Long Live Music

A composer and musician whose approach to music and sound stemmed from Fluxus, Henning Christiansen produced installations that merge strong visual and audio components and references by exploring the limits of audition and vision to the extremes of their sheer simplicity. In the 1990s and throughout the 2000s, Christiansen's practice shifted towards conceptualism. Using an array of materials and props, he made large-scale, symbolically charged performance-actions with Bjørn Nørgaard and his wife Ursula Reuter Christiansen.

In his work entitled "Long Live Music (Viva la musica)", Christiansen depicts four, red, similar sized, finger-like protuberances against a yellow background. Placing a portion of tape measure across the middle, he points to the distances in-between and the subtle change of their height, gradually decreasing from left to right. There is also a familiar looking spiral form, like a musical sign, rolling over the tape measure from the right-hand side of the composition. For Christiansen, auditive and visual forms have reciprocity, a simple pathway leads from eye to ear or vice versa. Using colour, line, form, spacing, and variation, the artist transforms a two-dimensional canvas into an audio-visual score.