Bruce Nauman's "Notations' at the Art Museum (2nd review)

To be sure, the conceptual artist Bruce Nauman's work is not to everybody's taste (see, for example, Victoria Skelly's dismissive reaction to his Venice Biennale show). And Philadelphia art critics haven't been particularly enthusiastic about his Giorni and Days, the sound installations currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Inquirer's Edward Sozanski tried hard to stay objective but in the end concluded, "It's difficult to remain in these environments for too long— five minutes, perhaps— without risking disorientation or ringing in the ears." And BSR's Anne Fabbri makes no attempt to disguise her dislike of these installations and the aesthetic they represent.

It's only natural to wonder, as Fabbri does, about the lot of the museum guard— so natural, in fact, that on my visits to the two installations I made sure to ask a few of them how they liked their assignments. The answers I got, typically delivered stoically with long-suffering eye rolls, can be summarized as follows: "Get me outta here!"

It's hard not to sympathize with them. The sound from these installations carries far, and the room containing Days has two entrances. So even though the guards rotate from post to post in 20-minute shifts, they must stand still and listen to the days of the week for at least an hour at a time every workday.

As for me? Well, I just can't find enough good things to say about Giorni and Days.

A woman's voice

Nauman's works brought me back to the mid-1970s, when it was my good fortune to have the run of the long-departed Presser Electronic Music Studio in Penn's Annenberg Center. In those days, long before the advent of digital sound editors, sound loops were created with actual loops of Mylar tape cycled repetitively over the heads of big Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorders.

I had aspirations to become an avant-garde composer— aspirations that soon led me out of music and into my very recently ended career as a software developer"“ and I had invited Mary Anne Ballard, a Penn colleague who played the viola da gamba, to record some material that I planned to use in some Stockhausen-like way. Instead, days later, I was drawn to a conversation fragment that we had inadvertently recorded, and soon found myself playing a tape loop consisting of just a few words of Mary Anne's voice.

The loop went round and round as I twiddled with knobs, mixing and remixing those few spoken words into a dense, pulsating wall of sound. After about half an hour, dream-like nonsense phrases began to emerge, still clearly in Mary Anne's voice but with no connection to her original words.

Sensual pleasure

I'm unable to do justice to the sensual pleasure I felt at having this blanket of feminine sound dig up material from my unconscious. In the end, my project went nowhere, but that afternoon of tape mixing remains one of my most pleasurable musical memories.

Even though I reveled in Giorni and Days as much as Fabbri despised them, I couldn't write a more concise or accurate description of them than she does at the end of her third paragraph: "Each space is filled with a cacophony of sound. When you walk slowly through the space, lined as it is by 14 suspended white rectangular speakers, the effect overwhelms all the senses." How can that be?

No doubt it's because, as the anecdote above illustrates, I enjoy having my senses overwhelmed. I did, after all, write my Ph. D. dissertation on Wagner's Ring. I also seem to have a taste for cacophony. My wife and I will subject ourselves, year after year, to the numbing cold of a New Mexico dawn in February or the snow and rain of Nebraska in late March to hear, for hours at a time, the glorious din of sandhill cranes and snow geese. Believe me, Nauman's installations are as nothing compared to that sonic spectacle.

Like a filigree mobile

Nauman's Giorni is a contained, closed work, a loop that repeats itself every quarter-hour or so; it's more varied in texture than its English-language companion— for me, the musical analog of a large filigree mobile.

Even at a distance, where Giorni sounds like the susurrus emanating from a large cocktail party going on down the hall, it's unequivocally an Italian cocktail party. Corny and clichéd as it may be, it evoked my memory of the sounds coming through the window of the little hotel that my wife and stayed in many years ago, just off Saint Mark's Square in Venice. (I can't help wondering, though: On a summer afternoon in 1988, how many of those voices really were Italian, anyway?)

I visited Giorni over Thanksgiving weekend, accompanied by my family on a crowded day, and probably didn't give it all the attention it deserves. Nevertheless, the experience made me eager to visit Days at the first opportunity. And now that I've entered the ranks of the retired (what a relief not to have to think about software any more!), opportunities abound. On a Tuesday morning in mid-December I was able to break up my Christmas shopping with a visit to the Art Museum.

Between noise and pitch

These days, anybody with an iMac and a few basic sound-processing utilities can, in an hour or so, throw together a work based on the same principles as Days. Making it worth listening to is another matter. The more I listened to Days— a dense, steady-state work with (as far as I can tell) no beginning or end— the more I appreciated the rich complexity of its texture and, especially, the delicacy of the balance Nauman has established between noise and pitch. For me it is, to put it simply, beautiful music.

English, as opposed to most Oriental languages, is a non-tonal (i.e., non-pitched) language. Nevertheless, even in English, everybody's speech has some characteristic musical quality. This quality rises to the surface when words are repeated over and over again, as they are in Nauman's creations. In Days, one female voice is particularly musical (on the day I was there, the voice on the third speaker on the left-hand side) and, no matter where I stood in the room, that voice often seemed to sing a major third, hovering over the surface of the texture.

For almost a full hour, it was just two silently suffering guards and I in the room with Days. I passed the time sitting, walking up and down, sticking my ear up to a speaker for awhile, just letting the sound envelope me. Finally, hunger and my Christmas shopping made me reluctantly leave, vowing to visit Giorni again under similar conditions (a vow as yet unfulfilled).

Lost in a cul-de-sac

Nauman himself describes his installations as, at least in part, homages to John Cage and the iconoclastic experiments of the 1950s, so I can understand Fabbri's dismissive "been there, done that." But follow this link and you'll see that things have come full circle.

Cage's musical ideas (and Stockhausen's and Berio's), which for so long had seemed to have been lost in a lamentably forgotten musical cul-de-sac, are at last perfectly attuned to today's aesthetics and technology— so attuned that if you're below a certain age, you'll probably never understand what all the fuss and outrage of the 1950s were about. Giorni and Days may be retrospective, but to me, they are also as hip and modern as an iPod.♦


To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.
To read a response, click here.