The Rudolfinum gallery took on one of the possible forms of emptiness. The unoccupied halls fit into the concept of the world-famous British artist Brian Eno, who created a work called Nave here in collaboration with Jiří Příhoda. “We gave priority to something that cannot be seen, but can be heard,” says Petr Nedoma, director of the Prague institution and curator of the exhibition of the same name. It will last until September 24.
At first barely perceptible through the cleared halls, the synthesized music echoes more and more distinctly as you walk into the gallery. It leads the visitor to the farthest “red hall”, from the ceiling of which hangs a large rectangular structure covered with a light, semi-translucent fabric.
A few numbers above the ground is a crack through which the light “blows out”. In fact, the entire giant structure shines like an overgrown square lantern. It glows and also sounds like a kind of cosmic music that has no discernible source.
The walls of the giant “shade” or nave, as the English name Nave can be translated, are made of vertical and horizontal battens, regularly folded into rectangles. Their dimensions exactly copy the ceiling cassettes, to which they adjoin with a graceful arch. Yet there is no doubt for a moment that the structure does not belong here. It’s too big, it gets in the way and you can’t enter it or climb on it. He can just get around.
In doing so, the visitor is immersed in the sound field of Eno’s endless, never-repeating music that has no identifiable source. It sounds, vibrates and grows from above. In the classy interior of the gallery, it should quickly lead to upliftment, but it is not so easy.
The father of ambient, i.e. atmospheric, mood-creating music, left nothing to be recognized this time. No piano in the background, or at least creaking furniture. Just pure sound synthesis, in which stimuli randomly meet and form not always pleasant consonances.
Brian Eno did not come to Prague for the opening. As an activist, he vowed not to use air travel again. | Photo: AFP / Profimedia.cz
At the same time, some of the sounds have a natural origin. “Brian Eno is known for, for example, filming birds in Hyde Park,” says gallery director Petr Nedoma, according to whom Nave also includes the synthesized sound of the sea or crickets. Or the battlefield in Ukraine.
But the listener will not reveal any of this. He hears unreal, seemingly cosmic music, tinkling impulses, rumbling, whistling.
The music unfolds generatively, through the random blending of several sound tracks that meet in an endless flow. The variability of perceptions is influenced by the listener’s walking, which passes 18 hidden sound sources. “That’s probably why he chose me, my object complements his concept,” thinks Jiří Příhoda, who worked with Brian Eno twenty-five years ago. In Prague’s Nová sína in 1998, he exhibited a similar structure anchored to the ceiling and raised a few centimeters above the floor, which went around and thus added a moving moment to Eno’s sound installation.
He called the music then Music for Prague. He thus followed up on his earlier Music for Airport, which was one of the first ambient compositions. “Music for Prague is also represented in the extensive book publication Brian Eno: Visual Music by Christopher Scoates from 2013, which summarizes the musician’s creative work,” reminds music critic Pavel Klusák in the catalog exhibition Nave.
It emphasizes the importance of the first Prague show of this world personality. “Eno created the musical tracks on the spot, in the nearby Prague sound studio Cinemasound, with the help of the then director of the Nová sína, Karel Babíček,” the journalist recalls and also names the curator Marisa Ravalli, who invited Brian Eno to Prague and also recommended the recent award winner Jindřich Chalupecký, then thirty-one-year-old Příhod, to work with him.
Now fifty-seven-year-old Příhoda, who lives in the USA, returns to the Rudolfinum Gallery after his big Void exhibition last year. “I was kind of hoping to meet Brian Eno at the opening, but it was to be expected that he wouldn’t come. As an activist, he vowed that he would no longer use air transport. And by land, it’s a long way from England,” says Příhoda.
Eno was said to be intensively present on the phone during the installation of Nave. And the organizers do not rule out that the 75-year-old musician will visit the Prague exhibition after all. In the fall, he is planning a concert tour called Ships, which he will start in Italy at the end of October. At the Venice Biennale, he will receive the Golden Lion for a lifetime of musical work, “for research into the properties, beauty and dissemination of digital sound and for the concept of acoustic space as a composer’s tool,” as the jury stated.
Pavel Klusák describes his merits as an insider. “We listen to the music of the collaborator and producer of members of the Velvet Underground, David Bowie, U2, Coldplay, Grace Jones, Karl Hyde of the group Underworld: but at the same time we feel the quiet exhalation of music for those who need a break in a world saturated with pop and spectacle,” says the critic. Elsewhere, he continues: “The sound floating in the air without a fixed rhythm comes paradoxically from the same author who infected Talking Heads with explosive Afrobeat rhythms.”
Brian Eno found good ground for his musical experiments in galleries when he moved to New York for six years in 1978. There he started with visual arts, especially video art. “Just as he questioned the difference between music and noise, he used the television screen as both an image source and a light source,” Klusák compares.
The Nave installation can be seen in the Rudolfinum until September 24. | Photo: Ondřej Polák
Eno is also the author of musical accompaniment for several films. In 1983, for example, with brother Roger Eno filmed soundtrack to a documentary film about the American Apollo space program and the moon landings.
He also acted several times in films, for example he got a small role in the British-Irish sitcom Father Ted.
In 1996, he released his music called Generative Music 1 on diskette. At that time, the computer was making its way into homes, which opened up new possibilities for the musical innovator. His “recording” was actually a program whose rules resulted in a different musical shape each time it was run. Such a composition was practically infinite in length. “For Eno, such an approach means a strong alternative to the entire 20th century, which was dominated by recordings – rigid, unchanging musical products with which companies and the media flooded society,” says Klusák.
On the cover of the disk, Eno allowed himself a little speculation, which the authors of the Prague exhibition dusted off again in the catalog. Brian Eno wrote: “Maybe one day the grandkids will look at us and say, ‘You mean you’ve been listening to the same music over and over again?'”
The exhibition Nave will last in the Rudolfinum Gallery until September 24. Free entry.
