THE GUARDIAN
By Adrian Searle
Published in Electric light orchestra. It hums, it rumbles, it rings: Adrian Searle tunes into an exploration of sound and vision , 2000
-first part is an excerpt below is the whole text:
...The most accomplished work here is Danish artist Ann Lislegaard's In Another
Room. A blank white wall cuts across a darkened space, at an angle. There are
speakers inset in each corner of the wall and a powerful halogen lamp blasts a
bright smear of light on the middle of it. The light flares on and off,
sometimes brighter, sometimes dimmer, faster and slower, in tandem with the
sound of someone moving around in an apartment - footsteps on a wooden floor,
furniture scraping, an office chair being wheeled from room to room. A female
voice describes the action.
The narrator tells us that the man in the room is looking out of his window. He
goes through papers on his desk. He listens to his answering machine. He
trundles his chair about, he sits and reads. We are told that the light is
falling, day turning into night. The voice of the one who watches him sometimes
overlays itself, incomprehensibly. The white of the wall where we watch is the
same white as the walls in the room we cannot see. I hear the man in the room
and I know that it is growing dark outside and that, as he looks through his
window, he sees trees and a dog.
I see real light flaring painfully on the wall in front of me, burning on to my
retina. I have to turn away after a while, and I see in my mind's eye the room
he inhabits. I imagine his furniture and his solitary maunderings. This is, of
course, a bit like listening to a radio play, with sound effects, but the work
also does something to the physical space of the gallery, turning it into a
space for the imaginary.
-----
Electric light orchestra
It hums, it rumbles, it rings: Adrian Searle tunes into an exploration of sound
and vision
The Guardian
Tuesday January 25, 2000
I hear a deep electric moan, a noise with a baleful edge to it. It reminds me
of standing under electricity pylons on a damp day. A picture pops into my
mind: a stencilled human silhouette contorted against a yellow background, a
black lightning zigzag delivering a fatal punch. The kind of enamelled sign
they fix to the local electricity substation. "Don't go too close. Danger of
death", it says.
Listen more attentively and the noise separates into harmonics, a 50 kilohertz
hymn to the mighty electron, whirring at 50,000 cycles a second. It could
almost be by Gyorgy Ligeti. Listen hard enough and any noise has music in it.
At home, I harmonise with the Hoover. Is this what composers do? The sound here
is a carefully modulated mix, derived from the electromagnetic fields generated
by a small television, a cooker, a bar heater and a radio, all ranged along the
back wall of a cordonned-off, semi-darkened space. The TV picture is a red fizz
and the radio is tuned into a gulf between stations. This is an installation by
Swedish artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff, in the exhibition Audible Light, at
the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. Audible Light is about sound, light and
sculpture, and includes artists from Britain, Scandinavia, Belgium and Germany.
"Hmmnn" goes Hausswolff's work, and I go "Hmm", not knowing what to make of it.
The title doesn't help me: Domestic Audiction Suggesting a Constant Flux of
Semi-Individuals to be Detected - a sort of boffin's plodding variant on an old
Damien Hirst title. The work generates the sort of sound the Aphex Twin might
twiddle with on a hardcore ambient recording. Is this future disco? This
morning I played all 70 tracks on the CD Trace, a compilation of two-minute
sound works, a belatedly released part of last year's Liverpool Biennial. It
included a man talking to himself near a spore of bear shit in the Canadian
woods, and the sound of Yoko Ono doing something in her bathroom. There was
lots of dweebling, and the odd gem. The 71st work on the CD I created myself,
using the fast forward button.
An alarm went off as I walked through the next gallery at Moma, competing with
the bells already ringing in my head. The source of the clamour, a red
industrial alarm, is sealed off behind glass in a tall, shiny aluminium cabinet,
a sort of sentry box standing in the middle of the room. A sensor detects you
as you move in close and a bell sounds.
The point of this work, surely, is to outwit the alarm. I tried going round the
cabinet in a low crouch, like Groucho Marx. I tried sidling to one side, but it
caught me out. I almost tried crawling, but this was an interaction too far.
Bruce Gilbert and Edward Graham Lewis, authors of Alarm (did it really take two
people to think this up?), are members of the experimental punk group Wire.
Alarm is terribly slight, an ambient interruption on your way through the
gallery. I wanted it to be louder, scarier, more forceful and jarring. I wanted
the earth to move for me.
For that, I had to stand in Carsten Nicolai's installation. Pressure waves bent
my ears; sound rumbled through my feet and my stomach. Nicolai has inset eight
loudspeakers flush with a false grey floor and through them comes a low,
juddering oscillation. It is a room filled with thunderous heavy breathing. Two
spherical flagons half filled with water sit on the floor, doing their own
reciprocal vibration. I guess they are body surrogates. You start to oscillate
along with everything else in the room. I reeled out, shudder-ing. Oddly, the
work made me want to pee, but I don't think that was the point.
The most accomplished work here is Danish artist Ann Lislegaard's In Another
Room. A blank white wall cuts across a darkened space, at an angle. There are
speakers inset in each corner of the wall and a powerful halogen lamp blasts a
bright smear of light on the middle of it. The light flares on and off,
sometimes brighter, sometimes dimmer, faster and slower, in tandem with the
sound of someone moving around in an apartment - footsteps on a wooden floor,
furniture scraping, an office chair being wheeled from room to room. A female
voice describes the action.
The narrator tells us that the man in the room is looking out of his window. He
goes through papers on his desk. He listens to his answering machine. He
trundles his chair about, he sits and reads. We are told that the light is
falling, day turning into night. The voice of the one who watches him sometimes
overlays itself, incomprehensibly. The white of the wall where we watch is the
same white as the walls in the room we cannot see. I hear the man in the room
and I know that it is growing dark outside and that, as he looks through his
window, he sees trees and a dog.
I see real light flaring painfully on the wall in front of me, burning on to my
retina. I have to turn away after a while, and I see in my mind's eye the room
he inhabits. I imagine his furniture and his solitary maunderings. This is, of
course, a bit like listening to a radio play, with sound effects, but the work
also does something to the physical space of the gallery, turning it into a
space for the imaginary.
Finnish artists Tommi Grönlund have wired up the biggest space at Moma, with
eight interconnected, wall-mounted parabolic reflectors. They look like
satellite dishes. Cables snake into the centre of the room, plugged into two
reel-to-reel tape recorders, each with a turning loop of tape. The effect is to
turn the space into a whispering gallery. You hear yourself and others in the
space relayed back, with a slight but perceptible delay. Stand near one of the
reflectors and you hear the mutterings of people on the far side of the space,
and their echoing, out-of-synch footfalls.
One annoying character insisted on playing the various ring options on his
mobile phone into one of the reflectors while I was there, reminding me of
Gerard Hoffnung's anarchic advice to tourists - to try the famous echo in the
British Museum reading room. Walking around in the space, you come across
pockets of reflected sound and dead spots. The gallery feels enlarged and the
reflectors look kind of pretty.
I gather that Ann Veronica Janssens's installation Cyberlight is rather
beautiful, too, but someone at the show's opening on Saturday night tampered
with it, and it wasn't working on my visit. Janssens filled the Belgian
pavilion at last year's Venice Biennale with a thick fog of dry ice, which
created a minor stir. This new work is essentially a light installation, the
only sound being the whirr of its "cyberlight" projector - included as aural
accompaniment to the still images on Moma's PC-friendly Audible Light CD-Rom.
It whirrs, helpfully.
- Audible Light is at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (01865 722733), till
March 19
1 - Audible Light is at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (01865 722733), till March 19
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