Page 6-7, 2024, score for 4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry


Page 6-7, 2024, score for 4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry


4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry, three-channel video with stereo sound


4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry, three-channel video with stereo sound


4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry, three-channel video with stereo sound



4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry
Adrienne Herr
March 14 - April 5, 2025

4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry is a three-channel video work in which three voices act simultaneously. They’re part of the same though they speak over, through and across each other, as if each were a thin wall in the construction of a person. Sometimes they move, for instance, when Voice 1 sings I’m in Heaven, Voice 2 and Voice 3 spin.


The voices are more than sound in that they have faces, but their faces are less than people. They act language as if pure material, sound in and through a body. After some more sonic juggling, Voice 1 riffs on existence that eventually becomes eggs: the sounds and their relationships to language (meaning) constantly become, just like the most concrete parts of what’s being said concerns existence. (I am just here to experience it / work-er / work her / I am just here to expire).


The voices make an equal amount of sense. It’s not like one says things in a more coherent way than the others. Sometimes they say full words, often enough to clarify the connection between what they say and what it once meant, or still means. Sometimes they repeat the words many times.


The voices look neutral, everything around them is black like in a theater box; a place where things and people are suspended from context. Observing the voices feels like looking at lingual parts in a microscope. Language before or after sense. What is language, then? It is an inward facing whirl of where it comes from at all. It is about the foundation of a person, why someone learned what they did. The constant flipping between being and perceiving.


The work was created first by recording multiple spoken improvisations that were then made into one composition, and subsequently transcribed into scores that are on display in this exhibition. Adrienne practiced the scores to the point where she could act them, thus creating a kind of reverse motion where what was initially an improvisation became the object of intense study in an ultimately impossible labor towards synchronicity. But as a spectator you barely perceive that the voices on the screen don’t actually speak. Right?


If improvisation, or immediacy, relates to the subconscious, and studying and laboring relates to the conscious, and if we agree that individuals mostly communicate with each other via rationality, this work reverses that. Here, the rational self is entirely focused on the immediate self. The immediate self yells and yodels; breaks and connects lingual parts in what becomes a demonstration of the (artist) individual as enveloped by a hyper “rationalised” economic structure, where the artistic resource and product is the self. Not in a way that seems to give answers, solutions are after all a supremely rational thing to want.


Voice 2 says individual force, Voice 3 a lot from you. Voice 2 individual, Voice 1 intention dissolving into something high pitched and rhythmical while Voice 3’s expect turns into a monotonous moan and Voice 2 continues to say individual in a way where sound is created through reversal of the breath. If the work reverses the relationship between rationality and immediacy, I think this is mirrored in the reversal of breath, the materiality of the voice becoming the discrete means to a thought, veering towards completion but ultimately rebelling into laughter, or into spit, or into breath, or into multiple iterations of the same face. When Voice 1 says I love it, 2 and 3 run.


–Cecilie Norgaard


★

Adrienne Herr practices within intersections of sound, performance, text and sculpture. Language and the languages of performative contexts are treated poetically to reframe our notion of materiality. The singular voice is rendered multiple in a translation across diverse forms to diverge from language-based sense making. Recent booklength works engage the ontological experience of grief vis-à-vis play, polyvocalism, eroticism and experiment. Her performances use extended vocal techniques and poetics, to present sound as the theatre of meaning.