Ann Veronica Janssens | Bozar Center for Fine Arts
by Guillaume De Grieve & Cedric Feys
Four and a half hours. That’s how long it usually takes to perform ‘Notes for Philip Guston'. Time and space blur in this meditative work by Morton Feldman. The visual artist Ann Veronica Janssens is intimately familiar with such experiences. Her own works also refuse to adopt a fixed form. For the next Staging the Concert, she will create a movement of colour with HERMESensemble in which you can come and go as you please.
What appealed to you in Notes for Philip Guston, a piece for flute, piano and percussion?
Ann Veronica Janssens: It was the fact that the duration of the piece gradually immerses the audience in softness and apparent simplicity. It is intended as an ‘open’ work. You can walk away from it and then come back again. You get the feeling that you are undergoing several variations of an experience you believe you’ve had before, but that no two iterations are ever quite the same. The piece reminds me of listening to birds having a conversation: you don’t understand what they’re saying, but it’s wonderful to hear. What interests me are impalpable forms, elusiveness, and that is something you can experience fully by listening to Notes for Philip Guston. My intention with this performance is to bring the musicians and the audience together as highly sensitive actors.
Absolutely. And it’s true, Feldman is playing a game with perception. Sometimes he repeats motifs for an hour, even two hours.
Ann Veronica: It’s a disconcerting experience, an idea that stimulates us. Is our memory playing tricks? Have we experienced this moment before? Have we heard this motif before?
Do you apply that principle to your own work?
Ann Veronica: Much of my work has to do with perception, with change caused by apparently very simple gestures. One thing I want to do, for example, is to make an experience of duration tangible.