Musicales

Loudspeaker, violin strings, bow, 250×100 cm

Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

When Vassilakis Takis met Marcel Duchamp in 1961, the latter was regularly seeing John Cage and the New York musical avant-garde that revolved around him. It was then that Takis integrated into his pieces not only the use of loudspeakers but also the new ideas peddled by the musician. Marked by Zen thought and by the desire to rid his works of every form of message or discourse, John Cage composed, in 1952, his work in three movements, 4’33’’ of Silence, itself inspired by a triptych of white monochromes made shortly before by his friend Rauschenberg. In conceiving his Musicales, which match monochrome surface with monotone sound, Takis consciously places himself in this lineage of ideas.
The only sound this work emits imposes, in fact, no melody. The beat it sounds out is not exactly regular. The visitor remains free to breathe at their own rhythm.  Suspended from a cable, like an architect’s plumb line or a medium’s pendulum, a metal rod swings and inexorably knocks against the taut metal string, which draws it in as soon as the current passes through it. The string is thus both the instrument of this sound and its own instrumentalist.
These Musicales thus make sound visible and materials audible. The sound lets us hear the object that produced it; it is in a way its “soul unfolded in space”, to borrow Cage’s terms.