MANON DE BOER

“I find it fascinating to watch the face of someone who is reading, playing music or thinking, because these are often moments when people seem to forget their ‘social face’, being so concentrated on an internal activity; moments in which a mental space is reflected on the face – the surface – between inside and outside.” Manon de Boer’s (1966) works mostly take the form of films which do not follow narrative film conventions. Instead, they offer points of access to abstract notions such as time, mental space and subjectivity. The attention and concentration of the interpreter, the actor, the person recorded or filmed, as well as the viewer, are thus at the heart of her practice.

Manon de Boer invited the violinist George van Dam to perform, in front of a camera, the Presto movement from the Sonata for Solo Violin Sz. 117 (1944) by Béla Bartók, reputed for its difficulty of execution, producing no less than six different recordings of the performance. Inspired by contemporary technologies used in the record industry, which aims at “perfect” sound, the artist asked the musician to choose the best performances of each passage from the six recordings, in order to reconstitute an ideal version of the piece. The video is the result of this composite version. While the sound corresponds to the perfectly executed sonata, the image, which is also composed of the fragments of the different recordings, allows the cuts to appear. The work visualises the constructed nature of this sound perfection, reconstituting both the difficulties and the tensions of the violinist’s rendition.

Explikatiounen iwwer dem Manon de Boer säi Wierk aus der Mudam Sammlung an der Emissioun Mech géif mol interesséieren, wat dat hei ass? um Radio 100,7.