Gue Schmidt Hans Heinz Holz
GUE SCHMIDT
TO HEAR IS TO SEE – FINAL SENTENCE TO THE ENLARGED VERSION
OR PROLEGOMENON OF THE CONCLUSION.

Actually and as a foreword to this exhibition I intended to formulate a prologue. However, in this place it should rather be a mixture of pro- and epilogue since TO HEAR IS TO SEE still exists but will be made an issue for the last time with this exhibition and will also be seen/ heard for the last time.
Showing the exhibition in the TPS (Triangle Project Space) in San Antonio, North America was a foreseeable step, but somehow it was also foreseeable that this would be the last one. Originally the project should have been showed there in 2005, only technical and logistic reasons made a delay until 2007/2008 necessary.

In contrast to the preceding exhibitions, the participating artists were asked to contribute another sound, image and text work especially for this place in order to make perceptible current trends in the arts of sound as well as new visual and if need be linguistic tendencies.
Moreover, the differences in the circumstances of production of the individual participants, which shape their images as well as their sounds, should be picked out as an important theme as well as the changes in subject matter in contrast to the old and preceding works.

Forty-seven of the ninety-three artists who took part in the 16 Stations from 1996 to 2006 have accepted this invitation and have created works or put works at our disposal which were created in the last two years.
The original hearing time and sound duration of 1.5 days/nights (=38 hours) was thus enlarged by 11 hours to a total of about 49 hours. Basically the point was not to expand the project in time for its own sake but also to account for the temporal representation of change. For a running time of ten years is a span of time, which makes changes actually visible as well as audible.
Another idea was to shed light on the possibilities and circumstances of production of the artists which have developed or changed in the last ten years.
In the beginning most of the participants had no or little possibility to deal with electronic cutting programmes and modulation facilities on computers or to use them if necessary, something which has changed to a large extent compared to the beginning of the exhibition series in 1996. Many, if not most of the new works have been created under or with these new production circumstances.
The same can be noticed when considering the photographic contributions to the exhibition, which have also been marked by the electronic processing of photos and images.
Another aspect of temporality becomes noticeable when taking into account that two participating artists from the beginning like Peter Battisti and Georg Jappe had to leave their field of production and might now look down upon our lively dealings from other dimensions.

One small difference between the current exhibition and its conception in comparison to the original and first exhibition and its successors merely consists in the duration of the contributions which can be established by comparing the accompanying work lists (’96-’06) with the individual contributions (’07/’08).
Here, that is to say in the present case, the sound work should not exceed a maximum of ten minutes, which not all but most of the participants adhered to, in contrast to the old exhibition where the time limit for the sound works extended from fifty seconds to up to two hours, a scope which was in most cases not used to the full.
The criteria for the selection of photographs also remained the same, that is to say if the participating artists could not provide a suitable photo another artist could be called in with a photographic work, a step which a considerable part of the sound artists have taken (all in all another 22 photographers). This process can also be traced on the accompanying photo index list on the last pages of this brochure.

Since this catalogue is the last in a series of print works documenting the way of the project, I decided to do without another documentation of the old works and to include a separate section on the last two stations Toronto/Canada’05 and Györ/Hungary’06 instead.
The second reason for this decision was the fact that due to the space provided in Györ there was for the first time the possibility to present in the exhibition installation works by a small selection of artists participating in the project, works which were in many cases the actual basis for the respective sound works.
One of the photos on page 50 – taken in one of the extra spaces – shows the sound sofa Polyfunctional Woman by Ilona NEMETH (foreground), the documentation of a performance in the sound space of the city of Berlin, Invisible Sculptures by Natalia PSCHENITSCHNIKOWA (left), the sound (metal)floor installation Yaw by Julian FEYERABEND/ Oskar HUMMER and the speaking trousers Set of 11 Maps by Hannes PRIESCH (background). In further spaces more installations as well as documentations by Claus BACH, Rene EISENEGGER, Endre SZKÁROSI, Anja WIESE and by myself could be seen.

It also gives me great pleasure that I could win for an extensive text Hans Heinz HOLZ, a philosopher and art theoretician, whom I would like to thank for a lot of additions to the project which are worth knowing although a lot has already been written on the topic (especially in H=S 2002) by male and female theoreticians of the most diverse provenance.
At the same time I would like to point out that this print work (H=S ’07/’08) should be perceived as a unity together with the catalogues 2000+ 2CDs/ 2002/ 2005 and with the triple music CD from the year 2005, since the actual extent of this project only discloses itself in this way.
Likewise I want to mention that there also exist print works in Hungarian and Turkish in addition to the project’s main languages German, Spanish and English.

Finally I would like to thank ALL those who made the realisation of the exhibitions possible, first of all the participating artists but also all the people outside and inside various boards, who were again and again ready to listen to me and to support me so that I could carry my particular concern TO HEAR IS TO SEE in and around the world.

Not the consumers but the associated producers have decided the matter, gee HO!

Gue Schmidt