Paul Panhuysen: Long String Installations

The Dutch visual and sound artist Paul Panhuysen (1934-2015) was among the pioneers of multimedia sound art. On June 2, 2018 the new 3-LP album LONG STRING INSTALLATIONS will be released at ZKM. It contains only unreleased recordings made between 1982 and 2012. 

The first recordings of Panhuysen's long string installations were published in the 1980s, most famously on a 3-LP box set edited on Apollo Records in 1986.

After two LPs in 2014 and 2017, Edition Telemark now turns to the group of works that is probably the most well-known within the vast oeuvre of Paul Panhuysen: his long string installations. Using this term, he referred to all of his works involving strings and sounds. They were realized all around the world between 1982 and 2012 – until 1991 mostly together with Johan Goedhart –, each installation made specifically for the site where it was displayed.

The new 3-LP album includes solely unreleased recordings made between 1982 and 2012, plus one recording »Ginger Strings« 2012, reconstructed and performed by Yvan Etienne and Brice Jeannin in DordtYart Dordrecht, posthumously in October 2017. 

Unlike other artists working with long strings around the same time, e.g. Ellen Fullman and Terry Fox, Panhuysen's strings were instruments or performative material only secondarily. Rather, his installations can be considered sculptural and sounding events in space, operating in between two lines of tradition, constructivism and situationism, that are evident also in many other parts of his oeuvre.