Investigation – In search of the unspeakable

Breathing, snoring, sighing, rumbling, speaking, singing… The voice is a primary human expression that cannot be silenced. At the crossroads of the intimate, the social and the cultural, it expresses our relationship to the world. Visual artists use it as a privileged medium to question our perception of reality and its production. Result ? Living, radical and extremely diverse works that open up new paths in a transdisciplinary practice, integrating dance, music, philosophy, political economy or even marketing, which finds itself at the forefront of the artistic scene. The Wellcome Collection in London is hosting a major exhibition dedicated to this theme until July 31. Bringing together the works of some twenty international artists, This is a Voice offers a real acoustic journey made up of sounds, of course, but also of paintings, manuscripts, medical boards and anthropological research! The voice material is dissected both in its forms and through the many conceptual and philosophical reflections that it has always generated. On the occasion of this news, we are putting online a survey on the subject carried out for our recent e-magazine dedicated to contemporary sound plasticities.

Tino Sehgal uses voice and language to create unexpected situations of which no trace will be kept. Argelia Bravo gives the floor to the people with I give you my words. Joachim Montessuis (photo above) finds in the voice a material to sharpen our conscience. Valérie Vivancos, meanwhile, is composing an opera with sleepers. If the intentions differ, the approaches intersect in the implementation of rigorous protocols and the search for a thought that is both concentrated and open, escaping conditioning and conducive to the emergence of states of consciousness that renew our way to be in the world. Over the plastic approach of the voice, a formidable investigation into humanity takes shape, at the precise moment when our century seems taken by storm between the advent of singularity, where machines dominate men, and a drive towards spirituality, making meditative practices of all kinds flourish and increasing the powers of consciousness.

In the footsteps of John Cage

The body does not know silence. And if the invisible revealed the unspeakable. And if, like John Cage, we imagined that each object had a spirit and began to create its own percussion instruments, like extensions of the voice and the rhythm of the body. Composer, performer and editor Valérie Vivancos is wary of words and only expresses her advances with a lot of safeguards. The fact remains that she chose sound to conduct an exploration of the world that begins by making a clean sweep of silence, goes through the natural sounds of the body, then the voice as a cultural marker and element of socialization, before starting today towards the ritual use of objects around percussion. In the footsteps of John Cage, in the footsteps of the Dadaists and Fluxus – “These artists are interested in the mixture between sound and life, they are the poets of the deep image, that linked to life, to form which is always in the making. –, his work is both concentrated and open to all possibilities, his practice lending itself to all forms and configurations. This gives little gems to listen to.

A piece in four movements from a single voice recording, published under the pseudonym of Ocean Viva Silver, Echolalia (2014) can cause states of hypnosis and other alterations of consciousness. Released this year under the Swedish label Sublunar Society, Sleep Opera (2002-2016) retraces fourteen years of work around sleepers who extend a participatory performance given in Copenhagen in 2002, during which the public was invited to sleep in a bunker , the noises emitted during their sleep being recorded. “Breathing is the orchestra, and the sleepers who emit involuntary noises with their voices are the singers, explains Valérie Vivancos. To add a pleasant side, I advised volunteers to bring 200 ml of strong alcohol and two tennis balls. These elements also allowed me to reverse the small gestures of the fight against snoring, my goal being on the contrary to promote it, the volunteers seeing themselves sewing half-tennis balls on their backs to encourage them to sleep on their stomachs. This participatory performance followed a first recording of sleepers, made during an immersion in a panoptic laboratory of Professor Billard's sleep disorders unit, at the Montpellier University Hospital, where doctors and "guinea pigs" observe each other, the sounds emitted by the latter being amplified. “I went through silence to move towards language and through the use of sound for ritual purposes, through song. " Next step ? “The use of objects and in particular percussion. »

Singing, vector of other states of consciousness

Composer, performer, poet and creator of the Erratum Musical label, Joachim Montessuis is one of the figures of electronic poetry, to follow in places as diverse as the Instants Chavirés, in Montreuil, or the Palais de Tokyo and the VisionR festival, in Paris. With mouth noises triturated and electronically intertwined and, increasingly, spoken and declaimed language, the visual artist composes hypnotic pieces that provoke sensations close to trance. Looking for something below and/or something beyond language, stimuli to access another state of consciousness? His work leads an experience of self-regeneration that questions the very nature of reality, over the voice. “We are all more or less asleep and alienated, explains the French visual artist. The sound dynamics can help create “good panics” or “sacred terror”, in order to get us out of our torpor a little. What if reality was a program? “Our thoughts would be codes, fertilizers, negative or positive, which take shape in this program. It's a simple experience that we all do all the time. The stopping of thoughts through the meditative process would reveal the indistinction between self and reality in deep fulfillment. The voice is part of this experience, it can express the whole intention of our thoughts through sounds. Fascinatingly, this approach to the voice is a direct route to "wild" thought and a non-dual experience of the world.

A parallel approach in Eastern Europe, that of the Estonian Jaan Toomik: in his famous video Father and Son, presented in June 2015 at the Vuitton Foundation, the artist uses singing to achieve a form of transcendence shared with the public. . He films himself skating naked in an icy desert, to the rhythm of a religious song interpreted by his 10-year-old son, causing the appearance of his father, who died when he was 9 years old. The artist sees in singing nothing less than a privileged medium for overcoming his own taboos and entering into contact with his dead parents.

Free speech from speech

Tino Sehgal offers the public “constructed situations” to experiment with. In This is Exchange, two characters offer us an exchange: “Give us your opinion on the market economy and we will refund half of your entrance ticket”. In This is Contemporary, three museum guards surround us by dancing and singing. These “situations” give rise to open and decontextualized discussions on the mode of organization governing our societies, of which language is the direct vector. The British artist refuses any recording, photo or comment. Orality thus becomes the means of creating a structure of dialogue, erased of any interference and any consequence, other than that of the renewal of thought. Literally immaterial and without traces, the work of Tino Sehgal reveals all the more that it does not fix.

Another political posture around the voice, that of Argelia Bravo is militant. The artist draws speech as a weapon against injustices, social inequalities and the impostures of discourse. During the last Venice Biennale, in the Venezuelan Pavilion, she presented Je te vous donne mes mots, a funny and caustic video installation, where women hooded in military uniforms, alternately armed with kitchen utensils and bare-chested breast-feeding to their baby, raise the question of the soil and the food that is grown there. The voice hammers and claims, the images increase their resonance. Beyond an aesthetic posture, the work signals the urgency of activism, giving a voice to women in a fight for gender equality, food sovereignty and independence.

Mohamed Bourouissa, for his part, uses the voice as the central medium for a critical reflection on the function of money. His video work The Value of the Product confronts us with a funny salesman giving a private lesson on sales. Tie, a mobile in hand, the man scrolls through the diagrams on a PowerPoint. The voice is sure, pragmatic, the image, it is kept in a semi-darkness which prevents us from distinguishing the face of the interlocutor. What factors determine the price? How to build customer loyalty? The vocal responses are clear and yet the impression that emerges ambiguous. In All-In, a video describing coinage, the Algerian artist – he lives and works in Paris – introduces the song Fœtus, by French rapper Booba, for a filmic treatment in the rhythmic clip mode.

Like so many paths back to origins or to the aspiration to a more intimate and profound understanding of the world, the plastic approaches around the voice experiment with devices that transcend representations and open up new possibilities in the perception of reality. “The voice is a potential psychotic code reprogramming consciousness and reality,” says Joachim Montessuis. It's up to everyone to listen to the vocal plastics, watch the videos which give a central place to song or language and lend themselves to the most audacious vocal experiments to find their unique harmony with the world.

Find this article in our e-magazine The aesthetics of listening, dedicated to the links between sound and contemporary art. Free to download from the App Store and Google Play.