionalised and faintly absurd, are still linear narratives (more or less). Here however, the artist seems less interested in the narrative aspect of storytelling than in simply setting the scene. During a recent trip to Japan, Vonna-Michell made a series of audio recordings of Tokyo by night &#8211; &#8220;underpasses, park life, viaducts, benches, beaches, insects, foliage, water fixtures, railway tracks, stations, cubicles, alleyways, shafts, ponds, pleasure domes&#8230;&#8221; These audio recordings are then \u201cvoiced\u201d by the artist &#8211; using both words and cartoony mouth noises to translate the sounds of Japan&#8217;s capital into a beautifully unpretentious comical sound poem. Even so, the feeling of storytelling and autobiography is sill present here via the associative and playful way Vonna-Michell moves from moment to moment. In Susan Sontag&#8217;s 1978 text \u201cUnguided Tour\u201d, the writer attempts to get at something like an aesthetic experience of the mess of memory that attends travel &#8211; where exact moments may be recalled viscerally but the city in which they occurred can be forgotten entirely, or events may reorder themselves with each telling of the story. The artist\u2019s sound poetry obeys the same formal logic as Sontag&#8217;s text, with discrete moments busily colliding and overlapping. Crucially though, for both Sontag and Vonna-Michell the aesthetic is of memories of <em>foreign <\/em>countries, with all the strangeness and impossibility of access that attends being in a place one doesn&#8217;t know. Not the frustration of being an outsider, but the fascination of being a tourist.<\/p>\n<p>In one of the moments from \u201cWasted Illuminations\u201d, the artist attempts to use his mouth to mimic a conversation between Japanese commuters, speaking a language he clearly does not understand. In fact, the effect is not so different than when the artist is rapidly speaking English &#8211; moments of comprehension buried in waves of something else. As the American composer Robert Ashley writes &#8220;Words are important if you understand them (and especially if they are good) but they are not crucial to the musical experience of language.\u201d And Vonna-Michell makes it clear that there is no need to fully understand a story in order to enjoy its telling.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Text by Robin Muybridge<br \/><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Tris Vonna-Michell&#8217;s \u201cWasteful Illuminations: Distracted Listening\u201d is at<a href=\"http:\/\/www.janmot.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"> Jan Mot<\/a>, Brussels, until 30 January 2016<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Mehr: <a title=\"Frances Stark bringt Hip Hop und Oper in L.A. zusammen.\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/de\/print-features\/2016\/01\/frances-stark-brings-hip-hop-and-opera-together-in-l-a\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Frances Stark bringt Hip Hop und Oper in L.A. zusammen.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Mehr: <a title=\"Kunst 2015: unsere Lieblingsausstellungen des Jahres\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/de\/showroom\/2015\/12\/art-2015-our-favourite-shows-of-the-year\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Kunst 2015: unsere Lieblingsausstellungen des Jahres<\/a><\/strong><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Perforations I (Wasteful Illuminations), 2015 inkjet print, three used Japanese telephone cards 54,5 x 109 cm (print) Courtesy the artist and Jan Mot, Brussels \u00a0In the performance work of Tris Vonna-Michell, stories tend to disappear into their telling. That is, there are narratives (with characters, place-names, dates and times) but the structure of the story&#8230;<\/p>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":27141,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11856,139],"tags":[3786,3787,402,3788,1591,3789,3790,3791,3792,1049,3793,3794,3795],"class_list":["post-27209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sleek-art","category-art","tag-brussels","tag-jan-mot","tag-japan","tag-lost-in-translation","tag-poetry","tag-robert-ashley","tag-robin-muybridge","tag-sound-art","tag-susan-sontag","tag-tokyo","tag-tris-vonna-michell","tag-turner-prize-2014","tag-wasteful-illuminations-distracted-listening"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Vonna-Michell Makes Sound Art in Tokyo While Getting Lost in Translation Vonna-Michell Makes Sound Art in Tokyo While Getting Lost in Translation<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/de\/article\/vonna-michell-makes-sound-art-in-tokyo-while-getting-lost-in-translation\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"de_DE\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Vonna-Michell Makes Sound Art in Tokyo While Getting Lost in Translation Vonna-Michell Makes Sound Art in Tokyo While Getting Lost in Translation\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Perforations I (Wasteful Illuminations), 2015 inkjet print, three used Japanese telephone cards 54,5 x 109 cm (print) Courtesy the artist and Jan Mot, Brussels \u00a0In the performance work of Tris Vonna-Michell, stories tend to disappear into their telling. 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