In his latest exhibition at GALLERY AOP, Marcus Neustetter explores the notion of his own time and place in relation to the universe by deliberately removing any contextual references or situational relevance from his work. In other words, Neustetter attempts to define time and place in and through their absence. In ‘representing’ time and place in this manner, Neustetter takes his visual inspiration for the show from the improvisational drawings that he made during his collaboration in a sound-based performance with Jill Richards at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg in October 2012. Responding to the sound of Richards’ piano playing, Neustetter made marks on a drawing pad positioned under a microscope camera, the resultant drawings of which were relayed to a screen on a music stand in front of Richards behind the piano. She, in return, responded to these drawings in her playing. The relationship between art and sound is at the heart of the exhibition, the drawings not attempting to ‘trace’ or ‘record’ sound, but to capture an effervescent notion of the ‘texture’ of sound in space.

The delicate colours, lines and minute brushstrokes in these drawings, reminds one of the blind Princess Lherimia in Frederico Fellini’s 1983 film, And The Ship Sails On… She has the ability to ‘see’ the colour of sound, especially that of the human voice. And, in true Fellini style, when her lover, Prime Minister Hupperback, with whom she is plotting a coup against her elephantine brother, the Grand Duke of Herzog, enquires about the colour of his voice, her merciless retort is “Your voice has no colour at all: at best its gray!”

The relationship between art and sound that Neustetter pursues in his drawings and installations on this exhibition stands at the intersection of a long tradition in modernism and postmodernism between these two art forms: representing the absence of time and place in art and sound is virtually breathtaking in its endeavour. The relationship between art and music was a driving force behind the development of abstraction (notably in such early 20th century movements as Orphism and Synchronism). The ‘art of noises’ was explored by the Futurists and Dadaists, and developed by American composer John Cage in the 1950s. Cage cited Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951), which he described as “airports of lights, shadows and particles”, as a major inspiration for his ‘silent’ piece, 4’33” (1952). The exhibition Sonic Boom: The Art of Sound at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2000, highlighted the increasing number of contemporary artists using sound in connection with the visual arts. 

Sound Art alerts the viewer to the multi-sensory experience of perception. As a flexible and still relatively unexplored medium, Sound Art is subject to new developments in digital technology and the internet. Neustetter successfully employs these new media techniques in some of the installation pieces on exhibition. He oscillates between drawing under a microscope and using the microscopic as a tool for examination, evident in his use of the tardigrade and macro-perspectives of South Africa’s Sumbandila satellite as abstract shapes, shifting his focus between the inner and outer understanding of his own position in the universe that can, at best, be defined as ‘without time and place’.

Neustetter’s recent experiences in the exploration of sound through his drawings has led him to intensify his experiments: in Without Time and Place Installation II Neustetter presents a drawing in 9 parts created while listening to a recording of the sound of his own drawing in progress. Propped up on music stands, this drawing installation not only makes reference to the other works on the exhibition, but sets into question the idea of the production of music and inspiration.

Following on Mitch Said’s video work Sky Gazer and his own Johannesburg to Johannesburg North-South Google Earth video, Neustetter has also created a new collaborative work with Said, referencing his now familiar ‘vertical gaze’ practice. In the work the two artists look simultaneously ‘up’ and ‘down’ on the same spot in an attempt to negate/erase time and place. Neustetter explains this work in the following manner: “The low-tech manipulation of the computer keyboard in juxtaposition to the hacking of Google Street View not only presents my interest in the clash of the technological requirements and resources, but equally importantly, the data that might be seen as banal, the elements that frame what one would usually be looking for on Street View. This abstraction of the digital data in the form of sky and ground, positions the work as playful and experimental in the media art context, but is irrelevant in terms of time and place, other than the location of the starting point of the Google Street View, which happens to be just outside the Gallery itself in 44 Stanley Avenue”.

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, on 14 November 1976, Marcus Neustetter attended the Deutsche Schule zu Johannesburg from 1982 to 1994. He obtained a BA in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand and a Masters Degree from the same University in 2001. During this time he launched sanman (Southern African New Media Art Network). In the past 10 years Marcus Neustetter has been consistently producing and exhibiting art and, in partnership with Stephen Hobbs, has been active as The Trinity Session and collaboratively as Hobbs/Neustetter (www.onair.co.za). www.marcusneustetter.com