Birthe Piontek for The New York Times
By JOHN WRAY
Published: July 26, 2012
“Brace yourself,” Janet Cardiff said to me politely. “Here comes the big boom.”
It was an overcast Tuesday evening in Kassel, Germany, and I was sitting in a cramped, cluttered trailer at the edge of a forest with Cardiff and George Bures Miller, her husband and collaborator of nearly 30 years, trying to make myself heard over the sound of artillery fire. The idyll of the twilight woods around us was being severely compromised, just then, by what might reasonably have passed for the soundtrack of the end of the world: the droning of airplanes and the shouting of soldiers and the thunder of bombshells detonating on every side. Miller and Cardiff were sipping Earl Grey tea and observing me with quiet amusement. “Kind of like being a war correspondent, isn’t it?” Miller said with a grin.
“What comes before and after, though, is just as important,” Cardiff added. “The other sounds, I mean, and the quiet between. It’s important that you get that sense of peace.”
Cardiff and Miller are artists who have become known for their work with sound, and the woods of Kassel’s normally sedate Karlsaue Park are home to their latest installation, “Forest (for a thousand years),” one of two pieces featured in Documenta, the twice-a-decade survey of contemporary art that is arguably the most lavish group show on the planet. In visual terms, “Forest” barely registers as an artwork: 18 shoebox-size speakers and 4 subwoofers arranged discreetly in the underbrush, with tree stumps to sit on. The piece depends on Cardiff and Miller’s use of a technology known as Ambisonics, developed in the 1970s by an Oxford mathematician, which creates a three-dimensional sound field out of whatever noises, vibrations or explosions they have recorded.
“Having this trailer makes us feel a bit like filmmakers,” Cardiff said. “But we aren’t filmmakers, even when we’re working with video. Sound feels more directly tied to memory, and to dreams, which are important to our — ”
Before she could finish, the big boom arrived. It was loud enough to make the trailer shudder, but what made me clutch at the corners of the table wasn’t simply its volume. Like the hundreds of other noises out of which “Forest” has been fashioned — the cawing of ravens, the hiss of wind, radio static, laughter, gunfire — the explosion felt as real to me as my own heartbeat.
Cardiff and Miller made two distinct artworks for Documenta 13, and earlier that day, getting off the train in Kassel’s Hauptbahnhof, I encountered the other, titled simply, “Alter Bahnhof Video Walk.” I write “encountered” — not “seen” or “heard” or even “touched” — because all the above senses were engaged by the piece, not to mention my perception of timing, decorum and balance. Cardiff originally rose to art-world prominence on the strength of her “audio walks,” as she calls them, and I came to Kassel, in large part, to understand why. It took me exactly five minutes.
In the station’s main atrium, I exchanged my passport for an iPhone and a set of stereo earphones, then took a seat on a nearby bench, tucked the headphones into my ears and pressed play. In comparison to “Forest,” nothing especially spectacular or startling happened over the course of the next 28 minutes: no explosions, no gunfire, no Götterdämmerung. I simply walked from place to place in the moderately busy station, holding the iPhone’s screen in front of my face like some terminal video-game addict, trying to bring my perspective and the perspective shown on-screen into alignment.
The station in the video appeared, at first, to be the same station I was moving through. But it was home to a soundscape that seemed more immediate to me than the noises that reached my ears from the present, one that was populated by ghostly commuters from some unspecified time in the past. Cardiff’s cool, breathy voice was my nearly constant companion, pointing out features of the building’s history, or sharing a dream, or issuing simple instructions. It was a game of sorts to try to follow her, and I was pleased with myself for adjusting so smoothly. It wasn’t until I found myself ducking to avoid someone approaching on-screen that I realized how unmoored I had become.
The problem of the walk — the impossibility of being in two times and places at once — was also the point of the walk, and it touched a deep ontological nerve. My mind demanded synthesis, but no synthesis was possible. “It’s hard for me to be in the present,” Cardiff’s voice sighs at one point in the piece, and by the time I took my earphones out, I seemed to know exactly what she meant. It took me the better part of the evening to reassure my stunned brain that the walk was over.
I shared my experience with Cardiff and Miller in the trailer that evening, between hoofbeats and the crash of falling trees. “You could say our work is about time travel, in a way,” Cardiff said. “The walks especially. A step away from reality — consensus reality — in the interests of seeing it better.” She turned to Miller, who nodded. “We’ve been trying to escape reality for, like, 35 years,” he added. “It’s been going O.K. so far.”
“My first date with Janet was already a collaboration,” Miller told me over breakfast in Kassel the following day. “We were both in art school at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton — I was studying painting, she was studying printmaking, of all things — and she invited me over to help her make a film.”
“I had a six-pack of beers,” Cardiff cut in, a bit wistful. “I’d recorded an all-percussion band called Nexus a few nights earlier on a little tape recorder, and we went to my place and watched TV with the sound off and the music playing.”
“It was ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour,’ ” Miller added, “and you were taking photos of the screen while we watched it. You ended up making a print out of one of those photos.” Cardiff was quiet for a moment, remembering. “So you see,” she said finally, “as first dates go, that one was pretty good.”
Miller and Cardiff knew each other already — they worked in the same group of studios — but they didn’t realize until they started dating how much they had in common. Each was born in a small town in rural Canada, far from the centers of culture — Cardiff on a working farm in Brussels, Ontario, Miller as the son of a country veterinarian in Vegreville, Alberta, “Home of the World’s Largest Ukrainian Easter Egg.”
More significant, perhaps, they were each impatient with the limitations of their chosen modes of art-making. “Whenever we got together, we’d do these films and sound pieces, all sorts of things,” Cardiff told me. “Right from the beginning, working with each other, we realized we could do things that were different than what we could do alone. Our artwork and our lives have always been connected.”
Miller and Cardiff were married two and a half years later, in 1983, in a country ceremony (there were ponies involved) in Cardiff’s hometown. She was 26; he was 23. Their lives over the next dozen years, first in Edmonton, then in Toronto, then in a small city near the Alberta-Montana border called Lethbridge, had their share of privation and uncertainty, but both artists seem to look back on that period with unalloyed fondness. “At one point in Toronto — I must have been 23 or so — we were so poor that we tried panhandling,” Miller said, managing to seem both embarrassed and almost imperceptibly proud. “We were terrible at it. We tried for one hour and realized we had to come up with a better solution.” They wound up designing T-shirts, which they sold on the corner of Queen and John Streets downtown. He laughed at the memory. “They did fairly well, actually.”
Miller and Cardiff’s pieces in the course of their first decade together ran the gamut from silk-screens to kinetic sculpture to a computer-illustrated comic book, even a video for Miller’s one-man rock band (“Mum Has Gone Away,” by Jordie Jones and the League of Misfits); but their first official collaboration was a multimedia installation titled, “The Dark Pool.”
“That was the beginning,” Cardiff said to me that evening in the trailer. “I think both of us felt it at the time.” She glanced at Miller, who nodded. “We’d done a lot of pieces by then,” he said, “but ‘Dark Pool’ was the first work of ours that felt mature to me. We’ve had offers to buy it — we get them pretty regularly — but I can’t bear the thought of parting with it. It’s not the kind of piece you can make twice.”
First shown in Vancouver in 1995, “Dark Pool” is, on the surface, an installation in the classic style: a 20-by-30-foot room, dimly lighted, with corrugated cardboard and thrift-store Persian carpets on the floor, littered with paraphernalia and artifacts — stacks of hardcover books, Kodachrome slides, dusty, paint-splattered furniture, an apparatus labeled, “wish machine.” Just when you might feel tempted to dismiss the work as hermetic, however — or even willfully obscure — “Dark Pool” begins to speak. Moving through the room, the viewer triggers the acoustic elements of the piece — scraps of music, half-told stories, fragments of conversation between a woman and a man — and with each snippet, a piece of the mystery seems to become clear. You begin to suspect that the vanished inhabitants of this space were a couple, perhaps even the artists themselves. It’s not hard to imagine, therefore, why they might resist selling it: in terms of form and content, “Dark Pool” may be as close to a self-portrait as Miller and Cardiff have come.
Even more personal, perhaps — and an indirect descendant of “The Dark Pool” — is “The Murder of Crows,” a 98-speaker installation that Cardiff and Miller are bringing to Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory on Aug. 3 for a monthlong run. The piece, their largest, was developed during one of the strangest and most fraught periods of their lives: the six months they spent in Katmandu, Nepal, trying to adopt their infant daughter, Aradhana, now a precocious 5-year-old. “That was a hard time for us,” Miller told me, “and I think the art shows it.” While they waited, Cardiff recalled, they roamed the city, crossing to the government district every so often to meet with officials, who told them something different every time. “ ‘Murder of Crows’ is a dark piece,” Cardiff added, “but it also comes out of the soundscape of that strange, smoggy city — totally different sounds from those we were used to.” She was quiet for a moment. “Neither of us will ever forget that place.”
Parallel to the development of the couple’s installations, which grew progressively more elaborate and ambitious, Cardiff, with her husband’s aid, was exploring a markedly more intimate interaction with the art-going public. In 1991, she spent two months at the Banff arts center in Alberta, as a guest of its residency program. “I was out recording things — wearing a pair of headphones, making sure I was getting good sound — and at one point I was reading the names of grave sites out loud,” she told me. “I pressed rewind, then pressed play — losing track of where I was — and I heard my voice describing what I was seeing in front of me. It was such a strange and particular feeling — one of those serendipitous moments, I guess. Over the next few weeks, I made my first walk, but only about a dozen people tried it. I wasn’t even sure what it was at the time — is this thing even art?” She shook her head.
One of the 12 people who took Cardiff’s walk was a young Canadian curator named Kitty Scott. In 1996, upon being invited to assist in a show at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum titled, “Walking and Thinking and Walking,” Scott remembered Cardiff’s odd, unclassifiable experiment and described it to the curator, Bruce Ferguson, who asked Cardiff to develop a site-specific walk for the museum grounds. The piece attracted the notice of a soft-spoken German named Kasper König, director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and a founder of the Münster Sculpture Project, who was also one of the contemporary art world’s most influential curators.
“I was sitting outside, on a lawn chair,” Cardiff told me, “and this guy sat down next to me and said, ‘I make this, you know, this kind of sculpture show in Münster. . . .’ ”
“We had no idea who he was at the time,” Miller added, laughing. “Luckily for us, he didn’t seem offended. Someone must have told him we were from Alberta.”
As evening fell on my first day in Kassel, I returned to the park to meet Miller, who wanted to get a live recording of “Forest” before returning to Berlin. He explained to me that he would be using binaural recording equipment — the same equipment that he and Cardiff used in recording the sound for their walk pieces — and said I would have a chance to meet Fritz, who I assumed, in my innocence, to be a technical assistant. I was more than a little startled, therefore, to make out Miller’s husky silhouette between the trunks of two trees, holding what appeared to be a human head.
“Meet Fritz,” Miller said cheerfully. “He’s made by Neumann, here in Germany, and he not only looks like a human head, he has the full weight of one — eight pounds. The microphones are in the ear holes.” The spatial component in human hearing, Miller went on to explain, has been so finely developed over hundreds of thousands of years that our minds factor in the distance traveled by any given sound, in order to determine its direction as precisely as possible. Fritz’s anthropomorphic weight and shape, in addition to his stereo microphones, make the sound effects in the walks seem more real to us, and more compelling, than the noises of our actual surroundings.
Despite the lateness of the hour and the bleakness of the sky, a cluster of parka-swaddled Documenta-goers remained, and Miller attracted the occasional stare as he clomped around the woods in Fritz’s company. Few watched him for long, however, because the piece itself demanded their attention. Though I’d experienced “Forest” a number of times by that point, I found it nearly impossible to tell which of the ominous rumblings and hissings around me were part of the piece, and which were due to the worsening weather. I said as much to Miller just as it began to rain.
“I’ve always loved the anecdote,” Miller said between takes, “that when the Lumière brothers first showed their films in Paris — the one of a train pulling into the station — people in the audience tried to jump out of the way. And that was a silent film, don’t forget. Imagine what they could have done with sound!”
It wasn’t until I returned to New York that I was able to see the installation many regard as Cardiff’s masterpiece, “The Forty-Part Motet.” The installation, on long-term display at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, is so deceptively simple, so matter-of-fact in its presentation — and so sublime in its effect — that it may be impossible to do it justice. It’s easy enough to describe: 40 cinderblock-size speakers, mounted on stands at the approximate height of a human head, arranged in a precise, expansive oval, facing inward. The speakers play “Spem in Alium,” a 16th-century choral work by the composer Thomas Tallis, which takes roughly 14 minutes. During a three-minute break, you hear the members of the choir clearing their throats, or yawning, or whispering jokes to one another about the choirmaster, before the music plays again. What exactly you’ll hear depends on which speaker is closest, because each member of that 40-person choir was recorded into a separate microphone, whose signal is then run, in the piece, through one — and only one — of the 40 speakers in that otherwise empty, unremarkable room in Queens.
It’s this single factor — one speaker, one voice — that transforms “The Forty-Part Motet” from a kind of glorified CD-listening party into something approaching a religious event. In the 30 minutes I spent in that bare, loftlike room on PS1’s second floor, not a single visitor passed through without being transfixed by the bright ellipse of human sound. One middle-aged man in a tweed jacket burst into tears. I consulted with the guard, a businesslike woman in her 50s, and was informed that such outbursts happen on a daily basis. When I asked how she felt about “The Forty-Part Motet,” given that she had to hear it in its entirety more than 30 times a day, she considered my question with care.
“A few of my co-workers, you know, they can’t take it,” she whispered, as if letting me in on a trade secret. “They say it’s too much.” She paused a moment, and we both watched a girl in her teens standing in the middle of the room with her eyes closed, swaying lightly to the voices. “But you’ve got to understand — some people have no sense of peace.”
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