Art Encounter: Haggerty Mueseum of Art

For this round of blogs we are to write about two pieces or events that we’ve encountered and explain and interpret how they use sound (or silence). To start off, I’d like to talk about a piece I saw at the Haggerty Museum of Art, Mircea Cantor’s single channel installation Deeparture, made in 2005. The piece is a silent piece which may make it difficult to understand how it’s sound, or lack of there of, really is involved with the piece as well as others.

In Deeparture a deer and a wolf are shown in an isolated white room, walking around together while minding their own business. At the exhibit, the piece was projected onto a large white wall so that the ratio of the picture size was about equal to that of the size of the animals in real life granted this was not the same for the close-up shots. The silence of this piece however was what really made this piece allow the viewer to become so involved. As I watched the piece, I was forced to create the sounds in my own mind. This is where I found the empty space the animals to be in to be quite provoking. Since there were no external noises or ambient sounds from the empty room containing the animals, it became very easy to focus on the individual sounds that the animals could only create in that space, allowing me to hear every little detail in my own head giving many more realistic characteristics to the piece.

I thought this piece related well with one of the points made in the writings of Aaron Ximm saying, “Composition is (tautologically) constrained by the range of sounds (and their properties) that we can produce, control, or affect, and by the limits of our ability to transfer or encode (inscribe) those things” (page 42). I found that when you applied it to this piece, that when you take away everything in the piece that does constrain our inner ability to hear these sounds, it becomes much easier to produce them, allowing the installations to be silent like this one.

I also want to talk about Aaron Ximm’s The Quiet American and how many of his pieces can relate to another point in Ximm’s writings. Ximm says, “Doors opened as I discovered what my tools could do; they closed according to what seemed the natural source of judgment: my ears. What pleased them I kept; what displeased them I discarded.” If there was one thing that I noticed right away was the steady progressing and layering of sounds. In the track titled “Malaria”, I think Ximm’s style of composing was very apparent. It seemed as I listened to the track I could sort of tell where Ximm was going to add a new sound or change all the sounds completely which I think is due to the underlying rhythm Ximm creates when making these compositions.