KONRAD SMOLEŃSKI Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

la Biennale di Venezia
CentrePasquArt
Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

Konrad Smoleński, an active participant in both the independent music scene and the visual art scene, blends punk-rock aesthetics with minimalist precision. Everything Was Forever, Until it Was No More is a sculptural instrument that reproduces, at regular intervals, a music piece written for bronze bells, wide range loudspeakers, and other resonating objects. The composition is based on a contrast between the symbolically rich sound of the bells and the abstract resounding noise. By using a delay effect, Smoleński offers an insight into a world where history has come to a standstill, thereby approaching the radical propositions of contemporary physics with its perception of the passage of time as an illusion.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring texts by Craig Dworkin, Alexandra Hui, Andrey Smirnov, as well as Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera, who, in their previous projects undertaken together or individually, have already commented on the problems pertaining to the field of the history of science and sound. Supplementing this interdisciplinary book are interviews with a physicist Julian Barbour, a philosopher Simon Critchley, a legend of electro acoustic music Eugeniusz Rudnik, and the curator Thibaut de Ruyter.

10 October – 16 November 2013
Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

Konrad Smoleński
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More - Time Test

Curators: Daniel Muzyczuk & Agnieszka Pindera
Collaboration on the part of Zachęta: Joanna Waśko
Audio equipment: Tomasz Marek Stage Service

Organizer of the exhibition: Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Warsaw
www.zacheta.art.pl

6 July – 17 August 2014
CentrePasquArt/Kunsthaus Centre d'Art — Biel/Bienne

Konrad Smoleński
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More - Time Test

Exhibition curators: Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera with Felicity Lunn
Assistant: Damian Jurt
Engineer: Paolo Merico
Audio equipment: Tomasz Marek Stage Service

Organizer of the exhibition: CentrePasquArt
www.pasquat.ch

Exhibition co-organized by Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Warsaw
www.zacheta.art.pl

1 June – 24 November 2013

The Polish Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition — la Biennale di Venezia Venice

Konrad Smoleński
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

Polish Pavilion Commissioner: Hanna Wróblewska
Exhibition Curators: Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera
Assistant Commissioner: Joanna Waśko

Organizer of the exhibition: Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Warsaw
www.zacheta.art.pl

Bells’ casting: Kruszewski Brothers Bell Foundry
Bells’ construction assembly and engine: PRAIS Company
Audio equipment: Tomasz Marek Stage Service
Architecture: Agnieszka Staszek and Anna Galek
Photo documentation: Bartosz Górka
Graphic design: Dagny and Daniel Szwed – Moonmadness
Web development: Rafał Jara - Fabric

Polish participation in the 55th International Art Exhibition in Venice was made possible through the financial support of Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.
The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.

Shipping Sponsor: FF Fracht

Acknowledgements:
Steve Albini, Maciej Formanowicz, Magdalena Formanowicz, Maria Florczuk, Ania Galek, Bartosz Górka, David Grubbs, Mats Gustafsson, Alexandra Hui, Rachel Kamins, Leszek Knaflewski, Marta Kołakowska, Katarzyna Krakowiak, Michał Kupicz, Michał Libera, Jarosław Lubiak, Małgorzata Ludwisiak, Ewa Łączyńska-Widz, Paweł Polit, Vincent Ramos, Robert Rumas, Agnieszka Staszek, Jarosław Suchan, Dagny i Daniel Szwed, Justyna Wesołowska, Adam Witkowski, Alexei Yurchak.

Concept

The two hand-made bronze bells which form the core of Konrad Smoleński’s installation successfully convey a somewhat crude and “primitive” character of a work that alludes to the traditional craft of bell-founding. The bells located in the central part of the space, along with the rows of broadband speakers echoing them and the two opposing walls of metal cases (in the Polish Pavilion) and wooden platform (in CentrePasquArt), serve as an example of a model stereophonic system. Although the form of the individual constituents seems familiar, the interaction between them in this relatively small space is quite startling. What seems especially out of place in this arrangement is the idiophones which are normally placed well above the line of vision. Moreover, the purpose of the enormous wooden platform or two hundred small metal doors are open to interpretation — their size and appearance are quite universal and may be associated with a number of different public spaces and the respective functions that correspond to them. Each of the constituents of this visual and aural arrangement plays an equal part. In Smoleński’s composition the sound of a traditional instrument is first recorded in real time and then processed, delayed and retransmitted. This is alternated with a monotonous drone from the enormous speakers, and finally the sound reverberates through the metal or wooden structures which are integrated with the architecture of the space.

Previously shown in Venice, the sound sculpture is based primarily on the manipulation of the tolling of a bell — an ancient instrument which has for centuries set the rhythm of our earthly and “eternal” lives. While transforming this familiar sound, Smoleński changes its meaning: a sound that evokes a variety of associations is now given an abstract frequency which seems devoid of connotations. Not only does the artist free the signal from its source, but he also resorts to the use of delay and reverberation. The accumulation of acoustic waves provides the broadcast sound with a weight which has a direct impact on all the subjects and objects around the installation. It appears that the acoustic signal can move the molecules of both animate and inanimate objects with an equal force.

The installation is a continuation of more than a decade of explorations carried out by a visual artist with a keen interest in sound. Smoleński’s works combine punk rock aesthetics with the precision and elegance typical of minimalism. The artist uses both traditional and self-constructed sound objects to examine the flow of energy and its interaction with the audience. By exploring the possibilities of electricity, sound waves and PA systems, the artist manipulates the meanings we usually attribute to objects which are typically used in rock culture.

These artistic endeavors and the way Smoleński uses his “instruments” in Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More bring to mind the illusory nature of time, as proclaimed by Julian Barbour. This British theoretical physicist undermines the significance of time while conjuring up his vision of a timeless universe, where one of the key categories is the present perceived as a three-dimensional snapshot, and where the chronological ordering of events is a result of nothing more than our memory of individual “Nows.” Therefore, time, according to Barbour, is but a sensation of temporality, enhanced by what he calls “time capsules”, or records of what we believe to have existed in the past.

Aside from Barbour’s hypotheses, our analysis of the artist’s experiments, including those with the sound of a traditional instrument, is based on a number of other scientific and literary theories, all expressing the inaccuracy or exhaustion of the idea of time. These include science-fiction stories, dissertations on experiments with sound and aural illusions, and studies on such museum concepts as the Encyclopedic Palace (title of the 55th International Art Exhibition in Venice). An echo of the installation used as a tool for accumulating energy can also be found in The Voices of Time by J. G. Ballard which offers an entropic vision of the “last man on Earth” collecting so-called terminal documents. The aforementioned compositional tools used by Smoleński are also typical for Samuel Beckett for whom the notion of time is one of the key issues, both in terms of text and plot structure. Thus, repetition, change and non-accomplishment, primary features of Beckett’s work, are characteristics that also to be found in Smoleński’s works. Both in Beckett’s plays and in Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, time is regarded as a persistence whose intervals and dimensions, generally known as the past, present and future, merge into one with time itself becoming, in the words of the playwright, “a monster that both condemns and redeems.”

The full version of the exhibition’s title taken from the book of Alexei Yurchak: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton University Press, 2005).

Artist

Konrad Smoleński (1977) graduated from the Poznań Academy of Fine Arts (2002). He has shown his work in numerous exhibitions at the following venues, among others: Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Pinchuk Art Center, Kyiv; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; Waterside Contemporary, London; Offen auf AEG, Nuremberg; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. Holder of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage fellowship (2000). Winner of the Deutsche Bank Foundation Award — Views 2011. He lives and works in Warsaw (PL) and Bern (CH).
www.konradsmolenski.com

The work at the Polish Pavilion is a logical continuation of the artist’s research into flows and eruptions of energy. Thus, his previous pieces and their qualities can work as a context in analyzing Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More.

Energy Hunters (2011)
is a film with a complex narration which is projected with the aid of a special structure inspired by a 1970s tweeter. The setting of the film is a roadside area dotted by high-voltage power lines — all these form the backdrop for the noise-rock band Foot Village moving quite slowly. The soundtrack is made up of a number of different sounds, such as different types of interference, growls, variable frequency sounds and scream-like vocals.

BNNT (2007–ongoing)
are audio performances by Konrad Smoleński and Daniel Szwed, which are held in open public spaces of cities, or in the institutionalized spaces of galleries and festival venues. The band members travel in a van which serves them as an improvised stage where they perform in balaclavas or masks. Each performance involves a sonic attack with the use of a string instrument modeled on the Tomahawk missile (Konrad Smoleński) and a drum set (Daniel Szwed). This is an interdisciplinary project involving both public performance — so-called sound bombing — and a publishing activity, which the duo have run for a few years now.

It’s Bigger Than Me (2012)
is a sculpture, a monumental figure, albeit minimalistic in shape, resembling a speaker casing or a simplified head which through vibration becomes at the same time a source of sound. Inside there are frequency generators producing the physical sensation of signal reception, which is especially strong from a close distance. Consisting mainly of low tones, the composition was made with the aid of a program used by sound engineers to check the acoustics of a concert hall. Such low tones can carry over long distances. What you hear is a monotonous drone of the type that could be sent out from a distant factory. Here several tracks are superimposed on one another; as a result the sound is at some points pleasantly harmonious and at others starkly dissonant.

Book

Konrad Smoleński, an active participant in both the independent music scene and the visual art scene, blends punk-rock aesthetics with Minimalist precision. This book reflects on the artist’s practice in the context of Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, his most challenging and conceptually complete effort to date. This monumental sound sculpture affecting not only aural perception, but also working on the audience on, so to say, a molecular level, brings together many of the motives previously present in Smoleński’s works. The sublime and symbolic tone of bells is transformed into the source of an overwhelming drone which works almost like a sonic weapon. A human and narrative level is juxtaposed with an inhuman noise that suggests an accumulation of energy that will never achieve discharge. The installation, by means of noise and the illusionist potential of sonic waves, enables the viewer to enter a chamber where history is inhibited and time dies.

An essay by Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera — curators of the exhibition — interprets the work with the use of theories from the fields of physics and sound art, and relates it to previous pieces by the artist. This commentary is complemented by those of specialists from different fields of knowledge who explore multiple aspects of the piece. Among them are: Julian Barbour, Simon Critchley, Craig Dworkin, Alexandra Hui, Eugeniusz Rudnik, Thibaut de Ruyter and Andrey Smirnov.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Hanna Wróblewska Foreword
Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More
Time Is Just Succession of Coexisting Things. Conversation with Julian Barbour
Alexandra Hui A Timeline From the Prepared Ear to the Present
Underwater Bells, Plastic Bells, Polystyrene Bells, Marsh Bells . . . Conversation with Eugeniusz Rudnik
Andrey Smirnov Power Supply for Communist Bells
S-T-E-R-E-O. Conversation with Thibaut de Ruyter
Craig Dworkin Cancellation and Vibrational Force
Have You Not Done Tormenting Me with Your Accursed Time! Conversation with Simon Critchley

Book:
Konrad Smoleński. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More.
Edited by Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera.
Warsaw: Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Mousse Publishing, 2013.
Pages: 248
Colour illustrations: 23
Black-and-white illustrations: 75
Language: English
ISBN: 83 60713 80 4
Price: 20 Euro

Excerpts from the book:

Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More
[…]
Artists and writers, from Robert Smithson through J. G. Ballard to Thomas Pynchon, have long been inspired by both physical theories and science fiction literature in their creation of works that attempt to describe a universe whose energy is being downgraded. In his description of this complex phenomenon, Smithson used terminology borrowed from the father of cybernetics:
Norbert Wiener in The Human Use of Human Beings postulates that entropy is the devil, but unlike the Christian devil which is simply a rational devil with a very simple morality of good and evil, the entropic devil is more Manichean in that you really can’t tell the good from the bad. There’s no clear cut distinction. And I think at one point Weiner also refers to modern art as a kind of Niagara of entropy. In information theory you have another kind of entropy. The more information you have, the higher degree of entropy, so that one piece of information tends to cancel out the other. [Alison Skye, “Entropy Made Visible” (interview with Smithson), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack D. Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 301–302.]
Also Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Pynchon, while clad in the costume of a tale dating from the end of World War II and the period immediately after the war, is in fact a story about entropy and its consequences. And then, after more than three decades of shunning the notion of time, the writer once again decided to address the theme in Against the Day (2006). The characters populating this novel set at the turn of the 20th century find themselves in a reality which is quite independent from time moving in one direction only. They explore different possibilities of defying time and draw a distinction between human time and deep (geological) time. The presence of entropy in Pynchon and Smithson’s works can be explained by treating them as a diagnosis of the collapse of a certain understanding of modernity, which Nick Land summarizes thus:
“Modernity discovers irreversible time — conceived as a progressive enlightenment tracking capital concentration — integrating it into nineteenth-century science as entropy production, and as its inverse (evolution).” [Nick Land, “Cybergothic,” in idem, Fanged Noumena. Collected Writings 1987–2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011), p. 351.]
Both critics of late modernity observe the consequences of the disintegration and energy loss which has superseded enlightenment. Energy Hunters (2011) by Konrad Smoleński, a film packed into an enormous structure resembling a giant speaker, evokes a similar atmosphere. Some time ago, one of the present authors attempting to describe the work in the context of the artist’s overall approach wrote the following passage:
Destruction caused by electrical discharges, short circuits, distortions, fire and omnipresent endism are just some of his chosen means of expression. He sells us tickets for a trip to a world a moment before explosion, where danger can be implied only from a low drone that inevitably causes a virtually physiological reaction and evokes anxiety. Or these are states of gradual energetic decline, entropy, characteristic for any complex system. He tells us, “Watch this and you’ll see electricity flowing.” And yet his installation is deceptive. The episodes of the film are woven together by the presence of the balaclava-clad members of the band Foot Village who, however, instead of a regular energetic stage show deliver what looks like a rehearsal, using their instruments to demonstrate the suspension of power without outlet. At the same time, they perform destruction, but not of a rock concert-style. The narrative is interrupted several times by blackness, devouring the sources of sound in moments of extreme chaos and sonic pulp. Can we see blackness as destruction leading to a sense of completeness? I doubt it, but my reception of this work is accompanied by a feeling that someone committing suicide must experience a moment before jumping from the bridge. A delicate tingling in the feet, the word “the end” appearing somewhere under the eyelids. Or perhaps this is just about being blinded by the sun, which can also bring about fever, visions and hallucinations (without the use of cacti or other substances)? [Daniel Muzyczuk “Views 2011,” in Views. Edition V, ed. Daniel Muzyczuk (Warsaw: Zachęta National Gallery of Art, 2011), pp. 51–53.]

Time Is Just Succession of Coexisting Things
Conversation with Julian Barbour
Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera: The installation by Konrad Smoleński tries to grasp a state of timelessness. The bell tone, which is of a symbolic and narrative nature, is transformed into meaningless abstract noise which moves the molecules of every single body, including those of humans. The problem of being is its linear composition, it is based on memory. This is why we want to ask you how memory on an individual level, and history on a social level, is possible in Platonia.
Julian Barbour: The simple answer is that each point in Platonia is like a complete picture of the world in one instant. so, it’s perfectly possible to create something like history. if you imagine moving along a line in Platonia, from one point of Platonia to another, things will change. it’s better to talk about differences rather than change. the simplest way I explain this is by two triangles that have different shapes. you can look at them simultaneously, but they have a different shape so you see the difference and say there is change between them. in fact, everything we know about history is all in the present. […]
Alexandra Hui
A Timeline From the Prepared Ear to the Present
[…]
Konrad Smoleński demands an answer. his work suggests that traces of the past can indeed be heard, once someone chooses to make them audible. In a reversal of the microphone’s role in Mold and The End of Radio, he unleashes captured marginal sounds back into the firmament. This sonic recapitulation offers listeners of the present a second chance of sorts. Listening to the “audio waste” of the world as Smoleński terms it can be an ethical, even revolutionary act.
[…]

Underwater Bells, Plastic Bells, Polystyrene Bells, Marsh Bells . . .
Conversation with Eugeniusz Rudnik
[…] Agnieszka Pindera and Konrad Smoleński: Did you decide to work with bells because it was a challenge you wanted to face? Especially in terms of all the symbolism they have?
Eugeniusz Rudnik: I started working with bells, because they were hard, beautiful and new. It was a question of ambition. What can I “get out” of a bell? How can I get inside it? How can I process its sound? How can I use it to create a world of my own that would correspond with the history of the sounds of bells in our reality, our culture, our history, and not just serve as a bare “parochial” code. I worked hard. [...]
Andrey Smirnov
Power Supply for Communist Bells
[…]
Living in a state of famine, under conditions of extreme cold and poverty, creative people dreamt about a future country where everything would be different — a perfect man, a universal language, real machines.
[…]

S-T-E-R-E-O,
conversation with Thibaut de Ruyter
Thibaut de Ruyter: […] Stereophony! For this radically changed the perception of space and music more than the invention of delay, which is a way of creating an artificial relation between time and space, an echo of the same note that appears a few seconds after. Stereophony opens up the possibility to create the illusion of space (a space that will, then, be modulated through reverb, delay and any other effects). With stereophony and High Fidelity recordings, musicians no longer have any need to tour, to go from one place to another to play their music. (Well, now that they don’t manage to sell so many records anymore, many musicians are touring again, but that’s more for economical than artistic reasons). The public can get a record and enjoy the music in pretty good conditions, in their home. Stereophony creates an illusion of space and the illusion of experiencing the musicians “live.” Delay, or reverb, or flanger, or chorus, or any other effect are more about experimenting with sound, it’s about creating different (and often artificial) sounds, not about shaping a fake reality. […]

Craig Dworkin
Cancellation and Vibrational Force
[…]
The Polish Pavilion installation thus continues, in detail, the weaponization of sound familiar from the aggressive high-decibel assault of Konrad Smoleński’s performances and the militarized instrumentation of his signature pocisk barytonowy [baritone missile] and bombardujące dźwiękowe rzeźby [sound bombing sculptures]. Such bellicose phrases may be theatrical, but they remind us that all cymatics — from the infrasonic to the musical, the lethal to the demolitionary — depend on the bombardment of atomic projectiles and their sweeping shocks of vibrational forces in alternating patterns of construction and erasure. We are besieged by waves, audible or not, that both carry information about the past and are also in some sense timeless — continual, and in constant wash, but also defining the horizon of the temporal itself in the reverberations of the Big Bang: “that humming background sound is ancient — the ringing of a huge bell.” [Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), p. 81.]
Indeed, “the vibration of the bell . . . comes to be a ‘magic’ moment outside of time, in a sense: the not-yet-multiple and no-longer-unified crux upon which the possibility of differentiation is formally grounded, but whose existence also implies the limits of classification. [James P. Mall, “Glas: What Is Derrida Doing,” Authors and Philosophers VI (University of South Carolina, 1979), p. 96.]
Or, in short: everything was forever, until it was no more.

Have You Not Done Tormenting Me with Your Accursed Time!
Conversation with Simon Critchley
Simon Critchley […] What I like about Beckett is that he is not a gloomy thinker at all: this Human Comedy is funny. As much as he wishes to leave the human condition behind, Beckett is able to combine that desire with the recognition that we can’t leave it behind. We’re stuck with ourselves. This is why Beckett didn’t write science fiction. Science fiction is a sort of universe where you can leave everything behind. We can’t leave. We are stuck in this world and this world sticks to us. […]