February 26 to March 13, 2016
99 Gansevoort St
New York, 212 570 3600

The Whitney’s elevator doors slid apart to reveal an open room marked by expanse and emptiness, illuminated by the slipping rays of a setting sun. In spite of a modest number of occupants, the space resounded with a roar of commotion. Andrea Fraser’s expansive sound-installation, Down the River (2016), inhabited the fifth floor like a ghost, hovering at the limits of awareness, threatening to become manifest. The audio was recorded in the A-block of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility, which, although 32 miles distant from the museum, also looks onto the Hudson River and the landscape beyond.

The deception implicit in the layered sounds of museum and prison was never fully realized by Fraser’s installation. It was only too easy to discern that the recorded audio was not of the museum space, for surely the expected tourists and Chelsea gallery-hoppers were not hammering and shouting across an echoing expanse; it was not the museum’s loudspeaker that echoed through the recording. Content was not the only indication of displacement. Saturated with texture and reverberation, the sounds were overwritten by the spaces in which they were captured. With eyes closed, the clamor of voices and the scrape and clang of metal recreated a place that was almost tangible when you could escape the visual. Walking from one window to the other, I sensed my passage through a variety of spaces: the loudspeaker reflected and mutated, inscrutable in its own echo and attesting a vast scale. A man murmured and the interstices between projection and reverberation indicated that he had spoken to the walls of a small room. Some voices were startling in their appropriateness, seeming too vividly real in contrast with the unnatural character of the other sounds. In their uncanny realism, they threatened to reach out and pull me into that smaller space. In these uncomfortable moments, Fraser brings her viewers the magic of transportation tainted by the shock of realizing the place they have been brought to is one that they never want to be. I felt that if I looked up, I would find myself as a fly on the wall of Sing Sing, as if there was another expanse just beyond the gallery. When I heard voices in the recording, I would involuntarily halt, as though I had been called or spoken to. Because, in a sense, I had.

Should we be fooled? The failure of this recording to alter the museum in which it was housed perhaps necessarily indicates the fundamental incompatibility of these spaces. The emptiness of the floor met the litany in a contrast that expressed that museum halls are never truly empty, are always echoing with implications and suppressions. Fraser’s text attempted to tie the Whitney and Sing Sing in the tradition of institutional critique for which the artist is known. The installation’s title refers explicitly to a slang term for incarceration, “going up the river.” In the same manner that the audio itself transports its listener to the place of the prison, the title reorients its audience; we are asked to consider what it is to be a prisoner who exists in captivity, looking from afar toward the museum, a space which is characterized by influx of attendants who choose to enter and may depart at will. The work is a biting condemnation of the viewers that it addresses, who, in their mere presence, empower the museum and further the distances between these institutions.

Last December at Light Industry, in Brooklyn, Fraser expressed regrets regarding the caustic, joking form that her performances often take; works such as Museum Highlights (1989) and Little Frank and His Carp (2001) condescend not only to the museums that they are executed in, but also, to an extent, to the audience that visits such institutions. Within the group of onlookers there is an even further divide between those who know the insincerity of her behavior and those who accept her actions at face-value. Wearily, Fraser observed that, no matter the ultimate recipient of her critique, the audience always laughed hardest at those of its own members who did not understand her performance for what it was. Joke’s on you. Although this installation is not farcical in the same manner, instead, following the more serious tone of recent works such as L’1% C’est Moi (2011) or There’s No Place Like Home (2012), Fraser continues to manipulate her audience. However, this joke is on all of us, even the artist herself.

I began to walk to the stairs, passing first through the sharper sounds of a single cell, then on to the din of the hall, which was punctuated by the opening and closing of heavy metal gates. I paused. I stood as a single point in the expanse of the Whitney’s fifth floor, an expanse that felt like infinitude and possibility. Diagonally across the wooden floor, a couple walked towards each other, taking pictures that depicted the sequentially closed distance between them. At the massive windows, groups of visitors stand pointing out landmarks of the New York skyline, impervious to the rattles and clanks that shook through the room. Criticism is most painful when it contains glimmers of truth, that some gaps cannot be bridged.

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Erika Blair: This is Only A Test at Rope
February 20, 2016
508 W. Franklin Street (between N. Pace Street and Pennsylvania Avenue)
Baltimore, MD

Erika Blair’s “This is Only A Test” was staged at Baltimore’s Rope Gallery the same week that a much-publicized legal battle between Apple and the Federal Bureau of Investigation intensified. Apple rejected the FBI’s demand that the computer company develop a method to hack its own phones so that the Bureau could glean data about Islamist mass murderers in San Bernardino, California. Apple rightly pointed out that the Bureau basically wants access to everyone’s phone. All this comes in the wake of previous failures by Apple to secure its users’ data, and 15+ years of government imperiously sucking up as much private information about citizens as possible.

At Rope, Blair presented a stark scene. Within the small gallery’s main space a short plinth supported a desktop HP printer. Three surveillance cameras were mounted around the room and the printer would regularly spit out photos selected by the artist from each camera’s live stream. Blair was sequestered in the basement, monitoring the scene on three laptops, a bit like the stereotypical spook from movies: slightly hunched in an industrial space repurposed as clandestine surveillance HQ.

At regular intervals, sound from massive speakers positioned next to Blair would rumble out a message appropriated from Chicago’s 1990s-era Emergency Broadcast System: “The Chicago broadcasters are participating in a required monthly testing of the Chicago emergency broadcast system. This system was developed to provide information to the public during an emergency. This is only a test.” It was deafening above, through the floorboards, and even more brutal below. The show ended up as a kind of three-hour performance — the artist enduring against extremely loud noise, against cramped quarters and discomfort, against the dreary monotony of a stakeout.

The EBS was developed so that the president (starting with Kennedy) could quickly reach the American public in the event of an emergency, presumably nuclear war or apocalyptic crisis. Although it now seems antiquated, other, less visible systems have usurped it. In May 2009, the Sri Lankan government announced a final victory over the insurgent Tamil Tigers by sending a text message to all of the nation’s civilians. And the Amber Alerts that pop up on cell phones are not only indicative of public concern for kidnapping victims, but also of the power of government and telecommunications firms to collude in both gathering information from and disseminating information to citizens, which is creepy. The feeling of benignity that attends the EBS system is actually a desensitization to the intrusion of power into private spaces, one now heightened by our habituation to even more intrusive mechanisms, including the proliferation of surveillance cameras and the legally sanctioned collection of data.

Viewers walked through the gallery, socializing and drinking beer, but eventually most of them ended up in the small storefront space near the entrance, standing or seated on the floor and windowsill, talking. This is probably in part because of the assaultive noise and the storefront’s greater seating opportunities, but one might also wonder if having your photo taken semi-surreptitiously over and over, and seeing it printed out in the middle of a room, have something to do with the main gallery’s emptiness. Given the opportunity, people probably want to avoid being spied on. Without explicit prodding, their behavior changed merely by the inhibitive coercion of inspection.

The forces shaping the battle between Apple and the FBI — and, more importantly, a broader conflict between the American people and their government — have also formed the nexus that Blair is exploiting. What she calls “surveillance capitalism” comes in seemingly greater quantities from the longstanding military-industrial complex, trickling down into regular civil life. You can buy surveillance cameras cheaply, and access them from afar. The technology that inspired Blair’s use of sound, long-range acoustic devices, has moved from battlefields to urban crowd control and dispersal, such as at several Occupy encampments during 2011. And LRAD operate by principles similar to the parabolic loudspeakers now sometimes found in galleries or museums trying to minimize sound bleed in exhibitions.

The fallout of the Kennedy assassination (another of Blair’s favorite subjects) culminated, in part, in the Church Committee of 1975 and the House Select Committee on Assassinations of 1976, which reinvestigated many of the preceding decades’ most infamous state crimes, and seriously discredited the legitimacy of the US government, starting with the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI. People had known that covert surveillance had gone on, but the vast and intrusive extent of it was made plainly clear for the first time. Perhaps we’re seeing a replay of those same reconsiderations of federal power, 40 years later, as we remember that intrusion into the lives of private citizens is actually completely corrosive to democracy, even if, at the outset, the oversight seems restricted and beneficent. There is an opportunity coming, possibly, for people to reevaluate their relationship to political and policing authority, if it is felt and understood with the urgency one experiences as blaring sound waves rattle one’s skull. Each small intrusion is a test of what limits a community places on power. What’s the current threshold?

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“ONGOING DISTANT ROARS DOWN THROUGH FOREST ON FOOTPATH,

CLOSED CABIN, EDELWEISS IN LOG PLANTER, COLD SHADE”

The following conversation took place in playful and casual bursts over email between Brooklyn and Stockholm, mostly from August 18, 2015 through August 20, 2015.

EMMALEA RUSSO: Your work makes me think about the importance of place. Where are you now? What’s it like there?

HELEN MIRRA: I’m in Sweden, though only for 10 days. The August light is friendly — clear and soft, and in Tyresta National Park, lake-swimming is bright, cool, and blueberries and mushrooms are rampant.

Much of your work is process-based and comes out of walking and/or being outside — a “paced printmaking” as you’ve called it. How did this shift to the outside happen?

For seemingly a long while I had been making work about the idea of the outside, without spending much time there. A series of opportunities shifted me out, maybe starting with a year I had a residency in Berlin, with a studio in the forest on the edge of the city It crystallized during another residency year in Basel, when I was given an office rather than a studio to work in — a problem I resolved by deciding to spend the time mostly walking in the mountains, collecting rocks. That being a total pleasure; I knew I wanted to stay outside, and found a strategy for how to do that. There were a few years when the works were all a kind of printmaking. Then it drifted into other forms.

How has the work changed — how are the objects different — making work about the idea of the outside versus being actually outside while making/collecting?

Only at first it was collecting — or, better, borrowing, as I returned most of the rocks to the mountains a few years after I had taken them. When walking became central, in its moving-center kind of way, I became less attached to the so-called work, and these days it feels more like it makes itself, and I assist.

I read an interview where you described yourself as a “careful amateur.” I think of this term often and I like the vastness of it, especially in a time so concerned with specialization and expertise. How does being a careful amateur fit your work and life? What are the benefits and drawbacks?

That’s funny: I think now I’d more say a brazen amateur, trying to be less cautious. “Not-knowing is most intimate.” So much more is available when one is not focused-on, not buttoned-up. So-called mistakes are constant, and no cause for distress; the aim is simply for one’s mistakes to be harmless. Once one is really mostly practicing being a beginner, everything is easier — frustrations still come up but are briefer in duration and easier to set aside, or to flip into curiosity, and approach.

How is a walk in the city different from a walk in the country? Do you have a preference?

It has taken me a while to embrace walking in the city, and it was practicing half-smiling, as described by Thich Nhat Hanh, that has allowed me to. Cities have the disadvantage of concrete and cars, and the advantage of discernible responses to practicing half-smiling. Forests are still the easiest for me: the changing surfaces underfoot, the moving light, the multitude of sounds high and low, near and far, the palpable diversity of species, the distinctions between a wet and a dry forest, in smell and color and the feeling of the air. Mountains are the most eccentric, and object-related.

Where and how do you prefer to spend your time?

I mostly try to drop preferences about where I am, and just be where I am. Still, I do feel most in my element when walking, especially in unmanaged green space, without any need to get anywhere particular, and while standing weaving, alternating balancing on one foot and the other. There are substantial pleasures of being somewhere I altogether or mostly can’t understand the language. This is an obvious kind of not-knowing, when there is nothing to do but pay attention to small gestures and expressions. I’m content in a hammock, particularly the one in our backyard next to where we buried our longtime cat-friend, Maclow.

You have a book called Edge Habitat Materials (2014). I think of walking as an edge practice. How do you think of edges? Who are the artists/people/thinkers who engage edge-space in ways that inform your work, or feel compelling?

I think of the edge being where one thing turns into another, turns inside out, upside down, where synesthesia happens — what happens in translation or communication, looking for and not finding the exactly right word. Of course a classic edge is the one between the familiar and unfamiliar. I think the edge habitat is the territory of André Cadere and Ad Reinhardt, both keystone artists for me. Percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky. Translation work of Basho by Kazuaki Tanahashi and of Chinese Buddhist writings by Bill Porter (The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse, 2014), Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013). Forgetting is a great edge.

You have a solo exhibition that opened August 20th in Stockholm. Could you talk a little about the work in the show and the process of making it?

I’ve been weaving on a large triangle loom, with the hypotenuse set at 180, 215, or 240 cm. Each weaving has wool from two black sheep — changing from one to the other halfway through. Three blacks appear: two from the individual sheep, one of their admixture. These three blacks are barely differentiated one from another but for a delimiting colored strand, dyed from foraged mushrooms, drawn through each work. Each inexact triangle is doubled over a cedar support, or folded into an even smaller floor sculpture.

In the fall, I saw your show in New York at Peter Freeman and found myself getting very close to those woven triangles, noticing the different strands of color. Those invited very close looking. I feel this way about much of your work. For example the Quarry works (2007) — small sculptures made with folded pieces of clothing, each with a rock perched on top. I find that these and the triangles ask for a certain kind of hovering and closeness — certainly evoking Dogen’s “not-knowing is most intimate.” Can you say more about the connection between not-knowing and your practice? Zen teachings and your practice?

Hovering is a good word — the aerial equivalent of tender-footed curiosity — which is one of the ways I think of not-knowing. Like the outdoors and walking going from the theoretical to the actual, it has been the same for me with so-called secular Buddhist philosophy — while I was intellectually engaged with it when I was younger, now I’d say I’m an adherent.

The “aerial equivalent of tender-footed curiosity” is lovely. It makes me wonder about the ways you’re encountering the outside — the “unmanaged green space” — and how that might relate to the ways in which viewers encounter your work in a gallery.

It’s like walking all day in rain and then coming inside and changing into dry clothes, or sleeping and awake, or vice versa. A gallery is a temporary minimalist habitat, and sort of like an animal shelter. I’m largely in agreement with Rémy Zaugg’s charge for ideal exhibition spaces (his 1986 lecture was recently translated and published: The Art Museum of My Dreams, or, A Place for the Work and the Human Being) and it is a reminder of why, how, they can be worthwhile. Maybe an examined life is best led outdoors, constantly reminded of its interdependence, and the exhibition space is a useful temporary fiction of autonomy for artworks, for another kind of attending to.

What’s next?

Referential weaving experiments, for a pair of shows in Berlin in January with Allyson Strafella. In one space we will show works of ours from 15 to 20 years ago, that we think of as connecting from there to where we are now. In the other, we will show new works, which we consider as reiterations or paraphrases, replies or responses, to each other’s particular existing works (which might or might not be included in the early-work show). Allyson is making typewriter drawings, and I’m making tapestry weavings. We both have very particular limitations, in color for instance, because of the materials we are using (typewriter ink, carbon paper/un-dyed and plant- or mushroom-dyed yarns), and size by the respective widths of typewriter platens and loom warps.

The post “Not-knowing is most intimate”: Helen Mirra in Conversation with Emmalea Russo appeared first on artcritical.

February 22 to March 22, 2015
178 Norfolk Street (between Houston and Stanton)
New York, 212 227 2783

Comprised of ink drawings, a soundtrack, and several stone sculptures, Vivienne Griffin’s second solo show at Bureau, “She Said,” exists effectively in the space linking intimacy with indifference. Griffin’s past works include austere, darkly humorous text drawings, found photographs of female celebrities, and an alabaster-and-fluorescent-light floor installation. She often employs starkly gritty commentary, using simple means and careful arrangements of objects and images. “She Said” expands out from there, creating a nacreous space wherein gold chains and alabaster highlight unlikely, effective convergences.

The soundtrack — its playback devices quite present in the main gallery — is the show’s most immediately perceptible aspect. A female voice announces herself amid heavy drones and trance-like, beckoning lulls. Once in the main room, there are stones and alabaster sculptures at varying heights on steel pedestals and on the floor. India ink drawings of shiny but common objects line the walls: Standard Tap (2014), Coffee Table (2015), Gold Bracelet (2014), Bin (2015), and Pyrite Healing Crystal (2014).

The show escapes nostalgia and kitsch through Griffin’s sensitivity to the placement of materials and an air of skepticism and complication. In The Glamour of Ornament (2015), a stone rests atop a steel pedestal, punctured and strung with a gold chain. Empty pedestals are placed around the object, evoking a kind of sad gathering place. The gold chain through the rock is a humorous, jaded gesture that nods to the end of ’60s-era political optimism, underscored by an adjacent India ink drawing that reads “PEACE AND LOVE MOTHER FUCKERS.” 

The dark iridescence of “She Said” recalls Joan Didion’s The White Album (1979), in which she discusses the Manson Family murders, paranoia, and the end of the ’60s. Griffin’s work is heavy with ways in which the collective consciousness perceives a time/place, and the objects and buzz phrases that hang around after it has passed. The show is made more interesting by what appears to be the dissonance of the artist in relation to her subjects. There are three instances of doubled titles. The soundtrack, The Only Way Out is Out (2015) is a drowsy, drone-heavy shimmer punctuated by gorgeous female voices. Beside the speakers, a stone piece sits on the floor, penetrated by a silver microphone and aptly titled The Only Way Out is Through (2015). This is a slogan that seems to have been adopted by pop psychology — an urge to confront one’s feelings. Together, they raise questions about escapism, intimacy, and ‘60s leftovers. Where are we going and how are we going to get there? How do we get out of repetitious historical cycles? The titles and the pieces themselves make assertions about enclosure. The closed loop of the audio and the trapped-in-stone microphone suggest multiple viable options for moving through time and space. Intimacy (2015) and Intimacy (again) (2015), two backlit, cylindrical alabaster-and-watercolor sculptures with exposed electrical wiring, appear successively. Lastly, The Glamour of Ornament (2015) and The Glamour of Ornament 2 (2015) sit close to one other in the main gallery, both stone pieces with awkward gold adornments. They are presented monumentally and made slightly forlorn — again with a kind of dark humor – by the addition of the gold ornamentation that hangs in a way that is suggestive of the figure.

In The Nostalgia of an Object (2014-2015), alabaster sinks into a similarly sized slice of memory foam. Griffin creates an effective frustration, as I was left with the desire to see the impression of the object. A material resting on memory foam, once removed, will leave a momentary imprint. The foam returns to its original shape, no matter the duration of the object’s rest. Similarly, the works in “She Said” perform in their time and place smartly, addressing the historical frameworks of objects while pointing back to the present, where the only way out is through and the only way out is out.

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The room smelled like rain-softened wool and leather at Issue Project Room on Saturday September 13th. The tightly packed audience, half of them sitting and half standing — the chairs normally occupying the back of the space were cleared to allow for the performers’ mobility — waited in humming excitement for experimental composer Yoshi Wada, his son Tashi Wada, and their accompanying musicians, David Watson and Jim Pugliese. Yoshi, born in 1943 in Kyoto, Japan, studied sculpture at the Kyoto University of Fine Arts before moving to New York in the late 1960s where he joined the Fluxus art movement and studied with its founder, George Maciunas. Though Maciunas acted as a catalyst to Yoshi’s early experiments in music, Yoshi maintains that he did not carry the movement’s influence into his later career. In a 2008 interview with The Wire, Yoshi commented that Fluxus appealed to him at the time, however his independent interests in sound and music directed him elsewhere. His departure from Fluxus led him to study music composition with La Monte Young, and by extension North Indian signing with Prandit Pran Nath, and Scottish bagpipe with James McIntosh.[i] In Yoshi’s most recent work, Fluxus’ democratic consideration of the artistic potential in objects and actions, the tonal precision of North Indian singing, and the emotive qualities of Scottish bagpipes all merge into a sensory environment thickening with the sense of urgency and approaching danger.

The unnamed performance began with the sound of an alarm. Yoshi churned a low whine from a worn, metal hand siren, which grew to an anxious, undulating howl, then stopped abruptly. He then focused his concentration on a small switchboard. With each definitive press of a button he rang one of the alarm bells installed in various unidentifiable locations throughout the performance space. The warning sounds compounded further as Pugliese’s bass drum and Tashi’s organ drone joined in. Pugliese’s mallet attacked the drum in sporadic intervals while Yoshi watched avidly, waiting to ring the alarm bells precisely in or out of synch with the echoing percussion. Like the slow, elongated footsteps of a giant or an army marching in unison, the drumbeat spread ominously into the air as the shrill bells quivered erratically in sonic contrast. The hum of Tashi’s organ crept into audibility, seeming to emanate from beneath my feet. Watson exhaled a mournful note from his bloated bagpipe, which hung heavily in the air. Later in the performance, Watson and Yoshi — who began playing his own bagpipe — circled the perimeter of the space. As elongated tones followed them around the space like half-deflated balloons attached to their instruments, the growing amalgam of sounds created a formless narrative specific to the evening and location.

In addition to its inextricable link to duration — unlike static two- or three-dimensional objects that can be experienced at various points in time, we only hear sound while the sound waves vibrate — the performance of sound also greatly involves the space in which it is presented. At Issue Project Room, sounds bounced around the cavernous ceiling, and from where I sat, the reverberations created a spinning sonic halo above my head. Further amplifying the sensory experience, the room, crowded with radiating bodies, became gradually hotter and more humid as the performance went on. At the point of swampy discomfort, the climate heightened the effect of the instruments and I became acutely aware of my corporeal sensations: everything blended into a bath of perception. The bagpipe, siren, and organ combined into a polyphonic discord while the drum rumbled on the side. The tones resonated so deeply it became hard to distinguish whether they were being heard or felt.

Yoshi’s composition filled both the walls of the architecture and the bodies of the attendants as it wove periods of intensity with ones of meditative restraint. The interludes allowed my mind to calm and wander, but never for too long as Yoshi continually reintroduced the siren and the corresponding crescendo of the other instruments. The utilization of sound’s ability to resonate within the body, through both high and low frequencies, combined with sounds that connote impending danger, created a foreboding psychological event. The lack of contextualization further disconnected the audience from an opportunity to interpret the elements. The only specific information Issue Project Room gave about the nameless composition is in Yoshi’s words: “I search for deep and ringing sound that travels deep into my cells. Where does this sound exist?” The question posed by Yoshi requires a heightened awareness, not just of what we hear but how it feels to hear. By blurring the lines that distinguish individual senses, Yoshi created an open space for unadulterated sensory perception.

[i]Haynes, Jim. “Piper’s Lament.” The Wire June 2008: 20-22.

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August 10 to November 3, 2013

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
New York City, 212-708-9400

As a rule, sound infiltrates space, and the nearby listener can’t help but inhabit what is heard. Sound can grate upon or delight one’s immediate, internal presence in a way that visual information cannot. The implementation of its unique influence for investigatory aesthetic aims has been a concern of the sound art genre since its emergence via Dada and Surrealist movements early in the 20th century. Soundings—MoMA’s first show to present sound art exclusively—clings to the museum’s typical foregrounding of the image, exhibiting work that demands visual appraisal as much as it demands close listening.  This fidelity to visual media impedes the expressive capabilities of the works as sound. In this way, the show fails to make clear the unique influence that sound wields as a reservoir of meaning left largely untapped in our image-laden culture.

To the show’s credit, the reason why its shortcomings are so glaring is that it does indeed provide rare moments of pure, sonic eloquence, which set the bar high. Jana Winderen’s Ultrafield (2013), a sixteen-channel ambisonic sound piece installed in a darkened gallery, is, along with Susan Philipsz’s Study for Strings (2012), among the mere two works in the show that offer nothing but sonic information. Winderen’s piece is comprised of ultrasound field recordings culled from around the world—we hear bats, fish and underwater insects—which the artist has pitched down low enough to be detectable by humans.  The piece has an incongruous beauty to it. Unmistakable creaturely rhythms sound like rising clusters of synth bleeps and within this striking simultaneity of the familiar and unfamiliar, one is reminded that technology still butts up against an incredible wildness.

Philipsz’s Study for Strings is taken from a 1943 orchestra written by the Czech composer Pavel Haas during his imprisonment in a concentration camp. A performance of the piece was staged there as part of a Nazi propaganda film, and Haas, along with most of the musicians, was executed shortly thereafter. Study for Strings, drawing from a reconstruction of the score assembled by the surviving conductor, reduces the orchestration to only the viola and cello parts. The piece is unique in Soundings in that it not only uses conventional instruments, but is concerned with traditional musical criteria—such as harmony and counterpoint—if only in its divergence from them. While hints of melody in the piece are enough to conjure a warm, emotional identification on the part of the listener, long, abrupt silences provide the meditative space from which to question why and how. Is it in the music itself or the painful history of its composition? Conceptual projects rarely produce work so immanently expressive.

Ravaged lives, ruined buildings, and cast-aside technologies provide content for a good portion of the works presented, though the subtle devastation of Philipsz’s sonic mood stands alone in its precision. Jacob Kirkegaard’s Aion (2006), though not devoid of sensory appeal, is overly burdened by concept.  The film is a succession of fixed, long shots taken in four different derelict buildings in and around Chernobyl. Video and audio have both been subjected to a layering process, resulting in a dark image that is gradually peeled away to reveal details of the room depicted. The sound consists of low, atmospheric noise swelling to a heavy, machinic drone. The project reportedly pays tribute to Alvin Lucier’s vocal piece I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), which employed a similar layering technique. Aion‘s waves of mounting tension are sensorially absorbing, but its immediate audiovisual impact fails to anchor the artist’s references.

Overall, the curation tends toward a science-fair enthusiasm for mechanics, which encourages a manner of viewing that is more investigative than affective.  Carsten Nicolai’s wellenwanne lfo (2012)—a box-like apparatus of mirrors, water, and light which visually translates sounds inaudible to the human ear—looks like a sleek lab project, whereas a different curatorial context might present it as an elegant minimalist sculpture a la Donald Judd. Richard Garet’s Before Me is a clunkier iteration of the show’s gadget-art theme, piecing together dated sound equipment into a cheeky assemblage topped with an amplified marble rolling on a revolving turntable. The dull sound of the marble and the cobbled-together look of the sculpture implicate technological obsolescence in an ironic statement no less crude than its presentation.

Tristan Perich’s Microtonal Wall (2011) is the only tech-heavy piece in the exhibition that is refined enough in both concept and effect to offer a simple, unencumbered experience of sound. Perich’s sprawling grid of tiny speakers broadcasts a series of minute pitch changes which hum together in a white noise drone when approached from afar. In walking back and forth along the variously pitched rows, one can manipulate what is heard, generating, in a sense, one’s own improvised sound composition. Here, the piece’s stated motive is detectable within the encounter, such that the experience and its mechanics are elegantly unified.

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