Deborah Warner @ I-20
Joyce korotkin
There is much more
going on in Deborah Warner’s mixed media sound installation at I-20 than
meets the ear — trumpets, whinnying horses, hoof beats and heartbeats. Incorporating
two audio pieces, “Blood Horse,” and “Dead Heat,” in a surround
sound environment, as well as photographs and a central sculpture, this exhibition
highlights an interesting point about the devices artists use in various media
to subtly enlist a holistic audience response. By this I am referring not to
what the viewer looks at so much as to what the viewer is made to feel.
This is particularly
apparent in Warner’s audio works. Presented in a pitch black, curtained
off gallery space (in which one is accustomed to seeing video), the audio pieces
have no accompanying visuals. They are experienced nonetheless by the listener
as a sort of ‘sound painting.’ Unlike composers such as Philip Glass
and Laurie Anderson, who explored ambient and atonal sound as abstract composition,
Warner ‘paints’ images with sound that refers to the literal; sounds
that are so familiar they prey upon the listener’s experiential memory bank
to fill in the absent visuals. To put it another way, Warner supplies the soundtrack,
to which the audience unconsciously supplies the cinematography with the camera
of its own imagination. Thundering horses’ hooves, for instance, recall
dramatic cinematic battle and racing scenes. They escalate throughout the piece
in number, velocity and pitch, until they blend together and seem to become the
pulsating sound of the horses’ heartbeats. Somewhere in between flashing
on every horse spectacle you’ve ever seen, and creating your own without
even realizing it in your mind’s eye, you begin to tune into the visceral
changes within your own body that the soundtrack elicits. By the time the hooves
meld into heartbeats, your own heart is pounding along with them.
This visceral audience
response is integral to the work, and subversively collaborative in nature. The
distillation of clearly narrative sound alone enlists one to enter into an internal
dialogue with it. One becomes acutely aware of the ways in which the self is
manipulated into response by cinematic conventions. The work is thus as much
about the process of experiencing it as it is about the subject portrayed.
In a similar manner,
David Noonan also plays with cinematic conventions in his video, “Sowa,”
recently exhibited at Foxy Productions. In this work, he, too, used soundtrack
as well as close cropping and jumpy editing to signal and elicit physical response
from the viewer, causing one’s hair to stand on end with anticipation of
an unspecified assault about to happen to his hapless heroine. The fact that
“it” never happens added to the fevered pitch he set up. It is in such
drawn out anticipatory senses of moment that both artists grip the audience in
their spell.
Warner’s installation
becomes increasingly complex as one leaves the the surround sound piece and enters
the adjacent brightly lit gallery hung with photographs of stables and countryside,
dominated by a central wood and plexiglass sculpture of a miniature burnt stable.
With its glowing red lights, it has the immediate appeal of a dollhouse, albeit
one that has suffered a terrible fate. It is accompanied by headphones playing
Warner’s whispery recitation of “Children of the Night,” a Gothic
tale inspired by Coleridge verse.
The sculpture is
tied conceptually to the audio pieces. It relates the fable of a gentle white
horse named Casper who dreams of flying through the sky like Pegasus and winning
a race against a mean horse with a symbolically mean name, Mongol Warrior. The
synergistic yet antagonistic relationship between these two horses is the core
of Warner’s installation.
As it turns out,
the horses are abstracted from reality. Casper really is a gentle white horse;
Mongol Warrior is a hostile stallion. Warner taped their responses to each other
in their stables near the racetrack at Calumet Farms in Kentucky. Further placing
them in reality are the lyrically moody photographs, which portray their actual
environment.
Weaving fact with fiction, and art with life, Warner thus uses the spirit of
the horse as metaphor for the dreams, behaviors, follies and fancies of us all.
