Canadian Art International: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia
Every artist faces the problem of how to follow up a successful project or exhibition, but what to do after creating what is arguably the finest work of art of one's generation is a dilemma confronted by very few. Janet Cardiff's Forty-Part Motet, the winner of the National Gallery of Canada's Millennium Prize in 2001, was a work of great formal clarity and conceptual minimalism. Forty speakers on stands ringing a room played back 40 separate recorded tracks of an English choir performing Thomas Tallis's 1575 Spem in Alium. The beauty of the musical composition, coupled with the elegiac melancholy of the disembodied voices in an empty room, achieved a transcendent grace that left most who experienced it deeply moved, often to the point of tears.
Pandemonium, conceived and executed with her frequent collaborator George Bures Miller, is Cardiff's most convincing successor yet to the triumph of Forty-Part Motet. Within the forbidding, crenellated walls of Eastern State Penitentiary, a fortress of a prison built in the early 19th century near central Philadelphia, Cardiff and Miller's installation occupies a vaulted, two-storey block of cells in ruinous disrepair. Amid peeling paint, crumbling walls, collapsed ceilings and copious amounts of rubble and debris, the piece remains nearly invisible. Electrical cords snake out the doorway of each cell. Within each room, the viewer can discern, sometimes with difficulty, a simple mechanism that beats a mallet or drumstick on a discarded piece of prison furniture: a corroded bed frame, a rusty pipe, a battered light fixture, a broken sink or toilet. Controlled by an unseen computer, the hammers strike the objects, at first with faint, isolated tapping, as if a prisoner in solitary confinement were sounding out a desolate plea for human contact. A response emanates from the other end of the corridor, as if the inmates perceive one another and communicate in code. A back and forth of rapping, knocking and pounding ensues as assorted implements hit a diversity of found objects with varying degrees of force. The drumming changes in character—sometimes it is clearly intentional and human, sometimes apparently random or suggestive of the regular noises of the building or, at least, the building as it may once have been, filled with the incarcerated and their keepers, an entire community behind the castle walls. The beats sound in unison, keeping time, a little ominously. The clamour grows. It becomes rhythmic, then syncopated. It assumes a threateningly martial air, like a military marching band, then a grimly joyous one, like a Bahian batucada percussion troupe. Volume and cacophony increase until finally it conjures a full-scale prison riot, the pandemonium of the work's title.
Cardiff and Miller turn Cell Block Seven into a single enormous musical instrument, playing both rhythm and dissonance on the scale of architecture. Inside the instrument itself, the audience can move from place to place, and, as with Forty-Part Motet, the composition changes as one moves, depending on whether the resounding boom of a mallet hitting an old cupboard or the staccato clink of a stick on a porcelain sink is nearer. Also similar to that masterpiece (one of the rare occasions that one may use the term "masterpiece" in the context of contemporary art and mean it with conviction), Pandemonium creates an affecting cognitive disjunction by having machines reproduce the sounds of humanity in a depopulated space. Yet this new work takes a step beyond the relative abstraction of Forty-Part Motet through the employment of narrative, invoking in turn the ghosts of lonely convicts, clanking pipes, prison bands and wild mobs. Unlike some of Cardiff's audio walks and joint Cardiff and Miller efforts such as The Paradise Institute, which occupied the Canadian pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale, Pandemonium does not rely on the transparent spookiness of illusionistic (but ultimately unsatisfying) special effects or seemingly tacked-on bits of science-fiction plots. Rather, its considerably visceral and remarkably haunting power comes from its historical and site-specificity, and from the effect of live sound in a real space and the patently literal means by which it is produced.
Winter 2005
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