Hearsay of the Soul, Werner Herzog

Getty Center. 1200 Getty Center Drive. LA, CA. 90049. (310) 440-7300  www.getty.edu

Closing April 20th

This moving journey into interior worlds combines the landscape etchings of 16th century Dutch artist Hercules Segers with the music of cellist and composer Ernst Reijseger. For this pilgrim, sitting on the bench in front of the installation the experience felt intensely spiritual, a communion with haunting music and the powerful, evanescent flashes of nature.The experience called to mind William Wordsworth’s poem, the World Is Too Much With Us; Late and Soon”

The world is too much with us; late and soon/
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers/
Little we see in Nature that is ours

Thankfully, Herzog’s piece allows us to escape the white noise, the constant distractions of the modern world. To take a journey into nature. To take a jouney into the self. Emerging refreshed and renewed.

-CCH Editor Leticia Marie Sanchez

Here is an excerpt of the artist’s statement about this piece:

It is time that we make a pilgrimage to the work of Hercules Segers, the father of modernity in art. Sometimes great visionaries appear who seem to anticipate the course of our culture, like the pharaoh Akhenaten, who, in addition to creating a new style of art in ancient Egypt, was more than a thousand years ahead of his time as the first monotheist. Or like Carlo Gesualdo, prince of Venosa, who, four hundred years ago in his Sixth Book of Madrigals, created music that leads straight to the twentieth century. This list is extendable: Hölderlin, who as a poet went to the outer limits of human language, or Turner, predecessor of the Impressionists.

Segers’s images are hearsay of the soul. They are like flashlights held in our uncertain hands, a frightened light that opens breaches into the recesses of a place that seems somewhat known to us: our selves…

—Werner Herzog

Photo Above: Installation of Hearsay of the Soul at the Getty Center. Hearsay of the Soul, 2012, Werner Herzog. © Werner Herzog.