Visual Arts and Music in Counterpoint

Rotterdam, June 2, 2012: For the past few days, observed attentively by puzzled onlookers, a whale has been swimming around the huge maze of the harbour. What is it doing here? Is it off course, frightened, amused? No. It is enthralled, for in an old submarine hangar, Sarkis has installed a work that is emblematic of his entire oeuvre: Ballads (2012), the core of which is John Cage’s Litany for the Whale. 1 1  -  Ballads was at Submarine Wharf from June 2 to September 30, 2012. At the same time, another work by Sarkis consisting of ninety-six watercolours interpreting Cage’s Ryoanji was on display at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

This legendary music, dating from 1980, was not rendered according to the score’s instructions, which call for a repeated recitation followed by thirty-two responses sung in alternation by two equal voices. Instead, Sarkis had it played by a carillonneur on a complex keyboard that rang a carillon of forty-three bronze bells set in a colossal circular wooden structure rising eighteen metres above the ground.