Arte al Día Internacional – December 2006/January 2007

Sound in recent works by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla; text originally in English, with a Spanish translation available here.

In recent works, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, a team of artists working together since the mid-1990s, have used sound as text: in their videos, working as a script, in the sculptures, giving new texture. The works that I am thinking about are their newest installation, Clamor (2006), a work in progress as I write; the sculpture Rights of Man Bell (Un-Tuned) (2004); the video Returning a Sound (2004); their installation Hope Hippo (2005), presented at the latest Venice Biennale and, like Clamor, including a live performance of sorts; and, finally, Sweat Glands, Sweat Lands (2006), a video premiered at this year’s Whitney Biennial in New York. These works are either inspired or make reference to social conditions specific to their site of production or display. But it is the work’s sonic, recognizable feature that allows for a de-localized and more comprehensive reference and experience of contested territories, to histories of war and other instances of social struggle.

Allora & Calzadilla’s Clamor consists of a large sculpture functioning as something between a musician’s chamber and a sound booth, but resembling the form of bunker or cave-like structure with several, discrete crevices around its surface.¹ At its presentation, the sculpture will accommodate musicians who will be concurrently performing different pieces from the genus of war music. Besides shielding the musicians from its public, the sculptural form that contains them will barely allow their music to transcend, muffling the sound and confining a music genre composed, intently, to be heard at long distances. The sound that escapes the crevices on the sculpture’s surface, and its strong reverberation on the ground, is at once incomplete. Rather than the ceremonious, rigorous event that characterizes the performance and context of military music, this sculpture music shell, with multiple-concerts played at once, is reckoned to pastiche and cacophony.

While this is the first work in which the artists directly work with war music, an earlier video incorporates the sound of a musical instrument quintessentially associated with military music and sounds of war: the bugle. Allora & Calzadilla’s short video Returning a Sound (2004) shows a young, serene man driving a motorcycle through the empty roads of Vieques, a neighboring island of Puerto Rico. His name is Homar, and his motorcycle, while simple and indistinctive in style, is uniquely customized. A brass trumpet extends from the motorcycle’s muffler. In place of the characteristic thunderous effect of a muffler, this device turned musical instrument emits an atypically harmonious sound. It’s music rather than noise. As a melody presumably composed by the motorcycle’s engine, the musical arrangement thus originates from the pace and momentum set by the driver, by the specificity of the road he travels, and by his experience of the surrounding landscape. The semantics of Returning A Sound is then based on resonance. Meaning emerges from the sonic and visual echoes produced during Homar’s travel.

Vieques, where Homar is known for civil disobedience, is a small, partially populated island in the Caribbean. During most of the 20th Century, and until recently, the USA used a section of that island for military bombing exercises.² Part of that territory is bordered; part of it simply abandoned. This is the place where Homar travels. Composed of brief image sequences showing him or his bike, the video melodiously interposes landscape shots of modest structures and unnaturally shaped grassy hills concealing bunkers. The alarm, signal, or bomb siren, characteristic and recurring of this island and comparable arenas, is replaced by the sound of the trumpet. This bugle’s call is jazzy and melodious, however, wistful and sad.

For centuries, the bugle has been the traditional brass instrument used for communicating with army troops. In the military, it has a language of its own. Military bugles announce wake-up, lunchtime, and bedtime calls, drill calls, messages for when to attack as when to retreat, warnings, and other types of signaling. While the bugle might have been replaced in cases with other alarm devices, its sound still prevails today. Its most ubiquitous representation might be in mass media. Musical scores for television news programs, particularly those related to war reportage, and war films have a short but interesting and influential history—one that has yet to be well documented.

As an engineer at Score Production tells, “Brass is the sound of important news.”³ Score Productions is an American company specializing in composing musical scores for television. Its founder, Bob Israel, is the composer for the popular music of ABC World News Tonight, 20/20, and other television shows. Another influential composer of this type, but who works independently, is John Williams, responsible for “The Mission,” a musical score that since 1985 accompanies, in different musical arrangements, most of NBC’s news programs. Williams, however, is better known for composing a plethora of unforgettable films scores, among them Star Wars, Superman, and over twenty other by Steven Spielberg, including War of the Worlds, Saving Private Ryan, and Empire of the Sun.⁴

While experiencing war music in person is somewhat rare for the general public, the associations or likes of it are practically at home. The public knowledge or even the politically unconscious experience of war is largely mediated by the music scores accompanying war television news reporting as well as narrative films about war, whether historic or science fiction. This fact, as simple as it may be, marks a precedent that informs any experience of Returning a Sound. The ambivalence between a bugle’s drill and ambient music that accompanies the video has too many connotations already that ground it closely to the territory of war.

Another type of sound signal packed with common connotations that lie between alert and judgment is used in Hope Hippo, an installation most recently described as a “slovenly riposte to Venice’s martial equestrian statuary.”⁵ In this case, the sound is produced with a whistle, and it is a live component of the work, not a recording. Hope Hippo consists of an accurately shaped and life-size figure of a resting hippopotamus, a structure made of mud, with a real person casually sitting atop reading the newspaper. This casual performer (the person changes everyday during the course of the exhibition period) uses a whistle when coming across an alleged injustice in the daily newspaper. If, in general, a whistleblower is a person who tells on corruption or wrongdoing, and, in sport games, it is literally the referee, the twofold connotations of this character are performed in this work.

Rights of Man Bell (Un-Tuned) is a sculpture the artists created for “Ailleurs Ici,” a group exhibition held at the Couvent des Cordeliers in France, a museum sited in a 13th Century historic building known as the gathering point for the Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen during the French Revolution. The sculpture is a new, modified brass bell for the convent engraved with the title of the artwork. The engraving may serve as a warning, as the sculpture is distorted to be perpetually un-tuned. With such flaw, the bell’s proper functioning is limited, as is the declaration once adopted and protected in these auspices.

Moving away from an evident concern and use of minimal aesthetics, simpler representations and poetic gestures towards a harsher depiction of antagonism and violence is Allora & Calzadilla’s Sweat Glands, Sweat Lands. A little over two-minutes, it is a music video for a song by the reggaeton singer Residente Calle 13 who, like Allora & Calzadilla, is based in San Juan, Puerto Rico.⁶ Sweat Glands, Sweat Lands’ central image is an old, dusty sedan parked next to a small bonfire where a sodden, greasy pig is roasting. An abandoned lot is the backdrop. The relationship between animal and machine is suggested in the lyrics, and made visually explicit by the raw connection of the pig’s skewer to the back wheel of the car. As the engine runs and accelerates, the animal spins and roasts. The camera pans in and out from there, giving little to attention to the man behind the wheel. It’s a night shot and a dark image. The lyrics⁷ are concordant with the scene:

Iluminao dentro de una cueva – Walking inside a cave
Mientra el estado – While the state
Come – Eats
Mea – Urinates
Borde – Border
Orden – Order
Desorden con ira - Disorder with rage
Como un lechón que gira – Like a pork that rotates

It goes on, and in between the lines there is an intermittent, “…hipo” (hiccups). This is voiced, not a sound effect; it is a persistent interruption, not the song’s chorus. Involuntary acts, like this, keep repeating. Residente sings that they are bouncing “like an echo.” And with the same determination and rhythm, he questions what is civilized, barbaric and global. The lyric’s characters are insects, amphibians, and anxiety driven people. The world he portrays is today’s, one dreadful. Warnings keep recurring: alertness, detachment. The already reddish roasting pig is disturbing and quite awful. The song muffles the car’s engine, and its driver is subdued to them, too. Residente ends it in a rumination of sobras, in English, remainder or excess.

–Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy

Footnotes:

¹ Allora & Calzadilla’s Clamor will be presented in December 2006 at The Moore Space in Miami, Florida. At the moment of publication of this article, the artwork was still in progress and thus incomplete; final work may vary from this description. The artwork description here is based on a correspondence exchange between the author and the artists in the Fall 2006.

² Returning a Sound is one of various artworks by Allora & Calzadilla that result from their travels to Vieques and their engagements with a community of advocates against military exercises in the island, and those active with critical assessments of its decontamination and future development. The artworks inspired by Vieques include a series of photography, installation, publications, and workshops under the common title Landmark, generally followed by a sub-title as a parenthetical note.

³ As cited in “Orchestrating Wars by Carter Burnell,” an article published in Esopus and Harpers magazines in 2003/2004. In this article, the composer Carter Burnell briefly traces the combination of music and news.

⁴ Interestingly, John Williams was drafted and served in the US Air Force during a brief period in the early 1950s, where he conducted and arranged music for Air Force bands.

⁵ As described by Max Andrews in the artist’s page of the exhibition catalogue for the Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006): 166.

⁶ Reggaeton, a predominantly Spanish-speaking musical genre combining reggae, dancehall, and hip-hop, is tremendously popular in Puerto Rico.

⁷ The song in the video is by Residente Calle 13, and is sung in Spanish. This is the English translation of the lyrics provided by the artist.