Jaki Irvine
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
Jaki Irvine, Room Acoustics Revisited (2008)
Jaki Irvine’s large single-screen projection at Kerlin Gallery, Room Acoustics Revisited (2008), initially appears to be a visually bland documentary film: a woman potters about an office, chatting to a man about composition, how a room can be organized like a piece of music, and various other sound-related topics. Subtitles, however, distract you from the fact the Caucasian woman is speaking English and the Chinese man is speaking Mandarin. At one point, the female character opines that ‘reconstructing something so vast is like looking at the world through a straw’, and the oblique film shows her viewpoint doing just that. While the press release offered some help, it lacked context and was difficult to fit with the documentary-style footage: ‘In the face of an almost total elimination of non-organised sounds from the acoustic field and the absence of adequate descriptions of most sounds in visual/written form, a young researcher at the [Institute for Sonic Research and Reconstruction] slowly comes to terms with the enormity of the task which the retrieval and reconstruction of a sonic landscape entails.’
The non-linear narrative took in shots of taxidermy in progress, a digitized image of a field of birds, a momentary black screen and spotlighted musical scores. Once the sense of verisimilitude disappeared, the documentary feel segued into a more sculptural experience of installation – that is, one became aware of oneself looking. Room Acoustics Revisited is perhaps concerned with the nature of communication itself, from the staging of a conversation in two languages through to signifiers of communication, but this characterization ultimately seems too broad.
Repeated viewings bring the press release into focus, in that the woman seems to be attempting to reconstruct sounds that have, for whatever reason, disappeared from the world. Meanwhile, the Chinese man assists with discussions of different theories of sound and its representation. However, the outcome of the woman’s project was ultimately irrelevant as one’s attention was caught by Irvine’s use of various filmic conventions. The pretentiousness of some of these was unintentionally funny: the ‘cinematic’ pensive look that crosses the male character’s face at one point was so pronounced that he might have been a character from Flash Gordon. Likewise, the shift from realism to digitized effects suggested a strained artfulness. Maybe this was intentional, but a deconstruction of filmic language was hardly the point given the supposed interest of the narrative. Because the impression of these details lingered, the work emerged as less than the sum of its parts. While it might be an easy criticism to claim that one art work is best understood in terms of an artist’s oeuvre, this artist appears to deserve this criticism more than others given both the lack and opacity of contextualizing information. The ‘revisited’ of the title is undoubtedly a key: I emailed Irvine about this and she told me she was interested in examining the consequences of one or two ideas from a 1973 book by Dr. Heinrich Kuttruff titled Room Acoustics. Aha! But, at this juncture of my analysis, I could only think ‘So what?’ – though ‘revisited’ could perhaps be conflated with ‘return’ in terms of the demands Irvine made on the viewer to watch and re-watch. To what end, however, I remain unsure.
Brian Curtin
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