Sounding Something...

"People say that music is a temporal art, but it's not just a temporal art. It's also spatial too." Musicians from John Cage to Alvin Lucier to Otomo and, oh, just about anyone who works with speakers to sound music has made this statement. So when David Byrne created his sound installation piece Sounding the Building, currently on view at the Maritime Building in South Ferry (presented before in Stockholm, Sweden in 2005), he wasn't exactly leading the vanguard of sound art. The idea of literally making an instrument out of the spatial parameters of a space is a little bit different though. Many artists who work with sound use it to map a space (like batman), or create soundscapes that are contingent on the dimensions and the materials of the space. To say that the space is the instrument however, makes the space both the instrument and the space at the same time. Plus, as a visitor, you get to sit at the organ and play it too. Wow. Cool.

As a visual experience, Sounding the Building offered an awesome spectacle. Walking up to
the second floor of the totally decrepit back part of the Maritime Building, I encountered a huge open loft space strung with cables all connected to a single tiny church organ in the room.

Sonically though, I didn't find the experience quite as impressive. From various corners of the space, clanking sounds, rumbling motor sounds, and low wind instrument sounds came from the ceiling, radiators, and pipes in the space. After about 10 minutes of waiting in line to sit at the little organ though, the sounds became redundant. With only three kinds of sounds being produced--metal/percussion, wind, and motor, the sounds themselves are not that interesting. Spatially, they cover various corners of the room, but they are immobile. It's questionable as to whether we are supposed to understand the event as a musical experience in the first place, but if we are, it's really quite unsatisfying. Conceptually, the idea that infinite variations that come from the different players works well with the the situation--a public exhibition where musicians and non-musicians participate on equal grounds. Some people sit at the organ with an idea of what "music" might mean, others are simply fascinated by the machine, and still others approach the instrument as a control board. No guidelines for a "good performance" exist. The resulting sonic experience though, is that it's more interesting to look at the way different people approach the task of creating sound, rather than the instrument itself, or the sounds it emits. Maybe that's the real point of the exhibition. But if that's the case, the effects created through the interaction between a variable human element and the predictable sounds coming from the machine aren't similar enough or different enough to make it interesting.

As a result, for me, the piece is more powerful and more fascinating in my imagination, or as a concept and as an image. The picture on David Byrne's website is awe-inspiring with the machine sitting there, wired like a dangerous bomb in a silent room. From the picture, I can't imagine the sound of the room and that makes it all the more powerful. There's something irresistible about the inaudible sounds that come out of a really cool-looking object.

Sounding the Building invites different approaches and experiences of the piece. That is precisely both its strength and weakness. On the one hand, the installation presents an austere, omnipotent looking instrument ready to turn you too into an instrument. On the other, the freedom of the interactions it allows are maybe too free and friendly, so much that it loses its potency of its own message and its purpose as a work of art. In the case of this work, the discrepancies between image, sound, and purpose seemed to weaken the overall effect of the work. Still, the exhibition is well worth visiting. Who could resist the opportunity to sample a taste of world domination by sitting at a crazy church organ with blue wires extending up to a 20-foot ceiling?

Sounding the Building is on view at the Battery Maritime Building until August 24, 2008.