Ikigai DailyExhibition 01 / Art, sound and making
The practice of attention
Works and ideas about what changes when looking, listening and making slow down.
Curatorial premise
01 / 03Attention is active here. A print becomes a technology for circulation; silence becomes a frame; constraint becomes an instrument.
- Selection
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Look again
A famous image can still reveal its material life, its method and the long ambition of the person who made it.
01.1The Great Wave off Kanagawa is a woodblock print, made through a reproducible process rather than as a single unique painting.
Hokusai's image became globally famous partly because woodblock printing allowed many impressions to circulate. It is not only a treasured picture; it is an artwork built for reproduction. Long before the age of screenshots and posters, a wave travelled because it could be copied.
Read the full card01.2Hokusai — the artist behind the famous print of a curling blue wave — had already made it when he wrote that everything he produced before the age of seventy was not worth taking into account, and that by a hundred and ten every dot he made would be alive.
The passage comes from a postscript he wrote at about seventy-five. He describes drawing obsessively from the age of six, dismisses his entire earlier output, notes that at seventy-three he had begun to grasp the real structure of animals, plants and birds, and projects forward: at eighty he would make more progress, at ninety penetrate the mystery of things, at a hundred reach something marvellous. He signed some late work 'the old man mad about drawing', and kept working until he died at eighty-eight.
Read the full cardListen to the frame
Silence and incidental sound are not empty space. They decide what the ear is finally able to notice.
02.1John Cage's 4′33″ is not four minutes and 33 seconds of nothing; it is a frame around everything you usually ignore.
First performed by David Tudor in 1952, the piece asks performers to make no intentional sound. The room becomes the music: coughs, chairs, breathing, traffic, unease. Silence turns out to be full of evidence.
Read the full card02.2The footsteps, fabric rustles and tiny physical sounds in a film are often performed later by Foley artists.
Foley is the craft of performing everyday sounds in sync with the image: footsteps on gravel, a coat sleeve moving, a cup placed on a table. If it works, the viewer forgets it was made. The invisible craft makes the fiction feel solid.
Read the full cardMake within limits
Structure does not cancel feeling. A useful constraint can give the work enough resistance to become itself.
03.1Bach's compositions are often described as representing the height of the Baroque era. His music sounds mathematical to some listeners because structure and emotion are locked together.
Bach's music is often described as the summit of the Baroque — its intricate counterpoint and balance so complete that later composers studied it as a model of the craft.
Read the full card03.2Bach's world did not have the modern studio or piano industry we know now. Creative greatness often grows inside constraints, not outside them.
Bach had no modern studios or recording industry, yet composed prolifically for the resources at hand — proof that creativity works within limits, not despite them.
Read the full cardThe work does not ask for more content. It asks for a more exact kind of looking.Next exhibitionWhat the eye cannot see