M U T E
Curated by Nicky Hirst
12:00 to 18:00 on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays by private appointment only
Steve Chapman
Andrew Cross
Tim Ellis
Peter Fraser
Nicky Hirst
Jeffrey Knopf
Judy Milner
Cornelia Parker
Katie Paterson
Nicky Hirst. Elemental 246
2018. Paired magazine pages
In 2020, I was invited by Steve Chapman to sit in silence with him for his experimental podcast Sound of Silence. I loved it. Steve describing himself as ‘at his best when he is on the edge of not quite knowing what he is doing’ deeply resonated with the way I feel about my own artwork and curatorial practice. When invited to create an exhibition for Ubicua, I was compelled to apply the same logic… In the words of the poet Wallace Stevens, ‘music falls on the silence like a sense, a passion that we feel, not understand’. Moved by our dialogues on music, visual culture and cross-disciplinary encounters, I knew I had to start from that feeling of ‘not quite knowing’ and expand on the conceptual notion of silence. The act of rendering mute soon became the driving force that guided my selection and commissioning of works for this show. Consequently, MUTE became an ensemble exhibition that alludes to experiences of transience and loss through the transformation of musical instruments and related objects from, in most cases, carriers of vibration and sound to artworks of quiet contemplation.
I have known many of these artists’ works for some years now and I felt Ubicua’s space was an ideal one in which to explore their common relationship with the expectations and conventions of sounds – and silence. In the case of Katie Paterson, she uses E.M.E. radio to reflect on sound’s metamorphosis when faced with the vacuum-based conditions of space. Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ was sent to the Moon using Morse-code transmissions. Its reflection off the surface of the Moon was only partially received back on Earth: some information was absorbed in its shadows or lost in its craters. Returning to Earth fragmented by the Moon’s surface, this historical composition was then re-translated into a new score, which is exhibited on these walls. We can see the gaps and absences becoming intervals and moments of rest.
In dialogue with this exploration of loss and transformation, Peter Fraser’s photograph of a shiny new drum kit conveys silent potential. These drums, though relegated to the corner, have certainly been noticed, even scrutinised. They display a transparent desire to perform and be heard. Yet they must remain there, expectant of sound. Such an impossibility of sound is present as well in Judy Milner’s piece, which evolved by juxtaposing solid and hollow elements. Poised and silent, the reconstructed architectural sculpture serves to deliver new meaning whilst acknowledging significations of the past.
The works of Jeffrey Knopf, Tim Ellis and Cornelia Parker then add their quiet pieces to this chorus of ideas. Knopf’s 3D printed pocket trumpet, made especially for MUTE, is a distorted digital artefact, unable to have breath pass through it, which he describes as ‘a husk of a memory’. In contrast, Ellis operates a process of defamiliarisation by breathing new life into neglected musical instruments and recontextualising them. Sourced from car boot sales, rubbish dumps and charity shops, many of the instruments are damaged, with missing parts, never to be played or heard again. Parker has previously used musical instruments from brass-bands in a number of large-scale works. Here, the instruments have been flattened to lose their three-dimensional quality, creating permanently un-playable ghosts of their former selves. For MUTE a squashed trombone, hangs in an embryonic, trompe-l'œil like state.
My own, new, piece further riffs on issues of disrupted communication: a collection of timeless, repetitive motifs which reference both still life paintings and the incomprehensible wah-wah adult voices in Charlie Brown cartoons, created by a trombone and rubber toilet plunger.
The exhibition is muted, but of course all parameters or rules must be questioned, so downstairs in the exhibition Andrew Cross noisily reawakens the long forgotten and much maligned musical form of Prog Rock, in working with drummer Carl Palmer, of Emerson, Lake & Palmer. A projected moving image brings back the extraordinary musical virtuosity and showmanship of percussion as Palmer performs a series of classic rock drum solos.
Nicky Hirst, February 2023
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.
John Cage, Silence (1971)
With this exhibition ArtUbicua inaugurates its 2023 gallery season, bringing to the white cube of the gallery space some of the debates on, and practices in, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary collaborative cultural production that has been exploring in different formats in the past decade. Such collaborative modes have become a growing global phenomenon in the creative arts over the last decade (Kester 2011). While these modes of working together are prone to multiple political and ethical debates regarding collective versus individual power struggles and authorship, the exchanges they produce provide fertile ground for explorations of identity construction and debates about hybrid communities. Similarly, by echoing and reinforcing such partnership and by sharing leadership, participatory research, too, offers meaningful ways of enriching creative practices and consolidating multicultural communities (Vaughn & Jacquez 2020). Founded by Patricia Bossio, ArtUbicua, then, as a project comprising music, film, dance, performance, visual arts and critical debates inspired by encounters between people in major cities, also finds its dynamic in the navigation and generation of reciprocal relationships, and in doing so can be understood as a space for community building. MUTE finds in its exploration of silence and loss a pathway by which to negotiate the artists’ differences. Their diverse creative approaches present a hybrid yet united voice of reflection on these topics when brought together in Ubicua’s space. In his book There and Not There: Chronicles of Art and Loss, Timothy Mathews (2022) states that ‘maybe loss, and grief, can fashion a community without imposing it’. That bond is subtly made evident when navigating the landscape outlined by Hirst on these walls. All these artists have had to deal, in one way or another, with the loss of someone or something precious – even if in abstract terms, such as the loss of certain traditions addressed by Cornelia Parker’s piece. That loss is mostly materialised in the denial of sound: guitars whose strings will not resonate; disjointed cymbals and drums, brass instruments no longer able to take breath. Even when sound finally erupts, as we reach the basement and encounter Andrew Cross’s video-installation featuring Carl Palmer’s drum solo, the picture of the large, empty field soon gives presence to absence and reminds us of the silence that ensues – the 1970s rock festivals are not playing there anymore and drum solo seem to have become a nostalgic memory.
Discourses on silence irremediably take us to John Cage’s works. When, in 1952, he sat in silence for 4’33’’ during a piano concert, Cage conceptuality expanded the musical scope by including silence. We learnt from subsequent debates that silence is, in fact, never absolute. Silence is about listening. As Voegelin explains: ‘In silence the visual perspective vanishes into sensorial simultaneity’ (2010: 84). We are forced to feel and hear the pulses of our own body and our surroundings… Curious then, how in their humble, multimedia shapes, the pieces of this show come to question silence’s agency. Are the artists, in their acts of rendering mute, actually the bearers of a new soundscape? Or is it us in our interactions with their works who invoke the potential of intersubjective listening? The exhibition invites us to reflect on how soundlessness is not really silence and how loss is not necessarily loneliness. There is a powerful notion of acceptance in the implied possibility of sound that resonates in these works. Silence, and its metaphorical associations with emptiness, in fact masks the anticipation of complicitous dialogue with ourselves and with the Other.
Clara Garavelli, ArtUbicua’s Director of Academic Research
References
Cage, J. (1971) Silence. Lectures and Writings, London: Calder and Boyars.
Kester, G. H. (2011) The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Mathews, T. (2022) There and Not There. Chronicles of Art and Loss, London: MA Bibliothèque.
Smith, H. & Dean, R.T. (2009) ‘Introduction: Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice – Towards the Iterative Cyclic Web’, in Smith & Dean (eds.) Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Vaughn, L. M. & Jacquez, F. (2020) ‘Participatory Research Methods – Choice Points in the Research Process’, in Journal of Participatory Research Methods, vol. 1, Issue 1.
Voegelin, S. (2010) Listening to Noise and Silence. Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, New York and London: Continuum.
About the Artists’ Practices
Peter Fraser has been at the forefront of colour photography as a fine art medium since the early 1980s. All his photographs are found, in that he does not construct his pictures, but rather focuses on the incidental beauty of the subject. His work has been described as bringing forensic attention upon everyday objects. Peter was recently awarded the Pollock Krasner Foundation Award to make new work in the UK and across Europe in response to the pandemic.
Katie Paterson collaborates with scientists and researchers on projects that consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise to stage intimate, poetic and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment. Katie has an ongoing project called the Future Library where a forest has been planted in Norway, which will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in 2114. Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unread and unpublished.
Judy Milner makes works on the theme of equivalences within the representational. She observes and represents forms that otherwise go unnoticed and alters forms and contexts to create new content. She has taught drawing and her interest is in how the eye is led around a formal draftable plane; or into a three-dimensional form, as an equivalent to its represented physical world, and how an art object acts as intermediary between artist and spectator. The art object serves to deliver new meaning - significantly different from, but still identifiable as, the original form, which the spectator often sees for the first time.
Tim Ellis produces three-dimensional sculptural collages, using a range of found objects, techniques and materials. Found forms are distilled and reconstructed to create objects that could potentially serve, offer a function, or imply alternative narratives. The totemic appearance and utilitarian finish to the sculptures harks back to another age, reminiscent of relics from a long-forgotten society. He has stated that his works act as distorted transmitters or signposts to the past, alluding to an alternative history, where present day concerns are played out.
Nicky Hirst’s work is best described as an exploration of serendipity that can occur in unintended and unexpected places. Her sources may be particular objects or certain words whose meaning she subtly shifts by manipulation or juxtaposition. Nicky enjoys playing with the tension between the predetermined and the random, the deliberate and the accidental, the similar and the different and has approached the curation of MUTE in the same way she would approach the making of an artwork.
Jeffrey Knopf creates assemblages from found objects and 3D printing. The sculptures are pieced together to create new forms and dialogues that are balanced, teetering on the brink of collapse, reflecting the fragility of our moment in time. As the artist stated, these sculptures/ assemblages can serve as reminders of fallen empires, since these fragments are found, rebuilt, and then pieced together to create new forms and dialogues. It can be said that they embody elements of the past, present, and future in the materials and techniques used to produce them. Jeffrey’s fragments are usually found online or scanned directly from museum collections.
Cornelia Parker is fascinated with processes in the world that mimic cartoon ‘deaths’ such as steamrollering, shooting full of holes, falling from cliffs and explosions. She allows the viewer to witness the transformation of the most ordinary objects into something compelling and extraordinary. Working with sculpture and installation, as well as embroidery, drawing, photography and film, Parker positions her subjects at the very moment of their transformation, suspended in time and completely still.
Steve Chapman is an artist, writer and speaker interested in creativity and the human condition. He has trained in gestalt psychology and improvisational theatre which he combines into an experimental and experiential approach in his work. He is at his best when he is on the edge of not quite knowing what he is doing. Steve works on many projects simultaneously and they all begin by him asking the question, ‘I wonder what would happen if…?’