Genko An - 03062 Seoul

The Genko-An series was conceived after Heiner Goebbels visited the Buddhist temple Genko-An in Kyoto in 1992. Inspired by the impression of viewing the same garden through two different windows—one round and one square—the artist created a series of site-specific installations. Genko-An 03062, titled after the ZIP code of the MMCA, transforms the garden
seen through the windows into a “garden of sounds and voices.”

The work is rooted in writings by philosopher Henry David Thoreau and in Empty Words (1974), a sound piece by John Cage, that artistically deconstructed Thoreau’s journals.

Genko-An 03062 includes excerpts from the artist's composition Walden (1998) — an orchestral work based on Thoreau’s WALDEN or Life in the woods (1854) — and it features the painter, sculptor, musician and instrument maker Robert Rutman. Walden is recognized as Thoreau’s exploration
of the value of a simple life in nature and of his unhierarchical listening habits. The installation further incorporates ethnographic voice recordings from Armenia, Siberia, Greece, Colombia, Korea among others along with the voices of various writers, artists and musicians
like John Cage, Robert Rutman, Heiner Müller, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Gertrude Stein, Hannah Arendt and Marina Abramovic...