Lukas Kühne’s Tvísöngur: Sculpture for a Concrete, Uncompressed Voice
DOI: 10.5920/DivP.2024.03
Abstract
This article draws from fieldwork and investigates the site-specific sound sculpture Tvísöngur (2012), conceived by sculptor Lukas Kühne. Located on the mountainside in Seyðisfjörður, Northeast Iceland, Tvísöngur—also known as the ‘singing’ sculpture—is made from five interconnected domes, each tuned to react to a specific pitch. The sculptural arrangement of the five domes is a direct three-dimensional representation of fifth singing, an ancient vocal practice consisting of a polyphonic chant where two vocalists sing in parallel fifths with voice-crossings at times. The article explores notions of public participation and corporeal engagement and investigates the sculpture’s aural agency and acoustic principles. Tvísöngur operates as a place of passage for a prospective vocal encounter within sculpture. The article establishes how Tvísöngur actively contributes to a sensorial experience of an uncompressed space and voice. This article is derived from Louvel’s thesis and her ongoing research on the interplay of voice with sculpture.
Keywords
Sound art, Sculpture, Voice, Sound sculpture, Site-specific, Acoustic, Resonance, Interaction
Introduction
Often, sculpture is regarded as a three-dimensional shape that we can circle. Barbara Hepworth notably invited us to touch sculptures and use our bodies:
I think every person looking at a sculpture should use his own body. You can’t look at a sculpture if you are going to stand stiff as a ramrod and stare at it. With a sculpture you must walk around it, bend toward it, touch it, and walk away from it. [1]
But how often do we have the opportunity to enter sculpture?
Of course, since the 1960s, participatory practices have invited the public into immersive sensory experiences within sculpture—coming to mind is Niki de Saint Phalle’s large-scale female body Hon (1966). Still, these public interactions are rare.
Ancient Vocal Practice and Its Sculptural Visualisation
Tvísöngur is a site-specific sound sculpture consisting of five interconnected domes of different sizes between two and four meters and covering ‘an area of about thirty square meters’.[2] The interior ceilings of the domes open onto a common rounded surface. Located on the mountainside, the sculpture overlooks the fjord of Seyðisfjörður in Northeast Iceland. It was installed in 2012 in cooperation with the Skaftfell Center for Visual Art. This work is part of a series of site-specific sound sculptures in which Lukas Kühne engages public participation, including Organum (2014) in Hailuoto, Finland, and Cromatico (2011) in Tallinn, Estonia. Onkai is near completition in the Nara’s mystical forest in Japan.
The name of the sculpture Tvísöngur translates as two songs or a duet—söngur means songs, and tvi, two. Brought to Iceland by the Viking settlers, tvísöngur is an ancient vocal practice consisting of a polyphonic chant where two vocalists sing in parallel fifths, with intermittent voice-crossings.
The sculptural arrangement of the five domes is a direct three-dimensional representation of the fifth singing, as each dome is tuned to react to a specific pitch. This materialisation of musical theory evokes Henrik Neugeboren and Paul Klee’s endeavour at the Bauhaus school in the late 1920s where they conceived a 3D scientific transformation of a Bach fugue. Neugeboren’s sketch eventually materialised in 1970, with the sculpture constructed outdoors in Leverkusen near Cologne.[3] Lukas Kühne’s undertaking facilitates a singular encounter with fifth singing theory through multi-sensorial exploration.
Voice and Sculpture: Organic Materials
Voice and sculpture are biological entities associated with the natural processes of living things, inherent to cell formation in the former, and organic material properties in the latter. In Tvísöngur, the notion of an organic and evolutionary process is both present in the voice—the vocal apparatus of the experiencer of the work—and in the sculpture itself, its construction arising from a local eroded rock. Tvisöngur is made of smooth concrete from a blend of gravel found nearby on the path to the sculpture, thus organically relating to the site and its rocky landscape. This is a crucial point for sculptor Lukas Kühne, who underlines how his practice must not be invasive to the environment but sensible and careful, so the gravel returns in the form of sculpture back to the mountain, back to its land. Also, the gravel’s colour changes according to the weather, so it naturally blends with its surroundings.
This gravel is black basalt, a mineral compound that is very common in Iceland. In some areas of the country, the cooling of the basaltic lava over an extended period has produced large basalt columns, astounding symmetrical sculptures naturally carved from the hardened lava. Lukas Kühne’s sculpture somehow conveys this geological process of erosion and natural carving of the mineral compound.
To install his work permanently, Kühne emphasises the importance of finding a suitable location on site in cooperation with locals, as he states that ultimately, ‘it is their sculpture, their work’.[4] When reflecting on his practice, Kühne gladly appropriates Joseph Beuys’s term ‘social sculptor’ to define this inclusive practice at the service of the land and its inhabitants. For Beuys, the social sculptor is an artist who creates social structures using language, thoughts, actions, and objects. Here, Lukas Kühne creates a sound structure in a remote town using sculptural objects, locally sourced materials, and acoustic principles.
An Encounter with Sculpture, with One’s Voice: A Place of Passage
Sound art is a hybrid art form forged from at least two directions: the visual arts and a sonic perspective. It is relational in the sense that sound is not autonomous—as music can be—but exists indissociably with a partner in symbiosis. The relational element can be a space, an object, a moving image, or the activity of people. In the 1960s, many sculptors took an interest in sound, developing intriguing sound sculptures. For instance, designer and sculptor Harry Bertoia conceived his Tonal Sculptures from various materials such as brass, bronze, or aluminium. Robert Rutman made Steel Cello from stainless steel. The Baschet brothers conducted in-depth acoustic research with various sculptural materials, conceiving in 1965, The Voice-Leaf, a sculpture for voice.
Sound art requires active public participation and a corporeal engagement that stretches beyond the much-privileged visual sense; Lukas Kühne’s Tvísöngur demands a more significant physical effort. To experience it, one must hike on a gravel path uphill up to a steep elevation of around 220 metres, pass two river streams, hop on a stepping-stone without getting one’s feet in the water, and then carry up in the mountainside until finally rewarded by the breath-taking Tvisöngur. The encounter can be pre-planned via a trail app. I hiked seventeen times, recording my walks with Strava (using geolocation tracking), and superimposed the trajectory on paper. My artist residency aimed to explore the inside of Tvísöngur using my voice as a tool of perception and produce a polyphonic composition.
Inviting public interaction, the sculpture Tvísöngur is quintessential for a sensory introduction to sound space, for an acoustic engagement with one’s voice. Lukas Kühne writes, ‘it is a unique combination of the visual and the auditory senses’.[5] I would add also the sense of touch, as the sculpture invites a tactile encounter, with the corporeal sensorium fully immersed within the sculpture. Few works invite us to enter the sculpture’s inside directly as a walk-in exploration. Providing an insight into the inside of the sculpture, the human voice operates here as a tool of perception and experience of Tvísöngur. With corporeality at play, the experiencer interacts with the sculpture and develops intuitively a relational approach with it and their own voice from the inner sound structure. When stepping into a resonant chamber, we naturally use our bodies to sense the space. We may click our fingers and clap our hands, but most likely, we are drawn toward using our voice. From our voice, we can sense the depth and contour of the space we inhabit in that instant. Tvisöngur taps into our ancestral aural behaviour of the voice once inside a cave. There is a correlation with the notable singing cave Sönghellir in the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, an ancient cave known for its distinct echoes. Still, here we are dealing with a contemporary sculpture. One could argue that this work is not sculpture but architecture; after all, aren’t all buildings producing their intrinsic resonance?
In her seminal article on the expanded field of sculpture, Rosalind Krauss concludes that sculpture is now a category that results from the combination of exclusion. If it is neither a landscape nor architecture, then it is a sculpture (Kraus, 1977, p. 336). Tvisöngur indeed sits within that field of practice. Furthermore, the distinction between architecture and sculpture has blurred, with large-scale sculptural works bordering on architecture. Since ancient times, there has been a traceable historical lineage of domes that functioned architecturally as places of worship. Still, Lukas Kühne’s domes are not designed for that purpose, nor for dwelling. If perhaps a temporary shelter, the interconnected domes function predominantly as a place of passage for a prospective vocal encounter within sculpture. And for that reason, I shall designate Tvísöngur as a voice sculpture. Undoubtedly, one could purposely carry an instrument up the hill, but most of those who will encounter the work while hiking on a trail will have their resonating body and voice as their sole instrument.
Tvísöngur is an open work, in the sense that Umberto Eco proposed—‘works of art that call upon performers, readers, viewers, or listeners to complete or to realise them’ (Eco, 2004, 167). Though it stands alone, self-sufficient, permeated by the wind and the distant sound of the waterfall, without a person inside the sculpture, no substantial dynamic sculptural resonance is activated. To be complete, Tvísöngur requires an encounter with a body, a voice. This participative dimension is vital to completing the work. The agentive voice is then the activator that shifts the status of the sculpture from static to dynamic. When hosting the transient voice, the sculpture gains liveness and aural agency. Curator Germano Celant describes the performer in these works as ‘the other substance in the passage from one to the other’ (Celant, 2014, p. 26). The visitor/performer activates the sculptural sound space with their voice, thus facilitating the passage from unfilled, vacant, in waiting—because, after all, space is never acoustically empty—to vibrating and fulfilled.
We tend to associate sculpture with immobility and muteness—when envisaged broadly as classical and figurative—but sculpture is not reduced to silence. Realising that sculpture had existed in silence through time, Harry Bertoia wondered: ‘Why is sound left outside?’ (Bertoia 2011, p. 186). Here in Tvísöngur, the sound is inside, and the sculpture is not passive but ready to hear. It receives the audio signal of the voice and emits back its resonance, the reflection of the sound space, resulting in a voice applied to the material of the sculpture. For researcher Steven Connor, the voice is not an attribute nor a condition; it is an event, ‘it is less something that exists than something which occurs’ (Connor 2000, p. 4). And so, in Tvísöngur, it is the eventful voice whose spatial and temporal agency brings aural motion to the static sculpture.
Acoustic Properties of Sculpture: A Singing Concrete
Lukas Kühne states that Tvísöngur becomes ‘a sculpture of singing concrete’.[6] How can the sculpture sing?
Based on acoustic design principles, each dome has its singular acoustic behaviour, whose resonance is determined according to mathematical parameters such as the height and width of the dome, or as Kühne puts it, ‘each dome works as a natural amplifier to that tone’.[7] The sculptor reveals how his contribution to a church organ renovation project was instrumental in designing the acoustic of the five domes. And so, the sculpture possesses potential acoustic energy to vibrate and produce sound waves from its encounter with voice. This ‘singing’ of the sculpture is the echo, the reflection of sound waves that arrive at the listener with a delay after the direct voice has been performed. This delay is proportional to the distance of the reflecting surface between the source and the listener. There is an echo in the dome because one stands with one’s body in space to sense and acknowledge this natural amplification phenomenon. In this sculpture of singing concrete, the voice is a sound matter that encounters the sculptural material. It is important to underline how domes often present acoustic challenges, posing problems of unwanted sound concentration in terms of live performance clarity, which acousticians try to solve. Yet, here with Tvísöngur, this is not a concern as the experience consists of a singular acoustic exploration for the individual who happens to enter the sculpture.
Domes have various concentration points, with quiet and loud spots depending on where you stand when projecting your voice. In each dome, there are also concentration points where one experiences the phenomenon of phasing when standing at the centre of the dome. Phasing occurs when the voice reflects from all sides with an equal reverberation time. Relating to my experience, my voice felt louder and closer to my ears in that particular spot at the centre, as if I was in a narrower space. This phasing effect happened because the standing sound waves of my voice that hit the wall came back to the same position, my position in the dome, and, therefore, to my ears as I sang. This resulted in an overlaying of both sound waves, the emitting sound waves and the reflecting sound waves, which happened to be in the same place, in phase.
Besides the experience of the long echoes inside the sculpture, this phasing effect contributes to the sensorial and acoustic discovery of one’s voice. The circulation of the voice is simultaneously input and output, as a two-way transmission where the voice sounds, resounds, rebounds, and then returns to the performer for a whole sensorium experience. Steven Connor defines the movement of the echoing voice as follows:
The echoing voice is not a voice in space, it is a voice of space. This voice continuously touches, comes back to itself, marking out a volume in space in the interval between emission and return. (Connor, 2000, p. 38)
This notion of touch brought by Connor appeals to me here as when enveloped in the sculpture, the experiencer is sensorially engaged, entirely in touch with their voice. How often do we experience our own projected voice in an isolated acoustic space without the interference of the outside world? These privileged spaces are not easy to find; they could be abandoned buildings, shelters, or caves.
Experiential Outcome: A Concrete Voice in the Extended Space
With Tvísöngur, Lukas Kühne provides a space that is not empty but extended, full of our being in the sculptural space. If the twentieth century’s technological expansion has given us the ability to dislocate sounds and voices in time and space, here in Tvísöngur, I experienced a feeling of unity when singing in the sculpture. With Tvísöngur, we step away from schizophonia—a term coined by composer R. Murray Shafer to illustrate that dislocation of sound and voice—to united phonia: a voice, of a body, within sculpture.
This corporeal encounter of voice within sculpture results in a concrete experience in the lived space instead of a dematerialised, virtual space. In ‘The Uncompressible, or: The Rediscovery of the Extended’, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk explains that since we have considerably reduced and compressed distances in transportation and communication, we subsequently experience a contraction of space and time, which he calls, ‘modern spatial compression’ (Sloterdijk, 2013, p. 251). Sloterdijk argues that a new spatial thought embodied by the culture of presence will ‘revolt itself against the contracted world’ (Sloterdijk, 2013, p. 254) and its effects of compression and de-realisation. He suggests possible avenues to counteract the modern spatial compression and rediscover slowness: ‘By suddenly learning to read extended life in maps again? By finding our way back from chronolatry to topophilic feelings?’(Sloterdijk, 2013, p. 254). This topophilic feeling is pertinent here, as the inclination towards the land is the starting point for Kühne’s site-specific sculptures, from their construction on site to their public encounter involving hiking. The sculptor’s practice converges with Sloterdijk’s statement. There is a political dimension in his sculptures—expressed by Kühne himself—as they contribute to a resistance to the fast pace of the world, its dematerialisation, and instead call for embodied presence.
In the context of the proliferation of digital participation—our post-postmodernist era, which Alan Kirby (2009) calls digimodernism—we increasingly live contactless lives, operating in virtual spaces. As we often pursue our extended persona online through avatars or other’s reality, we become dematerialised bodies and disembodied voices. When not taking comfort in our digital bubble, we crave tactile, corporeal experiences. And so, Tvísöngur actively contributes to a sensorial experience of an uncompressed space and voice, providing a space for self-discovery. Lukas Kühne refers to the sensorial gain of his sound sculptures as ‘acoustic power plants’[8] for participation that leave one physically and mentally recharged. Wrapped in the sculpture, one comes in contact with one’s voice, whose distinct vocal properties are applied through the material of the sculpture. The experiential outcome of Tvísöngur points to an uncompressed voice as a form of resistance to our modern world: a concrete voice in a concrete sculpture.
Acknowledgments
This article is derived from Louvel’s upcoming PhD thesis that investigates the interplay of voice and sculpture and draws from fieldwork conducted in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, as an artist-in-residence hosted by the Skaftfell Center for Visual Art in May 2023. The Henry Moore Foundation Research and Travel Grant supported this research. Thank you to Lukas Kühne. Thank you to Pari Stave, former artistic director of Skaftfell Center, for welcoming me to Seyðisfjörður. Thank you to Patrick Valiquet.
Endnotes
[1] ‘Barbara Hepworth interviewed in 1972’, [Online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgOZhznXtYY [Accessed 23 August 2023].
[2] Kühne, Lukas. ‘TVISÖNGUR Lukas Kühne Construction 2012 Seydisfjördur, East Iceland’, [Online] Available at: http://www.lukaskuehne.com/TVISONGUR-Construction.pdf [Accessed 3 May 2023].
[3] See Henrik Neugeboren’s eine bachfuge im bild (1929), eventually built in 1970 in Leverkusen, near Cologne.
[4] Author’s conversation with Lukas Kühne, 13 July 2023.
[5] Kühne, Lukas. ‘Opening of sound sculpture ‘Tvisöngur’, [Online] Available at: http://www.lukaskuehne.com/TVISONGUR-OPENING.pdf [Accessed 23 August 2023].
[6] Kühne, Lukas. ‘Opening of sound sculpture ‘Tvisöngur’, [Online] Available at: http://www.lukaskuehne.com/TVISONGUR-OPENING.pdf [Accessed 23 August 2023].
[7] Ibid.
[8] Author’s conversation with Lukas Kühne, 13 July 2023.
References
Bertoia, H. (2011). ‘Why is sound left outside?’ In Kelly, C., ed. SOUND. Documents of Contemporary Art. Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press.
Celant, G. (2014). Art or Sound: From the Multilingual to the Multisensory. In Art of Sound. Progetto Prada Arte.
Connor, S. (2000). What I say goes. In Dumbstruck: A cultural history of ventriloquism. Oxford University Press.
Eco, U. (2004). The Poetics of the Open Work (1959)
. In Cox, C. and Warner, D., eds. Audio Culture. Continuum.
Kirby, A. (2009). Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture. Continuum.
Krauss, R. (1977). Passages in Modern Sculpture. MIT Press.
Sloterdijk, P. (2013). The Uncompressible, or: The Rediscovery of the Extended. In In the World Interior of Capital. Polity.
About the author
Olivia Louvel is an artist, composer, and Sound Art Brighton member. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Brighton, investigating the interplay of voice and sculpture across Fine Art and Digital Music & Sound Art departments. She won an Ivor Novello Award at The Ivors Classical Awards 2023 for LOL, a sonic intervention delivered through the public address system of Middlesbrough’s CCTV surveillance network. Her resounding of a Barbara Hepworth archival tape, The Sculptor Speaks (2020), was premiered on Resonance Extra, followed by an audio-visual version presented at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2021 and Towner in 2023.