Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Raw Materials
Tate Modern Building, Southwark Tube Station, London
Bruce Nauman - Raw Materials
Sound Installation at the Tate Modern Gallery
The Turbine Hall, a unique gallery space previously exhibiting large sculptures specifically made for this old refurbished factory interior. I walk up the steps of the nearby tube station and make my way through the back streets using the Tate signs posted along the way. Under dark black 19th Century tunnels and past small café’s resurrected or sprouting out due to their new proximity to an Art establishment. Amongst the fabricated angular structures which form an anonymous mass all around this area I spot the gallery tower rising. Faded industrial signs melt into the dirty red brick walls that I walk past as I near the back of the Tate building. The sharp rigid transparent structural additions to the architecture can be detected. Millions of factory workers milling around in there.
I walked down the slope towards the row of grey doors and entered a large reception space. The unreal size of this area with the industrial crane above. As soon as I stepped through the door I was immediately surrounded on all sides with sounds of conversation. An abnormal number of people in this cathedral like space for passage into and out of the Tate. Not rushing to get anywhere or walking quickly past anything. Standing, wandering and smiling in recognition of the tone and texture of voices repeating there internal corrospondence. Instead of walking thoughtlessly to the inside entrance to buy books from the Tate shop or travel the elevator to the gallery area, people were now dawdling about, starting to walk then stopping to listen to different bits. To the dissonancy of sound directed from the side walls of this long and high hallway. Shouting ‘work..work…work…!’ or another sound of an assertive child: ‘you want to be here… you may..want to be here.. you may want…’the child getting angry. With the work..work shouting in the background. The cross over of voices resembles an asylum of incoherent individual sounds fixed by the rectangular speakers layed flat against the side walls at regular intervals. Sweeping out and overlapping, filling the world of the Turbine hall and surrounding the unsuspecting public.
The space where people have to go through. To walk about fifty yards through this Liverpool St. train station sized space. The voices are not casual. They are mostly insistent and unhesitatingly direct. People put there ears to the sound, close up to the speaker. They could stand away and still listen but they feel the need to block out the other surrounding speaker voices, the ones telling them to listen that way not this way.
When standing in the middle the mind can focus on certain sounds and block out others. Why block out one and not the other? Get rid of that threatening voice over there. Listen to that polite child that is quite incoherent when listened to? Because the voices are dislocated from their original context, they seem abstract and although familiar in their use of language this fragments as the various sounds overlap in the space. The initial brief understanding of the vocal sound breaks down and you begin then to notice the intonation and pitch of the sound. Especially in relation to other sounds in the space. In their abstract nature they become like three dimensional presences filling the space. A presence like that of surveillance cameras in supermarkets.
The voices claim a hold over the passers by: The thrill of being told what to do or conversed with by a stranger. Listening through a wall at something we cannot see. Of turning the knob on the radio and listening to the fragmented parts of different dialogue. The strangeness of watching others listening, with them not just standing and looking but moving around the room to gain different experiences of the sound. There is something novel about using the ears instead of the eyes. The nearest a gallery would come to haveing a concert and having that group experience.
We make up our own logic. I find myself discriminating for comforts sake. My feelings change and I want to listen to the aggressive shouting for a while and smile at the other softer sounds creeping in from the distance. I am creating my own composition.
The speakers are placed every ten yards and are normal speaker black fixed into the black iron support structures on the walls. A part of the structure. A part of the Tate Modern structure. A part of the Art institution. The sounds have authority placed in art institution foyer. When listening am I listening to the Tate Modern? The space is playful in that it encourages people to create their own sound organisation. People to be seen moving around the vast space to indulge in the nuances of sound difference between standing over here or over there. One child not embarrassed to lye face up, flat against the ground, trying out a different sound experience.
I took photos. Trying to capture people listening, if that could be visually captured. The smiles on faces. The odd laugh. Some standing in the middle as if they are on top of a mountain. The further down towards the sounds at the foot of the slope. The sounds creating a different feeling of perspective. I saw people pushing their ears against the speakers. I lifted my digital camera and then they spotted me and were gone. That hypersensitivity of the art gallery goer there displaying itself. Showing a shyness for the camera even though I concealed it well and turned as quickly as I could, pretending to take a picture of the window into the bookshop.
What would have happened if Bruce Nauman were to have placed the speakers outside of the gallery altogether. In the city where they would interfere more with the environment. People would be forced to listen to it. It would irritate their busy minds in a hurry to get from A to B. In the gallery people can drop their other thoughts legitimately and feel that they should give time to the artwork. They expect the illogical. They want novelty. In the street there is no time. There are too many norms to fill out. A group of people may walk past and caste a snide remark if catching you crouching to listen to a sound coming from a post box or a road drain. The Tate is safe. Only recently in history has interaction formed one of the rules of Exhibited art. It takes it from the street and enables us to experience it in safety.
The dissonant sounds heard in the Nauman exhibition are very similar to sounds heard in the outside world. The sounds that we often hear fragments of and form a confused background to our thoughts. We have no time to investigate them and really we don’t want to or we are not allowed to do so for fear of punishment. Nauman has taped them and placed them in order inside the closed doors of an institution for us to analyse. The tone of voice, the rhythm of words, the knocking together of opposites and incoherent sounds with no known reason. Rather like over hearing the sounds of people talking in a London tube station at rush hour. This exhibition, I think, enables people to work out their own mind impulses and workings. How the subconscious mind works. Organising information for us and sectioning it off. We then drive it on to find logic or meaning even if the origins are fragmented and incongruous.
The raw materials that Nuaman has placed here from outside, turn into abstract audio presences that generate a new life inside the hall, a presence. They do in reality fuse with the surrounding space as if moulded by it. We put on this space like a cloak as we walk through the entrance doors. It surrounds us on all sides and fits into every corner of the space. Then we have a conversation with it that leads us in all directions. Listening to the mad chantings and foriegn utterings.
There is a clever piece of Flash animation at the Tate Modern website which gives an idea of the sounds at the hall. In this case there is not substitute for actual experience. The sound has to be listened to with all of the site specific interactive elements intact. Why not go, be a guinea pig.
