Blogs part1 (act 3)

I want to explore two pieces of art from the Haggerty Museum of Art. First being Burt Barr’s Roz and second being Anri Sala’s Naturalmystic (tomahawk #2).

Roz, I felt out of place when I stepped into the room with a giant head. A female lip-syncing to male voice, in this case she was singing with the song in the audio, with her head underneath a showerhead. The act of singing in the shower or the lip-sync was not weird to me, it was my presence there watching that made me uneasy. As soon as I stepped into the room I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there, watching, waiting. After a brief time I noticed she wasn’t really singing the song, it was another voice. I later noticed that the shower was running, not visually but acoustically in the audio. And while I sat there waiting for something to happen I also noticed the light bounce in her while she kept the rhythm with her body movement; she bobbed in four-four time with the song.

As I waited I noticed that my thoughts moved from what is going on visually to the sound. I stopped starring at her avoidant gaze and her projected head on the wall and really listened. I closed my eyes and drifted to and from the audio track, often getting lost in other thoughts and then coming back. It hit me then, I felt like I was in the shower. The picture reminded me of how a shower feels. I often stand with water running on my face and just pondering. Random thoughts, music lyrics, jobs, girls, everything can be found in the shower, often singing a tune of my own. The installation reminded me of this while I had my eyes closed, drifting to and from conscious thought.

The second piece, Naturalmystic, was like a gem hidden in the ruff. I listened to the recording before I read the description and at first I couldn’t pin down the actual sound. Was it a kettle or an airplane? I tried to use visual clues to interpret what he was trying to achieve, looking at his lips as he puckered them during a popping sound and blowing air to imitate a rocket. After I read the description I learned it was not an airplane, but it was a close. He was imitating a tomahawk rocket flying and exploding. This sound is repeated over and over varying between in take. There definitely is a reason it was recorded on video and presented also with the audio, but I want to focus of the sound.

I thought the silence in between the different human imitation was as important as the sound itself. At first, when I was deciphering the sound, I perceived silence as an airplane distancing itself from me. But after learning it was a missile hitting the ground, signaled by a small pop made by his mouth, it changed my thoughts entirely. Silence, after every pop followed a silence. I really don’t think there is a silence in theory. Imagine a missile hitting our country, can you imagine a silence following it. You may for a second, but not for long. It will be in newspapers, the news, and, if bad enough, on everyone’s lips for weeks. Hearing only a small pop for an explosion made me feel like I was far away from the area. Like a kettle, I thought of it as building pressure and finally exploding.

The perspective I took as the bomb exploded is from somewhere far away. In contrast to Gary Ferrington’s article “On A Clear Day I Can Hear Forever” I didn’t hear anything but a bomb and silence. Gary refers to the traffic as the seasons go by, specifically how it slows in the winter. He can hear the bustle of the city, pedestrians, and all local sounds to him. His mood seemed light a gay as he explained the sounds he heard and the reason I bring up this article is to imagine the same perspective of local sounds, but with a tomahawk missile at the center of your thoughts. Gary could tell you that at 6:10 am the Denver to Salt Lake flight was doing it’s daily routine and I couldn’t help but to wonder how a daily 6:10 am tomahawk to backyard would sound like? Like I mentioned before, I cannot imagine a silence after the missile drops; my thoughts always focus on the havoc that would be unleashed. Turning light and happy emotions into chaotic extreme sound, I’m tempted to call noise. This sort of sound imagination reminds me how lucky we are to be safe, to not know what a grenade sounds like or how it feels when you stop cringing at the sound of explosions or guns.