DIY inventors, or Les Patenteux, of Quebec: La Collection sound performance evenings

“A patenteux is someone who does things that others have never done and who has imagination within.” ¹ – Mathilde Laliberté

It is no accident that for a number of years LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE has held audio performance evenings. Such events have a strong link with the art center’s mandate, which focuses on the promotion of site-specific and installative art practices, whether in terms of their dissemination, production or documentation. ²

The La Collection series of events took place from January to March of 2001 and involved the furthering of links in the field of contemporary visual arts practice, by way of the involvement of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, (MNBA), and their Prêt d’œuvres d’art (CPOA) collection. The principle was simple and yet at the same time extremely interesting, to use art works loaned from the collection as the basis for the creation of sound works, presented in front of a live audience. The artists invited by LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE to participate in the events each chose a work from the collection and used it as the inspiration for an audio performance, which also featured the original visual art work.

The link between sound art and the visual arts can be superficial: how many times have you witnessed performances involving audio and video in which there is nothing linking the elements, and the relationship between visual and auditory experience, other than artifice and gadgets ?! That said, LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE’s choice of sound artists resulted in a complete osmosis between creativity and inspiration in works presented across five evenings. The series included one event that took place at the MNBA, in an exhibition space dedicated to the colossal Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg by Jean-Paul Riopelle, an artist who has been omnipresent in Quebecois culture since the sixties.

The sound artists invited to participate in the project had one thing in common : the ability to work with new instruments or better still to create a new array of stringed instruments – instruments of their own that acted as forms of audio sculpture – revealing a further link between the visual and audio arts.

Martin Ouellet, January 25, 2007

Selected work: Lointain indéterminé no 3 and no 4, by Jean Lantier, 1998-1999, acrylic on wood.

For this work, the creator presented a discrete, almost unobtrusive form of instrumentation. The audience found themselves asking just how Ouellet – who was seated with them – had managed to produce his sounds, which all traveled in the same direction, as Lantier’s strange and blurred diptych looked on.

A system of rigid plastic tubes and cylinders made its way to the artist’s chair. We soon understood that the buzzing in our ears was being produced by the orchestrator and stringed instrument maker that is Martin Ouellet, as he sat, concentrating and moving his fingers at the extremities of his “pneumatic” system. An air compressor secreted in the entrails of LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE provided the necessary ammunition to produce the sounds. This was a contemplative work that combined high and low frequencies. The resulting audio effect was perfectly concordant with Lantier’s work.

With striking simplicity, Martin Ouellet performed a short minimalist work, which followed the slow auditory experience with which he began the evening. A pierced beer can attached to a long piece of string turned above his head, gradually making its way over the heads of the audience. The subtle variations in acousmatic sound were captivating, with the auditory experience varying for each listener according to their position in space and the speed and height of the object.

Maxime Rioux,February 8, 2007

Selected work: Assemblée phosphorescente, Proposition no 1, by Pierre Bruneau, 1995-1998, phosphorescent pigment and acrylic on canvas.

Since 1996, Rioux’s audio work has focused on his “Ki robots”, a system that he has invented that enables him to animate acoustic instruments with the help of inaudible base frequencies. The artist used several of these robots in his creation of a soundtrack for Pierre Bruneau’s multi-panel work consisting of several canvases of varying sizes that, to the naked eye, appear blank. The space was bathed in a near-total darkness, as projectors lit up the robots from beneath or above so fragments of phosphorescent images (profiles of Gainsbourg, a portrait of Lenin) were revealed by a person shining a bright lamp on Bruneau’s work.

The movement of the robots – primitive sculptures composed of string, metal wire, steel blades, familiar forms of container, wooden drumsticks, cymbals, etc. – created a strange sound track that was both percussive and tribal, plunging the audience into two layers of observation: the movement of the sculptures and that of the fragmentary characters that appeared on the wall.

Raôul Duguay, February 21, 2007

Selected work: Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg, by Jean-Paul Riopelle, 1993, mixed media.

As a poetic homage to the life and work of the immense figure that is Riopelle, Duguay’s contribution to the series was singular. Accompanied by a multiflutist and a taped soundtrack, this omni-creator (sic) accompanied himself from time to time, playing trumpet, delivering a work that evoked the thirty panels of the fresco by Riopelle, who passed away in 2002. The instrument invented by Duguay – his phonetic poetry – explored Riopelle’s imagery with skill and sincerity in a resolutely beat and jazz work.

Frédéric Lebrasseur, Lyne Goulet and Marco Dubé, February 22, 2007

Selected work: Dragons et dragonnes, by Fabienne Lasserre, 1998, acrylic on paper.

For this performance, the selected work was literally integrated into the creative process. Frédéric Lebrasseur, a percussionist and patenteux, and Lyne Goulet, a multiflutist, asked the video maker and VJ Marco Dubé to create a real-time mix of images of works by Fabienne Lasserre. This videographic work, projected onto the wall, served as the inspiration for the duo’s improvisation, in an approach that evoked the era of silent cinema when live musicians accompanied film screenings. Thus, various vignettes of Dragons et dragonnes functioned as an inspiration on two levels.

Following the purist traditions of contemporary experimental music and improvization, the duo structured a performance that began from “point a” and made its way to “point b” without the slightest stasis. The work involved a great deal of movement, echoing the movement and expressions of the characters in the chosen work. Using voice, cymbals, African percussion, saxophone and flutes, the duo staged an effective and at times fantasy and image-laden recreation of the narrative in Dubé’s video score, and its mix of colorful personalities from Lasserre’s work.

Sabin Hudon and Catherine Béchard, March 1st, 2007

Selected work: Fascination no 6 and no 7 (dissolution), by Patrick Bernatchez, 2002, acrylic and resin on mirror and wood.

The first live performance by this multidisciplinary artist duo featured sculptures that generated sounds, but in a different register from those found in the work of Maxime Rioux, as much in terms of their sonority as their aesthetic.

Hudon and Béchard’s work featured a universe of “micro-sounds” – forms of friction, buzzing, random melodies and slow movements – along with fragile-looking sculptural elements controlled by two computers. The performance was acoustic, as the generative elements remained un-amplified. The sounds produced by the various elements of the work, spread out here and there, travelled subtly thanks to the natural reverberative qualities of the space.

The soundtrack created by the duo was in perfect synergy with the inherently minimal quality of the art work that they had chosen. The performance was both visually and aurally captivating and arresting.

1. Grosbois, Louise de, Raymonde Lamothe and Lise Nantel. 1978, Les patenteux du Québec. Montréal: Parti pris editions, p. VIII.
2. As part of its artistic mandate, LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE offered the Quebec public a series of exciting contemporary performances centered on the chosen thematic. These moments of creation demonstrated once agin that visual art is a creative and inspirational vector for the conception and devising of audio art and new music forms, even more so when the makers in question have the heart of a patenteux…