Filmmaker Werner Herzog’s five-channel video installation, “Hearsay of the Soul,” is currently on view at the J. Paul Getty Center through January 19. Created for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, the work was recently acquired by the Getty Museum and represents a growing interest in time-based media.
Herzog and composer/cellist Ernst Reijseger will discuss their collaboration on “Hearsay of the Soul” and other projects exploring the relationship between images and music during a free, reservation-required event on Saturday, August 3 at 5 p.m. in the Harold M. Williams Auditorium.
Installed in a single gallery in the Getty’s North Pavilion, “Hearsay of the Soul” dramatically fuses images from the distant past with contemporary experimental music. An enveloping choral chant opens the work as the screens slowly sweep over magnified details of small landscape etchings by Hercules Segers, one of the great masters of printmaking from the Dutch Golden Age. These lush and expressive prints were not widely known during the artist’s lifetime, but exercised a formidable influence on printmaking, notably in the work of Rembrandt.
The video also features a performance by the composer and musician Ernst Reijseger (Dutch, b. 1954) playing the cello and Harmen Fraanje (Dutch, b. 1976) playing the organ in a Lutheran church in Haarlem, the Netherlands. Recorded with a handheld camera, this scene presents impassioned performances of an original composition by Reijseger; a recording of this music was included in Herzog’s 2010 film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”
The work concludes with a slideshow of Segers’s prints, accompanied by an aria originally composed by George Frederic Handel and adapted by Reijseger.
“This new acquisition joins works of video art already in the Getty Museum’s collection by artists Bill Viola and Judy Fiskin,” said Timothy Potts, director of the Getty Museum. “Its reference to 17th-century Dutch art, one of the great strengths of the Getty’s collection, provides a bridge within this assertively contemporary work to a poetic vision of landscapes from four centuries ago.”
The video echoes Herzog’s approach in both his documentary work and narrative films, which often employ rudimentary equipment and deceptively basic techniques to achieve powerful visual and emotional effects. His intense devotion to the source material moves between homage and appropriation, creating a complex relationship of imagery to music.
“Juxtaposing prints by innovative 17th century artist Hercules Segers with the avant-garde music of contemporary composer and cellist Ernst Reijseger, Herzog reveals unexpected parallels in the techniques employed by two figures from very different moments in history,” said Arpad Kovacs, assistant curator of photographs at the Getty Museum.
“The immersive experience of the installation reveals a connection between the intricate surface details of these etchings delicately overlaid with thin layers of pigment and the music woven together from diverse sources of influence, resulting in a work that unites the intimate with the epic.”
Werner Herzog directed such masterpieces of the New German Cinema as “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” (1974) and “Fitzcarraldo” (1982), as well as the innovative documentary “Grizzly Man” (2005). To make a reservation, visit getty.edu.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
