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HEARING AND SEEING THINGS
By Bill Arning
Published in Catalogue for The Danish Pavillion, 51. Biennale di Venezia, 2005
Ann Lislegaard’s art takes as its ground condition our senses of sight and hearing today in a highly technological and sensually dense world. She uses compelling narratives infused with Noir-esuque mysteries to engage the audience long enough to allow her works to serve as catalysts to better consider the relations between “seeing” and “hearing” things and the different ways those senses produce the effect of truth.
I have known Lislegaard’s artwork for about a decade and thought I had a good command of the material. Some pieces such as the 1997 video, Nothing but Space I had encountered on multiple occasions and felt like I knew thoroughly enough to speak of with confidence. I should have known better. The clue that Lislegaard’s work would be harder to know was there in that piece. The unapprehendablilty of the world is clearly telegraphed in the video in which we see a figure reflected in the psychedelic mirrored folds of a simple piece of Mylar. Whenever you think you have a clear picture she turns liquid on you and escapes. That is what happens with all the women in Lislegaard’s universe and the implication is that there is very little that we can actually hold onto with any certainty.
In 2003 I included her work, Corner Piece – The Space Between Us in an exhibition Son et Lumiére that I was curating at MIT. For the first time I was working on a daily basis with a piece and discovered aspects of her staged situations’ functional dynamics that I had not expected. Now I am wizened by the knowledge that the pieces I have not experienced in their fully installed form I cannot claim to know. The mass of sound, image and video disks that sit before me on my desk are just hints at the experience she plans for her audience. Lislegaard constructs surprises and tests the limits of our ability to apprehend what is going on in her narratives. If the documentation could adequately represents the works then they would not be successful in their installed form as the revelatory experience of using your senses in her rooms in their most crucial element. Her works are in effect sense-laboratories which provide limited stimuli and counts on our human nature to build a memorable narrative from her deliberately incomplete visual and aural content.
Vision continually reclaims the illusion of purity, stability and reliability from the abyss of doubt. This holds true even after every element of its construction of truth has been called into question, if not completely dismantled and disproved. The experience of visual content effectively mimics transparency, effortlessness, and incorruptibility even when we are looking at it through glasses, relying on the artifice of Western perspectival logic and remembering the particulars of what we have visually experienced only with the help of our digital cameras. In presentations of traditional art one generally aspires to powerful, bright “true” lighting conditions as if all other light conditions are false and we could know truth, yet time after time faith in visual veracity returns. We reach out to flip on the light switch and all seems right and the world is a knowable place, and epistemological crisis is reduced to a vague nagging sensation that is best ignored, least it grow into something more frightening.
Sound functions differently. To hear is to experience something that is hard to corroborate, so the experience of sound is always entangled with doubt. Both “Did you hear that?” and “Did you see that?” are common questions that enable us to assure ourselves that we are still within the shared, sane world of communal experience. In each case the normal response would be to return to the visual to investigate what we have experienced. We turn together with our potential fellow witness toward the locus of the aberrant stimulus.
Rarely would one employ directional listening to find the truth behind the anomalous experience, although there are exceptions. The sound of a violent confrontation in the next apartment might cause two to share the somewhat bizarre experience of pressing ears against the wall. And I do recall some voyeuristic audio pleasure obtained by listening to noisy sex performed by houseguests, that was unknowingly transmitted through heat vents, but that is neither here or there as sight still reigns supreme in the truth production business.
Looking for truth one turns eyes rather than ears in the directions of both sound and sight, and if needed one changes perspective to look more. Who has not stared at the wall as if to capture more or somehow silence the rude neighbors’ cacophony? There are few exceptions. Eyes trump ears is our search for the truth and the exceptions only prove that rule. (The next level of investigation is the tactile – touching to verify the visual, but it is beyond the scope of this essay to complete that triangle.)
When we study the production of visual truth, we turn repeatedly to the relationship between film/video (the visual world recorded in motion) to the still photograph that captures visual reality taken out of the endless flow of motion. The invention of cinema and the accelerating distribution of related technologies, video, television and internet created a rupture in the possibility of knowing anything for sure because it gave everyone living in a technologically advanced country the unforgettable experience of being simultaneously in two believable realities at once. The early history of proto-cinematic reality – the Camera Obscura, the photographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey, and Harold Edgerton, Magic Lanterns and Zoetropes, Thomas Edison and The Lumiére family, -- is so theoretically fascinating because at each stage the rupture between the examinable “mirror of nature” picture and that reproduction that mirrored the flow of life expanded. In the gap between moving and unmoving pictures a plethora of philosophical arguments around the knowabilty of reality are allowed to bloom.
Sound has no equivalent. We can only reexamine sonic evidence by replaying a sequence of sounds in time. While still photographs have no given claim on truth anymore, one can study a photograph with another human and discuss some shared experience, with ones observations of the photographic evidence corroborated by your fellow’s vision. You can point to a black pixel or beige smudge and ponder together what real-world object produced this mark on the image. When time enters this equation either via film/video or audio recordings the pointing function vanishes, and one is left with nothing better than “Did you hear that?” Of course there are ways to compare but they all involve taking the object of consideration out of the flow of time and translating into still pictures. One can freeze frame a film, and create a still picture, but one could not locate that frame within the temporal flow. Also by using various sensors one can see visually that a sonic event has occurred, but that requires another translation from sound to vision. We might have confidence that the graphic representation and the sonic event do prove one another, but that is not the same as direct and comparable experience of the event.
Ann Lislegaard has over the last eight years explored sound and vision as the salient elements of her installations, as the foregrounded subject matter of her installations. In each piece we enter into the work and have carefully constructed and nuanced visual and audio experiences presented to us in a way that keeps sound and vision strictly separate to better play them off each other, and in that play reveal aspects of the other’s nature. But Lislegaard does settle for a straightforward investigation when she can complicate matters further. She gets images in time to act like still images and vice versa. She builds constructions for her sound works and illustrates their sonic modulations in these rooms with light in a way that makes the audience members task both harder and more engaging.
She holds sound and vision apart as if they were specimens that might contaminate each other and only lets them mingle their effects when that confusion will aid in the analytical aims of her project. Her works can seem quite stripped down – blank walls, simple lights, low volume sounds – but what appears as a Zen minimalist urge is in fact an analytic strategy to allow the audience to consider the always complex interaction between sound and vision in isolation from other stimuli.
Despite Lislegaard’s clinical distance from her two seductive servants, her project has much in common with cinema. Filmmakers work with separate sound and film recording and editing equipment. Hence they are always aware that sound and vision are separate elements that may support or contradict each other, and that either their concord or discord may lead to profound experiences and tell stories. Yet the normative tropes of mainstream cinema are to make sound and vision work in concert to sweep the audience headlong into the other reality of the screen. In the space of the gallery or museum Lislegaard does the opposite without forsaking the persuasive powers of cinematic narrative.
Lislegaard frequently tells stories in her work and her stories are the lure that compels our active listening. We attempt to follow the tales, to digest them to the point where we can recount them to ourselves or others and thereby experience and remember them. It is in our internalizing of the narrative that we can consider our different responses to information depending on whether we saw or heard it.
“Active Listening” is a conflict resolution technique that asks listeners to listen well enough to be able to recount what the speaker has said without thinking of either a response or their opinion about it. It is a difficult skill to learn and requires serious effort, and that effort shows in the body language of those attempting it. The shoulders ride up the neck and the upper torso continually readjusts to try to angle the ears to best effect. Eye contact with fellows is avoided except during a few “Did you hear that?” moments in which we try to convey a shared experience. Whether reciprocal glances indicate a shared observation cannot ever be proved.
When The MIT List Center reinstalled Corner Piece, I had many occasions to wander into the galleries and see several strangers gathered in Lislegaard gallery in just such a posture. Some had already listened for a complete cycle or more, and in almost every case they had excavated details from the multiple layers of the soundtrack that I had not noticed. This was more shocking as I had invoked curatorial privilege and cheated by circumventing many of Lislegaard’s installation conditions. I had loaded the soundtrack onto my iPod and listened to it in both sonic isolation and in the distracting sensorium of the gym. Yet here were these amateurs noting narrative potentialities to me that I had never heard or considered. Were they “Hearing things” or was the piece -- when installed as intended -- offering up itself in ways that the individual elements never could when experienced in isolation?
The conspicuously fake wall of Corner Piece predated and outlasted the more real gallery wall that was built for the show and demolished at the end. The space of the piece was demarcated by a blue carpet that differentiated the work’s active arena from a space that was also in the gallery, which offered complete visual experience access of the works face, but was not physically part of the piece. Standing there one could remain unengaged. Being on the carpet and feeling the different sensations, tactile as well as the changed sound quality of the carpeted area verses the hard, reverberating concrete floor made for a hard to resist invitation to enter a Hitchcockian universe. Outside of the carpeted stage one tended to watch others in the active space but within one listening became the focus. The wall was a large enough expanse of wallboard. Its form evoked the ghost of a movie screen before or after the film has ended, particularly if one approached the wall and stared at it, which seemed that most natural way to experience the piece. The only interruption to the wall's white surface was four clean modern speakers flush mounted to the walls face in the work’s extreme corners.
The active elements were a multilayered soundtrack in which a woman’s voice describes another woman’s movements and activities. "This is the corner, It is the room, It is the same day, She is the same woman...a corner, some lights, several speakers, A carpet to cover the Floor". Many of the things she describes we can corroborate with our eyes and touch. If we are female, we could be the woman described and flattered or frightened by the narrator’s obsessive attention to the details of her motion, activities and comportment. The motions she describes of moving back and forth in the corner are likely to be what we are doing in the space as well. "The light, the color, the carpet, the wall, the other wall, behind the wall - all things that we are experiencing ourselves, When she describes things that we do NOT experience, a car pulling up, day turning to night, the sounds of neighbors, we perhaps assume we have missed something because the rest has been uncannily accurate.
If we are male we wonder what our role is, as we are clearly neither hunter nor game in this sensorial cat-and-mouse game’s gynocentric universe. The voice is close miked, giving the creepy sense that the narrator is just inches away, whispering too close in our ear. “I can see her even though my eyes are closed” the voice says, and we feel much the same way. The breathy description has managed to synestheticly convey the visual through sound. The narrator’s interest in her object of observation veers between the criminal and the erotic. She could be looking for evidence of intrigue or obeying a complex sexual urge to either seduce or give into this woman as a lover. A kiss is mentioned briefly, and the sensuality of her skin on a summer’s day is fetishized. But there is something disconcerting about the narrator’s interest and when she describes her object simultaneously as having short and long hair, we think her obsession may be more delusional than reality based. When she describes her as “a beautiful friend, my best friend “, we think this is another example of the stalker’s self-delusion, which she allows when she says that her mind might have created this mirror reality.
Or maybe what she is describing is only the plot of a closely watched film. Lislegaard has bright lights flashing behind the corner synced to the soundtrack by a simple light organ. This is a device that might be used in a low-rent disco or high school prom to create simple effects and the flashes of light with a soundtrack is by definition cinematic. The dark/light oscillation was in itself disconcerting, as flickering lights indicate in films that something is amiss, and murder may be imminent. The speaker notes at one point that her quarry leaves the picture implying that this is filmic reality, and to be off screen is to not quite exist. Add to this the aura of intrigue the permeates the text and we experience this as if we are watching a very reduced film – white light flashes and sound, not unlike Derek Jarman’s Blue, a monochromatic film with all the content located sound in such a way that the blue of the screen changes meaning with the words.
In Lislegaard’s other cinematic and narativized works, Kronborg Castle, Elsinor (2000), Eyes Wide Open, (2002) Another Room (2000) I-You-Later-There (2000) female voices also describe actions, places and characters. The architectural /sculptural setting, the nature of the mysteries and the clues provided vary but in all of these works who these women are and why they are telling us what is occurring around us is never fully revealed. In I-You-Later-There, by attempting to listen carefully we end up enacting the motions being described, and spookily the automated soundtrack either knows our future actions or is running the show. Such paranoia is absurd but unavoidable in Lislegaard’s world.
As installations, rather than theatrical performances which have a beginning and an end, listeners may enter the space and start their experience at any point. Similarly each visitor will focus on one or two phrases or details. Given Lislegaard’s reductive tendency in providing visual clues, favoring static images and blank surfaces any stated detail may be selected to be the one that is remembered. When we compare notes with others that experienced the work, their mental completion of the scene will likely be totally different. All these conditions lead to an experience of Lislegaard’s fictive realities that in infused with doubt.
The first inklings of doubt may encroach on our experience due to the vary unlikelihood of a strange woman choosing to stand by us and show us, via her description, a reality before us that for some reason we are unable to see. The realities our companion narrates could not be directly experienced even if we had access to the visual reality she apparently can see. Multiple realities are overlaid and allowed to contradict the other. In Kronborg Castle past versions of the castle décor are described. In Another room the narrator describes the interior, unexpressed motivations of another man from an omniscient perspective, of a literary narrator, like her subject who we cannot see nor hear.
In Eyes Wide Open the narrative is itself reduced to the act of looking and describing and yet the work is among Lislegaard most compelling works. On three large screens a handsome, slightly androgynous woman is examined in detail as she does nothing but stand there and allow herself to be examined. She occasionally touches her hair, or blinks or lets her head tip to the side. That this can be tremendously exciting to watch, a fact that is well known to anyone that has experienced the Warhol Screen Tests now that they are back in circulation, each a three-minute testament to the joys of voyeurism. This a particularly exquisite pleasure when the model is as compelling to watch as this woman, who resembles a cross between Indie film actress Chloe Sevigny and Elizabeth Fraser, the singer from the Cocteau Twins. She is fashionable in the way of today that could be from now or just as believably from another time. All of this woman’s movements are described in detail by the voice, who at one point lets us know that her desire is to share the special things she sees in this woman with us, “I saw her, and now you can see what I saw,"
Formally Eyes Wide Open is video from which the artist has isolated still images, and sequenced and reanimated them into a semblance of motion, but yet as stills -- outside the flow of time -- they seem marginally knowable and could potentially be examined in more detail. They stutter forward, like a Muybridge proto-cinematic sequences, but also like a contact sheet of a fashion shoot out of Antonioni’s Blow Up. Every once in a while one of the three screens breaks into a longer moving sequences as if the female specimen is attempting to escape from the laboratory gaze of her examiner. Panels drop out as screens go repeatedly to black, in some undefined correlation to the amount of language the voice throws at the woman’s already evocative face. It is as if the language rather than transmitting the woman’s charms interdicts our ability to see her for ourselves, as we can only see her through the eyes of another which is the equivalent of not seeing her at all. As in Corner Piece, the voice’s interest in the examined woman may in fact be from the purposeful distance of a casting agent, or the way heterosexual women are supposed to look at other women in fashion magazines, but voice has a certain quiver and breathlessness that indicates a clearly erotic desire.
Two recent video works continue Eyes Wide Open's formal explorations into making video, act like still photography, or rather some hybrid moving/static hybrid. In Double Vision (2004) and Room with a View (2002) women are alone in environments constructed on the computer. This is a very conspicuous artistic choice as staging a live action video with a similar content and drama is an easy thing to do in this day and age. Each appears to be a domestic setting that no one has yet moved into, a situation that the artist could have easily found and borrowed as a set in the real world. The domestic settings are depicted as if aliens unfamiliar with the ways of human life took a few details from television views of typical apartments to stage the human exhibit at their zoo. The inhabitants do their part in this theater of the normal by pacing, entering and returning or staring back. We are meant to remember that Lislegaard has controlled every aspect of this situation in a claiming of directorial hubris but while she controls the situation it is our job to interrogate these detainees visually.
In Double Vision Lislegaard’s play with the effects of realism and fiction spread across two screens with the same woman, returning to the Hitchcockian doppelganger she explored in a number of the sound works. She should be able to see herself as her pacing occurs in what appears to two rooms of the same house. Occasionally there are even two of her in the same room yet they do not interact; they can’t or don’t want to. While they feel imprisoned their rooms are defined by windows and doors. At one level this puts both Double Vision and Room with a View into a painting tradition that begins with Vermeer and comes down through Hammershøi to be used today mainly by filmmakers and photographers. Yet by building this virtual room out of apertures to an undefined exterior, the implication is that the area outside in neither realer not less prone to being spied upon. Like the Truman Show an exterior reality is inconceivable. To leave would be to rip a hole in reality that may not be able to be mended and would not be an improvement.
Yet this woman - or these women - does nothing but nervously examine her reality for clues to… something. This could be more a response to her boredom in this dollhouse. Lislegaard uses boredom, the woman, hers, ours, in the big nothing that is the central occurrence of the piece to exacerbate the nagging doubt as to exactly what is going on here.
Her virtual situations are as laboratory-like as her sonic situations. Each scenario has a highly reduced incidence of visual detail, with the main visual events being windows and doors. The light quality shifts rapidly and unexpectedly. It is powerful and clear light, and hence conjures truth effects but in a way that gives no comfort. Unlike the woman in Eyes Wide Open or any of the earlier unseen protagonists in the sound pieces, the women in these works are powerless objects of scrutiny, which is an uncomfortable situation for us as witnesses. She paces because she knows we are watching.
Each is almost a still photograph, pretending as if in its turning into an unmoving picture that it could ontologically mimic the condition of a still picture, it can’t, but in the gaps between images and the gaps of language we can pretend that the certainty of the still has returned. There are too many gaps in the production of truth, too much which does not add up in the unrevealing details of these women’s exposure.
And the scenario in Double Vision is silent. Once again Lislegaard uses the senses separately or forcefully separated in some way, in order to lay bare truth effects and the construction of reality and the large gaps in that reality. Working with sound, architecture, light, narrative and women’s personas, Lislegaard has created a striking art of eptisimological doubt and hermeneutic questioning capable of breaking though the cozy reality of mediated daily life, and that is quite an achievement.
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