Noise: Quiet Please I’m Listening
George Rodger Gallery, Maidstone, Kent
Sean Dower, Peak Moment (1997)
Curated by artist Conor Kelly, ‘Noise: Quiet Please I’m Listening’ seeks to unveil the sonic magic of the visual world. It’s a tall order, and unfortunately the exhibition is too cramped, both visually and acoustically, to hold the spell. Nevertheless, given the diminutive size of the gallery, the work is intelligently installed, with individual works situated inside a broken S-shape of corridors that hummed like some strange acoustic aviary. The show is a welcome focus on sound’s potent mutability, in contrast to the prevalent use of the medium as a sexy sideshow (see Dan Fox’s ‘Sound and Vision’ column for an expanded list of the curatorial uses and abuses of the ‘dematerialized’ medium).
The noisiest and liveliest work in the show is Georgina Starr’s Theda (2006-08), a record of various film- and sound-performances staged in London, Liverpool, New York and Genoa, in which the artist re-imagines lost scenes from the movies of silver screen vamp Theda Bara. Starr presents only the four audio recordings of the events, for which musicians were asked to respond by improvising in front of an audience to Starr’s cinematic projection. Played simultaneously on four speakers, the result is a surprisingly unified medley that transcends the discrete events it registers.
Similarly place-bound is Giorgio Sadotti’s Went to America and Didn’t Say a Word (1999), a field recording of the artist’s trip to New York for which he kept mum for a period of 24 hours. While indebted to Beuys’ silent protest I like America and America Likes Me (1974), it’s clear that Sadotti’s purposes are more mischievous. In an ongoing sound performance, Violin Siren (2005-), not shown as part of ‘Noise’, strolling violinists are employed to disrupt the hallowed silence of the gallery with bursts of klaxon-like noise. Sound, for Sadotti, is a form of impish resistance.
Sean Dower and Conor Kelly’s meditations on sound and vision are formalist in comparison. Dower’s Peak Moment (1997) is a constructed photograph of a decibel meter whose small coloured units range convincingly, if unexcitingly, from murmured greens to clamorous reds. Kelly’s mysterious-yet-distinct video Source (2005) comprises a vertical pan across an abstract flow of water droplets, whose out-of-time soundtrack creates a strange feeling of synchronicity. Culminating in a moment of revelation in which we see a microphone standing in the pouring rain, it’s clear that the real power of the piece (the acoustic disjunction) is being withheld.
Curiously, the press release claims that these works all share a concern for the ‘overlap between the gaze and listening.’ This seems a bit of a stretch – although, it’s easy to see how notions of ‘the gaze’ take shape in Starr’s practice in general, or in Sadotti’s collage-like paste-ups of newspaper adverts shown in his recent exhibition at London’s Limoncello gallery. If, instead, the show’s more humble aim was simply to encounter moments of wonder in the mental oscillation between sight and sound, then Ceal Floyer’s Drain (2006) was its apogee. An upturned tweeter lying on the floor emits a merry little gurgle – the sounds of a drain emptying – transforming the gallery space into a kitchen sink. Floyer’s understated work perfectly fits the plea for quiet in the show’s title.
Colin Perry
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