Void : 뮤트: Sohyung Seo

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno compared instrument sounds in Igor Stravinsky’s work with animals manifesting their names as their existence. The moment an instrument manifesting its existence with sounds.¹ SEO Hye-Soon’s approaches shift from distant to close view of the mountain landscape in The Humming (2020). A distant view of trees illuminating the silhouette on the ridge under the dark sky turns into a close view of the plain green plants. Overlaying this transformation, bassoon solo resonates slenderly, playing the first line of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. What follows are scattered sounds of the diverse instruments, breath of the musicians, coughs and speeches, as though the main performance has not yet started. We would fully focus on the sounds when the green screen becomes dark. 

Before discussing the exhibition and the works, I would like to talk about The Rite of Spring, especially about the bassoon solo, in The Humming. Igor Stravinsky of Russia published the music in 1913 that carved his name in music history. The bassoon’s high note initiating the music intactly delivers Stranvisky’s intention to present a primitive, raw sound. It had taken myriad attempts to alter pure, raw folk tunes in Russia’s traditional culture, which Stravinsky transformed into sophisticated music. Bassoon was rarely used in the orchestra then but the Russian musician also put forward percussion and utilized wind instruments for solos. There is an anecdote: Camille Saint-Saens, known for the orchestral music The Carnival of the Animals, was at the premiere of The Rite of Spring to hear the bassoon sound and asked what instrument it was. If it was the bassoon, Saint-Saens later said, he would be a red-nosed monkey to reveal the new sensation of the instrument’s tone.

Decades later, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss experienced the shocking “rawness” of a sound. Lévi-Strauss on the journey asked the Nambikwara indigenous men to play the bamboo instrument that the Brazilian tribe used during the rite, according to Tristes Tropiques, his memoir book. One night, some Nambikara woke him up and took him to a deep forest away from his residence. The four men, he said, played the instruments at the same time. But it didn’t produce the same tone of sound, so it led to music in peculiar harmony.² 

Lévi-Strauss said the indigenous sound was strangely close to Action Rituelle des Ancetres, the second part of The Rite of Spring. While mapping out The Humming and the exhibition, SEO said, she depends on the imagination of the indigenous sound that Levi-Strauss listened to in a deep forest across the globe. The aboriginal face paintings of the Kadiweu described in Tristes Tropiques serve as an inspiration for SEO to produce Tacet (2021). The exhibition’s title Mute insinuates the disappeared cultures. 

From Lévi-Strauss, SEO lets us take a look at the contemporary world. Mute reminds us of unusual scenes where people communicate less, or even stops talking, in cafes, or in other public spaces. SEO’s experience during a residency program in Austria is embedded on the screen showing the European country and Busan with the texts such as “Stay healthy,” which reveals a glimpse of the pandemic era. It is as if they are communications between the artist and the Austrian staff. The messages, including “tested negative,” “infected,” “sorry” and “very sorry,” provide clues for the viewers of the great influences caused by the epidemic crisis. SEO earlier dealt with subtle tones and nuances in communications in Parallax (2011) in which repeated a conversation between a professor and an international student whose French was not fluent. Nostalgia for the Few Op. 55748 handled additional elements of speech delivery that included speakers’ breathes, flows and pauses. SEO presented the interviewee only with such sounds components. A few floating words slowly appear and gently disappear on the screen—it might be because the texts are excerpts from the communications on emails. Texts are coming from the dialogue to emphasize themselves; and dull squeaky sounds are from piano. They seem to represent people today whose daily communications are isolated.

SEO’s exhibition reminds us of Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques and Stravinsky’s musical notes, and it leads us to think of the now-vanished indigenous people. SEO’s art, through imaginations, allows us to come and go between the past and the present. Imaginations link between the past, present and future to become a seed developing into new opportunities. SEO has prepared for this exhibition for a year during the residency programs in Gyeonggi Province and Austria. SEO said she again had chances to think of Lévi-Strauss’ remark about the contradiction caused by different cultures. Levi-Strauss said his paradox cannot be explained. A culture unit has less chance to get collapsed with less communications with other units, on the one hand. But such communities would have less understanding over cultural diversities and abundance, on the other.

¹ Adorno, Theodor W.: Musikalische Schriften I-III, 5. Auflage, Frankfurt am Main, 2020, page 402

² Claude Lévi-Strauss Tristes Tropiques (German version, 21. Auflage), Köln, 2015, page 283