PHONOGRAPHIES de l’eau 1 REGMIN

Notice

The author proposed the term phonography in 1960 to designate a practice that would be to music what photography is to painting. Research in this field has remained very marginal, both because of the taboo surrounding “realism” and because of the technical shortcomings that have long hampered its progress. The first known attempt was Week end, by film-maker Walter Ruttmann (1930). In the early days of talkies, he imagined leaving the film blank to print only the sound track, recounting the sounds of Saturday and Sunday. This cinema for the ear was hailed as a new and already perfect art form. But its posterity has been rather limited. Like photography, however, phonography offers the possibility of both appropriating reality and distorting it. From simple sound ‘framing’ to radical manipulation and ‘editing’, all degrees are possible. Phonography merges with music when the organisation of sequences is governed by its own laws rather than those of everyday life, and when any causal identification becomes secondary or even impossible. In any case, the boundary is mobile and permeable.
These four Phonographies de l’Eau were commissioned by the French government and completed in the artist’s studio. They were created in July 1980 at the Chartreuse de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon to inaugurate an exhibition on the theme of water.
Phonography no. 1: Regmin (a Homeric word meaning ‘breakers’). A sailboat journey in the morning.
Phonography no. 2: Ianassa (the “purple lady”, the name of a Nereid). Thunderstorm and rain in town during the day.
Phonograph no. 3: Proteus (the ‘Old Man of the Sea’, guardian of aquatic monsters). Amphibians and insects at dusk.
Phonograph no. 4: Spéiô (the ‘girl of the caves’, another Nereid). Emerging from the cave towards daylight.