Below are a few short texts that I wrote, all of them album/art exhibition reviews…

Gail Pickering at The Level Two Gallery, Tate Modern, April 2008

As a curatorial adjunct of Tate Modern, the Level 2 Gallery is the Tate’s answer to London’s promulgation of project spaces, independent artist-led venues, and other mercurial pioneer outposts of art. These spaces can have a contemporaneity, versatility and singular focus where the Tate’s main collection, in size and polyphony, can fall short. Here We Dance is third in a series of exhibitions aiming to address the theme of citizenship, this time focusing upon relationships between the body and the state.

Gail Pickering’s three part performance and sculptural piece ZULU: Speaking In (Radical) Tongues sets out to ‘channel’ and amplify an array of voices from 60’s and 70’s radical leftist politics. Surrounded by a sculptural rendering of the word “ZULU”, with each wooden and hollow-backed box-like letter acting as both stage and prop, a lone figure wanders through the letters, pushing them about and flipping them around as she speaks. Sometimes despondently creeping inside the boxes as if to find shelter amongst ruins, sometimes proudly standing on them as if on a soapbox, her speech alternates between ecstatic, polemical and introspective. During the performance, an old Revox reel-to-reel recorder mounted on a small wooden plinth silently whirs away, storing the words onto tape.

According to the artist, the text is a collage of memoirs, manifestos and other ephemera which she has spliced together, forming a schizophonic montage of radical language from the past forty-odd years. Although none of the speech contains citation of their source, the politicised tone of the voices is immediately apparent. An arrogant voice describes the audience as “ballot beef” or going from “bus face to lunch face” and “street face to home face.” Not that the work is simply a caricature of angry radical rhetoric: at one point a voice describes “I went along to a peace-in, I noticed everyone was smoking Gauloises, so I began to smoke too.” Further along another voice describes the brutal tactics used in a terrorist operation, “Quite simply, anyone who resisted was to be killed. The same went for anyone who tried to escape or became hysterical […] That was too much for me. I explained I wasn’t a killer. But he insisted, he said it was a matter of necessity, a matter of survival.”

The overall effect is that of a lament for a time when one could think that social change through independent, street level organisation was possible; that one’s voice would be heard. Using ideas such as ‘channeling’ voices and ‘speaking in tongues’ as compositional and performative devices both imbues the text with a religious aura and shifts the tone of the voices into that of the archaic and spectral. Watching this as a process is humorous and engaging, enabling the work to poke fun at the pomposity and apparent naïvety of the language used, while also revealing the variety of interpretations that the word ‘radical’ evokes. The actress gives a new body to these voices, letting them speak into our present, but at the same time relinquishes responsibility for what is said. It’s fascinating to watch this distancing between the artwork and its content. Though I’m left wondering if the work is only a simplifying rendering of the complex polyphony inherent in the idea of the radical, more indicative of an intellectual and artistic infatuation with the sexiness of the socially transgressive than with its artistic investigation. To the ear it can be heard as a rather bleak and futile ambience: that the idea of the ‘people’s voice’, the very possibility of it being heard individually let alone as a chorus, is now so seemingly distant.
*

Stephen Vitiello at Museum 52, 6 March – 5 April 2008

Tromping around the pavements of East London, visiting art galleries during a gray, cold, and wet winter, it’s an appreciated thing to come upon an exhibition that includes seating as a component. Usually some variety of multimedia installation set within sleep-inducing levels of light, many hours of hypnogogic relaxation can be spent meditating upon works that may have never been given a second glance. Especially during the rush of a busy day, if it weren’t for a comfortable perch to slow one down, it would be all too easy to miss work that demands more than a few minutes attention. So, the gallery traveller’s aching feet will most probably be pleased to come across two simple wooden benches that serve as spectator’s pew’s in Stephen Vitiello’s recent exhibition Finding Pictures In Search Of Sounds.
Installed in the pokey space of the Museum 52 gallery in East London, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery builds upon his work with sound and music, investigating one’s physical and psychological interpretation of space and image. Comprised of a two-room multi-channel sound work, separated by a short corridor, the show departs from the artist’s light-hearted sculptural assemblage exhibited in his 2006 exhibition Night Chatter. There, along with a smaller multi-channel work, he employed found-objects such as logs and household plants along with a Fluxus inspired improvisational aesthetic, akin to that of fellow sound artist Christian Marclay. Vitiello produced a variety of jokey object & speaker sculptures, using recordings of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, transforming them into the sounds of small tinkling bells broadcast from crawling ivy.
This time the artist has favoured a stripped down approach and soberly focused upon a sparing installation, emptying the space apart from speakers and bare wooden benches. Upon entering the gallery one steps straight into a darkened room, lit by a single fluorescent light. Painted a dull and mottled silver, the atmosphere of the room is somewhere between the austere religious gloom of a monastic cell and the confused loneliness one finds in an institutional waiting room. A dense ambient collage of field recordings emanate from small speakers mounted at head height upon two facing walls. Further along in the second room sits another wooden bench. This room, darker than the first, contains two bare dark blue pulsing light bulbs hanging from the low ceiling. Three speakers built flush into the wall and ceiling broadcast an intimate composition of domestic sounds exacerbating the distinctly claustrophobic space.
Sitting in the middle of a room, sandwiched on either side by a 5.1 channel surround-sound hi-fi, it’s undeniable that Vitiello has a great formal skill with the material of sound. At points one could feel the textures and weightiness of the sounds modulate and shift about the small space, transforming a dingy room into a dynamic psychological experience for the visitor. Then again, if the exhibition purports (amongst other things) to invite “a reconsideration of one’s physical response to sound” along with attempting to elicit a consideration of the “transitory in-between”, surely movement and listening should be integral to the work.
Any consideration of this on the part of the visitor is undermined by Vitiello’s dedication to the integrity of his surround sound stereo image. With it’s conventional seating arrangement for the listener and minimal recording studio ambience, the work risks reiterating a prescriptive and everyday type of ‘spectator’ based listening. Couple this type of listening with the quasi-religious tone in the work, and the result is a kind of sonic Feng Shui that only addresses the particularities of the space as a problem to transcend, rather than the basis of an opportunity.
*

Pei: Envision Normality, Kwan Yin CD

The following review is also published in the June 2008 issue of The Wire magazine

Resembling a scrapbook of snippets from a newly acquired portable minidisc recorder, Taiwanese sound artist Pei’s (aka Wen Liu) album Envision Normality collects together recordings made mostly during a summer in Taipei. The tracks are rough and unprocessed recordings of a disparate array of sonic moments, edited in a harsh and uneven manner with most of the CD dedicated to the hard white noise of crickets chirping, thunderstorms, rain and other aural ephemera.
Opening with the minute-long “Changing Root”, a glitchy looping electronic drone and by far the most ‘musical’ segment of the release, the track fades into the sound of a shovel digging into dirt, setting a leisurely back-garden theme that continues throughout the album. On first listen the album seems banal in the selection of recordings used. This is due to Pei’s choice of recordings sounding much like a DIY version of a sound library’s “general ambient” section. With a closer listening through headphones, one can discern layers of sounds within the recordings and behind the lo-fi hiss of the everyday soundscape. On several tracks one can just make out the ghostly noises of people speaking, dogs barking, the ribbit of frogs, running water and the artist’s breath. In fact, the sounds can be so faint it’s doubtful that some of them happened, but were the result of auditory hallucination caused by an over-concentrated listening.
There are several interesting compositional moments along the album. Where Pei splices together a quick staccato succession of what sounds like children playing in a water park which then rapidly shifts into the modulating sound of a radio playing in a car. Also notable are the sharp transitions in volume and proximity with the recorded subject that creates a shifting “point of view”. Overall, the effect can be cinematic, and is admirable for the simplicity of it’s idea. Utilising a basic editing technique that seems to rely on the odd croaks and groans found submerged within the recordings, Pei creates a bare narrative structure that gives the album cohesion.
The enthusiastic idiosyncrasy of the sounds and the composition is endearing, but it is a stretch to say that what Pei produces are compositions. Rather it would be more appropriate to call the album a collection of sounds selected and arranged in a highly personal way. Which is quite a mouthful considering that what this actually means is that listening to Envision Normality ends up as the aural equivalent of experiencing a friend’s summer holiday snaps.