Shirin Neshat, Art Gallery of New South Wales, to 29 Jan 2006.

Start with a whinge or two…
Firstly, this is a very small exhibition, I was expecting more from a show at the Sydney Festival/AGNSW. Whilst at least two of her films have been seen in Sydney in recent years, including Turbulent (1998) at the AGNSW (for which there is a still photograph is this exhibition), It feels slight to have only one film in the exhibition and it was hoped that seeing a few together would enable further insight into her work.

Secondly the sound is terrible, why does a cinematic video work not include cinematic sound. It is not just that the sound has been set up to fail but it is so quite I actually could not hear it and as such have no idea of the quality of the soundtrack. The work must have been installed by someone with very sensitive ears or there is another reason for this. Sitting in the space I can clearly hear what is happening outside and this strongly distracts from the work. It also means the rather noisy projects are much loader than the soundtrack

Now I have gotten that off my chest the work ‘Tooba’ (2002) is a typically powerful work by Neshat, who is easily one of the most existing artist currently working with video. The installation is typical of her work, two screens that face off each other. The audience sits to the side or in the middle and watches (backward and forwards) the two screens. At times they are in time but different angles and sometime stories are told across the projections. This means one is never sure they have fully seen and grasped all the stories and images and requires perhaps three to four viewing to be certain (as it is less than 13 minutes long this is a possibility).



The imagery is typically breath taking filled with greys, grey browns & grey blues. The landscape, set around the Mexican villages of Tiracoz and Cuilapan, is large, hilly and barren except for the rather wonderful tree that forms the visual focus of the work.

Throughout the work we watch the villagers, the men make their way to the tree, watch it and finally join it. Again in typical Neshat fashion these faces are wonderfully gouged out by age. They dress in similar black suits and white shirts, all with similar blank expressions. They look to be thinking hard, focused on the tree.

All of these elements go to make up the extremely powerful style of Neshat, one simply doesn’t walk away from these works, they stick for years. The simple cinema style, with simple or even slight narrative and the beauty of the cinematography points to the possibility of a truly art driven cinema.

.kk

over a period of a few years i wrote a series of self published review/concrete poetry e-mail outs. the idea was to write fast and publish fast. to have critical writing on the desktop of a small group of people that was about things happening in sydney that week. to me now it feels a lot like a proto-blog experience as we got use to using e-mail. the e-mails were full of noise and caused one off errors on different e-mail programs adding to the liveness of the posts.

this gives something of a feel for what i was doing
http://laudanum.net/pfe/pfe07.shtml

the index is http://laudanum.net/pfe/

pity the dates have been lost in the process of archiving

.kk

Unpublished catalogue entry for the sound section DLux's D>Art 2005.

All of the works in this show require attention to the texture and the nature of sound itself, as well as to duration and how these sounds actually sit next to each other over time. In many ways the headphone is perfect for this attention to detail. Your ears are cocooned in your snug headphones, the rest of the world shut out… try closing your eyes. There is something very immediate in headphone listening. What is lost, however, is space for the sounds to play-out in, even if that space is the speaker box itself. It is often in space that these sounds collide and transform, music isn’t just the encoding on the disc.

What becomes clear with all of these works is the need for close listening, it is only through close listening that the intricacy of the drones and the specific nature of audio can be drawn out. Experimental musics require different efforts to the usual musical fair of pop and muzak. It is in the requirement for concentrated listening that the works in this show becomes truly transformative and generative. This close listening seems to resonate with Adorno’s demands on the listener in the 30’s and 40s, but maybe he was right as we are constantly distracted by technology. It is clear that in the face of mass networked distribution of music through the MPEG3 format it is Mac who have taken the lead in the re-territorialisation of a once tactical zone of culture and in doing so they have taken an area that was ripe for experimentation and quickly turned it into commodity and spectacle. In part this might be the reason for a turn against the computer mediated environment in experimental music as musicians return to earlier and perhaps simpler electronic technologies, shifting their practice away from the rhetoric of the computer driven entertainment industry.

In this show the call for concentrated listening requires the listener not be distracted by technology, but do we know the technology well enough that we can forget it or somehow move around it. To listen to this show, to hear it the listener must not be distracted by knobs and dials, they must ignore the desire to skip ahead. To hear these sounds one must ignore the space they are in and sit still. Once this is done the sound opens itself up for connections beyond the everyday.