Margaret K. Koerner: Death, Time, Soup: A Conversation with William Kentridge and Peter Galison

William Kentridge: "So Peter tells me that story and I think, right, in Kassel, there was the famous Joseph Beuys honey pump, where he pumps honey around Kassel as a kind of social cohesion idea—I think that was his metaphor—so I thought, let’s have a literal pump. We’ll have a compressor and we are going to pump compressed air, and we are going to send it into two tubas. And we spent months trying to make an artificial embouchure, with compressed air and rubber lips and controlling valves, but each time we just got a terrible loud fart from the tuba, and nothing more controllable than that. That went into the Room of Failures, the embouchure, but the tubas remained as a basis of an important part of the musical vocabulary of the piece. I bought two beautiful tubas which would have been in the room of failures had we done that. One of them is being used by the tuba player at the live performance in Amsterdam. What remains of that is the tuba in the music, and that big machine in the installation, the “elephant,” as a kind of generator of the energy of the piece."

Mein Blog befasst sich in einem umfassenden Sinn mit dem Verhältnis von Wissen, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Ein besonderes Augenmerk richte ich dabei auf die Aktivitäten des Medien- und Dienstleistungskonzern Bertelsmann und der Bertelsmann Stiftung.