UNTIL SUNDAY 16/6
VAT. Guillem de Castro, 118
There is a point of resignation, as if ressentiment, when Llorenç Barber talks about his extensive career in the world of experimental music and the lack of institutional support he has suffered. "Very kind, a lot of tie and a palace that don't see”, but in fifty years no minister has wanted to know about experimental music, they didn't do it to him"no fucking case”. He has been proposing to leave the pentagram for fifty years, of the school and the director's baton, deliver the sound of academicism and bring it with its own joy to the public space so that it is something more than a tent container. According to him, music finds greater spaces of freedom when it stops occupying the places designed for it. Barber was making sound art before the term was invented and has had to wait for the world to change and catch up. Barber dixit. L’any 1988 organized his first city concert in Ontinyent, the first of many you do around the world combining bell sounds, bands and fireworks, with whom he developed the concept of "plurifocality" which emphasizes the various points of enunciation and listening that take part in concerts in public space. This of "hear bells and not know where” as the popular expression says. According to him, he has always been a "strange guy" within the world, musicians didn't understand it and plastic artists didn't either, and that loneliness has forced him to explain himself. A large part of this explanation is in the seven thousand personal documents that he has been preserving in successive moves and that now have their right to be in the exhibition Lawrence Barber. Listening archive that the IVAM proposes to us.
This sample has run into the same roadblock it ran into Lawrence Barber. The construction of a multiple us which can be seen at Carmel Center, it is not at all easy to successfully land material related to the sounds and listening of an artist with a very musical thought dedicated to making ephemeral actions. He doesn't performances, he does concerts; the row of inverted dishes taken from gas cylinders (used for lighting in the IVAM) that occupy the central corridor of the CCCC's Sala Goerlich do not conceive of it as an installation, but like a musical instrument. The IVAM had less space available for the exhibition and has focused on recovering, digitize and compile the Aielo musician files. The centerpiece is a travelogue sònic which takes up the ideas of listening and multifocality by sounding with a system surround its digitized sound archive. But you will also find brochures for the Nits d'Aielo festival, posters, vinyl records, the program of 45 together, publications, files with press collections, sheet music (of the arrival of experimental music John Cage, for example) and audio files where spoken music is heard, the bubbling of water or the chirping of sparrows. He was a pioneer in relating art, music i context (nature). Says Barber that "patience is not for committed artists", but he had to wait fifty years to receive the recognition of Valencia in the form of two simultaneous exhibitions, the last of them, to the VAT. S.M.
