Skin

Neuenschwander was appointed artist-in-residence at the museum in February 2007 and given the medieval attics of the old museum as studio for the six months leading up to the opening of the exhibition.  The theme of skin was chosen to link the history of the hospital buildings with the work of the artist.  The works were created in the spaces in which they would eventually be shown.  The result is an installation that plays on the history of the site at a number of different and often very subtle levels.

The artist worked in the Dormter, which served for centuries as the dormitory of the sisters who cared for the sick.  Neuenschwander made a video installation for the dormitory and a series of related canvases for the vast Diksmuide Attic which adjoins it.

Working with texts taken from tattoos (the first and most obvious reference to skin), Neuenschwander composed a dialogue of hope, despair, passion, loss and redemption between two speakers who struggle to communicate with each other by means of texts engraved on their bodies.  This dialogue or libretto served as the basis for the video and its music, as well as the canvases.

The SKIN video combines image, text and music in a completely new way.  In this large video triptych, the three elements are given equal value: image equates to text, text to music and music to image.  No element was created in reaction to the others.  All elements were produced independently and fused at the editing stage.

Neuenschwander collaborated with composer Jeroen D’hoe, who transformed the SKIN dialogue into the lyrics of a song:

Let your mask slip
But Never your feelings
And yes I said yes I will I said yes I said yes I will I said
Where you are that I may be with you
As I walk by your side
Or sit near
Or remain in the same room with you
Let white noise slip
But
Never Sweet Awe
Yes I said yes I will I said
In your eyes
On your Skin
On my Skin
In my eyes
Let’s see
This very thing nothing else
Fire of sight
Burn everything not part of it
Skin
To ash
Oh you whom I often and silently come
Where you are that I may be with you
And yes yes I will you said
Let your mask slip
But
Never your feelings
From my eyes
Your eyes
Your Skin
My
SKIN

Using this libretto, Jeroen D’hoe composed a highly emotive and rhythmically complex song for mezzo-soprano and guitar.  The commission to create the music was given in March, after which there was little communication between the artist and composer.  The creation of the music followed its own course: Textasy was the only thread connecting the composer to the artist.

The video consists of a six minute meditation and the main twelve minute work.  The meditation is a direct response to the site, which is darkened and in principle invisible to visitors during the exhibition.  For the meditation, Neuenschwander produced a time-lapse film of the Dormter windows.  The west windows of the hall were filmed for twenty-four hours from three camera positions.  Each position represents eight hours, which are then condensed to six minutes and placed side by side to reconstruct the wall.  The screens are placed diagonally in the space to allow an actual wooden column to interfere with the viewing of the video.  The images are mirrored, which allows each architectural element to stand opposite its filmed twin.

The sound track of the meditation is taken from Jeroen D’hoe’s composition.  A sequence of less than one minute is stretched to six minutes.  The electronic distortions of D’hoe’s composition correspond remarkably well to the vibrations and shifting light of the time-lapse film.  The result is a film that presents the Dormter as a living organism with a microphone in its entrails to record every nuance of its daily life.

The main SKIN video uses a kneeling or reclining figure to represent the site’s past as a dormitory and to present large surfaces of skin to the camera.  Simple movements by a male and female dancer were filmed and conflated to form one double-gendered or non-gendered body. The sensuality of these images at first appears to be lifted straight from the world of advertising.  But a flash of text and a violent guitar slam, quick enough in themselves to suggest subliminal advertising, break the soft mood  of the first moments of the video.

From this moment the tension slowly builds as text and image present fragments of partially comprehensible material.  The dancers’ bodies are engraved with tragic texts as a hand, slightly visible behind the veil of the writing surface, records their thoughts and fears.

The sleeping figures are always filmed with a horizontal tracking shot; but at one point a bleached white figure moves vertically through the central screen.  This body, a plaster sculpture made by the artist, introduces the theme of “masks” into the work: the body as skin, as surface, as blank and ready to receive text.  In the context of the medieval hospital, this blank surface receives the imprint not only of love and death, but of society, sickness and the community’s efforts to heal.

The last sequences of the video investigate questions of effacement.  The dancers blacken each other’s bodies and then remove the ink with calligraphic movements of their fingers. In the center, the negative image of this blackening is shown, resulting in a body that becomes progressively whiter against a white ground.  The hand in effect erasing the body it is caressing.  

SKIN VIDEO CREDITS

Technical assistance from EventHouse, Ichtegem and Beam Systems, Amsterdam

With very special thanks to the staff of the Memling/Sint Jan Hospital Museum

SKIN—as creative process

Jeroen D’hoe

The libretto [sung lyrics], which Brody Neuenschwander and I compiled through using existing tattoos, offered the point of departure of the audiovisual installation “SKIN”. Tattoos – ‘ultimate statements’, wishes, beliefs, promises on someone’s SKIN – shown and heard at an intersection between video (calligraphy, film images) and music.

At the start of the creative process we decided to develop the calligraphy, film images and music SIMULTANEOUSLY, but AUTONOMOUSLY, and all based on the aforementioned (joint) tattoo libretto. We did not see/hear (intermediate) results of each other’s work, before these were finished separately. This was a work process, which obviously generated a special intensity, reciprocal curiosity, and dynamic (also through the risk of possibly not finding the right visual or audio partner). Through it, the development of EQUAL art forms and expressivity was envisioned, which were to be integrated only LATER (during audiovisual montage).

This point of departure offered me – as a composer – an almost total creative freedom to compose a work for soprano and guitar, ‘liberated’ from possible visual implications or limitations – which, in a (conventional) film soundtrack context obviously would have been pertinent (e.g., temporal implications, matters of synchronicity, etc.). The sole ‘restriction’ in this case pertained the necessary use of the structure of the libretto as the basis for the textual sequence of the soprano part.

As regards the music style and technique, a minimal, ‘close by’ ( close to the “SKIN”) sound world was chosen, at all times in consideration of a direct – often theatrical – but always staid text expression of the tattoo texts: “let your mask slip” (rough, whimsical), “and yes, I said—yes I will, I said—yes, I said—yes I will, I said” (restless, obstinate, semi-repetitive/circular), “sweet awe” (slow – timeless, infinite). Also specific sounds, produced by touching or slamming the guitar strings with the SKIN, e.g., with the fingertips, thumb or hand palm, to realise ‘concrete’ noise and percussion effects. Together with Els Van Laethem (soprano) and Aram Van Ballaert (guitar) we made a studio recording of the composition, which offered the basic structure for the visual montage.

When presenting the visual and audio recordings to each other, diverse – some unexpected (!) – emotional, structural, and textural parallels among the visual and musical work proved to be very stimulating towards the (later) audiovisual montage. This way, a multi-layered interaction between image and sound came into being, which – at all times – would evoke the direct, ultimate, extreme tattoo statements WITHOUT ever allowing the visual and the audio aspects to be in a ‘one-on-one’-relationship. On the contrary; according to the specific creative process, in which image and sound were developed separately (and ‘led their own lives’), we aimed at an openness, in which the respective art forms would create room for each other, rather than establish a direct interaction, a clear complementarity, reciprocal reinforcement, etc.

A meditation combining extremely accelerated film images and slow-motion audio fragments (taken from the musical composition for “SKIN”) conclude the installation, as a tranquil reverberation.

For the Diksmuide Attic Neuenschwander painted seven monumental canvases using words from the video installation as well as other sources.  The decision to  install the canvases in the medieval roof timbers was made in discussions with Curator Edith Doove. As with the video, the work interacts with the medieval building on various levels.

The canvases can be seen as a progression of emotions from despair to ecstasy:

- Annihilation
- A cry pain
- A circus of the emotions
- An existential decision
- A return to experience
- A shout of delight
- A transfiguration

These strongly expressed emotions hang above our heads like a new heaven, or perhaps a false heaven, inside the medieval hospital.  At the center of the 30 meter long installation are the words MEDITATION/MEDICATION,  which sum up the entire history of the site in just eleven letters, the crucial T and C touching at the very middle of the space.

The ceiling painting attempts to claim a place in the tradition of large ceiling canvases.  In common with the trompe-l’oeil paintings of the Baroque, the work creates false (conceptual) perspectives above our heads.  The source of the texts in tattoos reminds us of the very fleshy nature of Counter-Reformation architectural painting.  And the orientation of the texts, from west to east, points in to the hope and desperate longing that all (love-) sick people experience.