November 2005 Archives
The Forty-Part Motet
I haven't posted here since mid-September; it's now November. I have a couple of excuses (I got married, had a honeymoon, am moving house, have been posting at MemeFirst), but it's still a very poor show. Maybe all the goings-on in my real-world life have rid me of the need to get minor issues off my chest at great length. We shall see. As the number of blogs explodes along with the number of people who use RSS readers, we're increasingly living in a world where infrequent posts of decent quality are to be preferred to mediocre new entries coming along on a daily or even hourly basis. So I'm not feeling particularly guilty.
All the same, it's worth posting something, if only to prove to myself that I'm still alive and capable of writing one of these things. And one of the things which has been on my mind over the past few days is The Forty-Part Motet, a work of art that has recently been installed at MoMA. Todd Gibson has already posted about it at length, and he's mostly right.
I saw the piece last week, on a trip to MoMA with my wife. (Yes, it still feels very weird saying that.) When we were sitting in the café talking about what we'd seen, there was a bit of confusion: I kept on saying that I loved "the Tallis piece", and while Michelle couldn't remember the name of the person responsible for the installation she really loved, she knew that it wasn't Tallis, and, moreover, that it was a woman. The name she was searching for, of course, was Janet Cardiff, and she was talking about the exact same piece.
Questions of authorship rarely arise in a fine-art context, except in cases of forgery or attribution. It's generally accepted that someone is the artist, who should get any credit due. Artists have played with this notion, of course, and many, from Old Masters to the likes of Warhol and LeWitt and Koons and Hirst, use assistants extensively. But you don't get the kind of debates in the fine art world that you do in other arenas: is True Romance a Tony Scott film or a Quentin Tarantino film? Whose Hamlet did you see? That of the actor in the eponymous role? The director? Shakespeare? Why is it that the authors of operas are generally considered to be the composers, while the authors of ballets are generally considered to be the choreographers? You get the picture.
In the case of The Forty-Part Motet, however, authorship is very difficult to attribute. MoMA doesn't seem to have any doubt: the artist is Janet Cardiff, who was assisted by a large number of people, and who recorded a 16th Century choral work by Thomas Tallis. Todd Gibson, on the other hand, apportions credit more equally:
The Forty-Part Motet takes all of its emotional punch from the choir's performance of Tallis's piece.. In her piece Cardiff has harnessed the power of a live performance by using the skills of a master recording technician... Unlike her other work where she creates original sound environments, here Cardiff has recreated a sound environment originally developed over 400 years ago. Filtered through Cardiff's technology, the music sounds good enough to make listeners choke up.
I would go even further. Cardiff has created a nice-looking space, with an oval of 40 speakers, but that is really no big deal. Her recording technicians did a good job, too, but then again recording technology has been sophisticated enough to create a piece like this for a very long time. I don't consider this a Tallis piece "filtered through Cardiff's technology", because the technology is pretty commoditised at this point, and there's really nothing to indicate that Cardiff deserves the possessive.
In other words, the work, as experienced, is Tallis's, not Cardiff's. It's a work of art which actually gets better when you close your eyes. Insofar as this is "one of the most sublimely beautiful spaces in Midtown Manhattan," to quote Gibson, that's because of the music, foremost, and perhaps the view out the window.
Tallis is something of an expert when it comes to the sublime, of course. And it's a testament to the power of his music that it can transform a modernist white box into something both transcendent and devotional. But neither Cardiff nor MoMA is making it particularly easy on him.
I would dearly love to own this piece – to have a room devoted to it, where I could listen to it whenever I liked. I could sit still, or walk around, as I slowly got to know every part and how they fit together. But the piece in MoMA isn't like that. People are constantly walking in and out – chances are it was halfways over before you even entered the room.
But it gets worse. 99% of the people who walk into the room have little if any idea what it's all about. They're in one of the greatest art galleries in the world, and they have come to look at art and to understand it. So they walk into the room, which has music, like a lot of contemporary art, and they slowly get it. First they get the structure: the way that each speaker corresponds to one singer. Then they get the overarching beauty of the music. And they realise how great the piece is, and get excited about it.
The problem, of course, is that people don't visit MoMA alone. They visit with their friends. And so whenever they get excited about a piece, they feel the need to tell their friends. Now I've been to a fair few Tallis performances in my time, but I've never been to anything with half as much chattering. At the end of our trip on Friday, Michelle went to the bookshop while I returned to the Tallis piece. I sat down, and within a minute a large earth-mother type was bustling in, telling her friend all about the work and how much she loved it. I shot her a nasty look, but it didn't do any good. She sat down next to me, and started rustling around in her plastic bag for whatever items she needed to listen to the music. Meanwhile, a bunch of other people were talking quietly about the work as well. I soon found myself essentially incapable of enjoying the music.
Tallis is a subtle composer. The voices work with and against each other in complex ways, and a few words stand out because of their plosive or sibilant endings. Listening to Spem in alium, especially a recording as richly detailed as this one, you become attuned to very subtle textures in the music – you become a much more active listener than you ever would be normally in an art gallery. And so all of the chatter and noise in the gallery really gets in the way and ruins the piece. There might be a debate going on about applause between movements, but no one would debate the proposition that one simply shouldn't start up a conversation in the middle of a devotional choral piece by Thomas Tallis. And yet that's exactly what happens all day at MoMA.
There are things which MoMA could have done to minimise the problem, and didn't. There are things they couldn't have done, too: I think that ideally, if this work is to be presented to the public, it might be better placed in a performing arts center, like Lincoln Center, where there is more of a culture of appreciating aural as opposed to visual art. But still:
MoMA could have hidden the piece away somewhere, signposted, as a special installation deserving of special attention. At the moment, it's just another piece in the contemporary rehang: you pass it on your way from the Nauman to the Turrell, and so it's easier for the public to give it the kind of (noisy) attention that they give to everything else.
More subtly, and more easily, MoMA could have just dimmed the lights a bit. I'm not saying that the audience should sit in darkness: the visual structure is striking, and the window can and should remain uncovered. But simply making the gallery dimmer than the rest of the museum would help to signal to viewers that this is not a primarily visual piece, and that they should slow down and quiet down a bit.
MoMA could even have simply put a sign up, saying "silence please" or words to that effect. They're happy with "do not touch" signs – does speaking in The Forty-Part Motet not ruin it just as much as touching, say, a Serra?
Cardiff should be overjoyed that this work is on display at MoMA: there's a good chance that more people will experience it over the next year than have seen or heard all her other works put together. She should go down to 53rd Street and talk to a couple of people, and try to make the experience as close to what she intended as possible. And that means changing the work a little in the face of new realities: MoMA is simply a very different gallery to PS1. What worked in the latter might not work in the former, and there's no harm – and quite a lot of benefit – in taking that into account when the piece moves across the East River to Manhattan.
Posted by Felix at 18:44 EST | Comments (6)
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