The Sounds of Sculpture / Liz Phillips: new sound works
By Paula Rabinowitz
Liz Phillips has created sound environments and large-scale site-specific sound installations for decades. The two pieces on display in the narrow Project Room of Frederieke Taylor Gallery offer works of a more intimate nature. Designed to bring her interactive works, which have always invited the public to share in the production of spatial and sonic configurations, into a more domestic space, each piece riffs on home furnishings—tables and wallpaper: Revenge against the Martha Stewarting of home and garden? Water Fall, a stunning wall dominated by an extraordinary slab of raw copper bookended by two charcoal gray slate tiles transforms its white sheet rock wall into a tactile field, a vertical expanse of inert rock that literally sings the body electric. Through capacitance fields and infrared sensors that track movement, the copper responds to the presence of its audience, sampling sounds in response to movements. The sounds, recorded along the river banks of New York bring water fowl, land birds, splashes, drips, flows, and gurgles into play with each other as the synthesized sounds echo and vibrate. Water falls. It also evaporates. The copper, among the last pieces found lying around Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, is a remnant of the ice age. Revealing the ravishes of time, the frozen water receding literally scratched the surface of the element raw. It swirls and crevasses and contours visible signs of the sounds the metal conducts. By contrast, the dark slate rectangles, perfectly symmetrical, formed by the human hand into an object of domestic shelter to keep the rain out—a roof tile—project the sounds of spilling water into the space.
Human-scale, the piece suggests how permeable walls are as they let in or block sounds from within and without. A century ago, feminist economist and novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman imagined a story of a middle-class woman’s dive into madness as she watched figures crawl out of her "yellow wallpaper" and slink across her floor seeking escape into nature outside the confines of her moldy Victorian house. Water Fall restores nature and the human figure to the modernist white gallery wallscape, giving depth to the vertical plane and extending it out from the wall to the body. It then returns to its origin, healing the rift.
In The Path of Least Resistance, other metals—aluminum, brass, silver, steel—have been fashioned into bowls and a low table that holds them to conduct a chorus of ringing, singing things. Rather than containing fruits or flowers, these bowls sit in a water bath within a steel table. Their varying capacities to transmit sounds—sounds recorded when they were filled with water and hit, rubbed, tapped, jarred or rearranged—becomes visible when activated by the presence of hands moving above the table. A transducer, attached under the table, vibrates the sound samples through the medium that generated them: water. As the sounds travel around the table, they return to their origins—the path of least resistance. Each bowl acts as its own speaker responding to its own sound by amplifying it and calling forth new sounds from the other bowls through "sympathetic vibration." These echoes become visible as the water surface ripples and vibrates from the deep tones. Thus two different states, solid and liquid, interact, exchange, and sing together, responsive to the presence and movements of all those "at the table." The table gives animation to inanimate objects through creating a sensitivity of materials to the currents passing around them. Physicists know that atoms are in constant motion, ions racing madly through space, but most other people tend to forget how unstable the material world actually is. Phillips’ reconstructed items of domesticity, the tables and bowls of daily life, reminds us that matter is energy and that energy matters. We can see it and hear it.
Spend enough time with the two pieces together (and they require time to hear all the parts) and they sometimes seem to respond to each other—talking across the space of the room about who has just been through and now left or still remains. The sounds follow the bodies, lingering for a few minutes calling out and, when no more hands gesture towards them, they answer themselves in a slow fade of reminiscences to restore order. The welcome quiet descends when guests have finally left.
These pieces represent an ironic return to the beginnings of Phillips’ work as she moves back into domestic spaces. As early as the 1970s, Phillips was staging electronic dinners where the table was wired to produce a capacitance field, and diners could literally play (with) their food, sampling olives and crudit�s, into a wild sonic din(ner). These private interactive encounters often accompanied her large-scale installations, playful demonstrations in the home of friends of what she had created for specific public sites. The "new sound works" at Frederieke Taylor invite another kind of private sonic response. They also demand that we really see objects for what they are—vibrating amplifiers of ourselves.
