whitehot | February 2008, Ces Images Sonores@ Museum of Contemporary Art at Place des Arts
From Noise to Music, Ces Images Sonores Shows Us What Sound Looks Like and Invites Inside. Sometimes the best art exhibits are the ones that make you want to reach out and grab what you see in front of you. They are the ones that beckon your clammy hands to be clamoring all over their surfaces, to poke and prod at their nooks and crannies, in short to interact and play with the artwork. This month at Montreal’s Musée d’Art Contemporain you might just encounter such a feast for your fingers and feet if you check out the new tribute to Sound. Careful though, don’t let a curator catch you—they’re liable to kick you out if your curiosity climaxes in sync with the music. I was put on probation myself.  Ces Images Sonores/Sound Images is the latest compilation of different artists’ takes on what sounds or noises can look like. It is a melting pot of manifestations of all the auditory experiences we undergo—from the everyday white noise of your television set to the extraordinary symphony—and how they can transform both our physical and psychological spaces. A highlight of this show being a long closet made out of plywood just at the gallery entrance: go inside and shut the door and you are transported to an era of Mozart and white sculpted walls of the finest French palaces. The one person time capsule stands over twenty feet high thrusting your gaze and arms upward to a stunning antique chandelier dangling from the ceiling above—sforzando!  Other features include an installation of black taffeta drapes silently spinning with openings for gallery-goers to enter into in order to be encircled by their this quiet curtain, or a grand piano designed and covered in tin foil by non other than Jean Paul Gaultier himself. Short films of Tibetan Monks chants juxtaposed against the thunder and rumbling of an oncoming high-speed train are found in an adjacent movie room, as well as blended recordings of the sounds of the ocean devolving slowly into the static noise of a television set. One artist chose to put together a series of clips from classic Hollywood films—each one more familiar than the last—Humphrey Bogart standing in a telephone box, with nothing but silence at the other end of the phone line, followed by a nervous Tom Hanks waiting for a girl to pick up the receiver so he can ask her out on a date. The telephones we are told are meant to demonstrate how much time we spend anticipating responses from one another—sounds—anything but silence—in order to open up some sort of communication. It’ll make you think a bit more self consciously about how strangely animated we are when on the phone-- machines pressed to our ears, often highly emotional expressions on our faces—listening intently to a buzzing or ringing noise, a disembodied voice, or worse, the absence of one.  On my way out my eye was caught by a record player made from bark and cardboard. Somehow in my fascination I couldn’t help but want to reach out and try to move the needle on to the LP–intrigued, in a childlike moment of trying to imagine what it would sound like. “EXCUSEZ MOI MADEMOISELLE!” came the poor curator’s terrified voice. Woops. I guess I forgot I was in a museum there for a moment. How embarrassing! But then again, I bet the artist would have wanted to know what that record player sounded like too. Playful bastard. Now I’m probably banned from that museum. Ces Images Sonores/Sound Images will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art at Place des Arts until March 30th 2008.
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