By John Pohl
Sound, its absence, its anticipation and how it can be created in one's mind by an image is explored in Anri Sala's "sense-surround" exhibition at the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal.
Sala, an Albanian-born conceptual artist who has been making waves internationally since showing at the 2001 Venice Biennale, and the Toronto duo Young & Giroux kicked off their shows at the museum last week. Kevin Schmidt, a video artist from B.C., has had his 111/2-hour Epic Journey running in the Projections room since January.
Sala considers an exhibition as a single work of art, so all his separate installations, which include videos, photographs, sound and sculptural objects, act in concert as the visitor moves through them. When one film ends, another begins, perhaps to the accompaniment of drums or other instruments.
After Three Minutes, a double projection of a cymbal lit by two strobe lights at a combined 90 times per second, has no sound at all. On the left screen is the original Three Minutes, showing the cymbal at the video camera's recording speed of 25 frames per second. On the right is a security camera's two-frames-per-second recording of the first projection. A stick is hitting the cymbal, but it's the irregular light flashes that seem to be striking the cymbal and creating a sonic rhythm.
But as silent as the projected cymbal is, you may hear a background beat of snare drums that is meant to ensure that the various projections create a unified space, curator Marie Fraser said.
The drums are definitely a weird experience. As you walk among them, the drumsticks are perched on the edges of the drums, seemingly striking the drums independently. Actually, they are activated by particular vibrations of the lowest frequencies in the soundtracks of the various videos, Fraser explains. They are "throbbing in time to a music imperceptible to the human ear."
In the video The Clash, an electroacoustic version of Should I Stay or Should I Go is played inside an abandoned concert hall, where the Clash performed in 1981, while speakers in the building transmit the same tune being produced by a music box outside the building, and two musicians with a barrel organ add their acoustic version to the mix. Sala sees the music coming from the three sources as combining to produce a melody that is an abstraction, evoking (through its absence) the punk version that once echoed through this now deserted place, Fraser writes in her catalogue essay.
More recently, Sala's films have become more musical, less narrative and increasingly abstract, Fraser said. Sala himself says that he tries to capture the "fraction of a second when sound is still an activity and not music yet." The film Long Sorrow is Sala's attempt to do this: Jemeel Moondoc improvises on the saxophone while suspended in a harness outside an 18th-floor apartment in Berlin.
"He seems to be holding his breath as if to control his vertigo, although it is this breath that must expel the sound from his instrument," Fraser writes. "In music, and especially jazz, a live performance is always a response to a situation." In this case, it seems that fear is breaking down the notes that would normally be heard as a temporality (a succession of instants) into spatiality (the superimposition of sounds). In another essay, the art critic Michael Fried notes that Moondoc stays totally absorbed in his performance in order to forget his precarious situation, yet "at every instant, (he) is conveying that situation into music."
Just as Sala's installation didn't exist until he put it together in the museum's galleries, Daniel Young and Christian Giroux's large modular sculpture was created only when it was assembled in the gallery. Mr. Smith, an assemblage of wood struts and panels and metal joints, is their visual response to the structural logic of a specific Tony Smith minimalist sculpture.
Their show includes a video that curator Mark Lanctot described as a core sample of urbanism in Toronto. The video, titled Every Building, or Site, that a Building Permit Has Been Issued for a New Building in Toronto in 2006, is just that: a roll call of 112 commercial buildings -banks, offices, retail stores, coffee shops and storage depots, each getting eight seconds of screen time. The details of the cars and pedestrians moving around the static images of buildings are more interesting than the buildings that Peggy Gale calls formulaic, utterly uninspired and "dismayingly the same" in the Toronto-based Prefix Photo magazine.
"If Toronto, as Canada's largest city, is considered its financial and artistic hub, this litany of small ambition is all the more depressing," she writes. Finally, there is Kevin Schmidt's Epic Journey, a video of a boat with a camera projecting the Lord of the Rings trilogy onto a screen as it drifts along the Vancouver waterfront on the Fraser River.
"I like to explore what makes art different from entertainment," Schmidt said at a screening of this and other of his works. The movie scenes are recognizable and its narrative can be followed, but it is usually a small part of the night scene that contains its own charms of bridges, buildings, the river and lights.
Sala, who was in the audience, said he was enchanted by Schmidt's videos and asked about their many religious references.
For instance, Schmidt's most recent work involved a road sign with dire warnings from the Book of Revelation. The sign was taken to the Arctic and left on the ice; it's designed to float if global warming melts the ice.
Schmidt said he's heard that the sign was photographed by a trucker and posted to his Facebook site, but he can't see it because the trucker has not responded to Schmidt's request of "friendship."
He hopes the sign will gradually become better known in cyberspace, where, ironically, a real object -as inaccessible as anything can be - will primarily exist.
An exhibition of videos and installations by Anri Sala continues until April 25 at the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal, 185 Ste. Catherine St. W. Also showing is a sculpture and video by Young & Giroux until April 25 and videos by Kevin Schmidt until March 13. Information: www.macm.org.
The museum will be open from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. on Feb. 26 as part of the Montreal High Lights Festival. The night will include guided tours of the exhibitions, WWKA (Women with Kitchen Appliances) exploring the sonic potential of the museum's Bistro Le C at 9:30 p.m., and performances by harpist M'Michele starting at 10 p.m.
john.o.pohl@gmail.com
© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
