Imprinting our Landscape: Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair
By Emily Lodish
I walk away from the kiosk on the park side of 59th and Sixth Avenue and toward the Central Park benches, as directed. From the moment I switch on the headset, I wonder if I haven’t picked the worst day of July to experience Janet Cardiff’s latest audio walk, Her Long Black Hair. It is an exceptionally sunny day, and I am listening to the sound of a heavy downpour. The sky is too clear to imagine the presence of a rain cloud. The cacophony of the crowd and the traffic on Central Park South is so loud I have to strain to hear the recording. I fumble through the materials to hold up one of several photographs Cardiff has supplied. A small child to my left gives me a look I find humorous, and slightly embarrassing. I fear this experience isn’t going to work on me.
I hear a siren, but there is no ambulance in sight. I realize the sound has originated from my headset, not my surroundings. The discord is Cardiff’s creation. The challenge is clear; I begin to walk.
"One step after another," Cardiff instructs, her own footsteps sounding, "one foot moving into the future and one in the past. Did you ever think about that? Our bodies are caught in the middle. The hard part is staying in the present. Really being there."
Removing the comfort of a gallery, Cardiff reintroduces listeners to the life, chaos, and distractions of a public landscape familiar to many New Yorkers, Central Park. Using a headphone set–a device usually used to isolate oneself from one’s surroundings–Cardiff splices together various narratives, music, noise, historical facts, and literary allusions to create an all-consuming auditory world where she is the director, curator and guide.
The relationship between Cardiff’s script and the spontaneous landscape is in a state of constant flux, the worlds converse with one another, and jar. The unpredictability of circumstances–the couple kissing before me will not be there tomorrow–necessarily makes each journey personal and unique.
"I have a nonlinear-thinking mind," Cardiff told the New York Times earlier this year. She sees the world as consisting of disparate elements constantly swirling in and around one another–sensory and memory, fact and fiction. On the recording she echoes herself, "There are always so many layers in front of my eyes. How can I really know what I’ve seen?"
The walk retraces the shadowy footsteps of an enigmatic dark-haired woman, and the traces of her past envelop the present. Cardiff populates the park with phantoms–Look at "the women’s hats. They’re all wearing them," she says as I hold up a photo taken forty years ago on the same street corner and compare what I see today. Unexpected extensions–"look at the Trump building back then." Even traditional walking tour facts, usually meant to clarify one’s surroundings, increasingly complicate the environment–the hundred-year old bones uncovered during the construction of Central Park add an eerie undertone to my steps.
Cardiff’s literary allusions, like her reference to Orpheus and the danger of "looking back," (a command she repeats), can become heavy-handed. Rather than inhabit the myth, I lose the raw, sensory connection to my journey. However, the piece is near intoxicating when Cardiff allows the experience to remain largely in the body. The sound of the skateboarders’ wheels on stone could be next to me or on the CD, but there is no need to find out which. It is either and both. What does it matter if I still jump at the sound?
At times the disjunction between the physical reality and Cardiff’s words produces a powerful, visceral effect. Standing on the Bow Bridge where lovers coast by in paddleboats, I listen to Cardiff’s account of an Iraqi father who lost three daughters in a bombing. All he found was an arm. "In my mind," she says, "I see a photograph of the arm, with fingers relaxed, draped on a light as if posed." I feel the pull of world events, but the uneasy feeling in my stomach is more immediate.
Another listener catches up to me and stands nearby. I feel isolated even as we are members of a community. It takes a second or two before I realize that the CD has spun to a stop. The loss of Cardiff’s presence is palpable and I grapple to reintegrate myself into the world around me. As I make the trek back through the park to the kiosk on Central Park South, each stranger, object, edifice, path, tree signifies something. Every person that passes me seems to suggest a narrative. And she is right about the ice cream trucks; they ruin the view.
Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair audio walk in Central Park is presented by the Public Art Fund from June 17-September 13, 2004.
