Blog Entry #4: David Byrne
What Byrne has done here is fantastic. The sounds produced in this space are eerie and unusual and yet beautiful. There’s something about the appropriation of a once living and animated building, now dead and given a new purpose. The noises that once filled the large corridors of the building have been long gone and only now is the building given life again.
This installation is in the same vein as other installations I’ve seen that I would consider installation. The room is completely transformed. Sound resonates from every wall, pipe, and fixture giving another dimension to the room itself. He truly changes the space and the changes he does would work differently in any other space. So this piece definitely fits the major criteria of an installation.
One thing I thought was interesting is that Byrne decides to frame the piece here by painting the bottom portion of the room. By framing the room he gives the viewer a visual presence of an environment changed. Not sure if it was necessary since the focus of the room is the noise but it certainly does ad to the viewer’s experience. I really like that the upper portion of the room was left alone to show the original decay of the space. Maybe also to highlight the area of the space devoted to the participation of the viewer. The viewer’s role is changed in this space once they decide to sit and play the room as the artist does in the video. I love that participation must be present in order for the space to function as he intended. With out the participant the audio portion of the piece is cut out and the organ becomes just a sculpture… a very large intricate sculpture. I also like the idea of not playing it as it’s intended… the absence of the most directly important element in the piece. The viewer gets to decide, although I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to play it. I also like that it’s not necessary to be a musician to participate with the piece, making it much more approachable. Something else interesting is the duality presented with the space i.e. the old rotting corpse of the building given new life with the project. In the same vein it’s interesting to think about how wasteful the space is just sitting there empty and how the artist was able to take the beauty of his experience in the empty space and assign meaning to it. Another thing I liked about the piece were the creaky almost spooky sounds that were produced. Like an old building or home creaks and bangs. It’s interesting to imagine how the space would change in darkness. How would it function at night without the natural lighting?
Some could say that one of the weaker characteristics of the piece is that all of the building was not included. I think it would have been interesting for Byrne to explore the entire building, which is apparent that he hadn’t when watching the end portion of the video. I thought that he was really experiencing the building in it’s entirety before seeing that portion of the clip. As much as I like the idea that the building is not tuned like a traditional instrument, it would be interesting to see what sounds the piece would make if tuned and subsequently played by famous musicians and composers. I understand that this changes the role of the viewer drastically and I think I prefer how it stands currently. One of the weakest parts of this piece is the way it’s documented by boingboing.net. If I was David Byrne I would have edited out most of what the interviewer said and cut out the running through the halls of the building. He probably didn’t have much say in how it was edited, but I think that it loses the regal quality that an artist like Byrne has created in the past. Boingboing.net makes the piece seem a little silly.
The Drips sound installation we discussed in the last blog entry was similar to the building installation in the sense that the room was transformed by sound and in a room with different dimensions and objects the experience would be different. However, the two installations are very different in other ways. In the building installation the sounds made are predicated on the interest of the viewer/player where as in Drips the viewer is just that… a viewer. In Drips the viewer is only participating in the installation by way of passively experiencing the space and in Byrne’s installation without participation there would be no experience. Also the Byrne installation uses structural and functional elements within the building to bang and play different sounds where as the Drips installation is only using the empty space of the room to resonate sounds. Both use the space however in the same way, using the empty spaces of the room to create the resonation of the sounds that are made… however they are made.
