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Technique: Speaker, Saint Head, Bulb Amplifier, Stereo sound track.

This sound scultpture had its origins at an Exhibition in México city called “a PROPOSOTO, 14 obras en torno a Joseph Beuys” in 1989.
The main frame of this sound sculpture is of course the sound, which consist of four mixed tracks. Each track represents something specific. One of them is a straight Gregorian chant phrase which is repeated over and over never changing in volume, and which represents a straight line in the horizon, a meditation, the spiritual aspect of Man. Then, the other three tracks vary continually, some times burying the Gregorian chants, some times letting the Gregorian chant to come out clearly. These tracks are: 1.- Electronic synthetic sounds. 2.- Ritual percussion sounds. 3.- Sexual sounds, and radio and TV sounds.
The idea is to develop about the phenomena of meditation. Concentrating on something specific to forget about our Ego, our daily preoccupation’s, and to escape duality, is like a battle we establish towards our mind. The more we try to concentrate, the more our mind dominates and emphasizes opposite forces. In this way, if we try to concentrate in goodness, evil becomes stronger, if we concentrate in Masculinity, femininity becomes stronger, and so on, but there is also a multiplicity of images that appear and which we cannot explain in a rational way.

In the original sound sculpture, I placed a saint's colonial head over a bulb amplifier that was tied with the amplifier audio cables, both were standing above a speaker form where we could hear the sounds described before. In the wall behind these objets we could see a gregorian chant score with black paint thrown over it.

In the video version of this work, the image serves to emphasize the idea developed in the audio. This consist of a hieratic face, looking with a lost regard towards a fixed point. The image recalls Spanish religious paintings of saints in meditation. This fixed image is a process of a 15 minutes meditation, and it is combined with blended close ups of the face which come and go (the ear, the lips, one eye, the nose). This process of this man meditating is repeated over and over, in a loop, like the Gregorian phrase.

(+ x -) = - Sound Sculpture. 14 artistas en torno a Joseph Beuys. 1989. Photo by Pedro Meyer.