| Imagine an acoustic version of the phenomenological
detours of Meret Oppenheim’s fur teacup. The overlapping of senses
not only evokes different spatial realms. That is to say, through synaesthesia,
the subject’s internal space and the "logical" necessities
of social and architectural space confront one another, and draw one
another out. In Ann Lislegaard’s latest solo presentation, I-You-Later-There 2000, the only element in the gallery space was a wooden, spray-painted construction of about four by three meters emulating a section of a floor, tilted to one wall and functioning as a screen of sorts, lit by the flickering of a powerful white spotlight. The intensity of the light mimicked the oscillations of a recording of a female voice, which intoned the speaker’s physical sensations, as well as her most pedestrian thoughts. At different moments, the voice drew closer and then further away, was echoed and delayed in sudden flourishes of unintelligible vocalizations. At some points, after particularly long breaks with no sounds, and hence darkness, the spotlight suddenly and violently flooded the space as the voice exploded in a string of language. Dispersed sounds of humming reverberations of street noise, tapping on the computer, and a shower were also present, to somewhat maddening effect. A psychological motivation was, somewhat ironically, suggested: "Silence drives me crazy", the voice could be heard to declare. The longer you listened, the more you were drawn into the work’s conquest of physical and mental space, the tilted floor section working as a stage for our projections, the unstable perceptions that normally arise within the gallery environment. The acoustic doesn’t have the same inherent capacity as the visual for rationality: it travels organically through physical partitions (metonymically present, in the exhibition, in the titled podium), it doubles itself in echoes, and augurs its source before allowing itself to be registered. Even though Lislegaard’s installation evoked visual images to go with the female voice’s perambulations, a certain visceral complicity still accrued to the beholder, as if the piece were implanted in your memory in the absence of the agency of the visual. On one level, the installation defined female space and temporality as a safe, amorphous zone, an ideological position that pretty much restates old notions of the holistic intimacy of maternal love. But then again, Lislegaard made sure that the space she constructed was abstract and cool: the tilted podium wasn’t as bone-hard as a Bruce Nauman structure, but close enough. And her space was vexed: the occasional cacophony rendered the feminine both potentially delirious and too cozy, too heimlich, given that, "silence drives me crazy". That Bruce Nauman persists in a work that investigates space and the psychology of limits isn’t strange. But that this discourse is staged in a way that produces an emotional platform for the almost weightless and invisible personal space most vulnerable to power is no small feat. |
