2009-2010:Soundwork

Length: 09'09''

In early July, the saxophonist Stéphan Rives came from his home in Beirut to record with the artists at his studio in Madrid. When they were about to listen to the result, a truck stopped in front of his window and its occupants started to open up the street with a pneumatic hammer. It was impossible to listen to the music, so he took his portable recording system and went out in the street to record the roar of something that has become distinctive of this town and court: the public works.

In one occasion, Leo Steinberg talked about Robert Rauschenberg saying that he had "invented, most of all... a pictorial landscape that opened up, once again, the doors of the world, not those of the Renaissance man that tries to find out the weather by peeping out the window, but the world of men who turn buttons around to listen to a recorded message, "ten per cent of probability of rainfall tonight", an electronic transmission coming out of some cabin without windows".

In this present piece, a product of so much peeping out the window and turning buttons around, the artist exclusively work with the sounds I recorded on that hot day of July in front of his studio, manipulating them, altering them, rearranging them, putting them out of their original context, and, in general, exposing them to a series of techniques to create a work made out of sounds of work. It is a "piece conceived as the image of an image", as Steinberg said about Warhol's work. Because the sounds assume their identity not only as the noises of public works, but as recorded sounds, used in a "manner that will assure it won't just be the direct presentation of a world space, but will admit any experience as material for representation".