Follow Fluxus / Jimmy Robert
Suspended closure, suspended

From the last of the described paper works Robert generates the cover of the record Suspended closure, suspended (2009) with the recording and setting of a text spoken by himself, structured along similar principles as his visual works. Poetically, as a no further specified narrator, Robert approaches ideas on the question of gender, starting from his own position to a wider spectrum. Five verses of very different length outline the topics. The connecting style element is the references with which he works in each individual verse: Quotations, titles and references to important works from the arts, politics and psychology, open a firework of aspects on intellectual history, offering a guideline for his questions around self-positioning. Robert’s emotionless narration, is accompanied by the countertenor Gert Hohmann who, with the possibilities offered by baroque singing ornaments, lends each of the paragraphs its own tone in a way, borrowing single words from the text as a starting point for his improvisation: Desire, Gender, Garland, Image, Position. As a kind of echo of the spoken word, the same artistic principle of quotation is used in so far as characteristic sound elements from baroque composers such as Bach and Purcell are arranged and transformed into a new musical collage.

In a recourse to the stylistic vocabulary of the baroque era and its ambition to represent human emotions in firm patterns – e.g. sound sequences readable like language - Jimmy Robert triggers to deal with issues about the very nature of one self.
The subjectivity of his poetic text and the musical translation however break the dogmatic claim of general validity, which in the baroque was still existent.
As suggested in the title of the work and the exhibition, all remains as a suspended closure, suspended.

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