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Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller The Murder of Crows 2008 Installation view Courtesy Art Gallery of Alberta |
Originally commissioned for the 2008 Sydney Biennale, Cardiff and Miller’s 30-minute soundscape The Murder of Crows uses the same technical process as their 2001 work Forty Part Motet, but involves over 700 separate computer-controlled tracks played back through 98 speakers, which stand in for both a murder of crows and the technology that structures our reality through sound. Unlike Forty Part Motet, where the spectator configures the score by walking from speaker to speaker or track to track, The Murder of Crows centralizes listeners in a provisional amphitheatre of folding wooden chairs. At the centre of this 75-by-25-metre audio installation, a dismembered gramophone lies on a 1940s burgundy-leather-topped card table. From it, Cardiff’s voice intermittently breathes a series of short narratives, nightmares that recall the horrors of war and man’s inhumanity to man.
These audio vignettes intermix with an electro-acoustic cinematic soundscape of violent storms, flocking crows and factory sounds that merge with a Bohemian Rhapsody-type aria. Anticipation builds as a marching band seems to be pushed through the space by an encroaching Russian choir that sings Aleksandr Aleksandrov and Vasily Lebedev-Kumach’s The Sacred War—once an anthem for Soviet patriotism, now all but drifted into folklore. Cathartic swells of chanting nuns from Thrangu Tara Abbey Kathmandu, Nepal, heighten the emotional intensity through a remarkable depth of sound, sculpting a space that sounds much larger than it is. Finally, as it often is in the movies, we are left with a paradoxically optimistic end in the form of an indie-rock ballad, The Crows Did Fly (Kathmandu Lullaby), written by George and sung by Janet, perhaps with their daughter in mind. One can almost see the credits roll as the space falls silent and listeners leave their seats to contemplate the personal cost of violence and war.
Cardiff and Miller collaborated with Berlin-based film composer Tilman Ritter and the Babelsberg Film Orchestra to compose The Murder of Crows as a requiem for the old world—a pre-9/11, pre–George Bush world where, in the artists’ estimation, “we weren’t so paranoid and things weren’t so dark.” The installation does indeed recall Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, which depicts a collapsed Goya engulfed by his nightmares and surrounded by a flurry of owls and bats. Produced after a five-year bout with cholera and his resulting deafness, Los Caprichos depicts Goya’s sensory and political isolation. Los Caprichos (caprichos meaning whim or fantasy) denounced the social oppression and economic crisis of Enlightenment Spain that could easily be seen to parallel our own time. Like Goya’s etchings, Cardiff and Miller’s soundscape conjures false monsters or imagined realities that might still have the potential to transform even the most frightening of worlds at a moment when reality and fantasy seem one and the same.
The Murder of Crows is like experiencing a film without images, and it recalls Cardiff’s earlier audio walks, which she describes as film scores for physical environments. The soundscape is structured like poetry or a dreamscape, where a collage of narrative and musical tropes from a variety of genres are linked associatively through metaphor to score our imaginations. In particular, The Murder of Crows relies heavily on fairy-tale and film references—the Brothers Grimm, Apocalypse Now and Hitchcock come to mind—to conjure horror and cultivate a state of cinematic suspense. Within popular culture and particularly film, the crow’s call is both a sign of warning and a sign of mourning that foreshadows the moment when we “know something terrible is going to happen.” The suspense is real, the horror explicit, at times even humorously so because of its baroqueness and absurd combination of genres. Yet The Murder of Crows transfers real anxiety to the listener; it becomes our mirror, reverberating back to us our culture’s deepest fears and loathings.
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Francisco Goya y Lucientes The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters 1797–8 / photo © National Gallery of Canada |
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