Georg Decristel

harps, but also constructed a number of them himself and taught laypeople how to play. Decristel’s conceptual approach—influenced by concrete poetry and Fluxus—was to deal experimentally with found situations, investigating their acoustic, spatial, temporal and/or location-specific structural parameters. The locations the artist chose for these concepts included sites both outdoors and indoors, both public and private, and both urban and rural. The list of his chosen places also encompasses art’s institutional context, including galleries, special events, and exhibition openings. Decristel was a constant occupant of this realm, albeit on its peripheries rather than at its center: he deliberately sought out the zone of transition to the realm of the everyday. His presence was international; he made appearances in Italy, Belgium, France, the USA and Canada, and maintained a close friendship with performance artist Terry Fox (USA). Decristel sometimes referred to his artistic activities as “strolling performances”: the artist would wander through his chosen scenarios playing a Jew’s harp, according an important role to the element of chance. As an itinerant Jew’s harp player who called himself “Georg the Resonance Chamber,” he would go out into nature or appear in private situations just as often as he graced artistic events, always enlisting his audience as co-players. His presence was improvised and conceived to be something ephemeral, much like sounds perceived as either music or noise. Decristel’s had a poetic description of this: “…in spiralen, trete ich auf trete ich auf der stelle…”¹ Decristel’s art manifested itself materially in various kinds of texts, which he often complemented with drawings; there also exist tailor-made concepts for those performances where he desired to set certain parameters in advance; a further important body of work is represented by his “sonograms” [Sonogramme], sheets of A4 paper of a fragmentary nature onto which he transcribed the sounds of the Jew’s harp as line-like structures—not notation, but graphic “visualizations,” as he called them—of sound. The sonograms were conceived as Xerox copies, large numbers of which were placed on the floor of the exhibition space to form a carpet of sorts for the audience; in this way, they themselves became part of the performance. Decristel’s oeuvre also includes photo series showing the artist as he played the Jew’s harp. Similar to the principle underlying his photocopies was how Decristel included various technical means of recording and duplication in his sound works. He also used music recorded on a cassette for live appearances: “there thus arose streams of sound, in that I fed in (played) the newest cassette recording and added the Jew’s harp sounds to it live … in identical or divergent frequencies; this gave rise to acoustic rainbows superimposed on one another (see also monochrome painting).”²“Decristel,” writes Heinz Gappmayr, “was on a constant quest for new insights and modifications. A precondition for this was the artist’s existential concernment, his philosophical realization of the world’s riddle-like quality. It is this to which his works, both acoustic and visual, refer. For him, art was something transcendental. The intensity with which he searched for artistic solutions found its match in his day-to-day life, where he distanced himself from trivial interests out of resistance to conformism and banality.”³ S.E.