A world of sound: high-tech effects, B-movie suspense and urban alienation all take a turn in an internationally touring exhibition that surveys Janet Cardiff's installations and audio walks

Art in America, April, 2002 by Aruna D'Souza

Walking into the gallery at P.S. 1 where Janet Cardiffs Forty-Part Motet was installed, you found little to see. Nothing but 40 speakers mounted at head height on metal stands. If you came into the room at the beginning of the 14-minute piece, you experienced silence. Then the room filled with murmuring voices coming from all directions, the sounds of a choral group greeting each other, finding their places, exercising their vocal cords, chatting with their friends. They are called to order and begin to sing, solitary voices joined by others, until the sublimely beautiful and intense Spem in Alium by the 16th-century English composer Thomas Tallis is heard in its entirety.

Like most of Cardiffs works, Forty-Part Motet (2001) relies on a particular recording technology called binaural sound. This results in a startlingly precise, located sound; one senses that voices are coming from very particular directions--over your shoulder, forward and to your right, sometimes even within your own head--thus creating a completely spatialized sound environment. It is perhaps not surprising that Cardiff, after working with this technology for a number of years, tackled Tallis's complex, polyphonic piece. Even in live performance, each of the 40 singing parts is practically indistinguishable from the others, so that one really hears the blending of the voices rather than the individual components; it is only through binaural recording technology that it becomes possible to hear the constituent tonal threads that make up the resulting piece of music. By placing a microphone in front of each of the singers, recording the sounds in a spatially precise way and then playing them back on speakers that ring the room, one is able, as Cardiff says, "to `climb inside' the music, connecting with the separate voices." (1)

This, of course, while standing in a nearly empty room. And yet, for its lack of material presence, Forty-Part Motet embodies a genuine spatial concreteness and even, one might say, an architectural one. When the work was originally installed at the National Gallery of Canada (it won that institution's 2001 Millennium Prize), it was placed in the Rideau Chapel, a small, reconstructed, 19th-century neo-Gothic affair. The music, which was recorded in Salisbury Cathedral, in effect "blew out" the walls of the real architecture: one heard the recorded music as if standing in the cathedral's cavernous space, rather than the much smaller and more delicate chapel. In its P.S. 1 incarnation, the work was installed in a very different room, a large, empty, loftlike space with very little by way of architectural detail but for large windows that look out onto the Queens neighborhood. Hearing Tallis's music there lent that banal, neutral space a monumentality and gravity to which it would otherwise have little claim.

The paradox of the installation is that, even when you were the only person standing in the gallery, the space seemed full: phantom presences surrounded you, whispering in your ear, taking up room with only the sounds of their voices. This, perhaps, is the essence of Cardiff's work, which can be roughly divided into three groups: walks, which take the form of recorded tours of museums or urban sites; cinema-based pieces, in which a moviegoing experience is re-created along with a binaural soundtrack; and room installations, in which gallery spaces and their contents are transformed into a veritable architecture parlante.

There is a challenge in mounting a survey exhibition for an artist whose artistic practice takes so many forms, especially given that much of the work is site specific. Add the complications that most of the pieces require a sustained time commitment on the viewer's part, and that--because several also require the use of headphones--only a limited number of people can experience each piece at one time, and you have a quite demanding curatorial task. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, until recently a senior curator at P.S. 1, solved part of the problem by focusing the exhibition around five major installations made between 1993 and 2001 (two of which were done collaboratively with Cardiff's husband, the artist George Bures Miller) and commissioning one site-specific, guided audio walk. Of the installations, only two (The Dark Pool, 1995, and The Muriel Lake Incident, 1999) had been exhibited in New York before. In addition, a number of audio walks were documented in a separate room (Discmans and video-playback cameras were provided to stationary viewers), and a few smaller audio-video pieces were included in the show.

Despite the diversity of their forms, many of Cardiff's works focus on a type of situation that makes one feel alone in a crowd: listening to music in a cathedral, losing oneself in the darkness of a movie theater, walking on a busy city street. The walks are particularly interesting in this regard, especially since, from Baudelaire on, the figure of the flaneur, that solitary walker who revels in his isolation amid the urban throng, has come in many ways to symbolize modern experience. However, while the literary fiction of the flaneur was a fantasy of distancing and disengagement, such that one was merely a voracious eye that could take in the sights of the city without being threatened by its heterogeneity, Cardiff presents a much less comfortable experience of flanerie.