Selected audio pieces from Ricarda Denzer's archive of works appear here in alternating programming.

ABOUT AUDIO ARCHIVE

Karen Werner, Ricarda Denzer, Interview with Innsbruck archaeologists, sculptor Dorotha Ropac, found audio fragments by Susan Sontag, John Berger, Kari Polanyi.

In her current audio-assemblage Ricarda Denzer dedicates herself to the creation of an artwork as well as its decay: Like an archaeologist, during the restoration of original objects either the missing pieces of a find are interpreted and filled-in using substitute material, or left as gaps. The ‚dirtying‘ of the cast of a historical find with original soil from where it was found is a technique employed by archaeologists to make the copy look more real. Denzer takes this technique and reinterprets many of its facets. The original here stands for the source, for the documentation and the origin, and it alludes to an artistic process where the movement between finding an object, the documentary moment, the facts, the new composition and the production of a fiction through montage is fluid.

In Denzer‘s work, rendering traces and imprints visible, and revealing layers by engaging with the locations, with the materials, with the narrative, leading right down to the voice itself. The exploration of the nature of original materials, the recently supplemented, reconstructed material, but also the technique of leaving gaps between pieces of original finds and the interpretation of missing pieces in the restoration process serves as a conceptual basis and a figure of speech in this audio piece.

http://ricardadenzer.net/Echo-or-Deviating-the-Original-2016-ongoing

http://ricardadenzer.net/Erste-Fassung-Interpretation-2018

Echo, or Deviating the Original

http://ricardadenzer.net/Kapi-Acik-The-Door-is-Open-2013

For a while, something like a regularity in the state of emergency occurred for me in the Cihangir district of Istanbul. From 4pm onwards, the street vendors withdrew from the streets and cafés. At night, the neighbour from across the street shouted from his window to the fleeing demonstrators of the Gezi protests: "kapı açık" - The door is open, so that they could seek safety from the police in his house. In the sound work "kapı açık", a window of time in the early summer of 2013 makes the simultaneity of different socio-political times in Istanbul perceptible through the sounds of the city pushing inwards from the outside through the open window.

Kapı Açık

2012 audio installation, radio piece, 40 min., concept, text, voice: Ricarda Denzer, sound architecture: Szely

http://ricardadenzer.net/Perplexities-2012

Perplexities

concept, realisation, research, camera, editing: Ricarda Denzer

voices: Bruce Bernstein, Director of the South- western Association for Indian Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA; Tourist Guide in Santa Fe; Rose B. Simpson, artist, during a bus tour to Taos, lives and works in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, USA; Sophie Lillie, art historian and specialist in restitution research, lives and works in Vienna; radio fragments,„Michael Kerbler in conversation“ with Richard Sennett, 2008; Fragmente eines Vortrags von / fragments of a lecture by Chantal Mouffe at Kreisky Forum Vienna, 2008;  simultaneous translator at the conference Borders, Nations, Translations, WUK, Vienna, 2008; audio excerpts from the lm The Hands of Maria. Maria Montoya Martinez. The Potter of San Ildefonso, 1968

For her work restore, created in 2008 for SITE Santa Fe, Denzer found the story of Rose Dugan, an American aviation pioneer, who in 1918 was the first pilot to fly over Santa Fe, New Mexico along with her passenger, Vera von Blumenthal—a Czech arts and crafts dealer. The two women settled there, became lovers and founded the Santa Fe Indian Market, the third-largest arts and crafts market currently in the US. Popularized by Blumethal and her relationship to the European design market, the now famous black ceramic works of Maria Martinez were acquired by the Weltmuseum Wien in the 1950s. Denzer traces this narrative back to her own point of departure, the 1920s Vienna and the Wiener Werkstätte, Art Nouveau and to a generation of Viennese collector families that were annihilated by the Holocaust. 


(Rose) Dugan was one of the first women students with the Wright Brothers, who pioneered aviation, and they were very much against women learning to fly, of course, you can imagine that, right. So she was that sort of strong-willed individual. Vera van Blumenthal was a Russian and she became an expatriate after 1917. But she was involved in Europe, in Czechoslovakia in developing handicraft projects. Many people got involved as industrialization came on, many people got involved, they thought that the sense of individual arts in crafts, blah, blah, blah ... and so she became involved and helped revitalize lacemaking in Czechoslovakia.

She establishes that kind of centre for Eastern European arts in Pasadena. No one knows how she and Dugan met, but she and Rose became friends. It is very clear that Vera van Blumenthal had at least two husbands, doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have been lovers. But Rose, Rose had a lot of money and Rose built a house just outside of San Ildefonso Pueblo.

“The Hands of Maria”, an educational video about Maria Martinez, 1968:

In the valley of the Rio Grande, at the foot of Hamos Mountains in the present state of New Mexico, lies the pueblo of San Ildefonso. This is a village of considerable antiquity. For centuries the cultivated fields around the pueblo sustained the people. But changing times, drought and flood have made severe inroads into their economy. Into this pueblo, Maria Martinez was born. She is a potter. And from her art has developed the pottery which has brought recognition to her, fame to the pueblo and an important contribution to its economy. Many of her pueblo neighbours have learned the art of Maria.

Something that was, you know, very much at a kind of forefront of trying to create a modern avant-garde form today, has become such a cliché of fin-de-siècle Vienna and everybody knows Klimt and Schiele and Alma Mahler-Werfel and dancing waltzes and that’s, you know, just – and Adele Bloch-Bauer – and it’s become almost ridiculous.

This group of individual patrons like Lederer and Zuckerkandl and Bloch-Bauer turned in a very significant way to Jugendstil artists, to the Wiener Werkstätte and supported those institutions in a great way – I mean, something like the Secession, the Secession building was basically financed by Wittgenstein.

And of course, the fact that many of these families happened to be Jewish means that today we have a kind of conspicuous number of Klimt paintings that are now, you know, that have been in the focus of the restitution process – some of his most important patrons where Jewish, but ...

This is the work for which Maria, the only Indian woman ever to be thus honoured, received the American Institute of Architects Award. The American Institute of Architects honours the daughter of a race and land whose arts were great long before the name America was known. Rediscovering techniques lost for centuries, you have raised them to new heights, still unaided by a potter’s wheel or closed kiln. We honour not only the skill of your hands, but also your holding fast to the Pueblo Indians’ early teaching that your discoveries and the fruits of your labours were not yours to keep, but rather to share with all people.

The idea was to work with Indian potters to help them improve their pottery. Because they, like most of the people at that time believed that pottery was just made to sell. So it was spoiled by money, by American and Spanish influence and by re-instituting their own traditions, getting rid of outside influences and making native pottery that’s only about native culture – they felt they could improve pottery. But what they did was, in 1917 they gave 300 dollars to the Museum of New Mexico, to the Palace of the Governors here, to a guy named Kenneth Chapman, called the Pueblo Pottery Improvement Project. So the idea was to reward better pottery. 06:15 Before 1915 there was another, one of the archaeologists, locally, and he just wanted them to duplicate archaeological pottery, so he thought that by just going backwards in time and duplicating what had been pre-Spanish, that would make better pueblo pottery automatically, and that’s ... I’m sorry but – stupid – as an idea. Because you can’t duplicate. But the interesting thing about the pots – when they try to duplicate these old pots – is, they are clearly made in 1913, not made in 1500, you know.

Barbara “Tahn-Moo-Whe” Gonzales, San Ildefonso Tewa Clay Artist, KNME 2006:

Maria really brought back the old traditional style of pottery making with the larger pots and because of what she was doing and the magnificent beauty of the pieces she was working with, an art market was really created. So I think today we really have to credit Maria for keeping this tradition alive and turning it really into an art

Jugendstil and Art Nouveau and also the Arts and Crafts Movement really developed at a time of industrialization and it was a response to the possibilities of producing art and architecture and arts and crafts mechanically and having the means of industrial production. At the same time you have some artists returning to the notion of handcrafted arts, returning to very kind of old techniques, returning to this kind of mythology maybe, or fascination with hands at work.

Rose Dugan got ... she was happy with the success, and actually the Indian Market, this thing, it was her money that established the first prize money for the market. And without Maria, this woman Maria Martinez, there would not really have been any reason for a market and without a market Maria would never have had the success that she had, in a certain way, probably.

And of course, today we talk about black pottery as if it has been here for centuries, as if it’s the old traditional form – the joke is – it is only as old as the 1920s, it is only eighty-seven years old – maybe ninety years old at this point. So the idea of what tradition is – tradition is constantly changing, it is constantly evolving and so forth – so when people then talk about what Indian Market should be – oh it’s old traditional things – it’s the way people have always done things – it’s centuries old ...

There is a direct line between German enlightenment and romanticism – you just illustrated it beautifully. My rationality tells me what to do, but then this thing touched by human hands – you’ve just given me the whole history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany – What that will look like – that is really interesting to me, if some of the working procedures for making physical objects can be applied to a geography, and I hope to find that out.

Soon we will be crossing from San Ildefonso reservation to Santa Clara Pueblo reservation which is where we’re from. The river runs right between us and this mesa here. The river is the biggest river in New Mexico. It is not very big, but we call it the big river. There is a huge gang problem in Española. Gangs are not a problem until they start hating each other, and then they become a problem. You can see on the right and the left, this wall is usually covered in graffiti, they painted it recently. When you have something written and then crossed out, that’s when you know that there is a problem. We have a lot of gangs here.

I think this youth needs a sense of belonging, so they create these gangs to feel like they are included in something. They feel protected and needed.

I am sorry, I cannot understand what he is saying ... absolutely impossible ... maybe I will be able to reconstruct his question ... when the speaker answers ... I am sorry, I did not understand what he was saying ... well thank you very much for giving me permission to speak ... I don’t know whether that was a question ... ok, I don’t think he really asked a question, so ... I am not quite sure of speaking, or of being able to say anything ... in response to this comment ... ok, let’s, ahh ... maybe let’s interrupt this monologue and return back to our dialogue.

What kind of culture are you trying to construct? I think the idea of confronting history or dealing with a country’s past is an equally good cultural identity for this country to have, if not better. So it doesn’t need to be physical objects that you would hold on to, but the whole process is actually a better goal to have. I think it’s very different when you have an object that has iconic importance for the country or people that it was stolen from, I think that’s completely different. Keeping or retaining that object in a museum in Vienna only kind of reinforces the act of cultural domination and dispossession. 13:30 The other aspect is something that the museums actually have to investigate, and come to terms with their own role during the Nazi era and beyond, kind of in the post-war era. You have the break in 1938 with the Annexation of Austria and the advent of National Socialism that completely wiped out on the one hand the generation of patrons and collectors that had been so important and totally annihilated, you know, this group of important Jewish collectors and patrons. But also you have on the other hand the beginning of, kind of, the politics of moving away from private collecting and a kind of nationalizing of private collections and building public institutions.

The train used to run here where this road is actually, and that brought in a lot of tourism and a lot of outside influence to the tribe, and also influenced the sale and making of pottery for tourism other than for utilitarian purposes. Because pottery for tourism introduces a lot of money into the tribe, that changed a lot of the social dynamics for the tribe, within the tribe, because of certain people who made pottery and certain people who didn’t, and caused certain people versus other people to get more monetary income and have more connection to outside the pueblo world.

... Anybody in the community could learn how to become a good farmer, a good potter and a good priest, and the skills for all three were the same. But in modern western capitalism we make a different assumption, that only a few will be able to do really good work and that the masses will generate inferior produce. I don’t believe this is true at all. I don’t think that there is any psychological or cultural evidence for that. That’s why I make the seemingly shocking assertion that motivation comes before ability.

Maria Martinez and her husband Julian then worked on a series of pots and a number of ideas. That’s what the wonderful thing is: in the museum collection is their thinking. There’s a series of about five or six pots ... you can see them thinking through the problem of what they would create, and what they came up with was the idea of a highly burnished black piece of pottery. So she took the idea of emphasizing the form and pushed to one side the idea of painted pottery – and the reason for that was that painted pottery was very, very Tewa Indian in viewpoint and understanding, whereas a painted form was much more in the Arts and Crafts Movement. If you think about arts and crafts, it is much more about form and so forth, so she really understood the Anglo world – the outside world. 17:20 And then, what they did was, they developed a body of designs which is still used today and they used the designs not as separate painting or storytelling on the pieces, but rather to accentuate the form.

So they took a pot, like a shoulder jar, which normally would have been painted entirely with panels and they moved the design up on the neck or on to the shoulder to accentuate the shape of the pot. So if you look at Maria’s pottery as a finished product – it doesn’t fit into a tradition – but if you understand Maria’s pottery as part of a tradition of thought processes using the intellectualism in art, then it fits into 2000 years of pottery – you can see it clearly ...

We’ve got the Palace of the Governors in front of us which is the oldest continuously used public building in the United States, house of the governors of Spain, Mexico and the United States and it’s now our history museum. In front of it we have Indian artists who are selling their wares, mostly jewellery, not too many of them today, but you can see them sitting there – this is a very, very special, unique program of qualified, selected Native American artists, selling their own work – nobody else is right in front of you there ...

... can we turn on the defroster? ... it seems like the windows are ... or maybe turn down the heat a little bit or something ... yes, the defroster to pull down the moisture ... We are now listed as the second largest art market in the United States – there are over 250 art galleries in Santa Fe – just in the city limits.

You know, commodification is like an elixir – right, in the sense that people get caught up in making money, or need to make money, so it is a very complicated formula ... So with native art, people have pushed for it’s commodification for 120 years at this point, maybe 130 years – so the early train travellers and so forth, people wanted things they could carry home with them – they expected it to be something inexpensive, and small, right?

19:30 So today, when a potter makes something today – that’s unique, and you know, and then people expect it to be just a few dollars – so especially if you look at the stores and you go to the stores, and you see a finely made piece of pottery – it’s a twenty or thirty or even fifty or seventy-five thousand dollar piece of pottery – for a unique piece of pottery – only a few potters can get that much – but then you can go and you can buy pueblo-style pottery, copies made in Mexico or made in China, for less than a hundred dollars – so that creates a problem in terms of people understanding and breaking out of the commodity sort of idea of art work.

20:25 The other thing that happens is that in many places still in the South West, people are very poor and there’s very few economic opportunities for them, but one of the economic opportunities for them is making Indian jewellery or Indian pottery and things like that.

The question of a kind of repatriation of cultural objects and artefacts is not a new one, because of course it kind of runs right through the whole discussion of antiquities, probably any kind of non-western art. The other standard thing, that people always criticise is, well, when we return this, how far back do you go in history? You know, people always end up with the Napoleonic Wars. There is a political interest in that as well. Because of course there is a difference between Nazi looted art and the Napoleonic Wars, and one of them is the Holocaust, and the other is, we haven’t resolved the issues in our most recent past. And it’s something, you know, that happened not that long ago. Long enough for something to have happened. But it’s really a question of our generation: how do you resolve that very immediate inheritance of one previous generation? It is probably one of the areas where you can best see the relevance of history to today. Because we have museums or collectors, or art dealers benefit on a daily basis from the atrocities that were perpetrated by the Nazis, so it is not something that is separated from history.

This is what people will tell you about the Indian market, they’ll say: “Oh, it used to be better – it used to be so much better – it was really deeply spiritual – it had a lot of meaning – but now it doesn’t have that anymore ... .” So you know – what does that mean? You know, what it means is, today’s people are just modern people like you and I – and they just play at being Indian more than selling their stuff – that’s what that means right? So it’s really – very pejorative. And so the older people are more authentic – those were really Indian, those were real people that were authentic – before western culture changed them somehow. That’s another way that people express that commodification – they think it’s increasing now with native arts ...

24:16 The 'us and them' thing is a huge construct – you know, it’s a construct that is paternalistic – that they don’t understand themselves ... so, 'us' – we have to explain what 'they' really mean, right? ... so that’s an incredibly deep thing – an interesting thing of course is that in conceptual art you are involved with it, it’s more and more an 'us and them'. You know, that’s a thing I find so striking about conceptual art now, that more and more I feel like an outsider looking inside your art. You really feel left out. In a way if you think about art – in western society it’s a bit like looking into, and making native art it’s looking out from – does that make sense? ... it’s a very different world view, and a very different type of aesthetic as a result of that.

Fragments of a lecture by Chantal Mouffe at Kreisky Forum, Vienna:

... one could also say that the political has to do with a conflict, and of course an antagonistic conflict because an antagonistic conflict cannot have a rational solution. There is no 'we' without a 'they' ...

restore

Voice interpretation, 6 takes, 19 min
concept, realisation: Ricarda Denzer, Voice Artist: Michael Krappel aka Fii
http://ricardadenzer.net/Mundindustrie-Mouth-Industries-2009

http://ricardadenzer.net/Mundindustrie-Mouth-Industries-2009

Mundindustrie

La Croûte du Chout – Das Saure vom Kraut. Es geht ans Eingemachte, 2007

piece; speech performance, 17 min. concept, editing: Ricarda Denzer  interviewee: Namrata Bali, Director of the Indian union Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), Ahmedabad, India, 2004

Interview: Ricarda Denzer, prompter: Monika Brusenbauch, camera, sound: Ruth Kaaserer

 text fragments: Elisabeth Keber, tax accountant, business coaches by Coach_if Vienna, radio fragments by an author, a philosopher and an expert in business ethics

http://ricardadenzer.net/La-Croute-du-Chout-Das-Saure-vom-Kraut-Es-geht-ans-Eingemachte-2007

La Croûte du Chout – Das Saure vom Kraut. Es geht ans Eingemacht

S. I. – Simultaneous Interpreting, 2002



Sprach Performance, Wien Umgehen, Tanzquartier, Wien / Vienna Live-Übertragung und Simultanübersetzung eines Gesprächs aus einer Wiener Wohnung auf die Bühne / live broadcast and simultaneous translation of a conversation from a Viennese apartment to the stage Live-Dialoge / live dialogues:
Konzept und Umsetzung / concept and realization: Ricarda Denzer, im Gespräch mit / in conversation with Carola Dertnig und / and Ulrike Müller Simultanübersetzerin, Performerin / simultaneous translator, performer: Eva Stanzl



http://ricardadenzer.net/Simultaneous-Interpreting-2002

S. I. – Simultaneous Interpreting

Hörstück / audio piece, 17 min
Sound, Schnitt / concept, sound, editing: Ricarda Denzer
Recherche / research: Barbara Kraus, Ricarda Denzer
Sounddesign / sound design: Fatih Aydoğdu


http://ricardadenzer.net/eigen-peculiar-2000

eigen

Konzept, Schnitt / concept, editing: Ricarda Denzer

Sounddesign / sound design: Fatih Aydoğdu

Kamera, Ton / camera, sound: Reinhard Mayr


302: Would it be correct to say our concepts reflect our life?

303: The rule-governed nature of our language permeates our life.

„how are stories created? – and how can they be fixed in the moment of their creation?“ – this question ist he artist Ricarda Denzer´s starting point for her audio-visual production

„reading in absence“. Denzer has people from her surroundings wander through an empty vacant flat commenting on it. This flat is most like the shell of a crab freed from all the meat inside an empty husk a framework a ruin a remainder. And while the people still believe they are speaking about others about this alien world and reconstructing or imagining it based on minimal traces doing memory work they are already entangled in the net of their own language and ideas. The emptiness of the place triggers a reading in the absent that gradually mutates into an investment and a production of meaning. The sound track becomes more and more independent establishing contexts and illustrating the complexity of viewing / reading practices. While the narrators move contemplatively and deliriously at once through the `undead` space and shifted verbal emergence becomes observable a rallying of fragmented associations take place: projection intuition fiction overlap one another in the monologues of the viewers who while speaking increasingly become readers and authors of themselves and their own frames of life.

Judith Fischer (Translation: Jonathan Quinn)

http://ricardadenzer.net/Reading-in-Absence-2000

reading in absence

In Zusammenarbeit mit / in collaboration with Isa Rosenberger


Ein Stück für den Anrufbeantworter / A piece for the answering machine, 1995


Neulich bei Frau Novak / Recently at Mrs.Novak´s,


Audio-Dokumentation / audio documentation , 1995


Ronda Zheng, Phantom und Kultfigur, betrat die Wiener Kunstszene in den 1990er Jahren.
Ihre Biographie ist eng verknüpft mit jener von Ricarda Denzer und Isa Rosenberger.
/
Ronda Zheng, a phantom and cult figure, entered the Viennese art scene in the 1990s, and was connected to the artistic careers of Ricarda Denzer and Isa Rosenberger.

http://ricardadenzer.net/Ronda-Zheng-1993-1997

Ronda Zheng

http://ricardadenzer.net/Die-Gute-Stube-The-Parlour-1995

Die Gute Stube

Ausstellungsdokumentation / exhibition documentation, 2010

Auftragsarbeit im Rahmen der Ausstellung Gender Check, MUMOK 2010. Beauftragt durch die Erste Stiftung / Commissioned work in the context of the exhibition Gender Check, MUMOK 2010. Commissioned by Erste Stiftung.


If Silence could speak and someone would listen

Beauftragt durch / Commissioned by Barbara Kraus, 2007

Regie: Barbara Kraus; Dramaturgie und Hörstück: Ricarda Denzer / Director: Barbara Kraus, dramaturgy and radio play: Ricarda Denzer