| A
piano in a gallery Carter Presents 2nd July - 2nd August 2006 Installation Diary |
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August 2006: Nothing much appears to happen in London's art world in July and August. Important (and equally important but less rich) people go on holiday. The rest of us just hang around and read books or get some work done, sensibly thinking 'it's great, it's quiet and it's warm for a change, why go away now?'. Most exhibitions have openings and then trickle out. Some, notably the Tate, often have a last minute rush. This one has had a regular trickle of visitors, hence a Closing view (as opposed to or more properly conjugant with an Opening). I did this last year at Camden and it seems like a good idea. Lots of people who hadn't seen it before and a few generously returning. |
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| Although
the installation has been stable over the last month the
balance had shifted this afternoon, the low note tending to get lost
for some mysterious reason. A last minute
adjustment before people started arriving. A lot of people seem to want to know how it works. It follows the same principle as The Listening Room and more technical stuff is posted at the Technology link at the top of this page. But 'Why?' is more interesting than 'How?' |
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July 2006: A bright sunny afternoon and evening for the opening of the work to public scrutiny. |
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July 2006: This is one of the most difficult installations I've made since The Listening Room, ICC, although the work itself and some of the reasons are different. The relatively long process of installing presents a major demand on any curator. The space is relatively small, which means that any physical changes to the feedback environment are magnified; for instance a bag left in a corner has an effect on the reflective acoustic out of all proportion to the visible. So over the last week a fair amout of fine-tuning every day. Jamie in his curatorial role has indulged this although he revealed tonight that he thought I was "just fiddling around". An afternoon of running the installation for more fine-tuning left me feeling slightly deaf to the general sound of the installation so I went to join Jamie, Tomoko and Mina who had been watching football in a bar. I thought it would all be over but the football seemed to be extended. The lovely bit was that the bar is Portuguese and when the Portuguese national team won the general sense of happiness and friendship extended far beyond any national boundary. Which it does every day in that place. We were wondering what it would have been like in an English equivalent - angst-ridden whinging, very drunk people and maybe a fight. |
| Back
to the gallery and where is that water coming from? Through the
wall. A major flood next door - nobody in - panic, phoning
around, shutting off the water and
power and a bit of clearing out. A sort of baptism of the work
prior to the opening tomorrow. |
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June 2006: Fine-tuning, cleaning and fixing cables in position. |
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| 29 June 2006: |
work
in
progress click on the speaker image |
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The high sound is still less interesting, perhaps it is constantly ringing one note on the piano which reinforces that pitch in the feedback. I have solutions which will have to wait until the floor is painted and the gallery cleaned out.
26 June 2006:
More moving around of microphones. This installation uses the piano as a resonating object in the middle of a resonating room so the basic but complex equation of room reflections, floor, ceiling, walls is made even more complex by the shape of the piano and the sympathetic resonances induced in the strings. A few hours work today seems to have produced a coherent balance of the elements involved and seems more stable than previous attempts.
On Thursday (22 June) I wrote: The room is part of the equation of the system of resonance but unlike The Listening Room and most of the other installations, this is not the main focus of the process.
Which begs the question - what is the focus? I'm not entirely sure. As spectator (or participant) of an artwork I should be looking for something I don't understand, something beyond my expectation. Sometimes it's so weirdly structured that I don't see it for years. It comes down to observation - ways of looking at the world. Observation is the responsibility of the spectator as well as the artist.
| work
in
progress click on the speaker image |
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I realised today that this situation is the inverse of a piano amplified, the speakers are in the piano and the microphones are in the room. This is a curious incidental aspect of the work which has nothing obvious to do with the way I was thinking about the installation. Maybe it is significant. It will certainly be significant to some people.
More moving around of microphones. The doors are open, birdsong in the background.
23 June 2006:
Installation continues at Carter Presents. My intention today was to experiment with microphone positions but instead the whole day was taken up with shopping for materials and talking to curator Jamie about the text of the statement he is writing about the work. His press releases are mini-essays. We are trying to identify some sort of meaningful and relevant historical context. Discussion ranges from Cage to Fluxus to On Kawara, Beuys and beyond.
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June 2006: Installation begins at Carter Presents... Shane and Will arrive to move the piano. By about 3pm the work is roughly assembled and beginning to make sound. The strings of the piano are resonating sympathetically with the feedback frequencies, very subtle. Not having had the opportunity to test this work I'm curious to how it will behave. The room is part of the equation of the system of resonance but unlike The Listening Room and most of the other installations, this is not the main focus of the process. |
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