Sight and Sound Installations: Fragments and Echoes of the World

Alicia Murría

What we shall call sight and sound installations, referring to the joint productions of Concha Jerez and José Iges, are those works in which sound –the human voice and a variety of other sounds– accompanies the most diverse physical elements. In them the spatial distribution of both sounds and objects establishes a path, as they invade and conduct a dialogue with space. Thus the aspect of the installation changes considerably with each venue, and sometimes the productions are presented as separates piece in order to adapt to a particular setting. On other occasions, substantial formal variations are made, and even the media are changed, though the conceptual basis remains the same.

Eight works can be placed in this class, all of them made during or later than 1989, the year the two artists began to work together, though the first three, Transgresión de Tiempos [Transgression of Times], RÍO / OÍR [River/Hear] and Punto singular [Singular Point], more strongly reflect the provenance of each of the artists –the visual arts, in the case of Jerez, and sound in that of Iges. Thus we may speak of a second period in which the visual and audible aspects of each work are addressed together throughout the entire creative and formulative process. To this second category belong Tráfico de deseos [Traffic of Desires] ](1990), Argot (1991), Force in (1992), Broken utopias (1993) and the two versions of Les amoureux au-dessus de la ville (1999/2001).

It is interesting to pause here to consider some of the particular features of these works having to do with the construction of the auditory and visual elements that they comprise. What kinds of sound were chosen as the vehicles serving to give shape to these installations? First and foremost comes the voice, the human voice in its sonorous and expressive dimensions, employed here almost like a musical instrument, but also as the voice that reads and emits messages. The texts, especially in the earlier works by Jerez/Iges, are of great importance to the whole, although their role diminishes progressively, and loses relevance in the later works.
Along with the voice and the texts of very diverse origins (from literary authors like Borges or Brecht to interviews conducted ex profeso; from the artists’ own words to fragments collected randomly from conversations recorded in the street), other sounds also take on some importance. They are those which do not contribute to signification per se, unless it is symbolic or even metaphorical –I refer to the residual sounds, the interference and static we hear when tuning a short-wave radio (which José Iges calls, in the words of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, tangles of waves) or others coming from scratched or dirty vinyl records.

But what aims are pursued by all these materials, some with their own weight of meaning and others with less, or none at all –unless it is to be found within a given context? Over the years a series of themes has come to form the fabric of Jerez/Iges’ production. The reflection on time in Transgresión de tiempos, a work carried out in the Oidor chapel of Alcalá de Henares, probes the experience of everyday time, on both an intimate, interior level, independent of everything outside the self; and exterior or social time, that flows towards us from the outside and links us differently to the world and to other people. The transgression between them is the core of this work, along with its procedural aspects, the passing of time, the past and present that the physical venue itself helped to underline, since it was a work made expressly for that place. The same theme reappears in the sound installation: RÍO / OÍR, made in Los Molinos del Segura, Murcia province, in an old industrial building under whose floors the river flowed in a symbolic continuum of which the artists availed themselves. It was an intervention composed of 21 points of sound distributed on the building’s walls, and which led the spectators to perceive space as an emotional experience through the different objects, including vessels containing river water, along with images and texts that again alluded to the transgression between the past and the present.

Concha Jerez. Transgresión de Tiempos. 1989

Similarly, the experience of time is the subject of Punto singular, a complex intervention, with a multitude of physical elements, which was carried out in the Santa Bárbara castle in Alicante. It is not by chance that the artists often choose spaces laden with memories, since this is one of the foundations of their work. The concept of a singular point, which is borrowed from physics, is used in this piece in the territory of sound. The idea of the human as a point of intersection, a singular point, is linked here to music as an art specifically composed of time, or, in other words, whose substance is time just like that of our own existence, since we are nothing more than lapses of time.

Concha Jerez. Transgresión de Tiempos. 1989

The need to measure this strange material, which is a characteristic of the human species, which is closely linked to memory, and, above all, to the capacity to reformulate our memories, is the object of reflection of this work. Objectivity and subjectivity, taken as elements that modify the measurement of our essence and our presence in the world, are suggested by the voice and the text in the different manners of utterance in this work. The idea of measurement, of its necessity, appears again in the sound installation Tráfico de deseos, put on in L´Hospitalet, a work that transforms the traffic lights on a street into speaking objects which whisper to the surprised pedestrian. Sentences about the measurement of desire were written in blue paint on the pavement adjacent to the traffic lights.

Concha Jerez y José Iges. Broken Utopias. 1993

If time, memory and history are fundamental subjects of reflection in the works of Jerez/Iges, art itself is addressed in works such as Argot (first presented at Vienna’s Museum Moderner Kunst, which would spawn a later piece, Argot, Intermedia Labyrinth, presented in Cologne, Munich, Leningrad, Moscow, and Vitoria). In it the text, made up of assertions made by the artists themselves, configures a sort of declaration of principles, of position, and of criticism of creative work. All is rooted in the distance separating the public from the work and the need to use text to facilitate the co-ordinates that make its reading and interpretation possible. In this installation there appears another concept that is found throughout the production of these artists, working individually and in partnership: interference.

Concha Jerez y José Iges. Argot. 1991

In Argot, interference is applied to artistic work as a factor that alters and irritates conventional relations, as a materialisation of ideas and impulses that open us to different and extended forms of perception and understanding of the world. But there is more –the succession of phrases and reflections are read by different voices and in different languages, creating a Tower of Babel effect in which language becomes at once the possibility of and a barrier to communication. Argot: Intermedia Labyrinth also delved into this metaphor about the possibility and impossibility of approaching the other.

Concha Jerez. Punto Singular. 1989

Again, reflection on history emerges in Force in, made for the Schloss Presteneck in Germany. The castle becomes a witness to existence, from its refounding in 1582 to 1992, the date of this work, and both the plot and the spectator through which a series of events are reviewed, both those made into History with a capital H and others, regarded as of lesser importance, which have been silenced or forgotten. The panoramic speakers were installed at the top and the bottom of a huge spiral staircase, a metaphor for the passage of time; a date was inscribed on each step, which also contained books made by the artists themselves with different texts and commentaries. The superposition of sounds and words, like an overprint of murmurs, alluded to notable deeds in art, science and thought, as well as commentaries about the individuals whose footsteps left no prints.

That intrahistory appears again in a different way in Broken Utopias, presented the following year, once more in Presteneck. The spiral staircase was again the space chosen, but this time the steps contained items suggesting a shipwreck of the present. At other points of the room two conventional staircases bore similar elements, the detritus of consumption: Barbie dolls and junk jewellery from dollar shops, as well as alarm clocks and radios with sensors Meanwhile, the recording contains fragments of interviews with anonymous people who were asked about their personal utopias, their worries, dreams and desires. Later on, this sound installation would spawn new works, among them the radio performance Bazar de Utopías rotas [Bazaar of Broken Utopias], made for the ORF in Innsbruck.

Lastly, we turn to their latest sight and sound installations, Les amoureux au-dessus de la ville (1999/2001), a work that has been exhibited on two occasions, the first in the Schüppenhauer gallery in Cologne, and the second in the Koldo Mitxelena room in San Sebastián. This is a work that differs from the earlier ones in several ways. For one thing, neither the human voice nor the written word is used. For another it has a somewhat less conceptually combative and more intimate tone in the formalisation of the physical elements that make it up. The first version employed recordings of city bustle. And the second used the sounds coming from music boxes.

Suffice this quick review of a part of the prolific output of the artists to indicate the conceptual density and the amplitude of registers in which they operate. The orbit of the Fluxus group, which was nourished by the most radical proposals continues to be a reference point for artists like Jerez/Iges who continually question traditional artistic practice, and broaden them with the aim of enriching the perception and the enjoyment of spectators, who become active players. Their work culminates in these Terre di nessuno, a exhibition that marks out their discourse through play, with fragments of reality and fiction, in which each spectator can create her own development, path, and interpretation.