SITE EIGHT / 22 August to 6 September 2013
With her cubes of silence, Raab explores both the nature of sound and our de-sensitisation to our local sonic environment. She uses the concept of silence not as a foil for sound, but rather as a different way of listening. In this exhibition, silence hangs from the ceiling, locked in boxes. These little islands float in space and form a kind of landscape around us which move in response to our presence: rotating slowly as the egg-crate surface of the acoustic foam catches the air.
Eva-Maria Raab's Silent Matter is part of the The Quiet Addition, three exhibitions hosted over three sites — RMIT School of Art Gallery, Spare Room and BLINDSIDE — set to explore the notion of silence within sonicrelated arts practice. The Quiet Addition is a component of the Liquid Architecture Festival 2013: the Sonic City.
The other two components of The Quiet Addition include:
Borrowed Time by Jeremy Bakker [AUS], curated by Andrew Tetzlaff
DATES 23/08/2013 to 19/09/2013
OPENING Thursday 22 August 5pm–7pm
FLOORTALK Thursday 5 September 2.15pm–2.45pm
OPEN Monday – Friday 10am–5pm
LOCATION Spare Room: RMIT Building 94, lv 2, rm 2, 23-27 Cardigan Street, Carlton, Victoria
a day, unsung by Ami Yamasaki [JPN], curated by Andrew Tetzlaff
DATES 29/08/2013 to 31/08/2013
OPENING Thursday 29 August 6pm-8pm
PERFORMANCES Thursday 29 August at 6pm, 7pm and 8pm; Friday 30 August at 6pm, 7pm and 8pm; and Saturday 31 August at 5pm and 5:30pm
OPEN Thursday – Saturday 12pm–6pm
LOCATION BLINDSIDE: Nicholas Building, lv 7, rm 14, 37 Swanston Street, Melbourne, Victoria
Andrew Tetzlaff in dialogue with Eva-Maria Raab
AT- You’ve grappled with the idea of silence in a number of your previous works—through sculptural installation (Silent Matter, 1m3 of silence), public performances (J’ai un cadeau pour vous), x-ray photographs (My head(phones)) and mock-merchandising (i-pluggg). Can you use your projects as conversational landmarks or vehicles to talk through your definition and views of silence?
EMR- For me it’s a way of making something visible, that you can’t see, that you can’t hold in your hands. The sculptural installation with the cubes of silence tries to store silence. The silence is hanging from the ceiling, locked in boxes. In the room you have several silent “sections”, little islands floating in space, moving slightly and forming a kind of landscape.
With the public performance it was more about making a collective and at the same time individual experience. I distributed earplugs to the people and we shared 1 minute of silence. Earplugs and mp3-players do have one thing in common: both serve to absorb noise. As a parody of the daily use of mp3-players, pluggg came into being: an object that combines earphones and earplugs as an allusion to the omnipresent noise in big cities as well as the habit of counterbalancing it with music. Silent cubes or earplugs, I use objects and media from daily life in order to be more conscious about the noise that surrounds us. It’s always a slightly different approach, but in the end it’s about being here in the present, in space.
AT- J’ai un cadeau pour vous was a work in which you invited participants to share a moment of silence on Paris’ inner city streets, your title referring to this moment as a “gift” away from the metropolis’ rather constant noise pollution. R. Murray Shafer, on the other hand, talks about “ear cleaning” and how “[n]oise pollution is what happens when man does not listen carefully”(1) He goes on to say that noise abatement is a negative approach to the problem and that the positive approach is to encourage listening, which will make boring or destructive sounds conspicuous and naturally lead to their elimination. It seems that these two positions are slightly at odds with one another. What do you think about Shafer’s ideas?
EMR- I agree that it’s not about abating noise but about listening. Besides, the sound insulation of the earplugs have another effect too: when you use them you can hear your own breathing much louder, which refers us to ourselves. So there is, of course, no silence. It’s a more conscious way of listening to yourself, listening to the world with all these little noises. Offering 1 minute of being aware of yourself during my performance in Paris can be seen as a very generous gift.
Also with my sound installation Present Perfect Progressive Tense I tried to encourage this way of listening to ourselves. It’s an installation that inverts the situation of the everyday use of MP3 players by using headphones that emanate recordings of surrounding noise. As a work it is both silent and resounding. Each of the twelve sets of headphones diffuses the same sound, recorded in real space, but at different times. The totality of these parameters forms a specific kind of interaction between the viewers, who finds themselves isolated but simultaneously prompted by surprise to engage in dialogue with their neighbour about the experience. So, if you want, “boring” noises like footsteps or the opening of a zip fastener suddenly get an importance that they usually don’t have in the “hierarchy of noises”. But in the end, we decide in every situation which sound we find boring or destructive by focusing on what matters at the moment.
In the Orfield Laboratories in South Minneapolis there is the world’s quietest room: -9 decibel. The “Anechoic Chamber” allows you to hear your own blood circulating. The silence is apparently so disturbing that people can’t bear more than 45 minutes inside. This is, of course, an extreme example of silence. For me silence is when you are suddenly able to perceive noises that you are usually not aware of. It’s this kind of beauty of little sounds that makes the range of audible noises complete.
AT- Acoustic foam is an interesting material to chose to work with in a sculpture, if only because it is produced (and usually used) more for its function than for its form. Here, it’s presumably being used for both and, on that topic, its form seems to be informed by a particular aesthetic. Is there anything that we can get out of contextualising this work in relationship to concept art, minimalism, or postminimalism? For instance, Donald Judd’s Untitled (1971) set of 8 orange steel cubes or Joseph Kosuth’s Box, Cube, Empty, Clear, Glass - A Description (1965) seem to have some striking similarities; not only were they making use of the same form, they were making use of the multiple and were interested in the cube’s relationship to its materiality as well as its surrounding architecture.
EMR- When I work with acoustic foam I use it in the opposite way. I put it AROUND a box to block the noise coming from outside. Since we are outside of the cube, we can’t experience the silence inside the cube. A cube is also always a box in which you can enclose something. I am interested in both the form of the cube and the material. I like the soft form of the acoustic foam contrasting with the sharp outlines of the cube. The fact that I put the cubes right into the space, floating in different angles makes their form even more visible.
AT- There is another part of the form of your work that I’d like to touch on—something that perhaps Kosuth refers to in his abovementioned texts Box and Empty—and that is its relationship to the ideas of container or vessel. Boxes are filled with things and I’m wondering, what would Silent Matter contain, if it were to contain anything?
EMR- A closed box always has a mystery enclosed. You don’t know if it’s empty or not, or if there is something special inside. You can’t open my silent cubes, so you can never be sure if there is really silence inside. When 1m3 of silence was exhibited, I noticed that the visitors often showed the need to go inside the cube to really discover the contents. There was always a kind of frustration that they had no access to the inside of the cube. And that’s what I am interested in, this persisting doubt, the range of possibilities of the content. Using multiple cubes also multiplies this secret.
AT- If we move on from the work’s form to have a look at the function of your cubes, we can easily see their direct effect on the sound environment as they subtly change the resonance and acoustics of the space. Even if we cannot hear this effect, we are conceptually able to recognise it through your use of material. Potentially, though, this is too narrow a view on your work. If we were to expand your sculpture’s “territory” beyond its foam edges then another reading is possible; the cubes, the air (sound is after all just a series of air compressions), the architecture, and everything contained in the space becomes “the sculpture”— the Silent Matter. It is no longer a set of “sculptural cubes”. It is a “sculpture in the expanded sonic and spatial field”. It is site-specific. It is moment-specific. What are your thoughts on this?
EMR- The RMIT School of Art Gallery, with its square plot and white walls without any windows, comes pretty close to being a cube itself. Putting several cubes of silence within this space creates a whole universe, where the walls respond to the form and the material of the cubes. When walking through the gallery the cubes move in response to the visitor, the egg-crate surface of the acoustic foam catching the air. The silence in the cube starts to pulsate, to rotate. The impulse for the “moving” of the silence comes from the visitor’s presence. It’s an attempt to define silence not just in time (J’ai un cadeau pour vous’ 1 minute of silence) but also in space (1m3 of silence) and weight, as the cube is quiet heavy. Seen from this point, it’s a very site- and time- specific work.
Endnotes
1. Shafer, R. M. (1993). The soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. Rochester: Destiny Books, pp. 4.
Eva-Maria Raab (Installation)
Eva-Maria Raab, born in 1983, is an Austrian artist based in Vienna and Paris. She graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux- Arts in Paris (2010). Working across a range of media including photography, installation and objects, Eva-Maria’s work focuses on the question of time and space, especially its digitalization through modern technologies. She seeks also to question daily stereotypes and standards referring to phenomena like social online networks, mp3-players or passport photographs. She systematically scrutinises its practise and usefulness concerning individual and mass, present and past, sound and silence, presence and absence. In 2012, Eva-Maria participated in the RMIT / AIR KREMS artist in residence program in Melbourne and has been involved in a number of exhibitions throughout Austria, France and Australia.
Andrew Tetzlaff (Curator)
Andrew Tetzlaff is a Melbourne-based artist and curator.
Alice Hui-Sheng Chang (Voice)
Since 2003, Taiwanese artist Alice Hui-Sheng Chang’s work focuses solely on developing extended vocal technique in improvisation. Her vocal explorations include sound from varying tension of physical vocal parts, driving air into alternative passages and vibration of calls and breath. Alice has been involved in residencies in Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, France, Portugal and UK. She has performed or exhibited in Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Poland, UK and US. She regularly collaborate with other sound artists and artists from different mediums in conventional and unusual spaces. She has a passion for collaborating with other vocalists, and runs vocal workshops and audience participative vocal events.
Ami Yamasaki (Voice/Intermedia)
Ami Yamasaki is a voice and cross-media artist from Tokyo. She creates installations and performance pieces and directs films that explore the relationship between us and our universe. Her work asks the fundamental question “How does the world construct itself?” and for her, the asking of this question is a love letter to life itself and more important than any answers that it yields. As a vocalist, Yamasaki has collaborated with rock icon Keiji Haino, provided original music for choreographer Makoto Matsushima and appeared the stage “Burning shadow of a Man” directed by Yasunori Ikunishi. Recent exhibitions include "song", Artist in Residence program, The Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (Japan, 2013), "[DUO_coffee shop]" with Theo, Roji to Hito (Tokyo, Japan, 2012) and "voices –feather composition", Proteus Gowanus and Reanimation Library (NYC, USA, 2011). Recent performances and performance /installation include "Violence and Form Parade in Me", directed by Miyuki Kawamura and Yoshio Otani, CIQ plaza (Kanagawa, Japan, 2013), Trans Art Tokyo’s presentation of "Burning Shadow of a Man" directed by Yasunori Ikunishi, Kanda Community Art Centre Organizing Committee (Tokyo, Japan, 2012) and "yes, me", with YES Theater and refugee camps (Palestine, 2012).