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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.
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.”
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.
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.”