Performance Art Firebrand Anne Imhof Has Released the Music From Her Sinister Venice Biennale Work, ‘Faust,’ as an Album

If you saw
Faust, Anne Imhof’s staggering and explosive Golden
Lion-winning performance at the 2017 Venice Biennale, you may not
remember the music that accompanied it. But you’re sure to recall
the sinister vibe it set. And now, you can relive the experience.

Last week, Imhof released the full
score to her austere,
operatic performance piece. The album, a blend of live recordings
from the Venice performance and new arrangements, was put out
through Entopia, an offshoot of the Berlin-based record label PAN,
and co-published by Galerie Buchholz and the German
Pavilion.

Like the performances of
Faust’s actors, Imhof’s score ranges in tone from
the brutal to the
beautiful. Moments of menacing industrial squeal, replete with
pounding drums and over-distorted guitars, give way to tender
balladic passages of sparse piano and a single sonorous voice. One
song begins with a minor-key choral arrangement, then dissolves
into several minutes’ worth of people screaming, as if they are
being tortured.

Imhof composed the score in the
months ahead of the Biennale, working with a trio of collaborators:
Billy Bultheel, Franziska Aigner, and her partner, Eliza
Douglas. It’s a normal
strategy for the quartet, who previously worked together to score
Imhof’s 2016 performance, Angst. They came together again for the artist’s
most recent effort, Sex,
which was on view at Tate Modern and the Art Institute of Chicago
earlier this
year.

The physical album, available on
CD and vinyl, comes with a booklet of photographs by Nadine
Fraczkowski, another of Imhof’s close collaborators. The book
includes documentation of the Faust performance and intimate portraits of its cast.
For those that are merely curious about the music, the album is
also available on Spotify.

The post Performance Art Firebrand Anne Imhof Has Released
the Music From Her Sinister Venice Biennale Work, ‘Faust,’ as an
Album appeared first on artnet News.