Preface by Martin Hochleitner

This publication accompanies an exhibition by Siegrun Appelt at the Landesgalerie am Österreichischen Landesmuseum in Linz. The starting point for the whole project was the novel Moderato cantabile by the French author Marguerite Duras, which appeared in 1959 and is about love, death and memory: “A city at the sea, somewhere. A woman, Anne Desbaresdes, attends her son at a piano lesson. Screams from the street. A man has shot a woman in the café below. People say she asked him for it. Anne goes into the café. In the days that follow, she returns to it time and again and speaks to a stranger about the murder, about the two, and what had led to it. The border between the destiny of the strangers and their own begins to blur. Her relationship to the stranger now threatens to replicate the relationship between the murdered and her murderer.”

Siegrun Appelt gave the novel to several people in her own surroundings, re-questing them to read it. They were nine in all: a composer, a curator, an actor, an architect, a costume designer, three artists and a publicist. Handing over the reading material started a process of communication in which Appelt asked every reader for an exact description of both the central venues in the novel, more precisely, of the music room and the café. Each of these conversations documented on video by the artist was so detailed that not just the architecture, spatial conditions and furniture, but also the lighting and atmosphere, were treated.

At the exhibition, the taped material of these conversations became the basis for a whole project of a visual reconstruction, that is, of Appelt’s visualization of the readers’ imagination. With the help of the computer, in a way similar to the making of photo-fit images, she combined the abundance of descriptive information into a complete picture. Video projections at the Landesgalerie show us visualizations of these rooms. An idea of this form of work is conveyed by corresponding illustrations in this catalogue.

What makes the Moderato cantabile project most remarkable is the fact that Appelt uses a literary model to bring together with great precision numerous basic tendencies in art today. Apart from the project’s process-orientated structure, complex communication and research procedures, differentiated forms of expression and installation as binding force in an exhibition situation, it is primarily Appelt’s approach to a concept of model that moves between image and reality. Decisive for this work, conceived in 2001 is the visual realization of the imaginary world of others. Appelt thus covers a transitory “in-between” (Stephan Berg) state of construction and reconstruction: She acts ceaselessly in the most varying roles of authorship and bridges the fine nuances between described and constructed, or researched and reconstructed space. In other words: What makes each image most exciting is the switching between the reader’s mental image, the effect of the situations described by Marguerite Duras and Appelt’s structured visualizations of space.

Even as model, Siegrun Appelt’s Moderato cantabile project proves to be an artistic parallel to Plato’s simile of the cave. Plato tells this story in a conversation between Socrates and Glaucon about an area of sensuality and the spiritual world in order to describe the difference between appearance (Schein) and being (Sein). Appelt’s method can be easily linked with the conditions outlined by Plato for the perception of being, the self, and idea – particularly in terms of the relation between recollection and perception. In addition, she also addresses in her project conceived by her as an artistic process the three most important questions in philosophy. Taking as her theme the conditions for the possibility of experiencing in the non-self (group of readers) as well as in the self (artistic realization), she also treats the conditions for the possibility of experience (effect of the literary original). What the history of philosophy sees as the philosophy of being, the philosophy of self and the philosophy of the spirit/mind, the three main concepts of philosophia perennis, form an interesting notion of reception in a project that was only possible with the cooperation of several people.

The Landesgalerie would here like to thank all those who participated in the project: Siegrun Appelt’s conversation partners, the authors of this book; Gerold Tagwerker for the exhibition architecture; Ivo Apollonio for the virtual visualization; Beat Furrer for lending a passage from his opera, Invocation, dedicated to this project.

My special thanks go to Siegrun Appelt for giving me the opportunity to ac-company her for many months as she made her idea concrete, and for showing it now at the Landesgalerie.

>link: Landesgalerie Linz

An Architectural Reading
Marguerite Duras’ Moderato cantabile as a test case of imagination
Vanessa Joan Müller

Filmic space is a special space: Though always fragmented, it is full of different atmospheres and emotional dispositions. What the camera sees becomes a membrane for the feelings of those who are inside the space, those who live in it and traverse it. The mise-en-scène, which is not just the spatial setting for a film but also a complex interaction between location, shot, object and movement, is therefore both concrete as well as charged with connotative implications since every detail in it represents something else. Furniture, pictures, windows, whether shut or with a view, are not just themselves but also semioticized surfaces which mirror the invisible inner worlds of the inhabitants.

In Marguerite Duras’ films there is often a conflicting juxtaposition between the places and the people who are supposed to be at home in them. While the camera shows houses, villas and their grounds, the soundtrack insistently speaks of another, invisible place which, though nearby, seems to be unreachably distant. This disjunction between the visual image and the sound image, visible space and the space of voices, represents the desire for an elsewhere. This is where the contradiction between being and wanting is negated by the metaphor of a flowing space that constantly renews itself and erases the past. The fact that this, in reality imaginary, place is usually maritime, a place at the sea, urges a reading of Duras’ spaces that is deeper than that of the things themselves.1

Gilles Deleuze has repeatedly pointed out the many meanings of the house in Duras’ films. According to Deleuze, the theme of the house is important for the film “not simply because women ‘inhabit’ the house in every sense, but because passions ‘inhabit’ women.”2 The house depicts the body of emotional composure from which the women wish to rid themselves. The female protagonists in Duras’ films are therefore constantly on the run, away from themselves and from the environment that is their social milieu. They leave their houses and find other, more anonymous, places like bars and cafés in which, though they are strangers, they are closer to themselves. Nathalie Granger or Vera Baxter are women who break away from conventions and search for places without a past, places where they can forget themselves. “The house grounds undoubtedly already had most of the properties of any-space-whatever, the voids and the disconnections. But the house had to be left, abolished, so that the any-space-whatever could only be constructed in flight, at the same time as the speech-act had to ‘get out and away’.”3

Marguerite Duras’ novel Moderato cantible was not filmed by Duras herself but by Peter Brook.4 Nevertheless, his film, too, fits well in this scenario that is based on the power of the house built on fear and desire, coming and go-ing: This contradiction between temperance and passion is expressed in Diabelli’s piano sonata moderato cantabile that Anne Desbardes’ son practices again and again. Her going into the café at the harbor is like leaving a domestic order, which is a continuation of her own middle class existence. However, even inside the café this “getting out and away” only finds a place of transition for that inner flight, which is no longer definable in territorial terms.

Marguerite Duras found her own auctorial style of narration in Moderato cantabile: without an omnipotent narrator, without psychological explanations for the actions of the characters, and open to the reader’s imagination. A crime at the harbor, a sonata that sums up existential contradictions in a musical motif and then the sudden desire of the woman to end the life she had led thus far. Peter Brook uses the novel’s open structure to fill it with his own interpretations by inventing new places and modifying the plot. The characters of the book find their perfect equivalents in Jeanne Moreau and Jean Paul Belmondo who until today influence our reading of the book.

Siegrun Appelt’s project, however, ignores the existing film and takes the novel as the basis for a new setting that emerges from a rescription of the text. Central to it are the venues of the book: the café at the harbor (also a maritime place) and the room where Anne Desbaresdes’ son receives piano lessons. The eloquent blurriness underlying this very polyphonic novel leaves open every concrete definition of the spaces. The various “readers” involved in Appelt’s project are thus confronted with the task of making these spaces visually comprehensible in several stages. In this way, they become the architects of an abstract “filmic” scenario depicted by their reading material (Lektüre).

Lending concrete form the mental images that emerge in the course of reading, however, also means deciding for one particular form of interpretation or reading and occasionally dismissing the text’s semantic openness. Reading the book is by no means a linear retracing of its author’s intentions but rather an interpretative appropriation of the text, which produces a different text in the mind of each reader. Moreover, Duras’ novel almost entirely delegates to the reader the task of defining the spaces, which are more psychological than concrete. What the interiors look like remains secondary since it is primarily about metaphorical constructions for social class, plans of life and psychological states. However, both the film and the “readers” in Siegrun Appelt’s project have to visualize these metaphors and decide on one concrete room, furnish it, illuminate it and imbue it with atmosphere.

The computer-generated rooms in which these imaginary venues of the novel become manifest are deserted and exude a distanced artificiality typical of such additive constructions. Like virtual places, they present themselves as architectural test arrangements, including the possibility of constant change.

But despite their distanced foreignness they make it clear that the viewer must fill the scene with his own imagination, since the original “reader’s” imagination has visibly suffered in the processes of transformation from text to verbal articulation, to drawing and finally to virtual architecture. Precisely this ostensible deficit – the clear impossibility of convincingly representing a reading experience based on a compound of personal and collective experiences – reveals the basic discrepancy between one’s own power of imagination and its inter-subjective communication. Even memory increasingly changes as it finds concrete form: In the interviews, the participants describe various aspects of the music room and the café, which entirely disappear or appear only in a completely altered form in the computer-generated rooms. These rooms have undergone so many transformations that they now resemble the “empty” spaces so characteristic of modern cinema and lend the (cinematographic) image an almost “archaeological” or “stratigraphic” quality, as Deleuze calls it:

An empty space without characters (or in which the characters themselves show the void) has a fullness in which there is nothing missing. Disconnected, unlinked fragments of space are the objects of a specific re-linkage over the gap: The absence of match is only the appearance of a linking-up which can take place in an infinite number of ways. In this sense, the archaeological or the stratigraphical, image is real at the same time as it is seen. Noël Burch put it very well when he said that, when images cease to be linked together ‘naturally’ […] it is as if the shots are themselves ‘turning’ or ‘turning around’, and grasping them ‘requires considerable effort of the memory and imagination, in other words, a reading.5

Whereas reading a book is rather like writing a screenplay for a dream than for a conventional film, the film gives the director’s reading an absolute form. However, though things in the film are always more than themselves and the viewer only notices discontinuous parts of the space, there still is room for a subjective adaptation of what is seen. Siegrun Appelt’s installation presents the space between the “real” images and those bordering on them produced by each respective imagination, the reading, in the form of abstractly arranged virtual spaces and recapitulated memory. We move between clearly constructed, empty paths and listen to the voices of those trying to give form to their inner images. In the absence of the novel’s characters, who lend these spaces a psychological dimension, lies that “void” which animates the viewer to compensate for those absent.

In her photographs and films, Siegrun Appelt often relies on this power of visually reconstructing reality in the act of viewing. Her various train videos, for instance, provide the viewer abstract sensory data which must first be counterbalance with his own visual experiences before a recognizable image can emerge. Even her photographs, which focus on a few details of hotel rooms, provide fragmentary images that only become complete when the viewer’s memory of similar rooms is activated. Seeing, recognizing and remembering enter a complex dialogue making us subtly aware of the complexity of our perception of the “world” and its fictive doubles, of how the actual image of it overlaps with our own, virtual, image and how the initial description is doubled, begins anew and, indeed, even contradicts itself.

1 See Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image. Cinema 2, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 257-58.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Moderato Cantabile, France 1960, directed by Peter Brook, screenplay by Marguerite Duras and Gérard Jarlot
5 Op. Cit, Deleuze, quoting Noël Burch, pp. 244-45f.

Moderato cantabile in Linz. Stratigrafical Remarks
Bernhard Kellner

A room consisting only of thresholds – five projection screens, nine monitors and loudspeakers, nine seats with built in listening stations. Siegrun Appelt’s Moderato cantabile does not appear to require a lot of technology. Music rooms and harbor cafés flicker on the projection screens (2.15 x 3.80 m) – pictures like held breath. Taken from a novel and woken to new life through human memory and technical machinery and communicatively arranged, the pictures appear to be involved in a conversation. New picture constellations are generated continuously by means of extreme slow motion down and asynchronous crossfades. These make relative or intensify each other and highlight similarities or differences. The nine monitors at first convey only a calm, concentrated babble of voices; the project participants describe their individual experiences of a room. Single words or fragments of sentences come to the fore, with each step you come into the receptive area of the next informative detail, which modifies the impression of the whole. On looking more closely, the most varied memory techniques, trains of thought and production processes disclose themselves as the speakers search their cerebral thought paths for harbor cafés and music rooms. Resonance or dissonance results from the interplay of what is seen and heard.
The nine wooden cubes with space for two people to sit in are an invitation to an approach to reception, which is both relaxed and, to the same extent, like a dialogue. With headphones the sound scenery can be cut out and a recording of Beat Furrer’s opera Invocation, also inspired by Moderato cantabile, puts what is seen into the context of sound.

The heterogeneous elements of the exhibition work through the observer. In linking himself to what is happening he becomes an active part of Siegrun Appelt’s composition plan. The autopoietic effect of the arrangement begins to be felt; the circulation continues. Now it is no longer the locations from Marguerite Duras’ novel which provide a fleeting model for wild re/construction processes, now it is the exhibition itself.

Spatial overlaps, stratified time – what kinds of events have an effect in this spatial composition? To what extent can individual layers be isolated and sep-arately described? From what does the momentum that runs through the various levels of consistency and which triggers the perceptible intensifica-tion of time perception take its nourishment? The attempt to describe this exhibition takes a stratigraphical approach, a free-association examination of some overlapping formations.

Layers of the past breathe in the field of tension between the projected pictures and the video interviews: The time in which Marguerite Duras wrote the novel, the time of the story told – of the murder, its obsessive reconstruction, of the ocean which gives the text its rhythm... -; the time of the reading process and its selective visualization and so on and so forth. Each layer is consistent with its own formal specifications and each has a specific distribution of coherence, fragility and permeability. There is a repeated surprising liquefaction, confusion: “Confusion connects, multiplies, brings together, it does not dissolve and it does not divide, it allows what is not analyzed to flow together: That is time. [...] I have long imagined time as a node or distributor or a confluence or more times which can all be grasped in a spatial scheme.”1

The plunge into cultural memory – Paris in the late 50s. A new generation of writers takes the stage. What connects them is their basic distrust of traditional forms of narration. Language is freed from every ornament and aims at a describing things, the things that a person sees and the variable configurations in which they appear, without the tendency of relying on metaphors. The omniscient narrator is annulled, the contract between writer and reader reformulated: The two become allies in the reconstruction of states of con-sciousness and subjective experience of time in the space-time universe of the text; gaps in the narrative simultaneously mark gaps in time consciousness. In this sphere of the “nouveau roman”, Duras’ novel also emerges by way of the successive identification of the heroine with a crime which she witnessed by chance; the story of the step by step transfer of an outer event into lived experience. Siegrun Appelt singled out this book from the totality of cultural treasures retained in traditional stored knowledge. She isolates two settings and their field of connotations, exposes them to continuing transformations and finally releases them into present time as self-acting ghosts.

Mnemonics – Padua, 1592: In his Plutosofia, Filippo Gesualdo Minor summarized the achievements of two thousand years of mnemonics. The undertaking to wrest memory from its unavoidable fate of dissolution goes back to the sixth century BC, to the poet Simonides of Keos. Mnemonics questions the conditions of memory and develops techniques to “recall things which are at a distance from our senses in space and time through lively and clear images”.2 Gesualdo defined location as the fixed medium of images and the image or the idea as its supporting columns. The images/ideas are reenactments, fleeting simulacrums that must be connected to location and domesticated in order to be able to appear clearly and distinctly. To this purpose he suggests a 17 point catalogue which ranges from the fixing of location in what is known via proportions, and lighting as far as the handling of similar and distinguishing characteristics. For the French poet and mathematician, Jacques Roubaud, who brought Plutosofia up to date for his book Poetry and Memory, mnemonics is not only the motor of poetry but primarily the beginning of translation work: “The principle of the constitution of images is translation, a ordered and systematic translation of the totality of things and events in the world into visual phenomena. Mnemonics is, above all, the art of seeing.”3

The project participants step into this territory when they outline “their” settings in different ways. Some begin systematically with a sketch of the ground plan, others begin with details and successively include the surrounding room, and some seem to read the outline from the inside of their eyelids. To what extent the train of thoughts really relate to a previous image in the moment that they happen remains open: “To visualize: Does that mean imagine again? The same thing once again? Or is it something completely different to a re-activation of the first encounter? A reconstruction? And how does a reconstruction distinguish itself from an imaginary or even a freely invented construction, which, in end effect, is fiction?”4

Gaps, intervals – “Whether I think there are two windows?” asks one project participant. “It’s a bit gloomy. Therefore I abandon the two windows. So let’s just have one window here.” Like lightning he came to a decision from out of the image-less intermediary layer, the sphere of the Gründungsvergessens. This elementary improvisation takes place: Negotiating the gap, jumping over the side of the moment which has no memories, which releases something akin to pure potential. The judicious use of forgetfulness characterizes all memory work. And the productive and communicative moment of the visualization processes collected in Moderato cantabile seems to lie in the empty spaces, the intervals, the zones beyond aesthetic control. Siegrun Appelt includes in her ensemble the currents of energy which emanate from the black holes in time consciousness. The breeze which blows around the elements in this exhibition, including the observer, and which still carries a scent of the Atlantic coast, comes from the pressure differences between layering and gap, the visible and the invisible, narration and blank space.

The digital leap. – Reading the novel, visualization technique, spatial composition: They all strive towards the point of digital conversion. With the numerical homogenization of the “inner” images the artist gives back to the cultural memory the borrowed material upon which she has imprinted the stamp of her freedom. For its part, memory technology takes liberties: Wherever the imaginations of the project participants may be able to reach, pixels are already there, the storage medium brings its own rules and perceptions into play. “Despite all handed-down tradition, experience with electronic mem-ories forces us to recognise the acquisition, storage, processing and transmission of information as a process which, although based upon objects (e.g. on computer hardware or human organisms) to a certain extent passes through these objects. [...] We must see ourselves as intersections in a network with information flowing through its filaments.”5 And that is the meta-level in Siegrun Appelt’s poetry beyond language: The story of how memory is conditioned by media and technologies.

Memory, localized, visualized. – Linz 2004: Things removed in space and time intensified to the utmost in the Here and Now, the greatest possible expansiveness in maximum density: punctum – the disturbing moment, the chance cut which makes an impression, wounds and affects. Something like “pure present” becomes perceptible, the foundation of time, the potential of the moment.

As an active mind the observer of the exhibition plugs into the inter-cerebral zone preconfigured by the artist. Upon stepping out into the still wintry old part of Linz after this irritating encounter with time, it gradually becomes clear that here, in a playful and in its original sense poetic way, has been achieved that was denied to the sciences: the exemplary localisation and visualisation of the memory process.

1 Michel Serres: Die fünf Sinne. Eine Philosophie der Gemenge und Gemische, Frankfurt am Main 1993, p. 233; from the French by Michael Bischoff
2 Filippo Gesualdo Minor: Plutosofia, Padua 1592; quoted from: Jacques Roubaud: Dichtung und Erinnerung. Die Erfindung des Sohnes von Leoprepes, Wien-Lana 1996, p. 15; from the French by Alma Vallazza
3 Ibid., p. 20
4 Paul Ricœur: Das Rätsel der Vergangenheit. Erinnern _ Vergessen _ Verzeihen, Göttingen 1998, p. 31; from the French by Andris Breitling and Hendrik Richard Lesaar
5 Vilém Flusser: Gedächtnisse. In: Ars Electronica (Hrsg.): Philosophien der neuen Technologie. Berlin 1989, p. 51f

>link: troisville

The Potential of People
in the Work Moderato cantabile by Siegrun Appelt
Christiane Meyer-Stoll

“Reading is a two-way process .... television viewing is a one-way street.”
Mary Winn: “The plug-in drug”, New York 1985

Siegrun Appelt requested nine people to read Moderato cantabile, a novel by Marguerite Duras, and then actively participate in her new project. To begin with, the participants received no further instructions from the artist.
What takes place in the process of reading? What types of relationships devel-op between the reader and the reading material, and beyond that, to the au-thor herself? The text intertwines and weaves its way into the feelings, expe-riences and knowledge of the reader. A mesh of two worlds thus emerges, opening new arenas for the imagination. Are there any interfaces, layers or points of intersection, or connection between the world of reading and that of the author, which then allow new realities to emerge? How can our own mind, our imagination, be chartered?

In the first conversation with the artist, the book’s nine readers describe with the help of words and drawings how they imagine the rooms, the spaces, in which Moderato cantabile takes place.

What does Siegrun Appelt demand of her participants? A concretization of the vague? Making manifest that which is incomprehensible? What is effective? What triggers images in the mind? And are there any images at all that can describe the rooms in which the plot unfolds? Marguerite Duras herself de-scribes the places only too sparingly, almost not at all. The entire action takes place in just three spaces: two venues at the harbor at very close proximity to each other, that is, the piano teacher’s room, a café where a murder has taken place, and a villa which is a long walk away, on the city’s outskirts. In-stead of detailed descriptions of the rooms, there are lengthy descriptions of the atmosphere – of the sounds, the smells and the light. To be precise, it is the light of the setting sun that connects the events and pervades the mood in Moderato cantabile.

The nine participants speak about and draw the undescribed rooms, all the while facing a camera which is taping them.

In the mind of Moderato cantabile’s reader, the word café evokes memories of numerous spaces and the mention of a harbor café evokes still more spe-cific ones; the description of workers from a nearby foundry coming in for a glass of wine after work perhaps intensifies into a mental image. Without consciously leaving gaps or causing any irritation to the reader, all further details are thus be left open to interpretation. The places form the backdrops for what takes place, but the events don’t really need these backdrops, as they are only needed to provide a setting, particularly for social events. As concrete rooms, these places become irrelevant, since the real events take place inside the people themselves. The people are at the centre. As we read, we are introduced into their barely comprehensible feelings, thoughts and conversations, their private inner worlds collide with ours.

In the conversations with Siegrun Appelt, the participants describe and draw the particular rooms.

What makes a place leave an indelible impression on our senses? What makes a place come alive? Is it a personal connection or experience associated with the place? For example, I am on a train passing a city where someone I know lives. My thoughts will inevitably focus on this person or events related to him or her, or I will be reminded of something I experienced in this city. It is such thoughts that ultimately make the place come alive. We create the places in the book in the course of reading, and later, in and with our consciousness and through our experiences.
In the next step, the rooms imagined, spoken about or drawn by the participants are visualized in the form of computer graphics by Ivo Apollonio. Digitally rendered “phantom” images are the result.
There is a transformation from the incomprehensible into the comprehensible. Possible venues for the plot emerge. In the process, not only the possibilities of visualizing the venues become apparent, but also the limitations and difficulties, indeed, the impossibility of visualization. Is it the rooms conjured up by the imagination that we see before us? Fundamental to it all is communication as well as our own ability to articulate verbally or through drawing. Just how capable is the recipient of transforming what is communicated?

Communication is the keyword in Siegrun Appelt’s work Moderato cantabile. To quote Karl Jasper freely, this would be a process in which the ego becomes real, reveals itself to its vis-à-vis. The music rooms and cafés emerge virtually. They are deserted. There are no human traces of use and they are therefore timeless.

While the rooms become concrete for both the participants and for others, the image on the computer begins to gradually overlay our own world of imagination. It begins to assume an independent presence while the inner image fades from memory. In the process objects and spaces distillate to signs of the mentally experienced – this means that visualisation transforms the objects and spaces into substitutes that are set free. These substitutes can then be absorbed by the beholder’s mind, where they are transformed and reassigned into the world of imagination.
The visitor to the exhibition encounters ten reading experiences; he or she is drawn into ten different recordings of conversations and their transformed products (music rooms and cafés), presented in the form of computer renderings.

What we experience in and through this work is a kind of “privacy of the human condition” (Joseph Brodsky)1. Every conversation is unique, every café and music room distinct. Even in the world of science, the human brain, the human condition, the world of human feelings and imagination, remain until today, a mystery. We perceive in amazement the uniqueness of every individual human being despite the many transfers, especially through media transmissions, which lead to standardisation, stylisation and even uniformity. This work proves that the apparent feasibility and comprehension of every access, including the growing abstract control mechanisms in life today, is unsustainable. Moreover, it becomes clear that the potential of every human being lies in his mental, personal and individual creative energy. The question that the work thus raises is this: How can we once again perceive this potential as something tremendous? It is the creative and communicative process itself that forms the basis of this work.

1 Quoted from Joseph Brodsky, www.nobel.se/brodsky-lecture

>link: kunstmuseum liechtenstein

exhibitionview (exhibition architecture: Gerold Tagwerker)
Langesgalerie Linz, 2004

exhibitionview (exhibition architecture: Gerold Tagwerker)
Langesgalerie Linz, 2004

exhibitionview (exhibition architecture: Gerold Tagwerker)
Langesgalerie Linz, 2004

exhibitionview (exhibition architecture: Gerold Tagwerker)
Langesgalerie Linz, 2004