Whitney Biennial 2004

At this year’s Whitney Biennial, I was greeted with an auspicious sign that my current obsession with the voice was going to be sated here. Instead of your usual Muzak, Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July have modified the Museum’s elevator to play choral voices for your brief ride. Once inside the other exhibition spaces, amid the slew of good, bad, and ugly I found several pieces that incorporate different uses of the voice.

\\Somewhere Harmony\\ by Julianne Swartz is a network of clear plastic tubing in the stairwell. Strains of different voices singing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” can be heard throughout the stairwell, and at occasional points in your journey one of the tubes ends, and when you place your ear at the termination of the tube you can hear a singular voice rendering the tune. The voices are clearly amateur, and the renderings differ. I was pleased to discover a tube that simply breathed heavily into my ear. I liked the heavy breathing because it reinforced to me the intimacy of the one-to-one interaction at the ends of the tubes – like the difference between having a conversation in a group and holding your cellphone to your ear, for example. The choice of such a familiar song is tricky territory, being already loaded with plenty of associations for most visitors, but I thought it worked with the locale of the stairwell. I can easily transfer the idea of wishing to be transported to a land you “heard of once in a lullaby” to the people in transit who are looking for some transcendent art experience on the next floor.

\\Theory and Observation\\ by Slater Bradley is a video installation that includes sound clips of Stephen Hawking’s computerized voice describing the concept of the big bang, and conflict between religion and science. The accompanying video images are of a children’s choir in Notre Dame Cathedral. The children are mostly depicted in inactive moments, evidently bored in their role of singing praises to God, and the children’s struggle to stay focused on the task at hand played very nicely against the larger struggles that Hawking speaks of. This is a beautiful piece and I sat through the 4 minute loop three times, easily. (Admission: I have a fetish for Stephen Hawking’s voice.)

\\Count On Us\\ by Marina Abramovic is a video installation consisting of several projections that respond to the war in Yugoslavia. Here the purity of children’s voices is used to deliver a heavy dose of irony, as Abramovic, dressed in a skeleton suit, directs a children’s choir to sing about the might and greatness of the United Nations, whose might and greatness failed to prevent tragedies from unfolding in Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Other projections feature stoic-looking children sweetly singing folk songs.

\\Almost, I Have To Stop, No-no, Come Here,\\ and \\Let’s Go\\ by Aïda Ruilova are wonderful, very short videos that feature distressed individuals in slightly strange situations stating the words that are present in the title of each video. The videos loop short moments a few times, and so each expression is repeated several times before the next video appears. These are funny, sharp vignettes. If I had to pick a favourite it would be \\Almost\\, where a woman crawls on the stairs, drooling, uttering the word “almost” in a completely exhausted fashion.

In each of these pieces, I found the use of voice critical. Ruilova’s pieces reminded me of the effectiveness of vocal repetition, the innocence of the children’s choir underscored the irony in Abramovic’s work, the use of amateur singers in Swartz’s piece lent it charm, and Stephen Hawking’s computerized voice added a detached sort of gravity to Bradley’s work. The power of the human utterance was highly audible at this year’s Biennial.