Singular Experience And Permission of the Physical Moment

Friday, May 7 1824. Kärntnertortheater,Vienna

It had been ten years since Beethoven stepped onto a stage, paper advertisements around the city announced the performance of his Ninth Symphony. Ludwig prepared an unparalleled physical scale and sound to his performance. He doubled the size of the orchestra, tripled the size of his chorus with perhaps as many as ten voices per written part. The evening was absolutely mighty. A sensation so eruptive the audience stood to their feet five times, a number of ovations considered so obscene the authorities were called to calm the crowd. And the memory of this historic performance was not saved in a recording but in the bodies of those who experienced it.

The Abstract exists just outside associative time. An Abstract Form can bring an unknown, an "unfelt", powerfully into intimate relevance by direct physical experience. They require our presence. These Forms are to be touched, entered, walked upon. They are conceived and constructed to be permanently encountered. Their Work is your permission to physically engage, to allow the rare opportunity for the body to lead the mind beyond its known pattern of reality into the monumental collectively and individually.

These Forms are not a “minimalism” but a singularity. The singular moment when thought is silenced by abstract presence and something unknown/formless collapses into what was previously known, felt, experienced. This moment is free from association and has nothing neurally to connect back to but the sensation within the body. And when that experience is profound, it is profundity then that grows our physical connection with the outside world. Thus allowing, even for one moment, a truly physical experience to return us transformed. As humanity evolves an immediacy without actual physical presence, these Forms give opportunity to awaken sedentary senses and exult their skill, liken to the awareness of those in the audience at Beethoven’s premiere–what would be their only time with his Ninth––the experience to feel human.

UNE begins this series of Form: The PROTOIST Series, the Form before the Known.