It's oh so quiet, shh shh
May. 22nd, 2004 12:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaWell, earlier in the week I once again parasited ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
snow_leopard's spare preview ticket to go to the V&A's new exhibition.
So, at some point the V&A rounded up a bunch of musicians and artists, sent them off to find themselves a space in the V&A, and invited them to develop an audio track to fit that space. The visitor picks up a little mp3 player, headphones, and a map of the chosen spaces. Following the map from gallery to corridor, infra red magic causes the correct tracks to be played as you enter each space.
So, in effect, this is not really a new exhibition. The galleries are all previously extant bits of the V&A; the new and interesting part is the soundtrack created to suit them. I really like this idea - I've always thought that life should have a soundtrack, and for a couple of hours on Wednesday evening mine did.
The first stop, according to the little map, was the Raphael cartoon gallery. This is a lofty, vaulted room and most of the cartoons are of a religious nature, which give it an almost chapel-like feel. Elizabeth Fraser - who ? She's one of the Cocteau Twins - had written a haunting, melodic track which seemed to suit the space really well. If you have ever heard anything, ever, by the Cocteau Twins, you'll know exactly what this sounded like. However, it provided a gentle backdrop to drifting around the quiet room, and seemed to echo the space above the drifter.
We moved on to the Chinese Gallery, where Jeremy Deller's track nearly managed to put me off the whole idea altogether. It consisted entirely of a little girl reading out the labels from her favourite exhibits in the gallery, stumbling over the longer or more unfamiliar words. Although I later griped that some tracks didn't seem to refer at all to the space around them, this one clearly did. Unfortunately, it was also intrusive, distracting, and thoroughly detracted from the experience of wandering round the gallery.
With an exhibition like this - particularly when so many of the tracks were on the experimental side - it's far too easy to become dismissive of it, to laugh at it, and not give it a fair hearing. It took some supreme effort of will after Mr Deller's contribution not to do this, as we continued on through a fair variety of both spaces and tracks.
Some did genuiely seem to enhance the experience - the Jean Michel Jarre-esque electronica provided by Cornelius for the Glass Gallery was a clear favourite with me. Then again, I'm a sucker for nice glass, anyway. Have you ever noticed that, although almost any ceramic exhibit in a museum is horrid, people actually seemed to work out how to make elegant glass some centuries ago? So while potters were still churning out Victorian pot cabbages and the like - and shepherdesses. What is it with shepherdesses ? I'm sure English distaste for the sickeningly coy little figurines were the reason behind the otherwise unjustifiable bombing of Dresden sixty years ago. But I digress. While potters were still perpetrating unspeakable horrors on the domestic skyline, glass blowers had got their act together and begun making things of real beauty.
Some tracks suited their space, even if I wasn't entirely sure I enjoyed them. The recording which played throughout the Cast Court of northern children trying to climb something - culminating in the sickening thud of a body falling - generated a sense of height which did seem to belong with the hugely tall cast of Trajan's column which dominates the room.
It was interesting, too, to see which spaces people had chosen. Many weren't galleries at such, but in fact access ramps, lobby-ways, even toilets. Unfortunately, the tracks which accompanied them seem doomed to be consigned to the bin in my head labelled "Experimental audio that Didn't Work". Sitting on a handy bench, watching the world go by to Leila's track designed for the foyer area we were in, I began to see that such things could work: pieced together everyday sounds, snatches of conversation, half-heard noises made for an atmospheric background. But in general, I felt slightly unnerved and unbalanced by the pieces designed for the easily-forgotten areas.
And some pieces, as I grumbled earlier, just didn't seem (to me) to fit at all in their space. The hiphop track written for the rococo music room in the British gallery was interesting in its own right - but ultimately irrelevant. I'm not a fan of hiphop, so carefully did my best to give it my full attention and appreciation; however, although I quite enjoyed it, it didn't seem to bear any relation to the white panelled walls and excessively gilded relief mouldings. A room with that much goldleaf should have had a glam rock track at the very least :)
Nearly at the end, I was gently terrified by the track for the Bromley-by-Bow room in the British gallery. This is a lovely room - two walls of the interior of an old townhouse, old oak panelling and wooden floorboards. Its soundtrack was an interview with a gentleman who clearly loved the room, but whom I dearly hope was a caricature, a created character just for the exhibition, someone to stand for everything everyone believes about the worst side of the British public school system. However, anyone who can say in all seriousness "No, mustn't change things. Ever. Change is bad." - well, I hope it was an actor.
Ultimately, I'm not sure whether I'd say I think the exhibition was a success, or whether I'd recommend anyone pay £8 to hear it. It's certainly interesting, and it's a very ambitious and intriguing project for the V&A to have set up; I'm delighted to see someone looking at enhancing - or even considering at all - the audio experience of a museum as well as the other senses.
If anyone else goes, I'd love to hear what you think of it. If you're interested, it's website can be found here. Thanks, again, to Snow_Leopard for the ticket.
snow_leopard's spare preview ticket to go to the V&A's new exhibition. So, at some point the V&A rounded up a bunch of musicians and artists, sent them off to find themselves a space in the V&A, and invited them to develop an audio track to fit that space. The visitor picks up a little mp3 player, headphones, and a map of the chosen spaces. Following the map from gallery to corridor, infra red magic causes the correct tracks to be played as you enter each space.
So, in effect, this is not really a new exhibition. The galleries are all previously extant bits of the V&A; the new and interesting part is the soundtrack created to suit them. I really like this idea - I've always thought that life should have a soundtrack, and for a couple of hours on Wednesday evening mine did.
The first stop, according to the little map, was the Raphael cartoon gallery. This is a lofty, vaulted room and most of the cartoons are of a religious nature, which give it an almost chapel-like feel. Elizabeth Fraser - who ? She's one of the Cocteau Twins - had written a haunting, melodic track which seemed to suit the space really well. If you have ever heard anything, ever, by the Cocteau Twins, you'll know exactly what this sounded like. However, it provided a gentle backdrop to drifting around the quiet room, and seemed to echo the space above the drifter.
We moved on to the Chinese Gallery, where Jeremy Deller's track nearly managed to put me off the whole idea altogether. It consisted entirely of a little girl reading out the labels from her favourite exhibits in the gallery, stumbling over the longer or more unfamiliar words. Although I later griped that some tracks didn't seem to refer at all to the space around them, this one clearly did. Unfortunately, it was also intrusive, distracting, and thoroughly detracted from the experience of wandering round the gallery.
With an exhibition like this - particularly when so many of the tracks were on the experimental side - it's far too easy to become dismissive of it, to laugh at it, and not give it a fair hearing. It took some supreme effort of will after Mr Deller's contribution not to do this, as we continued on through a fair variety of both spaces and tracks.
Some did genuiely seem to enhance the experience - the Jean Michel Jarre-esque electronica provided by Cornelius for the Glass Gallery was a clear favourite with me. Then again, I'm a sucker for nice glass, anyway. Have you ever noticed that, although almost any ceramic exhibit in a museum is horrid, people actually seemed to work out how to make elegant glass some centuries ago? So while potters were still churning out Victorian pot cabbages and the like - and shepherdesses. What is it with shepherdesses ? I'm sure English distaste for the sickeningly coy little figurines were the reason behind the otherwise unjustifiable bombing of Dresden sixty years ago. But I digress. While potters were still perpetrating unspeakable horrors on the domestic skyline, glass blowers had got their act together and begun making things of real beauty.
Some tracks suited their space, even if I wasn't entirely sure I enjoyed them. The recording which played throughout the Cast Court of northern children trying to climb something - culminating in the sickening thud of a body falling - generated a sense of height which did seem to belong with the hugely tall cast of Trajan's column which dominates the room.
It was interesting, too, to see which spaces people had chosen. Many weren't galleries at such, but in fact access ramps, lobby-ways, even toilets. Unfortunately, the tracks which accompanied them seem doomed to be consigned to the bin in my head labelled "Experimental audio that Didn't Work". Sitting on a handy bench, watching the world go by to Leila's track designed for the foyer area we were in, I began to see that such things could work: pieced together everyday sounds, snatches of conversation, half-heard noises made for an atmospheric background. But in general, I felt slightly unnerved and unbalanced by the pieces designed for the easily-forgotten areas.
And some pieces, as I grumbled earlier, just didn't seem (to me) to fit at all in their space. The hiphop track written for the rococo music room in the British gallery was interesting in its own right - but ultimately irrelevant. I'm not a fan of hiphop, so carefully did my best to give it my full attention and appreciation; however, although I quite enjoyed it, it didn't seem to bear any relation to the white panelled walls and excessively gilded relief mouldings. A room with that much goldleaf should have had a glam rock track at the very least :)
Nearly at the end, I was gently terrified by the track for the Bromley-by-Bow room in the British gallery. This is a lovely room - two walls of the interior of an old townhouse, old oak panelling and wooden floorboards. Its soundtrack was an interview with a gentleman who clearly loved the room, but whom I dearly hope was a caricature, a created character just for the exhibition, someone to stand for everything everyone believes about the worst side of the British public school system. However, anyone who can say in all seriousness "No, mustn't change things. Ever. Change is bad." - well, I hope it was an actor.
Ultimately, I'm not sure whether I'd say I think the exhibition was a success, or whether I'd recommend anyone pay £8 to hear it. It's certainly interesting, and it's a very ambitious and intriguing project for the V&A to have set up; I'm delighted to see someone looking at enhancing - or even considering at all - the audio experience of a museum as well as the other senses.
If anyone else goes, I'd love to hear what you think of it. If you're interested, it's website can be found here. Thanks, again, to Snow_Leopard for the ticket.
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no subject
Date: 2004-05-23 07:19 am (UTC)