The Voice Imitator
Anna Schuleit Haber, Yotam Haber · The Massachusetts review · 2016
The Voice Imitator Anna Schuleit Haber (bio) and Yotam Haber (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution THE VOICE IMITATOR is an ongoing collaborative series of 104 paintings by Anna Schuleit Haber and piano pieces by Yotam Haber, inspired by The Voice Imitator, a short story collection by Thomas Bernhard. The paintings measure 30" x 22" each, on BFK paper, and have been created between 2012 and now. Little of the actual human figures that Bernhard describes in each story is revealed in each painting, except for certain details of limbs and gesture, which appear and disappear within a fragmented, deconstructed pictorial space, leaning far into abstraction. Using oil paint, acrylics, ink, pencil, and oil pastel, the brushwork resembles the loose fluency of handwriting, like a serial narrative. At the conclusion of the project, the 104 paintings will be exhibited alongside and in dialogue with Haber’s compositions in a gallery or museum context. The project will also become a book. [End Page 653] Click for larger view View full resolution THE MILKMAID. In which five cows cause a forty-minute delay for an express train and much dismay for their milkmaid. [End Page 654] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 655] Click for larger view View full resolution GIANT. In which the skeleton of a giant is discovered by accident in a town where only short people have lived. [End Page 656] Click for larger view View full resolution THE LODEN COAT. In which the loden coat of a missing man turns up as the only clue to both the missing man and the mysterious missing treasure his father had buried. [End Page 657] Click for larger view View full resolution THE AUSZUEGLER. In which the wooden leg of a WWII veteran is unable to save him from the cold. [End Page 658] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 659] Click for larger view View full resolution A SELF-WILLED ACTOR. In which the author of a single play, performed at the best theater by the best actors in the world, uses unjustified and extreme force to control the reception of the play’s premiere. [End Page 660] Click for larger view View full resolution TWO BROTHERS. In which a philosopher and a businessman who are brothers first become famous and wholly absorbed in their work, and then both die in the midst of life. [End Page 661] Click for larger view View full resolution THE NEEDLEWOMAN. In which a crafty contractor murders an unsuspecting fortune teller over a mis-prophecy. [End Page 662] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 663] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 664] Anna Schuleit Haber As a Radcliffe and MacArthur Fellow, anna schuleit haber’s work engages a range of media, technologies, and environments. Her work includes sound systems in psychiatric institutions that turn architecture into a vessel or body of sound; collaborations with computer scientists and architects for a contemporary oracle; and projects that involve type designers and dying newsprint media, live sod and thousands of flowers in a hospital, and a body of water as an environmental mirror. Her current work includes a series of paintings based on Thomas Bernhard’s fiction, and large-scale drawing commissions for architectural settings. Yotam Haber Hailed by New Yorker critic Alex Ross as “deeply haunting,” and by the Los Angeles Times as one of five classical musicians in “2014 Faces To Watch,” yotam haber is currently working on Voice Imitator, an evening-length cycle of piano works with visual artist and MacArthur Fellow Anna Schuleit Haber, based on the stories of Thomas Bernhard. Other current work includes New Water Music, premiering 2017, for the Louisiana Philharmonic and community musicians to be performed from boats and barges along Bayou St. John in New Orleans; and a new piece for the Kronos Quartet in collaboration with the electronic performer Philip White. Copyright © 2016 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.