In
the feature length documentary film centred around Marina Abramovic's
2010 MoMA performance retrospective The Artist Is Present,
Klaus Biesenbach, apparently quoting Marina, tells us that the
difference between performance art and theatre is that “when you
perform you have a knife and it's your blood, when you are acting
it's ketchup and you don't cut yourself.” Even though this is
undoubtedly a simplification it feels comforting to have a clear
definition, language creating the illusion of safety in separateness.
Answering
my probably somewhat banal question along similar lines, “what is
the difference between sound art and experimental music?” artist
and curator Sam Belinfante generously provides me with an equally
well thought through and appealing sound bite. Sound art (I
paraphrase) suggests an artist inviting other artists, musicians, etc
to assist her or him in the realisation of her or his idea, whereas
experimental music implies a group of artists and musicians working
together in a collaborative spirit, towards an egalitarian creative
goal.
As
a starting point at least I found it helpful to keep this definition
in mind when thinking about The Voice and the Lens, a four day
festival and exhibition at Ikon Gallery, curated by Sam Belinfante
and Ed McKeon, the later of music production company Third Ear. Neat
little boxes can be misleading if taken too literally, but we do so
long for them.
For
The Voice and the Lens the curators have selected five artists
with an interest in sound and the voice, paired each with a creative
vocalist and asked them, in their sets of two, to explore the voice
as both subject and medium. In this way five newly commissioned
works have come in to being that will occupy the First Floor
Galleries at Ikon and will be neither sound art nor experimental
music but something in between the two, expanding notions of
performance and collaboration into new territory.
Upstairs
will be a series of what Belinfante refers to as 'mute images'. The
title is, in part, a play on words, images being by definition mute
whilst these particular images will imply sound via the imagination
of the viewer. Interestingly, everyday language becomes tricky in
the sphere of art works whose primary concern is auditory, its
subjective nature revealed. Technically speaking can we refer to a
'viewer'? Is this an exhibition we will go to 'see'? These
linguistic ructions neatly point towards some of the notions the
exhibition is exploring: the fallible and visual-centric nature of
language and the role of voice created sound in a space beyond or
without language.
Sam
Taylor-Wood's Mute
is the earliest work on show, a six and a half minute video close-up
of a man singing opera with the sound removed, from 2001. The work
makes the power of sound apparent through its absence. That which
evokes such profound emotional activity in the singer, we the viewer
(if you will) cannot hear. We have a strong sense of it but it is
not available to us. The result is a strange disconnectivity, by
turns cartoonic and pathetic. Mute,
Belinfante admits almost by way of confession, is the work that
inspired the show and by default much of his work of the last few
years concerning music and the language-less voice. Belinfante's own
photographic work for this show, Aperture,
is a series of seven stills that visually record the artist
performing an ascending scale, the changing shape of the mouth
mimicking the camera's aperture widening as it lets in gradually more
and more light. Aperture
was his response, homage perhaps, to Taylor-Wood's film.
A
different trick after similar ends has been employed by artist
Kathryn Faulkner. Faulkner has used a CymaScope, a device that
generates an image in response to sound vibrations passed through it,
to create My Voice, Chanting (2009). The syllable the artist
has chosen to engage is 'om', the mystical sound of the universe in
various Eastern philosophical and religious traditions, believed by
some to be the vibration of divine consciousness and all that is.
When recorded by the CymaScope however the vibrational quality is
lost, its effects preserved visually. In so doing the result, again,
is alienation, a sense of absence and loss that perversely highlights
the profound nature of sound and at the same time our conscious
unawareness of its omnipresent and perhaps even transcendent nature.
Whilst
we're speaking - on the telephone ironically, a medium that allows
one to hear but neither see nor feel the person with whom one is
attempting communication - Belinfante, who is currently working on a
PhD in Fine Art at Leeds University, quotes Nietzsche, Derrida and
Lacan. My sense is that as well as being an aesthetically
interesting show this will also be heavily theoretical for those
wishing to approach it in such a way. Mladen Dolar, in his book
first published in 2006, A Voice and Nothing More, posits the
voice as not so much an “anthropomorphic masquerade of thinking”
but as “the lever of thought”, the active, that is to say, rather
than the passive component in the relationship between the individual
and the world. This seems to me to be a profoundly radical notion
that necessarily casts its radicalism over Belinfante's exhibition.
If the voice controls thought rather than thought controlling the
voice then it is surely something we should be paying meaningful
attention to.
8 to 11 November 2012
IkonGallery, Birmingham
written for This is Tomorrow
