"Lost in the Memory Palace": Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller April 6 to August 18, 2013
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Photo: Zev Tiefenbach © Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller.
"Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller"
Portrait Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, 2012. Photographed in Grindrod, BC, Canada
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Photo: Seber Ugarte & Lorena Lopez. © Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller.
"Killing Machine"
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, "Killing Machine," 2007, Mixed media, sound, pneumatics, robotics.
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Photo: Seber Ugarte & Lorena Lopez. © Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller.
"Killing Machine"
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, "Killing Machine," 2007, Mixed media, sound, pneumatics, robotics.
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Photo: Markus Tretter (Kunsthaus Bregenz) Interior view Kunsthaus Bregenz. © Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller.
"Opera for a Small Room"
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, "Opera for a Small Room," 2005, Mixed media with sound, record players, records and synchronized lighting, 2.6m x 3m x 4.5m.
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Photo: Markus Tretter (Kunsthaus Bregenz).
"Opera for a Small Room"
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, "Opera for a Small Room," 2005, installation detail.
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"Experiment in F # minor"
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, "Experiment in F # minor," 2013, mixed media, 8’ x 6’.
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Photo: Anton Bures.
"Road Trip"
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, "Road Trip," 2004
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Photo: Anton Bures.
"Road Trip"
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, "Road Trip," 2004
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"The Muriel Lake Incident"
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, "The Muriel Lake Incident," 1999.
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Photo: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
"Dark Pool"
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, "Dark Pool," 1995, installation view.
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Photo: M.N. Hutchinson, Calgary Alberta.
"Dark Pool"
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, "Dark Pool," 1995, installation view.
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Photo: M.N. Hutchinson, Calgary Alberta. © Courtesy the Art Gallery of Alberta.
"Storm Room"
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, "Storm Room," 2009, Mixed media installation.
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Photo: M.N. Hutchinson, Calgary Alberta. © Courtesy the Art Gallery of Alberta.
"Storm Room"
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, "Storm Room," 2009, Mixed media installation.
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Photo: M.N. Hutchinson, Calgary Alberta. © Courtesy the Art Gallery of Alberta.
"Storm Room"
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, "Storm Room," 2009, Mixed media installation.
Lost in the Memory Palace: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
By Murray Whyte
Somewhere in the din on the fourth floor of the Art Gallery of Ontario, between the dizzying light show and crashing rock opera that make up Opera for a Small Room and the macabre pas de deux performed by a pair of lethal robotic arms in Killing Machine, you have to ask: But is it art?
Pondering this at Lost in the Memory Palace, the tightly edited survey show of verifiable Canadian art gods Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, is, of course, blasphemy. As the only Canadians to ever lay claim to a prize at the Venice Biennale, the Biennale di Venezia Special Award for 2001’s The Paradise Institute, the husband-and-wife pair have been all but beyond reproach.
Since then, they had been bouncing back and forth between Berlin and Western Canada. Cardiff was a faculty member at the University of Lethbridge for more than a decade, but the couple decamped in recent years and now spends much of their time on a rural property near the tiny community of Grindrod in the British Columbia Interior, making elaborate technology-driven installations in a barn-sized studio.
To be fair, their mode of making art has always been unconventionally unique: Cardiff, for her early fascination with sound as a raw material, and how it could envelop the visual reality in which it existed and reframe it as something new; and Miller for his propensity for a cross-fertilization of kinetic sculpture and installation – assemblages of things not content to sit still and be, but charged with a manic energy to do something.
In their best collaborations (which Cardiff told me recently is virtually everything, regardless of whose name is signed to what; one is never far from the other, from conception to making) the hybridization of these distinct areas of interest can produce a truly transporting experience. The Paradise Institute, absent here (I’m not sure why; it’s owned by the National Gallery, up the road in Ottawa) is one of those: a scale-model movie house that requires its audience to wear headphones and where, suddenly, the audio experience of a full-size grand old theatre belies the cozy surroundings.
Two narratives unfold: the conventional movie, which, true to form, is a self-conscious remix of genres like sci-fi, film noir and straight-up potboiler; and the story inside the theatre itself, where viewers become keenly aware of the presence of ghostly theatre patrons, murmuring to one another, checking cellphones, and the like.
The background noise, so to speak, is actually the foreground, and Cardiff’s first, best audio technique: binaural recording, which centres sound somewhere between the ears and produces an eerily internalized experience. Existing in two realities simultaneously – three, if you count the fact you’re inside an art piece – is their trademark, and using sound to destabilize the world in front of your eyes is their lasting contribution to 20th century art.
So what’s with all the shouting here, then? At first wander-through, Opera For a Small Room is a rush, all pounding, Tommy-like rock ’n’ roll angst and light shows, as a battered old speaker gushes out a tale of disaster and loss from what looks to be some loner’s shack in the woods. Outside, in the darkness of the gallery, larger speakers broadcast the gentle rumble of a passing train, but it’s at best distracting; that destabilizing technique is lost in the background to the tale of woe and its crescendo, swimming in a lightshow that would make Geddy Lee proud. Which is fine, and fun, and entertaining, but that’s all it is. If you’re looking for something that throws your world off-kilter, you’ve come to the wrong place.
The same seems true of Killing Machine, a recent piece in which a sheepskin-draped dentist’s examination chair is fitted with wrist and ankle restraints. It’s inviting, in its creepy way: all is still until someone like you strolls in and pushes the big red button suggestively lit beside the installation. Suddenly, spotlights come on, a gorgeously spare dirge starts to play, and two robotic arms, fitted with what can best be described as probes, come to life. They swoop along the chair, prodding and poking at the absent figure, until – again – the lights go all rock show, the music amps up, and the arms begin the grim business of what is suggestively dismemberment in earnest. The cycle finishes, and the arms return to the beginning, as if to say: ‘Next.’
I loved watching this once. It brought to mind all the influences the pair have laid claim to over the years – things like film noir or the campy sci fi of Philip K. Dick. A second viewing, though, left me bored. Haven’t I seen this movie before? Entertaining as hell but without implication, Killing Machine, like Opera for a Small Room, is a beginning and an end, leaving no room for me.
Whatever your feelings on this, it seems to bear little relation to the works that first brought Cardiff to international notoriety, her startlingly unique and moving audio walks. Through a set of headphones, Cardiff guides viewers through a setting around which she’s built a compellingly ambiguous narrative. The Missing Voice, in Jack the Ripper’s old territory in London’s Whitechapel district, is eerie, harrowing and hilarious as Cardiff plays the role of a woman obsessively mapping the famous murderer’s ancient paths.
In 2000, she created A Large Slow River for Oakville Galleries, centred on the lakeside mansion west of Toronto that the institution calls home. In it, Cardiff guides the walker through the house, into the gardens and down to the water’s edge, as a quiet anxiety builds. “I wander through the house, looking in room after room,” she says, breathily, in your ears. “All there is is emptiness, plaster on the floor, broken windows.” The sensation is of walking with a ghost, hearing things she might have seen that don’t come close to what your eye beholds. You stand in the future, forced to look into an unknown past. Or is it the future? The binaural audio moors her to the centre of your brain. Your world transforms. You’re lost.
I’ve been hungry for that experience since the day I first put those headphones on, all those years ago. Lost in the Memory Palace offers few such departures. Experiment in F# Minor offers dozens of speakers hatched from their boxes, sitting face-up on a table. Pass a hand over, and they come to sonorous life, activated by shadow. This piece, more so than the others, was reaching for something poetic, I think – mediation, the disconnect between technology and the ineffable, the music of chance – and came close, in an understated way. It works.
Understatement, though, seems something long in the rear view for Cardiff and Miller. Older pieces here, like The Muriel Lake Incident, a precursor to The Paradise Institute with its miniature theatre and aural layers of quasi-reality and artifice, have a certain charming elegance. And while one could never use the same term to describe 2004’s The Dark Pool, their room-sized, glorious mad-scientist’s mess of things with trip-switches planted strategically along the way for aural interludes, understated it may well be. Tables are strewn with books, drawings, notes, sketchpads, photographs, archaic electronic machinery, clothing and an eerie diorama of cars parked at the lip of an inky-black reservoir of undetermined origin.
The sense here is of a long-ago disaster – of a group of people hard at work at something who had to leave in a hurry, and never came back. It’s up to you to put the pieces together. The diorama is a clue. Look at the drawings, read the notes. Then, listen: “Who knows if what they say happened there is true?” asks a grainy male voice projected from a speaker horn connected to an ancient turntable. He goes on to discuss the dark pool, an unexplained phenomenon that just showed up one day and consumed all it touched. “I’ve often wondered if it was some kind of mass psychosis induced by an unstable electromagnetic field,” he says.
This, finally and at last, is more like it. Just like the walks and the theatre pieces, the best works by Cardiff and Miller hook you in and leave you to piece together the world they’ve built in captivating fragments. It is immersive, a two-way street. In the end, it’s a matter of taste: would you rather be invited in and held tight, or shouted down and wrung out? I know my answer.
Lost in the Memory Palace: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from April 6 to Aug. 18. It opens at the Vancouver Art Gallery in June 2014.
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