Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have collaborated to create a different sort of room altogether, one you look into but can’t enter, one full of stuff, mostly fusty records and turntables, lights and speakers. Although the multiple turntables are all spinning LPs, none of the needles touches shellac as the speakers blare out an opera and cowboy songs and a man’s speaking voice as MC. A silhouette occasionally moves across the crowded interior; the catalogue would have you believe this is “theatrical magic.”
OPERA FOR A SMALL ROOM? Technology’s promise of eternal life?
|
The story behind Opera for a Small Room? The collaborating artists stumbled on a massive stack of opera records (all inscribed with a single person’s name) in a second-hand store in the remote wilds of British Columbia. The resulting installation is their homage to the unknown woodsman opera lover. Making sense of their confection, curator Marjory Jacobson writes, “Within the cybernetic sensorium that has come to define our age, the digressive meander of narrative and the denial of closure imply for many thinkers an illusion of immortality and an affirmation of technology’s promise of eternal life.” Which I think means Cardiff and Miller have made a lot of noise with a lot of junk.
At the other end of the spectrum is American Bruce Nauman’s Office Edit, which for all its stasis (the artist turned on an infrared video camera to record the events in his studio during his absence at night) enjoys great conceptual appeal: a recording of one’s not being home, complete with scampering mice, moths, and ambient sounds. Staring at a room’s motionless objects as they’re infrequently punctuated by the dartings of rodents and insects may not be life-changing, but it reminds us that even where we most belong — our dwellings, our work spaces, our lives — absence is never far removed, both the temporary and the permanent kind.
‘Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art’ | MIT List Visual Art Center | 20 Ames St, Cambridge | Through December 31
ADVERTISEMENT
 |