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Prigov Simplex

Prigov Simplex

Prigov Simplex

Minimized in dimensions and complicated with branches carrying headphones, a simple Booted Emblem is transformed into a Prigov Simplex; it takes the form of a speaking object, proposing a systematic approach for it. Prigov’s voice, with its ability to appropriate a wide range of intonational readymades and its personal playful oscillation between identification and alienation, can be considered an example of the voice of the postmodern poet. The Prigov Simplex is created to install a ready-made performance of some sort in an element that resembles a sculpture or an rudimentary robot. The audio content installed in the Prigov Simplex creates a specific way of approach and includes the observer and the listener of the installation in its disposition. That is to say that the setting is acting as a ready-made short performance that has two sides, the one of the visitor who is driven to listen to the content of the Prigov Simplex machine and that of the viewer of this first listener while performing this elementary act of listening. The reciprocal relationship between script and voice in the poetic performance of Dmitry Prigov is altered in the setting of the Prigov Simplex machine to a relationship between the hidden audio content and the performativity of it while being heard. Readings and oral interpretations of texts, music pieces and recorded sounds are not only proposing a content to be listened but also disposed as scripting the viewers and their reactions to this same content; the viewer attached to a Prigov Simplex machine serves as a calculated living part of the audio content as if the content itself directs the body and face of the listener to undertake a specific role. The reference to the unofficial cultural milieu of Dmitri Prigov and to the attached importance to the oral recitation of poems in front of a close-knit audience of friends takes in the case of the Prigov Simplex the character of a calculated ready-made sound machine with some presentable performing characters attached to it, the potential listeners.

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