Anri Sala: The Last Resort
Somewhat to my surprise, while still mulling on John Kaldor’s latest Art Project—Anri Sala’s The Last Resort—I was at a concert performance of Elgar’s ‘The Dream Of Gerontius’ and encountered the following apposite words:
And hark! I hear a singing; yet in sooth I cannot of that music rightly say Whether I hear, or touch, or taste the tones.
For Sala’s construction of snare-drums, hung upside-down from the roof of the rotunda on Observatory Hill in Sydney, may appear to be more of a musical event than an optical one as the drumsticks drum and a strange version of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto plays; but then again, it may actually be about 90% conceptual. And its difficulty is—as is often the case with the conceptual—that any real appreciation of the artist’s ideas requires more curatorial reading than simply observing.
Mind you, observing the delicate fluttering of these drums-sticks on Downunder drums and wondering both how it happens, how it relates to Mozart’s undrummed Concerto, and why is a good start. Do the drums, for instance, simply conjure flying foxes hanging from Sydney’s Port Jackson figs, as the Albanian-born, French national and Berlin-resident Sala noted after visiting the city to set Kaldor’s 33rd Project in motion some years ago? The delay in realising his project was caused by a subsequent invitation to Sala to represent France at the Venice Biennale with another musically-related work, Ravel Ravel, featuring the composer’s ‘Piano Concert for the Left Hand’ in two competing versions with deliberately different tempi. The First World War which caused the excision of many such limbs was referenced.
So, what is referenced in The Last Resort? This late, 1791 composition
Anri Sala, The Last Resort, 2017. The Rotunda, Observatory Hill, Sydney. 33rd Kaldor Public Art Project.
