A Contemporary Music Interpretation of Soy Isla – A Response to Zilia

To get the full experience of this blog, we recommend listening to the Spotify playlist created by the author, Nia Gomez. The full track list is below.

  1. Teardrop – Massive Attack
  2. Anchor Song – Bjork
  3. Sullen Girl – Fiona Apple
  4. Dry Land – Joan Armatrading
  5. Symphony in Blue – Kate Bush
  6. Seascape – Tracey Thorn
  7. Salt of the Sea – Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions
  8. Sea, Swallow Me – Cocteau Twins
  9. Blue – Joni Mitchell

Soy Isla is an embodiment of artist Zilia Sánchez’s perception of self, a reflection on her place in the world (or lack thereof)—the dichotomy between self-ownership and solitude. This playlist is an interpretation of the Zilia Sánchez exhibition, using modern music to embody thematic elements of the artist and her work. The playlist is exclusively comprised of female artists, expressing the sensuality of the female physical form like the curved and stretched canvasses in Soy Isla. Works including Maqueta Soy Isla (1972/92), Juana de Arco (1987), and the lip-shaped imagery of El Silencio de Eros (1980) exude subtle eroticism in their composition.

Zilia Sánchez, Topología erótica (Erotic Topology), 1960–71. Acrylic on stretched canvas, 41 × 56 × 13 in., Collection of Jose R. Landron, San Juan

Zilia Sánchez, Topología erótica (Erotic Topology), 1960–71. Acrylic on stretched canvas, 41 × 56 × 13 in., Collection of Jose R. Landron, San Juan

Massive Attack’s “Teardrop” highlights the feminine sensuality and minimalism present in Topologia Erotica (1960-71) and Topologia from the series Azul azul. “Water is my eye. Gentle impulsion, shakes me, makes me lighter.” The muted pink and blue shades of the paintings exude a weightlessness upon the curves of the canvas.

The dissonant instrumental harmonies of Bjork’s “Anchor Song” mimic the dichotomy of peaceful and ferocious waves. A singular female voice sings, “I live by the ocean, and during the night I dive into it. Down to the bottom, underneath all currents, and drop my anchor.” Just as an anchor, Zilia is rooted as an island to her homeland of Cuba and current residence in Puerto Rico.

The separation of an island from other land is arguably applicable to Zilia’s experience as a queer Latina artist, disconnected from tradition and the mainstream art community. In “Sullen Girl,” Fiona Apple laments, “It’s calm under the waves, in the blue of my oblivion. They don’t know I used to sail the deep and tranquil sea.” Apple refers to “they,” those who do not understand. Zilia states that an island “belongs to only one thing” and that they must “understand it and leave.”

The first piece in the collection, both the canvas Soy Isla (2000) and the performance video Encuentrismo–ofrenda o retorno (2000) depict the release of the work into the ocean. In “Dry Land,” the unyielding voice of Joan Armatrading declares, “Tides and waves have kept me, kept me going. I’m longing for the calm.” In Zilia’s performance video and Armatrading’s words alike, the ocean maintains its subject in constant motion.

“Symphony in Blue” is carried by a bright and assured soprano tone as Kate Bush sings of her past: “I spent a lot of time looking at blue, the color of my room and my mood. Blue on the walls, blue out my mouth.” Azul Azul (1956) carries the entire spectrum of blue on 23×21 inches of canvas. Blue is not only a dominant color of the exhibition and the ocean, but also a feeling associated with the work. As displayed in the geographic landscape of Soy Isla: Comprendelo y retirate (1990), a blue pointed center is isolated from a blue perimeter of the canvas. Circles of white and grey surround the center, creating a protective barrier from the origin of the circle outward. The blue center is isolated, potentially lonely, as the title of the piece asks the viewer to “understand and retreat.”

Zilia Sánchez, Azul azul (Blue Blue), 1956. Acrylic on canvas, 21 × 23 in., Collection of the artist, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York

Zilia Sánchez, Azul azul (Blue Blue), 1956. Acrylic on canvas, 21 × 23 in., Collection of the artist, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York

The lyrics of the acoustic melody “Seascape” by Tracey Thorn allude to nostalgia and a relinquishing of control: “Watching tides that take me away, to a distant shore. And I don’t want to be saved.” Upon release in Enceuntrismo–ofrenda o retorno (2000), Zilia’s canvas is left to be governed by the intention of the waves. Coexisting as the black image on white canvas in Zilia’s Subliminal (1972), Hope Sandoval’s “Salt of the Sea” pairs a gently xylophonic chime with a wailing electric guitar. Above it, a sirenesque tremor whispers an ode of her wanted fate: “Waiting to fly around the salt of the sea. A way to be, a way to be.” The Cocteau Twins’s “Sea, Swallow Me“ from the album The Moon and the Melodies reflects multiple components of the exhibition: the presence of the ocean as translated in the blue tones of Azul azul and the lunar motifs of Lunar V (1973) and Lunar (1980).

Zilia Sánchez, Afrocubano, 1957. Oil on canvas, 27 ½ × 21 ½ in., Private collection, Madrid

Zilia Sánchez, Afrocubano, 1957. Oil on canvas, 27 ½ × 21 ½ in., Private collection, Madrid

Joni Mitchell’s iconic “Blue” references tattoos, which are featured on works including Soy Isla (1970), Untitled from the series Afrocubanos (1957), and Concepto Z (1976). Mitchell observes, “Blue songs are like tattoos, you know I’ve been to sea before. Crown me and anchor me, or let me sail away.” Tattoos, as markings on the body and imagery thought to be essential to ones sense of self, could further represent the experiences that shaped Zilia’s identity. Like Joni Mitchell, Zilia  knows the sea, feeling its presence as boldly as black ink upon skin. With intense sentiment, familiarity, and elusiveness, Zilia Sánchez proclaims her place as an island. This contemporary music interpretation is intended as a response, a respectful communication with the many forms of Zilia Sánchez represented in her work.

 

Echoes of the Ancient Baby

Tori Wrånes, Ancient Baby, 2017, Video projection, sound variable, Courtesy of the artists and Carl Freedman Gallery

Tori Wrånes, Ancient Baby, 2017, Video projection, sound variable, Courtesy of the artists and Carl Freedman Gallery

Anyone moving through the Nordic Impressions exhibition will have encountered Norwegian artist Tori Wrånes’s surreal multimedia work Ældgammel Baby (Ancient Baby). Whether you are entranced by its perpetual orbit or repulsed by its gargoyle-like ugliness, there is something unmistakably rapt in Wrånes’s dreamlike vision. The figure is not quite human, yet seems to be spinning in the amniotic fluid of modern human life: sneakers, oversized raincoat, and a shock of hair like a kitsch troll. Corporeal sounds emanate from the character, too, which appears aching to be heard and understood, if only we had the means to interpret its otherworldliness. The character’s groans sound pre-linguistic, echoing Jacques Lacan’s notion of the “object voice” or Julia Kristeva’s Chora—vocal utterances that articulate pure sound loosened from denotative meaning, like the sounds that babies make before they acquire language and culture. Voiceless and “othered” from such systems, the character’s seeming distance from the human lends a primordial character to its sounds. Cloaked in the heavy sonic affect of reverberation, they feel more elemental in their resonance, like the mysterious drone sounds of planetary vibration or the groaning tensile shift of tectonic plates. The sensation is that of being immersed in a sonic and visual deep-time, an eternal recurrence which is amplified by Wrånes’s conscious multi-layering of temporalities; you are both there in the vivid materiality of the present, yet absorbed within the longue durée of mythic or archaic time.

Tori Wrånes, Ancient Baby, 2017, Video projection, sound variable, Courtesy of the artists and Carl Freedman Gallery

Tori Wrånes, Ancient Baby, 2017, Video projection, sound variable, Courtesy of the artists and Carl Freedman Gallery

There is another ancient means by which Ældgammel Baby seeks to communicate with us. It makes music. At points in the work, the character is seen blowing through a flute-like instrument, producing a deeply uncanny sound which echoes through the galleries in Nordic Impressions. Flutes are the most ancient musical artifacts, with archaeological examples of hollowed bone flutes dating from 40,000 years ago found in the caves of Germany and Slovenia. Is this bewildering yet tender moment of music-making simply another means of displacing our perceptions of time? Perhaps there are deeper art historical implications at stake, too; gestures toward the complex history of musical iconography in visual art, from the representations of instruments in Greek and Roman vase painting, to the domestic interior scenes of music-making in Vermeer and beyond. Often the depictions of musical instruments in sculpture and painting of the ancient past served as metaphorical symbols of Neoplatonic harmony; music as a representation of the aesthetic ideals of order and proportion. Yet in Greek mythology, it was flute that signaled the purely sensuous and moral danger of the god Dionysus. In Titian’s famous evocation, we see the Satyr Marsyas flayed alive for his hubris in challenging Apollo’s rational, celestial music of the Lyre with his passionate, discordant sounds on the Aulos (a flute). Perhaps, then, Ældgammel Baby is a floating Dionysus? A strange, unknowable god creature bound by irrationality and chaos, forever spinning in ritual abyss. However, Wrånes does not foreclose the notion that the Dionysian may also represent a utopia, a dreamlike vision of freedom from the strictures of convention, shedding light on the human condition and what we choose to represent about ourselves in our daily lives. “We are all trolls,” Wrånes has said in interview, “when visible, we try to show and present our best sides, to be happy and pretty. I am more interested in what happens when you turn off the light.” When the light turns off, it is the materiality of sound that we are left immersed in, enveloping the spectator in traces of an aural past (real or imagined) resonating in the acoustic present. What might we see in the echoes left behind?

—Jeremy Ney, Director of Music at The Phillips Collection

Music in Circles

On November 18, during their Sunday Concert at the PhillipsTrio Zadig performed a program of piano trio works by Maurice Ravel, Benjamin Attahir, and Leonard Bernstein (arranged by Bruno Fontaine). Director of Music Jeremy Ney reflects on Asfar by Benjamin Attahir, composed in 2016 and given its DC premiere at The Phillips Collection.


The 29-year-old French-Lebanese composer Benjamin Attahir trained in composition at the Paris Conservatory under teachers Marc-André Dalbavie and Gérard Pesson. His music received early support from the late Pierre Boulez, whose encouragement was formative to the composer’s development. Attahir’s already mature compositional voice does not, however, fit within a neat continuum of the generation of French composers after Boulez whose music is so closely embedded within the technological high-modernism and experimentalism of IRCAM (the musical research institution Boulez founded in Paris in 1977). Rather, Attahir’s music is more fluid, exploring the Middle Eastern influences of his own heritage, a broad tableau of French music old and new, and gestures toward 20th-century Russian neoclassicism. Impossible to pin down precisely, Attahir’s sound world is hybrid and elusive, interwoven with influences yet never divisible into discrete categorization. His diverse musical imagination has been championed by figures such as Daniel Barenboim, who premiered the composer’s 30-minute orchestral work, Al Fair, in September 2017 during a concert that marked the opening of the Pierre Boulez-Saal in Berlin.

Asfar for piano trio is emblematic of Attahir’s inventive collage-like approach to composition. It begins forcefully with an unsparing separation of the ensemble; powerful chords in the piano are set against coarse unison string statements. These two sonic densities—one percussive, one melodic—seem to be locked in a struggle to find a common voice.  Attahir sustains a hard-edged, jagged quality to the opening of the piece, which never falters in its consistent, driving pulse. A two-note melody, traded between instruments, tries to sustain a singing quality above an unsettling ostinato. Yet this fragment—barely melodic at all—cannot find a foothold within the relentless march of rhythmic intensity. A sudden stream of notes (repeated at octave intervals) moves down and then up the piano’s register, seemingly indicating a new direction. Yet it gets stuck, circling in on itself in a musical short-circuit. Attahir then creates an even wider closed loop, shocking the piece back to its origins in an unrelenting Attacca statement of the opening material.

The perpetuum mobile nature of Asfar then begins to fragment further, its rhythms becoming taut and constricted, with silence as well as sound beginning to mark the work’s sense of inner struggle. The episodic nature continues toward a central section that becomes more hushed and subdued, with flashes of what sounds like melodies inflected by Middle Eastern tonality. But what are they? Attahir’s gestures are so ambiguous and subversive that they resit being deciphered. The piece seems to conceal itself within a dense web of different ideas and motifs, each one vying for significance. The whole effect feels like a vast constellation of scattered memories, layering on top of each other in an aural palimpsest.

Attahir briefly draws the music toward a barely audible whisper, with the piano’s bass timbre flooded with the dark hue of reverberant harmonics. Drawing downward appears to bring us closer in, away from the shock and awe toward something more intimate, fragile, and revealing. Yet it proves merely a conceit as the inevitable, obliterating effect of the opening material returns. Bringing the piece to its close, Attahir toys with a final four note theme, which loops and eddies like a child scribbling circles on a page, or (perhaps) spirals around itself with the gestural ductus of artist Cy Twombly’s famous red Bacchus paintings.

Cy Twombly (1928-2011), Untitled, 2005. 128 x 194½ in (325.1 x 494 cm). This work was offered in the Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 15 November 2017 at Christie’s in New York.

Cy Twombly (1928-2011), Untitled, 2005, 128 x 194 ½ in. This work was offered in the Postwar & Contemporary Art Evening Sale on November 15, 2017, at Christie’s in New York.

—Jeremy Ney, Director of Music at The Phillips Collection