Without a Sound

by Matthew Thompson, Associate Curator

 

When discussing his composition 4’33”, composer John Cage takes care not to term it silent, as it is often described, but as lacking “intentional” sound. Composed in three movements (30”, 2’23”, and 1’40”, respectively) and represented by a blank score, the work is performed simply by reading the score and turning the pages—in essence, marking time. Many recollections of the initial performance of the work mention sound explicitly, from rustling trees and rain pattering on the roof to stifled coughs and murmurs in the concert hall.¹ It was performed at a concert, after all, and the audience, expecting to hear so-called intentional sound, had its attention diverted to the sonic environment already surrounding them. The removal of sound created a heightened awareness, a more intense experience of the real world arrived at through excision.

4’33” inextricably links sound and duration. In film, our conception of time—or more precisely, our experience of time—is likewise intimately linked to sound. Sound, especially recorded sound, lacks the irreducible unit of the frame. While the moving image is a rapid succession of single frames, sound is fluid. When film is slowed down, we usually notice that something is amiss because we hear it first. The voices sound wrong, for example, too drawn out and languid, almost inhuman, even when the manipulation is slight. When sound doesn’t match the action on the screen—either by corresponding to it, or, in the case of the score, by complimenting it—it upsets the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. But when sound is left out all together, our experience becomes entirely different.

 

No Sound is not a survey of silent film and video works but rather a collection of possibilities. It is a collision of temporal experiences, as time is bent, stretched, and compressed. As sound from the internal reality of a moving image work helps to ground the viewer, silent film and video creates a space unmoored from our expectations of time and temporal experience. Whether by direct aesthetic choice or technological necessity, the removal of sound pushes the viewer towards an almost hypnotic focus. Without sound, film is stripped of a highly flexible associative layer that, in its absence, allows the viewer to concentrate much more acutely on the gesture contained within the frame.

The shortest work in the exhibition, Bas Jan Ader’s Fall II (1970), is a mere twenty-five second shot of the artist leisurely riding his bicycle straight into an Amsterdam canal. The other Ader films included in No Sound, I’m Too Sad to Tell You (1971) and Broken Fall (Organic) (1971), also feature disarmingly straightforward expressions of sadness and failure. The simplicity and earnestness of Ader’s gestures highlight their immediacy and ephemerality, conditions which are determined in deference to time as they stand against monumentality and permanence.

Rising into the frame in slow motion and freezing into a contorted, almost agonizing pose before falling out again, Trisha Donnelly’s actions in her work Untitled (1998-99) are inscrutably bizarre. It is only anecdotally that we come to find that she is interpreting well-known rock stars’s facial and bodily gesture during a moment of transcendent abandon. While the viewer might expect such a grand gesture to be projected on a monumental scale, Donnelly’s scaling of the work is modest, corresponding to a single sheet of letter-sized paper. Our understanding of the value and intelligibility of the ecstatic creative moment are upset through these playful shifts of scale and reluctant sharing of information.

 

Another work that is explicitly modest is Guy Ben-Ner’s charming reenactment of Melville’s Moby Dick—shot completely in his kitchen, starring he and his daughter in only the most cursory costumes and make-up. Moby Dick juxtaposes the grand scale of the epic narrative and the intimate space of the home. Full of the sort of slapstick and rudimentary camera tricks reminiscent of early silent film, and using only the most basic homemade props, Ben-Ner’s becomes a much more immediate story of creativity and innocence through its domestic shift.

 

The longest work in the exhibition is Sleep (Eunectus murinus) (1998), Henrik Håkansson’s nearly three and a half hour long video, comprised of an unflinching, scientifically-dry shot—complete with running timecode—of a giant anaconda sleeping. Håkansson takes Warhol to the jungle, quoting the latter’s infamous fivehour film of a man sleeping, extrapolating the scene to an exotic locale and collapsing notions of the experiment present in both science and conceptual art.

While all film is, at its essence, still frames animated, works composed of what we easily recognize as static shots collide several experiences of time. The single photograph becomes the residue of an instant, the images changing before the viewer become temporally felt as they linger and shift, their stillness freezing them in the past.

 

Nancy Graves’s 200 Stills at 60 Frames (1970) is the first of five films that involved applying the working methods of the documentary to achieve abstraction. Although the film involved extensive research and travel, the resulting work uses one of the chief formal elements of documentary film—the still image—to create a non-narrative film structured around the exploration of light, form, and color. The absence of narration opens up the associative possibilities of the images and also heightens this sense of the documentary film set adrift.

 

Marcel Broodthaers’s film A Voyage On The North Sea (1973-74), in both production and presentation, relishes in an amateurish, provisional quality. From the classroom screen to the grainy, still images, the work takes on an expository tone, which is consistently undercut by the failure of the parts to add up in a meaningful way. In the film, photographs of a contemporary sailboat are juxtaposed with nineteenth century amateur paintings of ships. And, while the film has titles referring to page numbers, they do not correspond at all to the accompanying book, which is layed out in a grid like a classroom slideshow). It is along this circuitous path that Broodthaers’s film unravels the neat categories of printed matter, photography, painting, and film.

 

Our understanding of a past moment becomes nostalgic when it is tinged with desire, a peculiar longing in the present for something in the past. Many times, this feeling can pervade a work though a particular medium, a problematic issue for contemporary artists working with outmoded technology—like 8mm and 16mm film—that has strong cultural associations. David Noonan’s lyrical, impressionistic films actively engage the idea of nostalgia. His use of super 8mm film, slowed down ever so slightly, imbues the various “subjects” of each film—a girl in a field, an owl, a Tudor-style mansion, and insects—with a sense of ethereal weightlessness. Through this quality, heightened by the works’ silence, the films themselves become screens for emotional and psychological projection.

 

Paul Pfeiffer’s digital videos explore the relationship between the moving image, time, and the body. Although perhaps best known for his works that use the spectacle of professional sports as their point of departure, Pfeiffer has worked from a number of other visual sources, including photojournalism and art history. In Morning After the Deluge (2003), Pfeiffer begins with JMW Turner’s 1843 painting Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) — The Morning after the Deluge — Moses writing the Book of Genesis, a visual exploration of the reconciliation of science and spirituality. Turner composed the following verse to accompany the work: “Th’ returning sun / Exhaled the earth’s humid bubbles, and … / reflected her lot forms, each in a prismatic guise…”² In the video, Pfeiffer records footage of sunrises and sunsets, shot in real time, and merges the two halves. By freezing the sun, motionless, in the center of the screen, and allowing the horizon line to continually fall throughout the continuous loop, Pfeiffer inverts our visual grounding and sense of perspective, like Turner, making the familiar landscape suddenly alien.

 

Diana Thater’s Red Magenta Yellow Suns (2000) is comprised of a triptych of flat screen monitors, each picturing a different view of the sun that is beyond human perceptive capability. Working with NASA footage, Thater questions the relationship between technology and nature, as the exploding gasses and swirling heat, invisible to the naked eye, become languorous and seductive, at once still and yet violent and alive.

 

Doug Aitken’s obession with our experience of time and speed is present even in Inflection (1992), which becomes both immediate and otherworldly in the absence of sound. The video shows slow-motion footage from a camera attached to a model rocket, a low-tech exploration of the will to flight, the jarring surge of take-off made sublimely beautiful by its silence. We are presented with the imagery—the views recalling space travel and satellite photography—that shifts the way we look at and experience the world below.

From the unfathomable duration of the life of a star to the daily rotation of the earth on its axis, from the ecstatic instant of take-off to the moment spent bracing for a fall, from the epic narrative to “real time” documentary, time features prominently in each work in No Sound. This exploration of stillness, action, and our relationship to the natural and unnatural elements of the world around us—made at once more present and yet more remote through the removal of sound—allows us to feel out the elements of our environment that anchor experience, and remind us that sometimes we need to be set adrift.

 

NOTES
1 Calvin Tomkins, The Bride & The Batchelors (New York: Penguin/Viking, 1965), 119.
2 James A. Hanson, ed., The Makers of British Art (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), 202.