LCMF 2024
30 November & 1 December:
Jack O’Brien / Laure M. Hiendl
Camden Art Centre
Jack O’Brien / Laure M. Hiendl
Chronochromatic Variations III (2024)
(world premiere)
(LCMF / Camden Arts Centre co-commission)
Performers
Octandre Ensemble:
Federico Ceppetelli violin
Chihiro Ono viola
Elena Cappelletti cello
‘For it was Hermes who first made the tortoise a singer.’
– Hymn to Hermes
The first artist to refashion a found object was the divine trickster Hermes. Waddling from his mother’s cave, the baby godling spied a turtle and turned it into a lyre; he chopped off its legs, scooped out its flesh, cast strings from its entrails, wired up its shell and started strumming.
The mythical tricksters are all retoolers: scavengers, benevolentburglars, filching food and light and ideas. ‘Sometimes it happens that the road between heaven and earth is not open, whereupon trickster travels not as a messenger but as a thief, the one who steals from the gods the good things that humans need if they are to survive in this world’ (from Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World).
The trickster is the guide and patron saint of LET’S CREATE, the London Contemporary Music Festival 10th anniversary edition. And in our opening event in partnership with Camden Art Centre, we bring together two artists who embody the trickster’s foraging spirit.
In Jack O’Brien’s installation The Reward, the centrepiece of his exhibition, two pirouetting industrial staircases, swaddled in stockinette, lie side by side as if curled up in bed. Around this suspended couple, Laure M. Hiendl’s new commission, Chronochromatic Variations III, will play out, courtesy of three musicians from the Octandre Ensemble.
What you will hear is late romantic landfill: a string trio by Anglo-Irish drunk E.J. Moeran (1894-1950) that’s been cut up, spliced, looped and stitched back together. Like with O’Brien’s work, we witness, in the words of writer Dominic Johnson, a ‘binding, squeezing, penetrating, stuffing, bulging, shredding’ of the source material, until it too becomes another pirouetting sculpture – but of sound and time.
Hermes’s grandfather was Cronos, the Greek god of time. And Hiendl, in the word ‘Chronochromatic’, appears to be toying with him in this work. Moeran isn’t the only thing being repurposed: time has become timbre.
The result is what Hiendl – borrowing from the philosopher Lauren Berlant – calls ‘an animated still life’. An uneasy, stuttering suspension of sound and metre that hints at the familiar shapes of English pastoralism but skews them to uncanny purpose. You feel cradled and caressed without there being any justification for it.
The trickster’s reward – hypnotic as it is – is never a simple gift.