Several Silences
The Renaissance Society, Chicago, USA
'Several Silences' (2009), installation view
It is tempting to suggest that the Renaissance Society’s spartan galleries were made for a show like ‘Several Silences’, curated by director of education Hamza Walker. But it would be more apposite and indeed fair to say that this modest but powerful exhibition quietly imposes its will on the austerely vaulted space. The title of the show is drawn from a 1979 essay by the late Jean-François Lyotard, but neither Walker’s essay nor the elegant installation belabours this point. Quite simply, the exhibition explores – judiciously and with admirable restraint – the various social and aesthetic valences of silence in contemporary culture. The peril here is obvious: how to lend provocative form to the most immaterial of phenomena while avoiding the pitfalls of heavy-handed literalism or the lure of romanticism. How, in other words, to articulate silence without encroaching on the integrity of the concept itself?
The mute, ethereal character of the exhibition is established by Ryan Gander’s scatter-sculpture, A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor (2008). Comprising 100 glass orbs, each of which contains a laser-etched image of a blank sheet of paper, and distributed throughout the gallery, like soundless musical notes punctuating the space with silence. More than other works in the show, A sheet of paper… makes manifest a very particular instance of (near-) silence, namely the familiar experience of watching a piece of paper swaying calmly through the air before coming to rest. Exploiting the fact that the motion of paper floating through space makes the sensation of silence strikingly literal – in fact, rendering one’s auditory awareness of silence visible – Gander’s work tests the capacity of one sense to embody another.
Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann, personal kill # 13 (2007)
The conceptual whimsy and sculptural delicacy of Gander’s work is countered by the pointed political rhetoric of a photograph by the German collaborative duo Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann, which shows a single wooden chair at the far end of a sinister concrete-clad room. It helps to know that the photograph, personal kill # 13 (2007), is an image of a military facility used to teach close-range combat, but the image speaks volumes without this paratextual hint. Although the photograph gives form to the eerie stillness that settles over a place in the aftermath of violence or trauma, Geissler and Sann seem more interested in the discursive silence that surrounds such training environments, and the broader public politics of war.
Harold Mendez, Nothing Prevents Anything (2007)
In addition to the austerity of the installation and the generally muted palette of the works, there is a faint air of melancholy that permeates ‘Several Silences’. Two ready-mades by Harold Mendez typify this impulse: Nothing Prevents Anything and Better off then than when life was babble? (both 2007) propose silence as a property that marks the passage from utility to uselessness. Mendez’s pendant works are discarded white signage boards salvaged from university campuses. Worked over and denuded, these former announcement boards emerge as vernacular abstractions, the accidental elegance of which is not the result of design or contrivance, but of heavy use and eventual obsolescence.
If silence has a cultural application, it is as an elegiac device. As the title suggests, Jonty Semper’s The one minute of silence from the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales (1997) is a recording of the minute’s silence held in Hyde Park, London, on 6 September 1997 to honour Princess Diana. Alive with ambient noise, singing birds, occasional coughing and a crying baby, the audio-track is most remarkable and moving for its impurity, for the crowd’s failure to maintain utter silence. The sum of this collective effort and related failure, Semper seems to suggest, constitutes one model of public respect. As if to demonstrate his claim, Semper follows this minute of what might be called ‘living silence’ with one minute of dead, clinical silence recorded in a studio, an astute and emotive reminder that memorializing silences are defined, in effect, by the impossibility of their aims.
Harry Shearer, The Silent Echo Chamber (2009)
The most accessible work in the exhibition is Harry Shearer’s remarkable The Silent Echo Chamber (2009). Comprising seven flat-screen televisions of variable dimensions hung salon-style on the entrance wall, the installation shows video footage of numerous media personalities and politicians in the minutes before going on air. Variously pensive, stoic, nervous, impatient, aggravated, good-humoured and distracted, Shearer’s work reveals a host of public figures – including Karl Rove, John McCain, Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama – in something close to an animal state, pacing in their figurative cages, hungry for release. Denied a reason to hold forth, these politicians and pundits appear naked, temporarily alienated from their natural function. Though most stare, fidget and putter, waiting for the recording to commence, one appears completely absorbed in his chosen activity. President Obama sits casually, cross-legged, perusing USA Today with an impassive expression, rarely looking in the direction of the camera, apparently indifferent to the impending broadcast. While Larry King and James Carville appear nothing short of imprisoned by this dead time, Obama is unflustered and content in what was for him, undoubtedly, a rare moment of respite and, perhaps, grace.
Christopher Bedford
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