From the issue dated November 17, 2000
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NOTES FROM ACADEMEArt That Pricks Up Your EarsBy LAWRENCE BIEMILLER
Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
Stop a moment. Listen. What do you hear? Traffic? Crows? A fan? A computer printer? A laugh track? And what do the sounds tell you? That it's raining outside? That someone's walking down the hall? Sound is easy to take for granted. Your brain unconsciously registers thousands of noises every day -- the clicks of doors closing behind you,
But spend a few minutes with Alan Berliner's "Audiofile" and your attitude may change. "Audiofile" consists of 81 tape players in small file drawers, each labeled in alphabetical order: ALL NEWS RADIO, ARIA, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, ASCENDING, and so forth. Open a drawer and sound comes out -- CRACK OF DAWN is an old-fashioned alarm clock's ringing; G MINOR is a chord; RADIOACTIVE is the clicking of a Geiger counter; TWILIGHT ZONE is the theme from the TV show. REWIND plays voices backwards, and fast; HIGH TIDE splashes waves on rocks; WIT'S END is a scream. Open several drawers at once and you can mix their sounds, controlling the volume of each by closing its drawer partway. After a few minutes of experimenting, it's easy to find yourself hooked. Try pairing LORD'S PRAYER -- recited by a congregation -- and PERPETUAL MOTION, the sound of a camera shutter clicking repeatedly. What about SENIOR CITIZENS -- singing "You Are My Sunshine" in thin voices -- and OFF THE HOOK, a series of loud tones followed by "Please hang up now"? You're composing not music but sounds -- creating your own cacophony and then listening for whatever it can tell you, or maybe just for the sheer joy of it. "Audiofile" is one of the first works you encounter in "S.O.S.: Scenes of Sounds," the inaugural exhibition at Skidmore College's new Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, which opened late last month. "You can't not like that piece," says Charles A. Stainback, who served as the show's curator and is also the museum's director. The show includes an Andy Warhol painting of a telephone and a number of sculptures -- including Javier Tellez's "Long Distant Call," in which a pair of stuffed armadillos nose into two empty cans connected by a tangle of string. But it's the media works that make "S.O.S." stand out, and that lead you to welcome serendipitous occurrences of sound for days afterward -- even the whining of autumn's leaf blowers. The first media piece, Beverley Mastrianni's "Artspeak," is on a lawn outside the museum -- two snaking walls of brushed aluminum that define a short path. Walk between the walls and motion detectors set off recordings: "What are you doing here?" the first asks. "Do you know anything about modern art?" Or enter from the other end: "What is this supposed to be? My kid could do this." If you set them both off at once, the two speakers in the middle of the piece juxtapose words: "Crevice." "Calm." "Canyon." "Lifeless." "Fissure." "Strange." "Stream." "Imaginative." Three works are in the lobby, including a piece that is the show's largest and least visible: One night recently Jeff Talman came to the empty museum and recorded what Mr. Stainback refers to as "pure sound" -- the ventilation system had been shut down, the humming lights had been turned out, and everything that Mr. Stainback could find to turn off had been turned off. Then Mr. Talman took a single second's worth of that ambient noise and used a computer to stretch it out to play on speakers in the museum's lobby for eight minutes -- the length of time it takes light to travel from the Sun to the Earth. The result, which is heard once an hour and is titled "Radiant Point One" is a lonely recording of booming, otherworldly tones that rise and fall, and of ethereal rushing noises that sound like solar winds scouring the planet. Another piece in the lobby is "Telephone Plays From the Humana," which consists of five three-minute plays you can listen to on five ordinary pay phones ("I'm persecuted by lovers of long red hair," one begins). And Christian Marclay's "Tape Fall" is nearby -- a reel-to-reel tape deck mounted high on a ladder, spilling magnetic tape from a single reel down to a growing pile on the floor as it plays a recording of water dripping. After only a few days, the pile of tape beneath the piece is already substantial; "S.O.S." runs through January 28. "Every two hours the gallery monitor has to change the tape," Mr. Stainback says. "I love the simplicity of it." Mr. Stainback came to Skidmore three years ago from the International Center of Photography in New York, and he says a show about sound is "an idea I've been thinking of, in different iterations, for a long time." And he wanted to make sure that the Tang's first show could hold its own against the museum's lively new building, which was designed by the architect Antoine Predock and seems certain to attract attention in its own right. Indeed, Mr. Stainback describes "S.O.S." as the museum staff's way of asserting possession of the structure: "We knew it was going to be noisy. But that's part of taking on the building. It's part of what I wanted to do -- find something that would permeate the building." He also wanted to let visitors interact with the art, to get them talking about it. "I want people to leave the museum engaged," he says. "It's not some stuffy sort of cavern where you look at things that you're supposed to appreciate and you don't know why you're here." Students who serve as gallery monitors -- and even the uniformed campus-safety officer assigned to the building -- walk around encouraging visitors to open the drawers of "Audiofile," or to try out Laurie Anderson's "Handphone Table-Remembering Sound." It requires you to sit, put your elbows on two buttons in indentations in the tabletop, then lean forward and put your hands over your ears. Your posture gives you a sudden sense of isolation, and rumbling sounds like the low tones of an organ's biggest pipes travel from the tabletop through your arms to your head. "Some of the things are intentionally ambiguous," says the curator of all these sounds and effects. "Some of the connections people will make after the fact." And some people are so reserved that not even a uniformed officer's permission makes them comfortable dancing in a museum, which is by far the best way to appreciate David Rokeby's "Measure." The piece, set in an upstairs gallery with glass walls on either side, consists of a mantle clock whose ticking is amplified and played back through speakers. As you approach it, a video camera picks up your movements and transmits them to a computer, which in turn reinterprets the motions as variations on the ticking noise -- variations that can sound like a motorcycle revving its engine or like the twang of a plucked guitar string. The more you move, the more noise you hear. Mr. Stainback demonstrates, creating a short but intense percussive sonata by racing back and forth, making wild motions with his arms, then pausing to sway like an inverted pendulum. When "S.O.S." is in full voice -- drawers playing, telephones ringing, installations knocking and shouting and whispering -- the main gallery is so noisy that you seem to lose yourself in sound. You can't hear your own sniffles or footsteps, which is oddly disquieting, as though you were losing one connection to reality. It's then that you realize how much you depend on the astonishing level of feedback sound offers -- to register that the refrigerator door has closed all the way, that a snap is safely snapped, that the car is in gear. In recent years computer scientists have been struggling to create three-dimensional technologies that let them immerse themselves in visual representations of data, but evolution long ago provided us with hearing as a way to take advantage of the tremendous wealth of information we live each day immersed in. Two of the quietest pieces in "S.O.S." help remind you of that. They are both by Joseph Grigely, who is deaf, and they consist of scraps of paper on which he has had conversations with others. In one piece, "Fireside Talk #2," the scraps are arranged in small frames on a mantelpiece; the other, "Seven Green Conversations," brings together snippets linked only by the color of the paper they were written on. ("So far so good but it hasn't been long enough," one speaker writes. Then: "Some side effects.") Equally memorable is "The Wait of My Words," in which Rafe Churchill has re-created the bathroom of his house, right down to the towels and the toothpaste. You can stand in front of the mirror and listen to a recording of Mr. Churchill rehearsing names and phrases to prevent himself from stuttering during the day ahead: "I'll have a Sapporo. ... I'll have the ... uh ... chimi -- the chimichanga." By the time you're ready to leave "S.O.S.," even the campus-safety officer's crackling radio and one squeaking shoe have become art. On your way out, stop by "Audiofile" again and open some drawers -- maybe LES FLEURS DU MAL (a woman reciting Baudelaire's poetry, in French), SINGING PRAISES (a medieval chant, in Latin, for male voices), and SONG OF MYSELF (a man reading from Walt Whitman). Stop a minute. Listen. http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Page: A88
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Copyright © 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education