The exhibition "Sound Images", curated by Josée Bélisle, at the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum has a great concept behind it. Showing the power of the sound track as part of a work of art is a great premise for any contemporary art exhibition. However, in many ways, this exhibition fails to do justice to the concept behind it.
One of the first pieces in the exhibition, Christian Marclay's Telephones, gives you an idea of what this exhibition could have been. This work is composed of a series of short clips from film scenes involving telephones calls. Even though the clips are very short, between 5 to 10 seconds, you usually understand very quickly the context of the phone call because of the sound present in the short clips. The sound track, the actor's voice and even the type of phone bell used can help the audience understand whether this phone call is friendly or hostile. This is possible even if, in this piece, we have no access to the actual conversations.
Another work, one that is physically very close to Marclay's Telephone in this exhibition, fails to deliver the same kind of interesting concept. I am talking about Michèle Waquant's Les Bruits Blanc. This work includes video footage shot in different cities, with a sound track composed of repetitive white noise. While the use of white noise to represent the sound track of the city is already a doubtful concept, the quality of the video footage and even the quality of the white noise just makes this piece an annoying and almost unbearable work.
The inclusions of some of the other works in this exhibition are also hard to justify. While Linda Covit's Cloche Aphone, a silent replica of a traditional Tibetan bell, is easily justifiable because the silence, in this case, has more meaning than any sound, others works just seem included because of the artist's renown. The most obvious example is Michael Snow's Untitled, a series a silkscreen images displaying the hands of a piano player performing on a keyboard. Unlike Covit's Cloche Aphone, the silence here is hardly justifiable. A work by a less known artist actually using the sound track would have been much more relevant in this case, but it seems no contemporary art exhibition in Montreal can draw any crowd unless a work by Michael Snow is featured. Another doubtful choice is Ann Hamilton's work Bearings. Although the work in itself is quite interesting, curtains spinning around by the use of small motors hung on the ceiling, its inclusion in this exhibition is beyond explanation. The sounds made by the small motors are hardly anything else than an unintended background noise that adds little to no value to the work itself.
It was not in my intention in the beginning of this review to write a devastating critique of this exhibition. However, I will try to understand why this particular exhibition, as I have mentioned in the beginning of this text, fails to do justice to the concept behind. There is more than one cause behind this, but I think the words of Howard S. Becker in his essay A New Art Form: Hypertext Fiction can summarize one of the great problems involved in the creation of a contemporary art exhibition. In this article, he remarks "to exist fully, works of art require audiences as well as authors. Work that resembles what is already available finds an audience easily, for it requires nothing of audiences that they do not know how to do. Work that differs from what is current will have predictable troubles." (Becker) It is probably why, even in an exhibition where it would have been an obvious choice, there not a single work featured that employs a computer interface. Is this not an extraordinary medium when it comes to the subject of "Sound Images"? One hypothesis for this omission is that computer installations are an uncommon art medium that audiences are not accustomed to seeing in a museum. In North America, the speed at which new technologies are assimilated is so fast that experimenting with new technologies seems pointless, for it will be replaced by a better one in only a few months. (Manovich) This might explain why there is a very small output of interactive computer installations, and thus very few project to choose from for the curator of an exhibition.
Finally, the exhibition “Sound Images” is definitely not what we should expect from a contemporary art exhibition. It seems Danto had a point when he mentioned in his book After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History that contemporary art is so incompatible with the structures of today’s museum that a new breed of curator is needed, one that would try to engage an inattentive audience directly with the art on a personal level.
