The idleness of shadows

 

DFTPTMMYAIN, part 3 – The. 2022. Christof Migone. 

Earlier this year, I was one of the twelve artists invited by the Canadian artist and writer, Christof Migone to take part in his 12-year project: Different From The One Place Time Mood Mindset You Are In Now. 

With a knowing nod to Alvin Lucier’s, I am sitting in a room (1969) the invitation was to participate in, The:  the third word and part, of Christof’s annual dozen. Like Lucier’s magnetic room, The, composes its form from an instructed action: 

Room you are not in. Room where you usually make (sounds, images, objects, etc.), but that is currently running on idle. Idling in unintentional sounds. Room is lit but faded in and out after the fact (I will do the fade in fadeout). Camera captures room or detail (up to you), only one position throughout. Presence might be felt but is not present. You were there and you will be there again, but you are not there now.

The room where I make is spare, small and recently painted. It’s also the place where I keep and shelve the things I made and make with. On a desk in the corner there is an iMac with one Sonic Egg studio monitors on either side. An old straw hat perches ergonomically on the left-hand egg. 

The room has one window. When the iMac is on stand-by or off, the window is reflected in its screen; the dusty emptiness of the room behind made visible through the glass darkly. On sunny winter days, the light from the window casts shadows on the wall opposite, shadows that breath slowly in and out of perceptibility. I use these shadows as an opportunity to stop and stare and let myself dawdle in their idleness.

I made two films in response to the instruction. In the first and selected film, the stare of my iPhone is fixed on the wall where shadows appear. I pressed record, left the room and closed the door to. Twelve minutes or so later I returned to press stop. The twelve minutes recorded are uneventful. Shadows are slight and fleeting. The distant spin of a washing machine whines through its cycle. A draft from the open window, pushes and pulls the room ajar, creating spontaneous creaks, which occasionally synchronise with the fluctuations in light and less light.

In a more composed second attempt at idleness, I fixed the stare of the iPhone upon the iMac screen. I muted the microphone, and started a metronome before leaving the room, to return twelve minutes later and press stop. Visible through the blizzard of dust which covers the screen, the reflection of the metronome keeps time silently. An occasional particle of dust, drifting through the air is caught in the sunlight of the silenced room. This silence is replaced with the audible draft of the previous twelve minutes. The silent metronome announces and measures loss, whilst time creaks and idles in the dust.

In the late winter of 2021, sitting in front of the dim mirror of the iMac screen, I started to experience a bright and recurring flash in my left eye. Unlike the stained-glass spiral scotoma of a normal migraine, this light was briefly white and peripheral. Some days later drops of liquid dilated the aperture of my pupil and the attentive lens of the optometrist found a small tear in the retina of my left eye. As if to celebrate my visual field was immediately flooded with millions of black dots. That evening in a small, dark and automatically locked room, small bursts of a laser welded a line around the edge of my retina, the light so bright that my left eye seemed to lose the notion of sight. 

Through winter 2021 and spring 2022, there were four more tears and four more laser surgeries to weld my retina back into place. This has left my vision full of floaters, the remains of cells, casting their shadows on my retina. Like the wall and iMac screen, my visual field is full of dust and the idleness of shadows.

Emergency Eye Clinic: Southampton General Hospital

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This lift doesn’t stop here: particle physics and a piece of string

I approached Supersymmetry via a car park lift illuminated in a narcotic violet glow. Cellotaped to the lift wall was a piece of A4 paper, upon which was printed ‘THIS LIFT DOES NOT SERVE THE 3^rd FLOOR’. Interjected in felt tip between ‘The’ and ‘3^rd’ was ‘2^nd’. I got in anyway and was served with the 1^st as promised, from here I took the stairs to the 3^rd and final floor, where I entered the enclosed darkness of Ryoji Ikeda’s latest installation. It is ironically appropriate to enter the digital, dark matter of Ikeda’s Supersymmetry via an out of order lift and a dank walk up the concrete steps of a car park stairwell.

Supersymmmetry presents: ‘ an interpretation of quantum mechanics and quantum information theory from an aesthetic viewpoint […] drawing on [Ikeda’s] exchanges with scientist and engineers […] at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the worlds largest particle physics laboratory’.

The installation is divided into two separate parts: experiment and experience. Entering the first ‘experiment’ I am enveloped in a visceral bloom of base, intermittently pierced by sublime, frenetic pinpricks of sound. People gather like moths around three, elevated pools of squared and flickering light. Small round particles of matter roll across the surfaces of this illumination, generating patterns of shade, which shift, disperse and congregate. The motion is hypnotic, strangely reminiscent of those oily wave machines, so popular in the 1970’s. These wave machines were the domestic equivalent of the Executive Ball Clickers, whose cradle of steel spheres once provided an aspirational pre-glitch click to the ‘modern’ office soundscape.

From the experiment I proceed through a curtained blackout, toward the noise of experience. Synchronized bursts of light and data travel at speed down a corridor of screens accompanied by an interrupted cacophony of bleeps and blips. The sound suggests organised forms of communication and analysis, as if we were listening to something being questioned, measured and sent. Physically engulfed in the sensual broken waves of digital noise, I am surprised to be suddenly awash in childhood memories of Star Trek;  beamed back to the deck of Starship Enterprise, where control panels flash and everything looks like it is doing something, when of course, it isn’t. As I look around I notice that most people are filming, immersed in Supersymmetry through the raised screen of their mobile phone, a gesture reminiscent of Spock, who would survey new worlds with his handheld Tricorder. A sense of pretense begins to intervene in my experience and I am suspicious that the ‘scientific and mathematical model’ that Ikeda presents is a facade, a beautiful, sensual but ultimately empty aesthetic experience.

In a sudden peak of brightness I look up and notice a series of wooden structures attached to the roof: they looked like upside down tables. Above these I can see damp stains of peeling paint. I realise that the structures have been designed to protect the technology of the installation from the holes in the car park roof. These uncomplicated structures offer an eloquent mathematical model for the solution to a real problem: how do we protect the fabrication of Supersymmetry from the reality of rainfall?

From the pavement outside Carroll/Fletcher I stare through a window at A film about a city (2015), part of the new Wood and Harrison exhibition An almost identical copy. The clinical austerity of Wood and Harrison‘s architectural model is touched with elements of futility as I notice hoards of miniature human forms sheltering under the canopy of a square, whilst others sit on a solitary bank of stadium seating, facing nowhere, waiting for nothing to happen. There is something desolate about this city, this idea of a city and I am reminded of the Talking Heads song The Big Country, in which David Byrne describes an aerial view of the perfect country:

I see the school and the houses where the kids are
Places to park by the factories and buildings
Restaurants and bars for later in the evening

Byrne concludes: I wouldn’t live there if you paid me to.

Unlike the ‘scientific and mathematical models’ of Ikeda, these models, reminiscent of train sets and Airfix kits, are intimate human spaces, they share a physical ratio with reality.
In the video installation 100 falls (2013), Harrison climbs a ladder ascending out of frame. A pause. And then a human dummy dressed as Harrison, drops to the floor. An obvious video edit and the lifeless dummy reanimates as Harrison. He stands up and proceeds to climb the ladder again. So it continues, one hundred times and then, one hundred more. As I talk to one of the Gallery administrators I am aware that behind his back, whilst we chat, Harrison continues with his pathetic ascent and fall, caught in a tragic, inevitable loop of self-harm. The sense of inevitability continues in Semi Automatic Painting Machine (2013) in which we observe various objects as they are mechanically conveyed through a process of being spray-painted. Amongst the bunting, plants and flip charts, we find John Wood, who was born with a face that looks like it has always been expecting this to happen. He is transported and sprayed white, turned, conveyed and sprayed high visibility yellow. Just as Harrison accepts the inevitability of his continual fall, so Wood is resigned to his place in the chromatic production line of the painting machine.

The downstairs gallery seems abandoned, models of tennis courts and industrial estates are deserted; the funfair has moved on. In the out of town car park of the video installation DIYVBIED (Do-It-Yourself, Vehicle Bourne Improvised Explosive Device), model cars randomly explode, not in a CGI altered reality sort of way, but in an indoor firework, Captain Scarlet sort of way. The cars look out of date, unexciting variations of the Hillman Avenger or Morris Marina (once the most popular car in the UK). As one car explodes and then another, I am reminded of those television images of motionless cityscapes, evacuated in response to telephone warnings and suspicious devices, scenes which are then suddenly reanimated by a controlled and remote explosion. As another door flies off another Avenger, every car becomes suspect and the anachronistic image becomes a contemporary premonition of landscapes to come.

As with all of Wood and Harrison’s work there is an obsessive attention to detail. In the gallery upstairs their almost compulsive obsession to order, results in a series of small, pointless and joyous interventions. In what appears to be the office work of bored and idle hands, drawing pins are organised, pencils sharpened, rulers bent and string measured, In the senseless world of Wood and Harrison, everyday objects are faintly rearranged and organised into poetic models, which question our perception of the tangible and concrete, perhaps much more than the aesthetic particle physics and sensuous digital immersion of Ikeda’s Supersymmetry.

When Things That Happen, Don’t.

I took a day-trip to London to see Wood and Harrison’s Things That Happen at the Carroll / Fletcher Gallery and hear Graham Dunning’s talk at SoundFjord.
It rained and my navigation skills proved themselves to be suspect once more. But I was justly rewarded for my endurance.
Having had the immense pleasure of teaching with Mr. Harrison at Wolverhampton University, I have some knowledge of the video works that Wood and Harrison have created over the years. Things That Happen brings together, new pieces (I have never seen), alongside earlier works, which I have only seen on old, defunct televisions in various badly lit seminar rooms. The show is an eloquently curated retrospective, presented within an appropriately minimalist space: Carroll / Fletcher is a beautiful gallery with a very satisfying gray concrete staircase.

At the back of the gallery a familiar black dot provided me with a mnemonic focal point. I have watched the video Blind/Spot on DVD many times. In my mind I had imagined it to be exhibited full size at the end of a gray minimalist corridor.  I find it however, unassumingly projected onto a free-standing projection screen, similar to those once set up in schools and homes throughout the 1970’s, enabling us to watch educational films on childbirth, and Super 8 films of holidays in Rhyl or unprofessional family pets. Of course, this is the perfect situation for the work: a screen upon a screen: a projected space upon a space for projection. The video holds a black dot in the middle of a white rectangle, before abruptly snapping up to reveal another black dot on the white rectangle of another screen, which snaps up again to reveal another dot on another screen further down a corridor of other screens. The dot remains the same size, although in fact it is increasing in size as it recedes down the corridor: the circle filling a larger area of the rectangle in order to remain unchanged to the eye. This simple experiment seems to rent a hole in my perception of the space I am seeing: a visual diagram undermining my frail understanding of the laws of physics. The tear is accompanied by the audible snap of the screen rolling up, however, the sound is not dramatically amplified, but carefully left to descend from the tinny speaker of the projector above our heads.

Next to Blind/Spot, in the corner of the gallery, a TV monitor sits abandoned on the floor. In front of this hang a pair of headphones, quietly awaiting the unification of sound and image. On the TV screen a microphone swings from side to side in front of a small amp. I am of course reminded of Reich’s Pendulum Music, to whom Wood and Harrison offer their ‘Apologies’, but here there are no performers and the repetitive un-touched initiation and cessation of movement, adds futility to the dull tock of the looped swing. The visually mute chronometric pendulum of MIC/Amp remains silent until I put on the headphones. At this moment an intermittent feedback, swings through my ears, slowly approaching an exquisite full stop, in the form of a constant standing tone humming intimately, right between my eyes. Wood and Harrison’s use of sound is adroit and understated, the work Shelf   (2007) ( (not in this show) is in many ways as much a sound piece as it is a video installation.

In 10 x 10 (2011) a cyclical almost autonomic gush of breath, reminiscent of a David Lynch soundtrack, seems to repeatedly drag down image after image projected onto a large wall.  The regular rhythm of this noise implies continuity, a mechanical descent, which distances us from the space we are observing.  The closed-circuit of these images provides a voyeuristic glimpse into the windowless rooms of a bizarre office block, inhabited occasionally by a bored man (Harrison) whose behavior seems simultaneously mundane and bizarre: throwing paper planes into a bin; blowing up balloons, which never increase in size; dropping office furniture onto randomly arranged strip lights. The monotonous descent of images proceeds like a visual paternoster, allowing us to join or leave the threads of narrative that a full ride reveals.   Sometimes Harrison appears adorned in a line-up of fancy dress costumes, which reminds me of Village People: a police officer, a cowboy, a Red Indian (sadly no macho man). Harrison seems to be waiting for an office party that no one else could be bothered to attend. The dull dejection of such overdue moments pervades many of the works that make up Things That happen. The actions performed seem to result from a lack of purpose, time suspended in that idle never ending empty moment when things that happen, don’t.

Soliloquy #3: sebastiane hegarty (2008)

Later that afternoon I clumsily orienteered through increasingly unfamiliar regions of Tottenham, in search of SoundFjord, where Graham Dunning was giving a fascinating talk as part of his exhibition For Posterity. The talk concerned his attempt to reunite a found reel-to-reel tape with the owners of the voices left upon it.

At a car boot sale, Graham had bought a flat-bed tape recorder together with a spool of audio tape. Upon this he found waiting the voices of a family who had recorded themselves ‘for posterity’: for the listening attention of unknown ears. Diligently Graham had located the survivors of these voices and corresponded to discuss a safe return. But the narrative had continued whilst voice remained still: one of the children heard singing had died in a motorbike accident and his father had also died some years after the tape had been recorded. The surviving relative of the voices could not bear to hear them speak: to have them happen again.  She did not want them returned, but preferred them left where they were: unspoken and unheard.

Found tapes have featured in my own sound work and I have boxes full of discarded voices that others have left to disintegrate on forgotten audiocassettes, reel to reels and answerphone tapes. There is something fatal in the act of recording voice.  Edison of course, considered the phonograph a portal for conversations with the deceased, whilst, in Ulysses, James Joyce imagined a gramophone would one day be placed in the headstones of all our dearly departed.
Having made numerous covert recordings of people talking on trains or in the delayed spaces of transport waiting rooms, I am aware of the fatality that occurs when we attempt to keep that which is fleeting. When listening back to these voices whilst still in the present company of their author, I was struck by a dull but absolute sense of loss. The layering of the past upon the present generated a distinct lack in time, a lack that made ghosts of those whose voice I had confiscated.