Lights up. Four musicians—three with violins in hand, and one seated with a cello—take up their instruments. This marble-framed Greek-era auditorium isn’t like most. White plaster stretches from the high ceilings to the floor and fills the gap between the marble pillars of the stage. The musicians feebly reach their arms through small oblong holes such that it appears the wall is the performer itself. The metaphor is obvious. These musicians are a synecdoche for the institution of art. The narrative evolves rapidly and is grasped immediately. Behind the wall the musicians bicker at each other. The four musicians each play a different archetypical role: the joker, the revolutionary, the coward, the conformist. One can quickly decode the themes of the piece. It is predominantly a topical gesture at the degradation of culture through modern technology, changed notions of art and self, and the constant demand for performance—a digital cult of personality.
Spatially and technically, The French Horn is actually separate from Murmur, Yet thematically, they rely upon each other within the microcosm of Gabriel Lester’s exhibit in De Appel. The French Horn is a multi-media sculpture that occupies the surface area of an entire room. Lester has recruited a collective of nine artists, scholars, copy writers, students, architects, two Amsterdam homes for the elderly and a group of amateur actors to aid him in constructing his web of interconnected puzzle pieces. The French Horn lies hidden behind the large white plaster wall on which Murmur, the short film, is projected. Walking behind this wall brings one literally and metaphorically behind the scenes of Murmur and into the beating heart of Gabriel Lester's work.
While Murmur's reliance on established forms of storytelling preserves its clarity and simplicity, The French Horn is simply sensory overload in every sense of the term. Newspaper clippings, hand-drawn pictures, post-it notes, maps, booklets, photographs, framed puzzles, poster boards, movie posters, printed-out CNN screenshots… just about every manner of paper medium is collected in this room. The paper is arranged on the wall by topic, and labeled by post-it notes. Strings connect the post-it notes topics. It resembles something out of a movie: either the detailed work from a hard-to-crack CSI case, or the chilling delusions Jennifer Connelly found in the shed in A Beautiful Mind. Gabriel Lester’s work intentionally walks the line between senseless delusion and meticulous brilliance; The French Horn delivers riveting, exciting material that is truly and deeply frightening.
The piece as a whole is impossible to approach unless one centers on a single item. My personal experience drew me to the text on the wall that reads: “Puzzle time! Help each member of the quartet find his way out of the maze!” Reasonably, I assumed that this material acted as a metaphor for the entire piece. To me, this text was a ‘clue’ that suggested the whole piece was structured like a puzzle. Even though around it was a whirlwind of unrelated paper scrapings, if I held tightly to this nexus, it would be my beacon: the work would unfold analogously just as a fractal, with The French Horn representing the smallest and most primordial unit. And so I began my quest to solve the ‘puzzle’ of The French Horn.
In some cases, the pieces fit together snuggly, and I found myself underlying my booklet and annotating it in excitement—humming with with that self-satisfied afterglow of having completed some intellectual heaving lifting. Other times, the work felt messy and complicated. It bore the mark of being side-tracked so far from the original intention that the work no longer resembled the original theme. My mind buzzed with criticism: just like the astronomical phenomenon of the planetary “slingshot,” had Lester perhaps been prey to the laws of gravity— victim of the very heavy nature of his topic and thus repelled far from its core when he approached it too directly?
What I saw wasn’t a narrative or thesis at all: it was a just a mess of interconnected trains of thought. For example, paper pyramid drawings titled “class-systems and oppression” were connected to collections of images with the label “minstrel.” This was connected to “joker.” In turn this was connected all the way across the room to “Laurel and Hardy.” “Systems of Oppression” also connected across the room to “Zimbabwe,” which connected to “illegal animal hunting” of “large predatory animals.” “Lions” connected to “cowardliness,” and “predatory animals” connected to the death of the toddler at Disney land…. Ad infinitum. Nuclear war, pop culture, film, artificial intelligence, art, the human experience…. There were unending topical dimensions of the piece.
I came back a second day. But still, I couldn’t form the narrative out of the seemingly disparate topics. The first day I took notes, and the second day I took a video. Weirdly, my memories and notes tell a much different story than the video does. I realized that it is because my perception filtered out the topics I felt were unimportant or insignificant—whatever failed to fit the narrative I was constructing. I was trying desperately to make the piece mean something to me. I wanted it to say something about art’s purpose, or about how history repeats itself, or about technology and the soul. But in retrospect, I was trying to force meaning onto the web of interconnectedness. I was trying to make meaning where the actual point and literal thesis of the whole damn thing was simply to point to the process of meaning-making itself.
It seems to me that The French Horn reveals to us our very nature: we long desperately for meaning and justice and goodness and order. Often, we are so desperate for this structure that we limit our field of knowledge—block out certain information—in order to maintain these narratives of how the world works and why. We like solving puzzles and riddles because it confirms our belief that the world is actually confined by boundaries—something that can even have an answer.
The title of the exhibit in its full hits the nail almost perfectly on the head: “unresolved: Gabriel Lester’s unresolved extravaganza.” And indeed, it is. Traveling through the first exhibit, one can quickly see that this artwork acts as a thesis for the exhibit as a whole. Although the associative, messy method of understanding appears psychotic at first, it is emblematic of the online culture in which we live. The internet is structured by “links” that refer to each other. Wikipedia is quite literally knowledge and words referring to each other—making The French Horn not far from a material representation of this online reality. When this daily reality is manifested, it appears psychotic and foreign to us. But why? Because it is out own blindness manifested in paper and tape. Like Oedipus, we too blind ourselves to things we already know—to the web of information that exists within our grasp that we actively push out of sight. It is by our own doing that we are made deaf, dumb and blind? Though the intelligent often blame technology for the destruction of culture, Lester's posits a very Heideggerian thesis on the utility of technology: that technology has a profound capacity reveal the facts of life but is not a force or agent on its own. Lester suggests that it is we—the actors and agents with moral capacity for thought—that are complicit in our own self-destruction.
In this regard, Gabriel Lester succeeds by letting us down. He forces us to abandon our beloved patterns of thought that we often hold like swords. We lay down our weapons at the entryway of The French Horn and are are forever transfixed.
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