Groundwork was a project organised by Cornubian Arts & Science Trust (CAST) which brought international art and artists to Cornwall. The programme placed emphasis on moving image, sound and performance, presenting new commissions and acclaimed works. I wanted to draw attention not only to the profound nature of Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet (2001) but also its playful transgressions, highlight how Steve McQueen’s Unexploded (2007) suspends the viewer in a state of anticipation and Gravesend’s (2007) scrutiny of the harsh reality of Coltan mining in the Congo, accentuates the sterile technological environment in which it is processed as a means of capitalist production and consumption.
Groundwork 2018
Janet Cardiff and Steve McQueen
Janet Cardiff
Groundwork 2018
25 May – 27 August
Richmond Chapel
Tolver Place
Penzance
Cornwall
Janet Cardiff is known for a body of work that comprises audio walks, film, photography and sound installations. Born in Canada and now living in British Colombia, she often works with her partner Georges Bures Miller, but first gained recognition as a solo artist.
Forty Part Motet (2001)
Cardiff’s sound installation Forty Part Motet was presented for Groundwork in Richmond Chapel in Penzance. It is comprised of an arrangement of forty speakers which enables the listener to move around amongst a choir of forty individual voices. The sound moves from one speaker to another, resonating within the architectural space of the chapel.
A wonderful tension existed, between an ecclesiastical formality and a playful wit, within Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet. The relationship between place, form and content provided a domain in which the austerity of the church and the hubris of the classical seemed to collapse. The disused Wesleyan Chapel opened its doors to all who were curious, at ‘street’ level, becoming all at once a shrine of transcendence and a playground of irreverent humour. Thus, an opportunity opened to play God at the altar and vicar in the pulpit, whilst being immersed and cleansed by the sheer divine and ethereal beauty of the human singing voice and exaltation of Thomas Tallis’s choral Spem in alium nunquam habui . One found oneself occupying the space in ways unpermitted by the conventions of traditional performance. Whilst standing nose to nose with each and every one of the forty audial cyborgs – arranged in musically precise groups of five, from soprano to bass – one could transgress boundaries and engender audacious intimacies, drawn in by the overlapping intricacies of evocative harmonies.
The hiatus of silence induced a yearning anticipation for what would come next, as one scanned the wooden ceiling rafters and explored the fragmented stain-glass of an eroding 19th Century embodiment of faith, imbued with a sad and mournful integrity absorbed from the humanity that once inhabited it. Its walls, like palimpsests, peel back multiple moments of human existence. The breaking of the silence played out as a moment of skittish relief, as light human banter mischievously drifted across the open space, revealing an earthy mortal presence previously veiled by celestial voices.
Steve McQueen
Groundwork 2018
5 May – 3rd June
CAST
3 Penrose Road
Helston
Cornwall
The British artist Steve McQueen is celebrated for his moving image work and is also the director of the feature films Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave. Born in London, he currently lives and works in London and Amsterdam.
Unexploded
(2007)
Film duration: one minute – was shown on a monitor at the entrance of Gravesend. It was made by McQueen when he was sent to Iraq as a war artist. It was filmed from multiple perspectives showing a crater left by an unexploded bomb in a building in Basra.
Gravesend
(2007)
Film duration: 18 minutes – Steve McQueen’s film Gravesend is concerned with the mining of coltan, a dull black mineral used in capacitors, which are vital components in mobile phones, laptops, and other electronics. We see footage of workers sifting through dark earth, gathering coltan along the Congo River and robots processing it in a spotless, brightly lit laboratory
Unexploded, guards the threshold, as footage unfolds from one section of a bombed-out dwelling to another, but its emotional impact remains stifled and mediated within the modest device that contains it. The magnitude of the trauma of Basra locked behind a screen. However, although trapped, Unexploded, performs a significant, yet possibly unintended, task of holding the viewer in a liminal state of anticipation, between the outer public space of the gallery and the inner sanctum of Gravesend. The sound that emanates from the velvet pitch beyond is piercing and frightening in its visceral and violent precision. The silent vacuum of Unexploded is blasted apart by the audial force of Gravesend and the horror of war is in fact engendered by the brutality that lies in waiting.
From within the black cocoon, one is implicated as voyeur of human graft and toil, literally driven by the force – of raw knuckle and nail against rock, earth and natural running water. Whilst the latter, with its rich hues and lustres, presents a certain beauty aesthetic inherent in the organic, one can never escape the harsh exploitation of homo-laborans, which is immanent in the struggle of open mining along the Congo River. McQueen juxtaposes the former with a clinical and sterile technological, ‘close encounter’ of a highly refined and digitised kind, exclusive to first world capitalism, devoid of any human presence. The extraction of coltan continues to feed the production and consumption of an ever developing ‘smart’ global communication. The gulf between the third and first world bleeds a black river, accompanied by a deafening cacophony, which threatens to engulf, strangle and drown those present. Together they form an apocalyptic moment of terror.