Sound Still
UCT Irma Stern Museum 29 August - 16 September 2006
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Sound Still: a Collaborative Exhibition
Lyn Smuts, August 2006
Background to the exhibition
When ceramicist Katherine Glenday became aware that artist Lyn Smuts was exploring the visualization of sound, they began a dialogue that catalysed the series of production sessions contributing to the Sound Still exhibition. Smuts has worked primarily on her own, while Glenday's intense personal production is followed by engagement with other creative people - a consciously inclusive attitude that favours the development of relationships. In their differing ways of working, they echo the contrast between the modernist approach to art-making (the artist as creative individual) and a collaborative approach that regards other people as co-creators. For the participants, this collaborative approach encompasses a more feminine side of human creative consciousness.
By engaging the feminine side of creative consciousness, the participants recognise the natural world as creative source. This idea is one of the major unifying factors of this collaborative show. Art historian Lucy Lippard refers to the primary role of nature in the making of art when she says: 'Art itself may be partially defined as an expression of that moment of tension when human intervention in, or collaboration with, nature is recognized' (1983:84). Amongst the participating artists, interpretations of and involvement with the structures and gestures of the natural world range from the mathematical to the lyrical. A collaborative show would be meaningless if everyone thought and did the same thing. Distinct differences of content and context are apparent between the participants, yet, along with the tension inherent in this diversity, a unifying curiosity is apparent. By taking part in this event, the artists believe they are engaging with their 'proper' business, which is articulated by contemporary composer John Cage as curiosity and awareness (Godfrey 1998:61). Far from being superficial, this kind of playfulness can be understood as a way towards continuous renewal and flexibility, and as an attitude that challenges current norms. It is an attitude that counters authoritarianism and rigidity, and is wary of certainties.
The Sound Still exhibition encompasses a synaesthetic approach as it explores sound energy. Sound, sight, tactility and especially movement - which is also seen as operating almost imperceptibly within the collaborative group dynamics - all play a part in this event. Fascinated by sound, the participants have been exploring the implications of its physical manifestation and symbolic interpretation for some time. As curator, Glenday chose to name the event Sound Still. She explains: '…we have harnessed our various forms of craft to make our probing visible in an embodied form. We have explored and attempted to 'still' the evidence of how sound affects matter and how the airwaves around us eddy with pattern. In Sound Still the artwork flows around us as arrested sound'.
Glenday believes that an exhibition is merely a point at which visualized energy is held still and communicated, before it continues. 'Perception and therefore creativity is not a linear process. There is not an end to our explorations'.
The origins of the show
The direct reason for putting together the Sound Still exhibition was Nicola Visser, director of the Remix Dance Company's request that Glenday make some bell vessels, as they wished to choreograph a dance around their sound. This original transaction, involving the resonant object, dance, and dance notation, underlies the content of the exhibition. As a natural progression, Glenday invited Austrian artist Lore Heuermann, whose performance work involving sound and motion she had long admired, to participate. In previous work together, Glenday and art facilitator Mirjam Macleod had explored process orientated group interactions. Glenday, influenced by Arnold Mindell's process-orientated psychology, where the individual is seen as the participant in an emotional or 'relational field', included Macleod in the collaboration as a facilitator to enable the group to discover its nature as a new entity.
During the collaborative work sessions, some explorations centred on a printmaking experiment by Smuts, that the participants eventually expanded upon. Long interested in the visual marks made by sound, such as sonar printouts, Smuts was intrigued to discover the eighteenth century experiments of German physicist Ernst Chladni. Wishing to demonstrate the vibrational nature of matter, he had activated a metal plate, fixed horizontally on a vertical rod, by playing its edge with a violin bow. Sand sprinkled over the surface of the plate formed intricate patterns that illustrated the intense activity sound creates in matter. The fact that Chladni used traditional etching materials, such as fine powders and copperplate, encouraged the printmaker to experiment. The first rough experiments resembled chaos; gradually, intricate patterns appeared. Collaboration with Glenday and ceramicist Christina Bryer led to experimentation beyond printmaking materials, highlighting the transience of sound by transferring sound images to the fragile medium of porcelain. Subsequently John Turest Swartz, through the medium of film, has taken the process further. More than the representation of a mere phenomenon, his finely tuned work suggests the recording of a kind of cosmic energy at work.
The visualization of the movement of matter by sound, in the seemingly magical way of the experiment with the simple vibrational plate, is an intimation of the fact that energy informs all matter and causes all structure. All matter, including human beings, can be seen as part of an energetic world that includes sound energy; we as living beings share in the same gestational structuring process as all other matter.
Implications of the exhibition
The Sound Still exhibition is a collaborative event, where a group of artists have left their private spaces to share their energies and expertise, around a central theme. As much of the work was created collaboratively, there was a great deal of interaction between people and between works and people, which was a sociable experience. This collaboration explores differing modes of functioning, which invoked the challenges inherent in the sharing of ideas. For French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, the historical 'chance', as he puts it, of the contemporary artist is one of learning to inhabit the world in a better way, instead of trying to construct it based on preconceived ideas of historical evolution. The role of the artwork is no longer the formation of an imaginary utopia; it becomes a way of living and model of action within the existing reality (2002:13). As independent established artists, the participants were able to create a body of works together while enjoying one another's recognition, respect and appreciation as co-creators. While independent work in the studio is often a necessary part of finding an artistic voice, this collaboration challenges the norm whereby the artist needs to remain an independent individual in order to fulfill their vision, and implies that meaningful, joyful discoveries can be made by collaborating with co-creators.
In his 'relational aesthetics', Bourriaud developed a theory of form rather than a theory of art. He explains that the 'glue' that holds artworks together is constantly transforming according to the historical context. For example, whereas the medium of bronze was once a conventional form of 'glue', our contemporary visual experience has become so complex that a collection of disparate objects with no obvious links (such as an installation, for instance) can be recognized as a unity or world in itself. To a certain extent, Bourriaud's idea of 'relational' art, finds an echo in the Sound Still event. Sound Still has as its 'glue' the phenomenon of sound: sound is explored as a manifestation of energy. Given the understanding that everything, including human beings, consists of the energy of sub-atomic particles, it would seem obvious to explore this interrelatedness. The participants were drawn together by a common interest in interrelatedness and a certain shared sensibility regarding respect for the natural world as a source of creativity.
Participatory consciousness
The concept of a participatory consciousness, beyond its relevance to art, has implications for each person as a socially and ecologically aware being. The term, 'participatory consciousness' is derived from the book The Spell of the Sensuous by American philosopher David Abram. Abram credits the early French anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl with using the word 'participation' to characterize the animistic logic of indigenous peoples (1997:57). Abram believes that the interplay of the senses animates the earth as a vital entity in the minds of those who experience the world in this way. A resultant respect for the natural world, and thereby an ecological awareness, is engendered.
Participatory consciousness refers to an acknowledgement of forms of consciousness outside that of the human. It refers to the relational nature of the transaction between the human, and what Abram calls the more-than-human world (1997:x). This participatory consciousness is best revealed by the powers of the shaman, a figure referred to by Glenday and of interest to many artists, notably Joseph Beuys. Glenday regards the artist as a potential shaman, a critical member of the community who acts as a midwife to perception. Shamanic awareness seems to be linked to an acute experience of the earthly web of relations in which a community is embedded. The power of the shaman is less a supernatural power than it is a highly evolved understanding of the interrelatedness of nature and humans. The work of Glenday is a plea for a participatory consciousness, one that embraces the natural world, so that we are able to sustain the world ecologically and continue to enjoy its physical and spiritual nurture.
In western art, performance art is arguably the area in which the artist manifests most potently as shaman or midwife. As RoseLee Goldberg explains: 'Depending on the nature of the performance, it can be esoteric, shamanistic, instructive, provocative or entertaining' (2001: 9). In the Sound Still exhibition Lore Heuermann performs before groups of people, sometimes in collaboration with dancers or musicians in drawing on lengths of scrolls. In performance, the audience and co-performers become her references for an intense personal language of movement that she has developed over many years. In a previous exhibition Heuermann devised a 'human alphabet', in which the human figure is represented as a calligraphic mark. In the sense that Heuermann identifies with the human and the natural world, there is an element of shamanism in her work. The way she exhibits her work has a participatory nature: her calligraphic scrolls are photographed meandering over rocks, lying flat on the earth, or floating suspended from the roof of the monastery where she produced them.
The graphic mark
Art historian James Elkins holds that 'All images carry a degree of writing' (1998:xv) and that any graphic mark forms a structure. Much of the work in Sound Still makes drawings of the energies of nature. As Heuermann writes a language without a conventional encoded system, her work may be regarded as a subversion of text. This is countered by the widely held view that the graphic marks representing language and the graphic mark-as-picture are always an indissoluble unity. The Greek word gramma includes both meanings: picture, written letter or piece of writing (Elkins 1998:88).
Visual images are compelling exactly because they are multifaceted objects. That which is visible, always implies all that is invisible. This exhibition around sound is also an exhibition about silence, and, for several of the participants, like New Zealand artist Claire Beynon, about stillness. Beynon says, 'Silence suggests an experience of absence or aloneness, whereas in fact, it can be one of presence and oneness. Stillness and silence are dynamic. They are potent spaces - ways of being that resonate with energy. Silence contains and emanates all the fullness of sound. Similarly, stillness is anything but static. It reveals our connectedness with and separation from our environment. It exposes memory, challenges reality and the imagined, highlights knowledge and ignorance of self and other, accompanies us through life and death, teaches patience, protects innocence, encourages community'.
Elkins asks of art history: 'Why do pictures not rather belong with numbers, or dancing or kissing?' (1998:272). In creating this exhibition, the participants engage with these very issues. Physical action, energy and motion are all engaged in the production of visual art. As there is no sound without movement, Sound Still has, by its subject matter, linked a wide range of activities to visual art. For the Remix Dance Company, sound-as-movement, expressed by Glenday's vessels, and the fragility of the vessels' physical form, is directly relevant to their choreography.
In the words of Visser, 'In Second Time Broken it is primarily the recognition of the bell pots by choreographer Adam Benjamin and his ability to see the connections between dancers, the sounds and the pots that occasions something new and transcendant.
It is in the space between the dancers where the choreography begins … [a] space that may be charged on an emotional or physical, spiritual, contextual, social, racial, political [level] … or [it may be] a dead space an empty space an unmentionable space. The space is listened to …… and then shaped so that ultimately what is seen is the dance of the whole, the quartet together, rather than the technique or character of each individual dancer … it is the connection between the dancers, over and along the space, which is read and remains when the lights black out at the end of the show. In this performance the vessels make this unseen space visible - a fifth dancer. Performing this piece is to drop through to the underside of quiet where silence is full and wholeness is a trick of the light'.
The analogy of kissing as mark-making is appropriate to Smuts as a printmaker, who literally creates a picture from the transfer of marks during the contact between two surfaces. The imprints of manifested pattern demonstrate the relationship between the artist and the natural world. Tactility is a strong communicative tool in the making of art.
Pictures can also convey a sequential numerical pattern. When Bryer saw the Chladni patterns, she was struck by their similarity to the patterns in her mandalas. She works on a grid of non-periodic double five-fold symmetry that has been explained in a paper published by Roger Penrose (1978:16-22).
This non-periodic geometry is also found in a cross-section through a DNA strand, (Briggs 1994:97) and often, like the Chladni images, resembles the patterning found in animal skins. Both the Chladni images and her non-periodic mandalas possess a true centre and a vertical axis of symmetry. Bryer comments: '…looked at long and hard, these patterns will always give you eyes and a mouth, you will find the vertical spine, you will find life'. Through geometry, the artist engages with mathematics, art and mystery. According to Robert Lawlor, geometric diagrams can be contemplated as still moments revealing a continuous, timeless, universal action generally hidden from our sensory perception (1997:6). Bryer draws a complex and precise mathematical grid upon which to construct her ceramic designs. The organically rhythmic motion of the human hand, superimposed upon the mathematical precision of the grid, forms her artwork. This creates a dynamic tension in the patterning, so that the regularity of the grid is subverted. When using the grid for two separate plates, the slightest variation in initial choice of colouring or emphasis will lead to enormous differences in the finished product. What eventually emerges, she suggests, comes from within the pattern. Her series of works, with their minute variations, lead to a finished product embodying multiple transformations and mutations. The process of making these images is compelling because it engages only with 'what is' at that moment, an attitude closely aligned with the process work of Mirjam Macleod.
Waves and movements
As a process orientated art facilitator, Macleod works collaboratively by engaging the differentiated unity of a group. Glenday approached Macleod with a view to her acting as facilitator of the group dynamics among the participants. According to Macleod, when a group creates a work together, a new dynamic can enter the space allowing for a shift to take place in the work. Macleod describes this as 'an opening in the group to something more than the sum of the parts.' Generally one lets go of the thinking action and something drops into that space that is recognized by everyone. Looked at afterwards, a commonality is revealed in each person's process; and in that commonality lies the ground of our humanity.
No brief is given, the process is not goal orientated or linear; it takes on a meditative character in which the movement of consciousness is expansive
The process that the artists engage in is a spontaneous mark making process. The marks are visual translations of our individuality and in the recognition of our place amidst the other's mark - we can more clearly see ourselves and the symphony we create together.
Just prior to the opening of the Sound Still exhibition, a group workshop of all participating artists will take place under the guidance of Macleod. The resulting work will be exhibited as part of the show. In the words of the curator: 'The resultant work carries each one of our 'thumbprints' intact and honed, while encompassing the harmonics of a wider field of interconnection and belonging'.
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