How we made Cave Art – an artist’s thoughts on Brueckenmusik 2006

I participated in Brueckenmusik-12 in summer of 2006, along with fellow artists Akio Suzuki and An Seebach; the first-person-plural of my title is not intended to speak for them, or any other artists who made pieces in the Deutzerbruecke space. It’s only there to diffuse my authorship of the piece I made, which I feel emerged out of the site rather than out of my head.

No love-padlocks for the Deutzerbruecke

The Deutzerbruecke crosses the Rhine at Cologne. Easy to say. The river that once presented such a barrier is spanned by a piece of concrete roadway. No tolls, no questions, no being turned back. During the Pleistocene era, the North Sea came almost to Bonn and the whole region was a tidal zone. By the end of the ice-age, the estuaries merged together creating the Rhine valley. The river achieved a legendary status as a boundary following the ambush at Teutoburg Forest. After that it marked the no-fly zone for Caesars, big and little. Latin on one side, German on the other. But what was at one time a natural boundary gradually became a channel of communication. The Treaty of 1815 made it the world’s first international river. Modern industrial Europe flowered its excrescences of steel mills and chemical refineries along the shores. The Rhine had been a linguistic and political boundary, but now the suburbs of Cologne lie across the water, Germany all around. Yelp lists more pizzerias on Deutz side than the Colonia side now. But in the summer of 2006, one heard mostly Portuguese, and even that in the form of cheers and songs as Cologne hosted the Brazilian team in the World Cup.

Still, a bridge is a narrowing, a constriction. In some way every bridge presents a confined passage, and the Deutzerbruecke especially so. This (reconstructed after 1945) bridge, earlier called the Hindenburgbruecke, and before that the Deutzer Hängebrücke, was originally built in 1913 and is an early example of a box girder bridge, in which the bridge surface is supported by a rigid tube of steel and concrete that is cast in place. The Deutzerbruecke inaugurated this design and inspired many other bridges, including the famous “Three Sisters” bridge in Pittsburgh and the Kiyosu bridge in Tokyo. While offering several structural advantages, a drawback of this design is that box girder bridges are more difficult to maintain, because of the need for access to a confined space inside the box.

Due to this maintenance requirement, the Deutzerbruecke contains a completely enclosed under-deck hidden in its belly. While tourists report that the best panoramic photos of Cologne may be taken from atop the Deutzer span, the under-deck is a dark, rectangular concrete tube where no ray of light ever penetrates – a sort of suspended dungeon - a basement in the sky. This confined space constitutes the exhibition site of the annual Brueckenmusik festival.

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

My first visit to the exhibition space took place in the winter or early spring of 2006. The curators had recommended that I experience the site in person before defining any specific proposal, because of its distinct acoustic properties. So I made the side trip to Cologne to hear and see what the space had to offer. We passed through large industrial doors at the base of the Cologne side of the bridge embankment, entered a high-vaulted space and climbed a narrow stairway up to the ceiling where a tight rectangular hole through a massive cement wall affords the only way to enter the maintenance tunnel. This passage is small - barely over one meter in all three dimensions, so one must crouch down uncomfortably. The more so since this crouched posture must be maintained until the thickness of the massive concrete has been traversed. For a moment one feels caged. There are what appear to be chisel marks on its sides, either from frequent collisions with tools, or a frustrated attempt to widen it by force. This passage, reminiscent of the cold womb in the rites of Mithras, a deep cool chamber one must pass into in order to be cleansed and then reborn into the world of light, is the only access point. All artists, materials, audience, press, critics alike, must pass through it to enter, and again to exit. There is no other way out. When, after crossing the span, you arrive almost at the end of the tunnel, with the Deutz side of the Rhine running far below your feet, you must turn around and go back to re-emerge into the world outside.

In winter it was cold enough outside, with grey skies and wind whipping around, but inside the tunnel it was somehow colder still. This made the sonic scene all the more daunting. The tunnel, a rectangular tube about 1/2 kilometer in length from shore to shore, is divided into 3 chambers of unequal length separated by concrete walls pierced with a doorway. My space, the very last 100 meters or so of the tunnel, was illuminated by a dim horizontal row of lights revealing the cast concrete walls of the box girder construction filigreed with a bas-relief of industrial pipes and conduits. The rectangular profile of the chamber - wider than it is high - reminded me of a waveguide for microwaves, and I felt as if I were indeed in such a Hertzian space when I heard the third-of-a-second slap echo bouncing back and forth with our every footstep, every word we spoke.

We could also hear the accumulated noise of, but not the distinct onsets of sonic events emanating from the roadway above, the cars passing. The concrete roadway above also bears the tracks of a tramway that connects the two banks of Cologne, and when it passed, it offered up a revelation. The sound built up unrelentingly and filled the whole space with a cosmic din all its own. In that instant, I realized that nothing I could do with loudspeakers could ever compete in sheer sound power of the tram. Whereas subtleties of sound would certainly be erased by the echoes from the hard concrete walls, the trams passing overhead promised to obliterate any vestiges of artistic intent. Like a glacier passing over a landscape.

As we passed again out of the grey chill of the bridge into the grey of winter, the accumulated coldness felt physically painful in my joints. I turned the nut over in my mind as we walked to dinner. At least in June, I thought, everything would be warm and sunny, and there were still a few months to complete my proposal. Back in California I cranked through some mundane strategies for addressing a sonic site: to overwhelm it, perhaps by means of a spark-fired propane cannon; to displace it’s noise in space or time; to address its history; etc. and finally arrived at the image of forcing the tram noise to bask in its own shadow. That image gave me somewhere to start. I devised a small circuit with an electret microphone capsule, preamplifier and envelope follower drive a neon-sign circuit. The capsule is arranged to be particularly sensitive to infrasound, the lower reaches of sensible vibration. The neon sign transformer, when hooked up inappropriately, causes an 8 -foot long fluorescent tube to light up. Spaced at regular intervals these circuits make visible the movement of pressure waves of sound as they ping pong back and forth along the length of the tunnel. So I divided the length of the bridge and multiplied the number of circuits.

Equipped with this plan and the equipment I arrived in Cologne ready to work. The city was bright and sunny, abuzz with Brazilian energy and FIFA commercial hype. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the temperature inside the tunnel below the Deutzerbruecke had risen very little since the winter. Every day I dutifully passed through the hole, abandoning all hope of light, air and quiet, to enter the dungeon and go to work. Emerging in the evening, I seemed always to be covered with a layer of sticky sweat, even though I’d been chilly the whole day, and with a layer of grey dust over my clothes and skin.

Literary accounts of imprisonment often devise descriptions of prisoners who discover a miniscule ray of hope shining into their dark cells. It sometimes takes the form of a chink in the rock, or a small mouse or bird who passes freely between the cell and the world outside. Mine was a small hole, about 10 cm in diameter that pierced the floor just toward the end of my segment of the tunnel. The hole was either cast into or bored through the thick concrete floor and passed clear through to the air outside. It was originally covered by a small steel plate and I hadn’t noticed it in the first days there. When I opened it, suddenly all of the world seemed to rush in – daylight, reflected from the embankment below; sound of the outdoors, people talking; and fresh air wafting up. What pure pleasure! When I was too cold, or tired, or dirty, I would position my face above the hole, breath deeply, listen to the sounds and look at the light. Like Borges’ Aleph, it offered a view of the entire universe in a point.

I set each of the neon tubes sticking upright in a bucket of sand, equidistantly spaced along the 100-meter length of tunnel. I adjusted the audio response levels so that at normal ambient sound levels, the tubes would be just below the threshold of lighting up. An occasional flicker lit up as we worked in the space. When all was finally installed and working, we killed the house lights and waited in the intense darkness for a tram to pass. As it rumbled overhead, the sound built up, the tubes began to flicker. Soon all the tubes were on full brightness, emitting a purple light that bathed the whole tunnel in a vibrating blaze. But most amazing, after the tram had passed and the reflected waves began to die down in cycles, we could see dark bands oscillation back and forth in the tunnel. These were the “nulls” where the reflections moving in opposite directions cancelled each other. After a while it was dark again. A clap or shout would call up a visual sequence of lights traveling down the tunnel at the speed of sound, and this provided illumination for a way out if visitors became trapped in the absolute darkness.

The piece was finished, but I wasn’t – my experience of the place didn’t feel “set.” In a fit of incongruous fancy, I set about to draw the magical hole in the floor into the experience. It presented an easy mark for an in situ camera-obscura: a 10 cm hole through thick concrete has a narrow enough aperture to project a recognizable image, and my hole did so right onto the ceiling of the tunnel. The only vista to be had, however, was that of the concrete embankment below the bridge, some 5 meters down. The idea of projecting a fuzzy image of blank concrete onto itself left much to be desired, even conceptually.

Instead, I made a trip to Bauhaus and found a long piece of 10” diameter plastic drain pipe and a pair of matching right-angle elbow joints. At a nearby 1-euro store I found some serendipitously sized oval mirrors, completing the requirements of a periscope. With the addition of a swivel bearing and a set of handles, this inverted periscope was mounted through the hole and we could peer around the quay below the bridge. The embankment turned out to be a hangout for teenagers and their cars, so there was subject matter to indulge visitors’ scopophilia, as well as sounds of music and speech that rose through the tube, bringing along the smells of outdoors.

Once installed, the periscope became a pleasant while unexpected discovery for visitors taking a break before trekking back through the 1/2 kilometer passage back to daylight. A moment to pause and peer, and perhaps to marvel at this dungeon in the sky.

Why we make Art in Caves

The Brueckenmusik Festival now celebrates 20 years of activity, each year’s festival centered in the same unique venue. Focused as the festival is on sound, it would appear to be the unlikeliest of sites. The acoustic characteristics of the bridge are so strong, so inflexible as to present a formidable challenge to anyone thinking about sound. All the more remarkable, since the 50+ projects by as many artists appear never to have repeated the same ideas. What seems like a direct mandate asserted by the space to one artist may be only the remotest notion to another.

The conditions of entry to the artworks of Brueckenmusik are delimited in time as well as space. The tunnel as we said a maintenance space for the structure of the bridge, is normally closed to the public and only during those brief weeks in summer may visitors pass through the narrow gap to enter. Even when it is open, tour buses of visitors don’t queue up to disgorge their charges into the maws of the bridge.

Symptomatically, the site of Brueckenmusik parallels the conditions of art-in-public-spaces in certain ways, and runs counter to them in others. Public art is frequently cast into an inimical site, often to serve as a band-aid for ugly architecture, bad city planning, don’t-give-a-damn infrastructure, as a kind of cover-up. Conventional public art also tends to act as a kind of lightning rod for the ire of the public, a scapegoat for all of the intrusive design and city planning that citizens simply can’t do anything about. As such, the artist confronts a hostile situation on multiple fronts – difficult or “implacable” sites and situations with regard to placement, sound, light on the one hand, and outright disdain or even vandalism from passers-by. When the artist succeeds, it is often by performing a deft disappearing act.

The tunnel space beneath the Deutzerbruecke avoids public outcry – it is well hidden and no large crowds attend. But the works of art exhibited there are conceived and gestated in an environment that is every bit as difficult – as I mentioned above: dark, cold, prisonlike, extremely noisy. While the festival probably is not regarded by the city of Cologne to be a palliative amendment for urban blight, it nonetheless serves a civic purpose, however inscrutable, to make an unwanted space desirable, even for a few brief weeks. And it is right in the middle of the city.

The public who attend Brueckenmusik range from the cognoscenti of the art scene to the mildly curious, the young, the offbeat tourist; and here the very obscurity of the site is a draw. Underground exploration has been a growing element of urban tourism in recent decades, with trips to the Paris sewers and Berlin bunkers becoming a first stop for many young travelers. In some ways this urban spelunking is part of a long tradition going back to Renaissance rediscovery of the ruins of Nero’s palace and the coining of the term “grotesque,” back to the pilgrims’ visits to the Roman catacombs and maybe even to the original Cro-Magnon graffiti artists’ acts of vandalism at Lascaux. For the artist to exhibit some vision of wonder or philosophical toy in Cologne’s box grid cavern may enrich the experience for the traveler who would otherwise merely mark of the GPS coordinates on his been-there-done-that checklist.

But what for the artist? Why make art in a cave? My own experience suggests that it serves as a host for a body of works by diverse artists that share the conditions of being, for each of them, a hapax-legomenon – a singularity; a work that can never be exhibited again, anywhere else, under any terms; can never be re-staged, or adequately documented; and whose preservation is unthinkable. Thus the realized works frequently lie at the outer limits of the artist’s praxis, incorporating ideas and elements of their individual style into wholly new configurations. And this exception, this hole, is the magical element that the works of Brueckenmusik share.

As detailed above, the conditions of creation, realization and exhibition inherent in Brueckenmusik tear at the notion of “creative expression” that often surrounds discussion of what artists are supposed to do. Someone might counter that by testing the far borders of the artistic practice expression of an extreme kind of art may be achieved, akin to creative work under conditions of a dictatorship or house arrest. But the elective circumstances of the Breuckenmusik festival belie this conjecture. Artists often wonder if their impulse to make pieces depends on certain conditions being just right – the white walls, the fortress of the studio, the cheer of the crowd. But the unique works of Brueckenmusik suggest that there may be more at stake: Could the unique exhaust itself?

Paul De Marinis (2015)