Tonspur [Sound track], 2017, is a series of eight ink drawings on washi, handmade Japanese paper. Vertical lines in black, white and a subtle grey run from left to right, spreading across the sheet of paper. Some lines are drawn powerfully and straight like incisions from top to bottom, then again delicately like fine seams; sometimes the lines are short, creating a dense field, next to these longer ones deflect; in turn others seem to follow a diversion and deviate from the straight line – like a sound wave that transmits across a water surface. Just as in her serial drawings, which by means of varying straight lines address topics such as repetition, compression and creating rhythm on a page, and which can be found as album covers for bands thilges3 and Polwechsel, here too musical themes resp. the question of recording sound itself: both in the sense of notation and sound track, play a role.
Contentwise these graphic works are closely related to the artist’s sculptural work, which present a momentum of resistance – be this a supposedly wrong choice of means (for instance in the case of the ridiculously time-consuming and complex handmade, that is knitted, production of a lorry’s spare parts), the transitory and temporary nature of her objects (many of them are made of frozen water and ink, one of the artist’s preferred materials), or the claim of everything to be contained in nothing, as demonstrated with the piece white noise (2009). This is a spatially extensive shelf full of empty books – the book of all books – that each shows a very fine sound track on their edges. The music typewriter (2012), on the other hand – a prototype of Arnold Schönberg’s notation typewriter designed by the artist and cast in frozen ink – notes during the process of melting away an ever new score of its own disappearance on the stack of notation paper it is placed upon.
Thus, an equal alternation between drawing and recording/noting runs like a consistent line through Claudia Märzendorfer’s oeuvre. Whether or not the series of drawings Tonspur (Das Verschwinden der Maschine im Geiste der Musik) [Sound track. The disappearance of the machine in the spirit of music] should be considered as a parallel thread of thought or continuation of one of her three-dimensional works, is not defined by the artist.