The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

By Willard Spiegelman
Houston  - Updated August 28, 2012, 6:59 p.m. ET

In 1819 John Keats called his imaginary Grecian urn a “foster-child of silence and slow time” and a “sylvan historian.” He put himself in a line going back to the ancients, who thought of pictures and statues as silent poems that speak volumes.

 

‘Lavender Disaster’ (1963) by Andy Warhol - Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / ARS

 

Silence is now as precious and rare as slowness, or solitude, clean air and a star-filled night sky. As someone who never goes anywhere without ear plugs, and who would rather stay hungry than be forced into a noisy restaurant, I was keen to visit “Silence” at the Menil Collection here. In a variety of tones, voices and media, it reminds us of what we often want but can never have.

You won’t experience silence here. That would be impossible, even in the cool, chaste chambers of Renzo Piano’s exquisite building. This exhibit is really a riff on the composer John Cage’s remark that “there’s no such thing as silence.” The show has 52 pieces. Some are metaphysical or abstract paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko, all favorites of John and Dominique de Menil, who had amassed a fabulous if quirky collection before the museum opened in 1987.

Hanging on the walls, too, are such two-dimensional works as Yves Klein’s vibrant, glistening, gold-leaf “Untitled (Monogold).” Sculpture, small objects, neon-tubing and other three-dimensional works complement the pictures. The show features audio and video installations, as well as a living performance piece by Tino Sehgal in which a dancer rolls slowly along the floor of an interior room for 2½ hours, followed by another dancer who does the same thing. It certainly is silent; whether it is gripping, rather than boring, depends on a viewer’s patience.

A typical museum show often moves chronologically; in a thematic show, organizers make other arrangements. “Silence” may seem random, but it has a partially recognizable plan. After entering a vestibule containing a selection of representative works, you go on to four inner rooms. The first, the most conventional and tightly arranged, is in many ways the most moving. Four Andy Warhol pieces—silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen from the mid-1960s—represent the ultimate silence, death: in this case, death by electrocution. Warhol’s depictions of the electric chair at Sing Sing are beautiful, almost abstract in their swirls of color, a kind of phantom homage to Jackson Pollock. The smallest one, “Little Electric Chair,” is so black that you might mistake it for a cousin to Ad Reinhardt’s all-black “Abstract Painting” in another room, until you come close and see the chiseled outline of the electric chair staring right back at you.

Interspersed among the Warhols are seven silkscreens by Christian Marclay, each focusing on the single word “Silence” above the electric chair in the death chamber. “Silence” surrounds you, at least visually, on all sides.

The other rooms contain miscellaneous pieces. Some “talk” to one another; others seem more randomly placed. Dominique de Menil, a woman of austere and religious character, famously said that “only silence and love do justice to a great work of art,” but one is seldom alone in a museum, where quiet contemplation is hard to achieve. Interrupting a private experience of the art are not only the voices and footsteps of other viewers but also the sounds from the audio installations, including—most boomingly—Kurt Mueller’s “Cenotaph” (2011), an old jukebox into which you put a quarter and then get to hear one of 99 moments of silence, all of which are preceded by very noisy introductions. No silence comes without sound.

Two of the most compelling pieces are video installations, each within its own darkened chamber. Jacob Kirkegaard’s 2006 “AION” (Greek for eternity or infinity) was shot on location in ruined spaces at Chernobyl, site of the 1986 nuclear reactor explosion. Shapes and colors move, come in and out of focus; an interior landscape is bathed in light, then dark shadows, then overwhelmed with whiteness. Static architecture changes as though it were Tai Chi, Keats’s “slow time” reimagined.

If you move counterclockwise through the show, the last thing you will see is the most resonant—a return to Cage, silence’s major spokesman. Sixty years ago, on Aug. 29, 1952, David Tudor sat down at a piano and performed for the first time Cage’s now celebrated (or infamous, depending on one’s point of view) “4’33”“: a work in three movements and total silence other than the extraneous sounds within the hall. Cage himself said it could be “played” by any soloist or group of musicians.

Manon de Boer’s film “Two Times 4’ 33”” stars Jean-Luc Fafchamps. We see him at his piano—stern, unblinking, virtually motionless—and we hear him set and release the chess timer that marks the three movements. A plate glass window behind him gives on to wintry snow, ice and wind, whose sounds we also hear. He finishes, he stands up. An unseen audience applauds. The screen goes black.

The film resumes. It’s impossible to know if he’s playing the piece again or whether we are just seeing the first performance from a different angle. This time, we hear only the timer’s clicks but now we watch the rapt audience of earnest, attentive young people. And we see another view to the outside: a northern European city (it’s Brussels, Dec. 2, 2007), part industrial, part architectural, part natural.

To reach Mr. de Boer’s installation, you walk through two heavy doors with sound-deadening panels, and two sets of heavy black draperies. You sit on a bench, with a single light above you. The chamber is dark. You are bathed in silence, except for the sounds of the jukebox outside, which penetrate into this inner sanctum whenever someone puts a quarter in the old nickelodeon.

Cage would have smiled, audibly.

Mr. Spiegelman writes about the arts for the Journal. His essay “Some Words on Silence” appeared in the April issue of The Yale Review.