Bernhard Leitner -- Sound / Body / Space. Notations.

Since the 1960's Bernhard Leitner has been building spaces and sculptures with acoustic matter. His material is the sound, the physical sound. Whole-body-listening is an essential aspect of his work. For the viewer, who has to interact like an user sitting, lying, standing, walking - within the sound-space-sculptures and sound architectures in order to have this experience it is an unique and hardly ever before experienced moment. Vaults, curves, spirals, planes are thus not only visible, but also audible in their proportions and thus also from a distance haptically noticeable. Such a conception, which has barely any pre-conditions in art history and music history, nor vocabulary and signs, needs an intensive empirical-aesthetic research and written fixation. Thus, the notation sheets occupy a special, almost independent position in the oeuvre of Bernhard Leitner.

The notation sculpture SOUNDCUBE 1970 as well as the space-program created for different sound-architectures within the soundcube are shown in the exhibition as a first ideamanifest. TON-WÜRFEL 2019 (SOUNDCUBE 2019) refers to it like TON-WÜRFEL 1982 (SOUNDCUBE 1982) exhibited at documenta 7. Sound planes of spruce wood are the sound sources for the new work. The dance-like collages and montages in turn relate to early body acoustic Investigations such as KÖRPER-HÖREN (body-listening) from 1974/75. Sound spaces in motion between speakers mounted on hands and feet in motion. The work SPRINGER (Jumper) from 2018 shows that listening is always a complex synergy of all our senses. The eye sees and hears how the sound jumps aleatorically over a series of hurdles.

Stefan Fricke