Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
"Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller" by Judith Wilkinson, Summer 2007, pp. 78-79
The centrepiece of “The Killing Machine and other Stories,” as Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s show at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) was ominously titled, was a new installation made especially for the exhibition.
Inspired by Kafka’s gruesome tale In the Penal Colony, the artists have recreated a grisly execution chamber complete with a couple of modern-day twists. Echoing the horrifying particularities of Kafka’s apparatus, which used needles to inscribe the law that a person has violated onto his body, Cardiff and Miller’s eerily modified dental chair moves balletically to a choreographed score. Kafka’s machine worked with the perverse but familiar logic that only through bodily torture can truth be revealed to its victims. Similarly, in Cardiff and Miller’s latest contraption, two automated arms equipped with probing lights and menacing needles sniff out their prey with terrifying motions.
Cardiff has described her desire to construct a machine lying in wait for its victim. The room where the piece is housed is dark upon entry; it is the spectator who activates the sinister device by pushing a button and sparking it into life. As in so many of Cardiff and Miller’s works on display here, including Opera for a Small Room and The Paradise Institute, the frame separating the work from the viewer is pushed to the point of collapse. But while there is often a kernel of darkness in these earlier works, The Killing Machine sees the duo making a decidedly more political turn. The spectator’s participation in the work is no longer a form of play, but rather suggests complicity in the current media spectacle of terror.While the television sets built into the structure emit only static, it is not difficult to imagine contemporary scenes of torture from Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo. The spinning disco ball and pink fun-fur chair covering only serve to heighten the audience’s uncomfortable oscillation between horror and fascination at the scene before them.
While The Killing Machine represents a brave departure from the pop references and seductive qualities of the artists’ earlier pieces, it nonetheless forges links with the other works in this retrospective. The sonic anger expressed in the guitar crescendo of Opera for a Small Room is put to work again in the latest installation. The vacant dental chair conveys a sense of the spectral, missing body that haunts so many of Cardiff and Miller’s pieces—Road Trip and The Dark Pool are two examples included here. If the disembodied voices and fragmented narratives of the duo’s previous works generated unsolvable mysteries, now the absent figure of The Killing Machine constitutes a call for political response.
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