Strategy: Get Arts. SGA50
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11. Günther Uecker rigging up his ‘banging door’ installation in studio C.03

The sound of an incessant banging door drew visitors to SGA down Günther Uecker’s sinister corridor of knives.

Günther Uecker rigging up his ‘banging door’ installation in studio C.03 (August 1970). Photo

At Strategy: Get Arts, in addition to his remarkable installation ‘SHARP CORRIDOR BLUNTED BY POLICE’, Günther Uecker rigged up a 12-foot-high banging door at studio C.03, which drew the visitor down the corridor of knives out of curiosity, resulting in a certain teasing frustration outside a room one could not easily enter because of the constant opening and closing.

Uecker's banging door as a musical instrument

Günther Uecker rigging up his ‘banging door’ installation in studio C.03 (August 1970). Photo
Photo © George Oliver, and Günther Uecker. All rights reserved, DACS 2021.

Richard Demarco has recalled how this incessant banging occurred for the three-week duration of SGA and was ultimately incorporated into a concert in the Sculpture Court, which lasted two hours.

This experimental concert was called Sound-Scene, a collaboration with the composer Friedhelm Döhl, for which Uecker deployed a huge suspended sail-like white cloth, upon which lights were shone, all synchronised with the synthesised music.

In conversation with Christian Weikop, Demarco remembered that when the final notes of Döhl’s music faded, the last sound the concert-goer would hear was the distant banging of the door.

C.W.