[silence] Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - art: Tate installation lulls visitors to sleep

[Ralph Lichtensteiger]

Tate installation lulls visitors to sleep, Sleep: Warhol/Cage/Satie

"After performing that first concert in 1963, John Cage said: 'The  
music first becomes so familiar that it seems offensive and  
objectionable. But after a while ... a very strange euphoric  
acceptance and enjoyment begins to set in.' Certainly, when Gavin  
Bryars had played the final note, and the rapturous applause had died  
down, I felt ill-prepared to return to silence."

"To mark the twentieth anniversary of his death in 1987, Andy  
Warhol’s (1928–87) first ever film, Sleep 1963, is screened  
throughout the night, accompanied by the legendary musical  
performance that inspired it. The five and a half-hour film will be  
looped to provide over eighteen hours of continuous viewing, and is a  
meditative study of the poet John Giorno asleep in his apartment.  
Warhol was inspired to complete the film with a new repetitive  
editing structure after attending the writer and composer John Cage’s  
(1912–92) historic 1963 performance at the Pocket Theatre in New York  
of the French composer Erik Satie’s (1866–1925) epic repetitive work  
for piano, Vexations, 1893. This transfixing event at Tate Modern  
brings together two artistic landmarks from a momentous year, and  
will be a contemplation on stillness, repetition, time and death.

Cage was the first to stage a complete performance of Satie’s highly  
idiosyncratic work for solo piano, a 52-beat segment accompanied by  
the instructions that it be played ‘very softly and slowly’ 840  
times. The piece was performed by ten relaying pianists each of whom  
played twenty minutes or fifteen repetitions of the segment at a  
time. The performance lasted 18 hours and 40 minutes. Andy Warhol  
claimed he attended the whole performance and that same year, decided  
on a new structure for Sleep based on the repetition of footage."

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2007/05/ 
tate_installation_lulls_visito.html

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/thelongweekend2007/9028.htm

kind regards,
ralph lichtensteiger
http://www.lichtensteiger.de/
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