with a white page lined with black shapes. This minimal of visual stimuli begins to fade off if one reads for any length of time, as the ideas formed by the combination of these marks overwhelm their meaning (or lack thereof) as symbols. The same is true of speech, like when we are being told a story. We might imagine people we’ve never seen, or places we’ve never been, finding connections between what we are hearing and what we’ve experienced.
Janet Cardiff, Walk in My Shoes
Tianna Lewis
In the traditional use of text, the readers’ field of vision is occupied
with a white page lined with black shapes. This minimal of visual stimuli begins to fade off if one reads for any length of time, as the ideas formed by the combination of these marks overwhelm their meaning (or lack thereof) as symbols. The same is true of speech, like when we are being told a story. We might imagine people we’ve never seen, or places we’ve never been, finding connections between what we are hearing and what we’ve experienced.
By submerging her audience in the scene being described, Janet Cardiff transforms and reinforces our traditional relationship with the narrative. In her recent piece at Central Park, Her Long Black Hair, as well as her current one, Words Drawn in Water at the Hirschorn in Washington DC, the audience is given an audio guide and instructed to walk through the narrative as it unfolds. In these audio walks, the participants are directed by the voice of the artist. They are told where to go, what to look at and most importantly, they are given fragments of a story–information from another experience to attach to their own.
Where one is usually not present in a story being told to them, an audience member of one of Cardiff’s walks becomes the exception. The immediate comparison between the story taking shape cerebrally with the retracing of the characters’ steps makes for an intimate, physical relationship between the participant and the work. It is a fabricated form of déjà vu, the uncanny sensation of walking through a memory. Except in the case of these pieces, you are walking through the memory of someone unknown.
This sense of involvement is deepened by Cardiff’s method of recording. She uses what is known as binaural audio, which consists of two microphones and a sculpted form of a human’s head. Using this shape as her template allows her to record an accurate version of what it would sound like if a person were physically standing in the recorder’s place. She collects the ambient noise along the route and reads the script she has written for the piece. What the audience receives is not the normal, b-roll voice produced from a studio. What they are hearing is a fellow walker’s feet on the sidewalk, talking to them, and sometimes losing their breath.
The mental space created is superimposed upon that of the participants. The individual partially sacrifices their privilege as interpreter of their surroundings for the duration of the experience, allowing a stranger to occupy their thoughts. This state of complacency is akin to that of reading. But the equivalent would then be to place the audience members in a dark room to listen to the piece, allowing the mind to construct a virtual experience. Here, however, when not only imagery but sound and location are already available, the interpretive process is shifted, and thus employed with the task of making connections between their mental environment and their physical one.
This exchange is controlled even further in Her Long Black Hair, by the addition of yet another type of information: photographs. These visual links to the narrative world of the audio forge a strong connection between the member and the stranger. The participant finds the spot where their point of view matches that of the photo, integrating them into the script by reenacting it. The photos are of course different from what the member is seeing, as they are a record of the past and contain elements from the audio that are now absent. The photos act as evidence of this alternate timeline, even if what is being "revealed" by them remains ultimately unnamable. In these pieces, everything that happens throughout the duration serves as material for the work. All that the viewer is experiencing lends itself to the generation of this ongoing and constantly fluctuating fiction.
The process is very economical, considering that the entire environment and all that occupy it become an art material without any physical alteration. Because this is achieved through the active engagement of each individual audience member, the result of these performances, the ironic equivalent of the finished art object, cannot be finitely determined.
By literally inserting a body into the abstract realm of narrative, Janet Cardiff accomplishes several things although in the negative. When the spectator is literally wearing part of the piece and tracing the actions of the artist, at what point do we make the distinction between producer and consumer? While the bodily integrity of each individual is maintained and arguably buttressed by its importance to the execution of the performance, the categories of artist and producer, dependent as they are on opposition to one another, overlap at so many points that a single definition of either becomes impossible.
