Nadine Robinson and Camille Norment, Slow Jam
Horace Brockington
Aretha was the riot was the music
if she had said: "Come, let’s do it "
It would have be done
-Nikki Giovanni " Poem for Aretha"
Nadine Robinson and Camille Norment, like Aretha, invite you into her sound, but not the expected range of artists playing with music. Both artists explore the semiotic nature of language as sound in a post-postmodernist context. Their objects and installations, while addressing a history of women playing with music or sound, give sound more a specific agenda. Laurie Anderson, Linda Montana Charlotte Mormon or Yoko Ono, to cite only a few, they want sound to be more than about composition and audio experiences. Their work is intentionally narrative, partially autobiographic and, at times, allusive. For Robinson, sound moves to the more important spectrum of the black artist working through a host of memories and cultural engagements. For Norment, the impulse is a more experimental and intellectual engagement of conceptual, modernist and metaphysical discourse.
Despite their range of interests and activities within the sound and visual performative spectrum, critics, curators and historians within the visual community often refused to acknowledge their contributions to the field aligning them with earlier black female performative artist such as Blondell Cummings, Lorraine O’Grady, Jo Butler, Senga Negundi and Maren Hassinger. These artists have been a vital part of this developing fusion of sound and the visual. Art. For many of these female artists their preoccupation with sounds is removed from the literary, experimental or performative in a strict sense that many contemporary visual artists prefer to use sound. By departing from the norm their approaches often complicate critics, and viewers looking for easy solutions to their intent. Therefore it not surprising that regrettably none have been invited to be part of upcoming Performa first biennale.
Taking different routes to addressing sound as content and context, Nadine Robinson and Camille Norment approach the notion of sound as an important element of the visual in the way that perhaps Manet and Monet understood the use of black. For while they both embrace it, sound operates towards totally different ends in each of the artist’s works. Robinson aims to assess the notion of art-making to address such issues of invented identities and alternative experience of culture. Whereas Norment wants to reconsider our perception of a given space as conditioned by light and sound as both scientific phenomenon and personal experience. They are simultaneously interested in the analysis of the posture and physicality that sound can produce. But they are equally concerned with sound not as a secondary part of an object/ installation but an integral part of the completed work and whose final completion is in part realized by the viewer. For both Nadine Robinson and Camille Norment, their conversations with sound language in an installation helps to explain and emphasize objecthood of the works. Robinson wants her works to be with autonomous objects in contrast to Norment for Minimalist environmental installations.
One could correctly argue that the understanding conditions in their works such as place, as female, as black, contemporary artists situated these two artists closer than what might be immediate be apparent. Robinson’s take off point appears the hip, aggressive and loaded with popular cultural inferences. Norment’s installation are subversive often because of their silent framed, transductive sound manipulations, as a result Norment’s sound engagements/installations emerge as far more intuitive, experimental intuitive, and far more cerebral. Each artist develops her own lexicon and usage of sound. However despite their divergent means and intent the artists are actually closer given that each embrace the possibility of sound to speak to the narrative, the autobiographical, the potential of sound to shield us from contemporary reality, but equality to allow us to embrace it inconsistencies.
Nadine Robinson
For Nadine Robinson sound is often about memory and emotions, a historical reflection rather lessons to be learnt from historical parallels. Robinson examines sound as language as rhetoric. In Robinson’s objects and installations sound, musical processing talk to physical situations, both the political and cultural. She aims to link sound to dislocation shaping of sounds in space presented as aural sculptures. For Robinson sound is directly relate to life as such her object/ installation push the viewer to consider musical language /sound as a metaphor for narrative and discourse. Robinson’s sound works operates between the "Modern’ and the "Ethnic" in order to define and analyze the relationship between the historical and the present. Robinson through her sound construction examines the tensions between the concept of the autonomous art object and mass media, popular culture. She wants to use urban sound to make comparison of how people outside the traditional western culture impose their own traditions with an increasing global culture, and how they achieve this through sound and music from a mainstream as well as local context. Nadine beautifully sculptural sound works speaks to the past and present in order to address human conditions both as cautionary narrative and socio-political platforms.
Robinson has created a series of works entitled "Boom Paintings" alluding to boom box radios of the 80s Nadine Robinson worked with Reggae music in many of these early works that contained music often mixed by her brother .Her sound objects and installation have evolved from simple elegant object such as the recent " White We" (Version One) to elaborate wall installations such "Tower Hollers", 2002 re-created for the Museum of Modern Art’s "Tempo" exhibition, that combined slave songs and elevator "muzak" into a enormous wall of sound. Robinson has stated that she aims to make her work ethnic specific, but as she has also created work that to talk to the racial transgressive and transmustive thus achieving her aim to fuse social and cultural references through sound and objecthood.
" I create artworks that brings social and historical politics together with a modernism/post modernism which is located from a reference point of black urbanism. I work with subjects and objects that are specific to my experience. For example, my academic life, black media, spirituality (Jamaican mysticism or obeah), the socio-economic /psycho-sociology of Bronx county, and my own sexuality"
–Nadine Robinson, PS1’s"Greater New York"
Conceived during a residency program at the World Trade center "Tower Hollers" installation as part of the MoMA Trans-Histories segment of its Tempo exhibition at MoMAQNS consist of a grid of 455 speakers representing the number of firms at the World Trade Center wired to four record players. Two songs play at once: work holler, or tune sung by African American slaver works and the elevated music heard at the Twin Towers, both designed to increase worker’s productivity. "Tower Hollers" has been described as Robinson’s attempt to bring forward the collective fate of generations of African American limited by past present class and ethnic discrimination.
"Das Hochzeitshaus (The Wedding House)" consist of stack Formica-encased illuminated speakers creating a 10 foot-high pyramid emitting a mixture of laughter and Pentecostal glossalalia (speaking in tongues) through a stream of blue light. Robinson has stated the work stems from her interest in the subject of labor, and her intent to spin social and cultural references that be read through what the artist describes as " My own Black West Indian subjectivity." The title of the installation refers to the famed Wedding House in the German town of Hamelin. These references extend to " Houses of Joy" a slang term for the elaborate amalgamations of speakers that power street parties, and recordings of laughter. The formal similarities between such a tower and the roof top of a Renaissance ‘Wedding House in Hamelin, Germany becomes the fusion point that Robinson reconstructs to transform the installation in an object of hypnotic associations and holy laughter.
In the installation "Die Rattehfangerhaus (The Ratcatcher’s House)" Robinson has stated that she explored the ontology of modernist paintings, the specificity of black street culture, symbolized by street " block "parties and the over-sized custom (speaker) box called "houses of joy", and the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and the working class in American global capitalism. The Ratcatcher’s House is the name of a half timbered Renaissance building in Hamelin, Lower Saxony, where the story of the abduction of 130 children by an musical exterminator cheated out of his pay is inscribed on a timber on the west end of the house.
"Ratcatcher’s House", becomes an audio-painting installation of 4 feet by 8 feet panels, reference the architectural structure of the original Rattenfangerhaus, large black speakers boxes, and 1970s modernism. The structure consist of an image of an janitor at the cleaning service, American Building Maintenance (ABM), is labeled on a record of patriotic instrumental music for Fifes and Drums. The music is sounded through nine subwoofers embedded in canvas panels.
Robinson has noted that the paternalization of blacks is also inferred by the German’s folklore’s story of the children disappearance at the hands of "magical music" played by the piper. She states "Music is important to everyone, but it is especially potent as an opiate for urban working —class blacks". She observes that the ABM worker could be all three, a rat, that nuisance to society or one of the abducted children, deluded by American ‘s deferred pipe dreams, commercial music industry, as well as the perpetrator, the musician or the piper.
Reflecting on the Pied Piper, she speculates that the figure is shown as the leader of a marginalized generation, a traveler without any possession that belongs to the people without honor, people, without any social rights. His marginal position operates as an excuse for not paying him after he has worked. For Robinson the maintenance worker, who ‘cleans up house" as the pied piper cleans up Hamelin is the marginalized outside, the American black, whose labor physically built American, and continues to service an economy that puts little value on physical labor in an increasingly global economy.
"Infrastructure Four Restaurants" consist of nine boom boxes in a grid. Painted white with worn circular speakers, the boxes play Thomas J. Marshall ‘s l930s recording of Mealtime Call" re-mixed with George Melachrino’s "easy listening "Music for Dining". Robinson makes apparent the juxtaposition of the African American work song and the light tracks. The works created during her residency in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s World Views at the World Trade Center in l999 were intended to emphasize the ethnic origins of the employees at the World Trade Center’s nine restaurants who worked mostly for white professionals.
Robinson has constructed works that use autobiography to investigate constructs of whiteness. Incorporating sound, materials such as synthetic hair. In "White WE Version (Version One)" composed of synthetic hair, enamel paint, speaker wire, CD; CD paper is a recent work aimed at this discourse. The wall mounted "White We " consist of over 100- feet of braided synthetic hair wounded in coils of 41 _ inches diameter, each in different shade of white, is intended to comment on Germanic interpretation of femininity akin to that of Heidi or Rapunzal. In their centers, small circular speakers emit the layered and looped voice of Diana Ross shouting "weeeee". The sound track is taken from the l975 film Mahogany, in which Ross blacks a black character attempting to rise to stardom.
In the work Robinson intent is to use sound to subvert literary and art historical traditions to illustrate the dualities inherent in concepts of whiteness. Such engagements equally reinforce her conceptual mixed media installations that utilize sound as point of creating intersections between Black music culture and white visual culture.
Robinson’s most recent installation "Flip Flop" is a mixed media installation of multi-colored lighting that presented with audio track mix of the Sugar Hill Gang’s hip hop anthem "Rappers Delight", and a musical score from the l957 musical "Pipe Pier of Hamelin". "Rapper’s Delight" by the Sugar Hill record a production company symbolizes the beginning of the music genre rap and hip-hop. The music score of the "Pied Piper " is based on " Allegreto tranquilo egrazioso" (Norwegian Dances Op. 35) and was sung by the late actor Van Johnson, who plays the part of the piper.
The installation is intended to comment on the relationship between the legendary character of the Pied Pier, popular music culture, and dance music. This relationships can best be described as shared qualities that suggest the hypnotic, seductive nature of music illustrated by the Piper luring the rats out of the cursed town of Hamelin, Germany and the attraction of a dance audience to the hip hop DJ or rapper. In the story the Pied Pier leads the children of Hamelin into an opening in a mountain by playing a special tune on his magical flute after the town refuses to pay him for exterminating the rats.
The exhibition spaces has been transformed into a type of club or mountains cave, with music bumping to an unusual beat that also moves colored bands across the room and doorways. The series of swirling bands of the colors yellow red, and blue lights that reference both the colors of the Piper’s costume and the image of the cornucopia used to market Sugar Hill Records, and the lights inside a large mountain outside the town that was the last place where people of Hamelin saw the children dancing to the music of the Piper.
This configured installation fused Robinson’s intent to make the contemporary metaphoric historical by conceptually realigning the large mountain outside the town, the last place where the people of Hemlin saw the children dancing o the music of the Piper or the contemporary club or dance hall.
Camile Norment
Camille Norment aims to explore sound as a means of fusing sonic with the architectural and real space in order to investigate and question the nature of metaphysical, existence, and nothingness. For Norment sound and perception are linked as a singular phenomenon. The subtle silences pauses and movements operate within Norment’s installations in order to explore the receptive and expressive potential of sound and light. She aims to fuse points of entry where sight and hearing produce both juxtapositions of heighten sensorial perceptions, miscommunications, and bodily sensations. Norment use of sound to operates at the junction of art and science. Her work is about scientific and artistic trying to transform itself into the other, and in which movement plays an integral part. Norment wants awaken the viewer to the impact of the environment and the gradual awareness of own biogenic sounds She provides subtle explorations of the points of overlap by engaging both as mutually imbricate rather than mutually exclusive practice. Through this process she creates the possibilities for image and knowledge production to be mutually reliant.
Camille Norment situates her objects and installations behind the more conceptual formalism, language, sound, and issues of minimalist objecthood. One could argue the points her works toward atmospheric, sound lines around more pluralistic tonality. The wonderness of Norment’s art is that sound is essential to the works to provide a degree of authenticity and authority. Sound for Norment address semiotic possibilities of contemporary art- making, the immediate, the physical and through extension the tangible, and perhaps, the intangible. Since Norment is greatly interested in exploring the context of architecture, as a result her sited specific installations are greatly informed and impacted by the physicality of their placement and surroundings.
"Music Box" is early mixed media audio installation by the artist in which Norment places in the center of blacken room, a large child’s music box that chimes out a repetitive hypnotically dissonant tune. While moving through the structure, the viewer encounter a floor filled with stiletto heeled shoes. A large diamond shaped mirror is incorporated into the installation that reflects the bodies moving through the installation.
One of Norment more architectural-designed sound installation is the "Dead Room" created in 2000. The exterior is covered with sound cones, while the installation interior is finished with its white vinyl wall echoes a type of hospital asylum. Normant has describe the e work as a type of science fiction fortress in which those walking through and around the structure move in a rather surreal hypnotic states as if moving in a bio-mechanical rhythm. For 3-minute seconds at a time, eight large sub-pulses a rhythm of bass frequencies too low for the human ear to actual distinguish. The interior space for the most part is silent, but the sound of the woofers throb such that sound waves move through out the space create a fusion subtle intangible sounds and disruptions of the visitors’ voices.
A related architectural sound installation "Notes From the Undermind", invites the viewer to a cell as a hidden space within the context of the exhibition space. The installation consist of mounted construction of stainless steel poles reminiscent of those used by strippers, and bars of prison cells. Norment selected vertical poles because of their sonic quality as well as physical attraction. Each pole emits a different pitch as they vibrate a specific frequency allowing the "voice" of the visitor to be present in the space. She notes that people situate themselves by grabbing hold but in the process of doing so they alter the harmonics sonic environment The harmonic choir changes as poles and visitors interact, or by the viewer stopping the poles from vibrating. Through this approach acts of the body is utilized are as performance mechanisms. These conditions are further impacted by other elements essentially the walls, ceiling, and floors which function as a type of sound distorting effect.
The combination of visitors voices, the acoustics, distorted voices blends subtly, yet harmonically with the ringing poles creating an audio affect that both surreal, and seductive. The affect is equally heightened by physical movement through the space and around the poles in the space. Through the simple acts of walking, talking, and listening the viewers physical presence in the space becomes what Norment describes as a " fetishized component."
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"Driftglass, 2001" is rather complex installation by the Norment consisting of a interactive series of optically deceptive mirrors with sonic feedback mirror, optic film, proximity sensors, and audio components. Norment has described "Driftglass "as an striking example of the transformation of everyday objects and behaviors into a new, elegantly intriguing experience, enacting the image that has disappeared, for the transient body. It’s a tease of presence defined through absent reflections and sonic feedback."
In the installation, the mirror is subverted as a place of self-reflection and creates a teasing act of disappearance. When approaching the mirror from an angle, a visitor simply notices a mirror, a surface reflecting people and the environment. It is only when viewing the mirror en face (and being caught in the sonic space of the mirror) that they uncannily see themselves as only a vague blur. Side by side, two or more persons will see clear reflections of each other while unable to see themselves clearly. Norment notes that the social environment becomes a substitution for the individuals own diffused reflection. In this gaze, the other is an imago, an idealized image and projection of desire through which the body is redefined, creating an intriguing social interplay of the gaze. It offers an exterior destiny to the interior being.
In order to double play on the notion of presence through sensor technology, "Driftglass " gives a sonic feedback emanating from the mirror itself: a hypnotic ringing that intensifies for the lingering body that approaching the mirror. It simultaneously negates and affirms the presence of the viewer. Referencing the shrill of microphone feedback, it is, as if the body were the microphone and the mirror the speaker, as such the body itself becomes a performer of the work.
"Norment’s "Crossing", an interactive sound and light installation, is a mesmerizing installation of rows of floor lights that are instantly triggered through a dark installation space. The track and paths operate a type of illuminated human runway. As multiple viewers walk through the installation they create their own path intersecting and by extension creating endless changing patterns while simultaneously navigating a soundscape that is also manipulation by the visitors movement through the space. The work thus becomes a subtle ambient biosphere in which its own movement pronounced by the dark environment creates a continuous conceptual grid.
"Zero Divide" is an architectural sound sculpture composed of stainless steel, synthesized voices, and audio components. The title references what is in mathematical terms, an impossible equation. In" Zero Divide", Camille Norment continues her investigation of sound, object-hood and the body and the intersection of fantasy and fetish. Protruding at waist length from two walls flanking a corner, two stainless steel arms face each other extending from the walls at 45 – degree angles. They leave a space in-between that’s just big enough for a body to press into and fill the void. Looking a little like sci-fi ray guns pointed at one another, each object contains a speaker sphere that omits an oscillating sound loop of signing voices.
The work has been described as type of phallic fetishes objects engaged with each other in terms of sound and the direction of their aim, as if mutually aroused in attraction and repulsion and ready for release or annihilation.
The result is "void" without resolution, substance or meaning. "Zero Divide" equally negates the conventions of installation, sculpture and 2D works. It activates the space as an installation, without needing its own room. It uses a normally dead space of the exhibition room, but is hung on the wall like a sculpture inhabiting the space of 2D works.
Her audio installation "Groove" is comprised of a series of hidden audio component placed within an architectural setting. This perceptual experience is composed of two audio signals that are essentially inaudible to human ears, and are rather perceived and felt by the entire body. When passing through an unassuming location in the exhibition space, a visitor encounter an unexpected sensory groove, creating an enveloping sonic space. The audio, while silent is still nonetheless localized such that it can only be perceived when passing through the groove.
The effects are unexpected and momentarily disorienting with its invasive patters of sound. A lingering visitor will experience subtle changes in pattern over time. The viewer begins to question perceptual experience as the persistence of sound strikes the mind through body sensation.
"The Stasis Project" is an on-going series of video ‘animation’ sequences employing architectural spaces as catalysis for the consideration of the perceptual gaze of the viewer-subject. " The Stasis Project" currently contains four independent video sequences. Each of the video sequences, placed at exit, stairway, and garage, is a short animation loop created by the transitioning between juxtaposed digital stills. The individual stills in each sequence vary only slightly in their formal positioning and framing of the images’ subject such that when viewed in sequence, results in a disorientation in the perception is achieved.
"Stasis Project" explores the disorientation and re-orientation of the gaze evoked by the perceived ‘shifting of space within a framework fabricated time is and the consequence of a physical body attempting to locate itself within a spatio-temporal locale. As the images repeatedly shift, the viewer’s positioning is challenged; his/her gaze is drawn deeper into the image as spatial locator. This attempt to re-orient perspective and confirm a stable positioning determines the viewer as active participant within the sequence’s latent narrative.
Norment notes: "This perceptual moving without moving places the viewer within an active stasis in which the architectural and contextual subject of the shifting image comes into conflict with the body’s desire to locate itself as a fixed subject. The gaze is constantly reoriented but seemingly never to change. The viewer becomes an object within a space-time continuum that challenges itself to remain static."
"Wayward" is a sound object composed of light, audio and electrical components. A pendulum-like-swing light hanging from the ceiling illuminates an obscure interior space. Its oscillation is continuous results in an unnerving equally hypnotic and meditative. A subtle organic, yet distinctly digital rhythm emanates from within the glass bulb itself and casts what the artist describes as a "flight" of sound throughout the space.
"Closure" is a video animation loop composed of sequential transitional still images of a Brooklyn apartment house as seen from the far end of the garden at night, accompanied by a distorted ambient soundtrack of the same city environment. The artist’s point of departure are views presented as a hidden subject whose adopted personal space is a translucent implying enclosure and privacy. The fixed physical structure, and the subtle movement of shadows and light, propose the appearance and disappearance of ‘presence". The artist intents to create an enclosure penetrated by the subject’s gaze pushing for that threshold between the static and active nature of the private and public environment within which its surrounded, and the voyeuristic subject of the gaze. Although a physical body is unseen, it is inferred in the sequence’s latent narrative, The static image suddenly, and repeatedly shifts every so slightly in orientation, as is characteristic of Norment’s installation the viewer’s positioning as body-object is repeatedly challenged, and the gaze is drawn deeper into the image as spatial locator.
Both Nadine Robinson and Camille Norment are vibrant young artists. Their investigations with concepts of object-hood, sound, and post-conceptual installation present innovative relationships between technical and theoretical possibilities, exploring the kinetic, the ephemeral. By pushing its boundaries to sound and important hybrid form of art as form and language they create artworks that are mutable, and vital.
Credits:
Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College " Great White", curated byJoanna Montoya, 2004
http://norment.net/studio/art/
Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, " ICA Ramp Project: Nadine Robinson: Das Hochzeitshaud (The Wedding House), 2003
Laster, Paul, Art In America, "Nadine Robinson at Caren Golden, New York"
Ligon, Glen, "Black Light" Artforum, 2004
MOMA, NY "Tempo: Trans-Histories", New York
Nikki Giovanni " Poem for Aretha" from "The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni l968-l995 ", New York, William Morrow, 1996
P.S.1 Museum/MOMA, "Nadine Robinson: Greater New York"
Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Project, "Nadine Robinson", 2005
