Bildung
Recitativo Secco
2015/2020

for stones and voice


The piece is a recomposition of what was originally a multi-channel sound installation premiered at „The Estate. Sculptures from the collection of von Rose family with films and photographs from the archives of Zofia Chomętowska” an exhibition at Museum of Sculpture in Królikarnia Palace, Division of The National Museum in Warsaw.

* It is stronly recommended to listen to the album with no pauses between the tracks. If you purchase the album, please send me a nudge and I will happily deliver a one-piece edit.

———————————————————————————————

There is a story to that piece. It goes back to 1930-ies, to a small town of Eastern Prussia called Döhlau (now: Dylewo), where an extraordinary collection of sculptures was developed by von Rose family. Consisting mainly of Adolfo Wildt marbles, the assembly was violently put to an end during World War II when the property was bombed. Sculptures remained underground for over 50 years until excavations by an archeological crew directed by Tomasz Mikocki were undertaken. What later became the collection of National Museum in Warsaw are Wildt's sculptures distorted and disintegrated. Due to physical and chemical processes some of them were turned into "sand" while others gained new colors and shapes. Most of the items seem nothing but random stones, others – oddments of once completed and admired pieces of art. They served both as instruments and topic for "Bildung".

Apart from the sound of sculptures' remains, the piece consists of stone recordings taken in the neighborhood of von Rose estate in Dylewo as well as marble caves in Carrara and also limestone lithophones played by Tony Di Napoli. They form a kind of dry setting for the recitative delivered by Sibylle Friedberg, von Rose family descendent. She reads fragments of Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Judgment" which delivered the essay's title. It is not easy to find one-word equivalent of "Bildung" in any other language. It stands for education in an Enlightened style; it indicates shaping and integrity; it also means formation, not excluding its chemical connotation. All the meanings were of importance to Kant when he attempted to clear out his vision of art referring to salt crystallization. All of them are also crucial for the piece bringing together art, fall of a social formation and disintegration of stone.



Libretto

Immanuel Kant, „Critique of Judgement”, 1790 (fragments), trans. J.H. Bernard

All kinds of matter, which have been kept in a fluid state by heat, and have become solid by cooling, show internally, when fractured, a definite texture […] Many salts, and also rocks, of a crystalline figure, are produced thus from a species of earth dissolved in water, we do not exactly know how. Thus are formed the glandular configurations of many minerals, the cubical sulphide of lead, the ruby silver ore, etc., in all probability in water and by the shooting together of particles, as they become forced by some cause to dispense with this vehicle and to unite in definite external shapes.

In a product of beautiful art we must become conscious that it is Art and not Nature; but yet the purposiveness in its form must seem to be as free from all constraint of arbitrary rules as if it were a product of mere nature. On this feeling of freedom in the play of our cognitive faculties, which must at the same time be purposive, rests that pleasure which alone is universally communicable, without being based on concepts. Nature is beautiful because it looks like Art; and Art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as Art while yet it looks like Nature.

In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion; without however grounding our judgement on concepts but only on our feeling, which we therefore place at its basis not as a private, but as a communal feeling. Now this common sense cannot be grounded on experience; for it aims at justifying judgements which contain an „ought”. Formation, then, takes place by a „shooting together”, i.e. by a sudden solidification, not by a gradual transition from the fluid to the solid state, but all at once by a „saltus”; which transition is also called „crystallisation”.