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Foreword by John M Cunningham , Director, Warrnambool Art Gallery for the Catalogue for The Memory Palace, a Survey Exhibition of the work of Prof. Emeritus Helmut Lueckenhausen covering 37 years of exhibiting, presented 11 April – 11 June 2015.
Stolen Time
It’s never been a secret that art has a complex internal arithmetic – one that mirrors the larger computation of nature as a whole. Much of the basics of mathematics for example, pivot on the idea of balance – that the quality of the left side of a formula is equal to the sum of the right. In art, and more specifically music, pianists are taught to think in similar terms as their left hand anchors and grounds a performance whilst their right hand is something in flight. Their right hand can do whatever it likes, but only of the left pays its rhythmic debt. The Italian’s have a wonderful term for this – tempo rubato – or stolen time, which refers to the way that an added note cannot be simply dropped into a musical expression, but must be taken from a point later in that phrase, lest the whole composition becomes unstable.
For Lueckenhausen ’memory is one of humanity’s anchors in a fast changing and sometimes alienating world’. Like a pianist, his works are created ‘...on an undercarriage of pure design’ which maps harmony and counterpoint within a flexible three dimensional space to furnish a picture of how mnemonics help shape our lives. In his hands, memory is not simply seen as a resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say history – which one both participates in and is a witness to – is both a part of and apart from. In the Memory Palace, everything is present at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others, and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance.
In this way, Lueckenhausen’s works have meaning and function in the life that makes use of them. Even if that life ends, these works say something to us, standing not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which one comes to make decisions about oneself. For the artist the ‘most important in this context is the understanding of personal space as a sanctuary ... of design that explores the relationship between people and the environment they construct around themselves to mark and protect the understanding of who they are – and which include a place for the decorative elements to which people are attracted as a form of benign, personal graffiti.’
In this benevolent collision – the collaboration between artist and audience – to create a new life and providence – is where the art of Lueckenhausen lives. Helmut Lueckenhausen’s The Memory Palace is a place too complex to be understood, and too simple not to be.
John M Cunningham
Director
WAG
Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cswGlM3Sw-8
Walk Through the Exhibition