Joe Turnbull reports from The Voice and the Lens festival (Whitechapel Gallery and Rich Mix) where he finds himself immersed in a Divine Comedy of tattoos, back slang and post-industrial rave/pop.
The advent of sound recording and motion pictures are two of the most beguiling developments in the last 150 years.
Undoubtedly these technologies – which both came to fruition separately in the
late 19th century – changed the face of the cultural and artistic landscape
irrevocably. It took almost another half century for the two to be formally
combined and the western cultural tradition hasn't looked back since.
The Voice and the Lens curated by Sam
Belinfante and Ed McKeon was a weekend-long festival exploring the relationship
between the human voice and moving image, encompassing film screenings, live
performances and talks delivered by vocalists and multimedia artists.
Recording technologies allow moments to be captured,
manipulated and duplicated in a way that simply wasn't possible before. This
tension between the original moment and the recording is clearly a theme that
the curators wished to explore through their programming, with several of the
works addressing the original/copy relationship, often combining live performance
with pre-recorded material to blur the lines.
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| Still from L'Inferno, directed by Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro |
Starting anachronistically at the end – the final piece
shown on the concluding day of the festival – 102 Years out of Sync, 2013 performed by Mikhail Karikis and Adam
de la Cour was a unique take on this subject of original/copy through a
historical lens. The performance told the story of L'Inferno; the first feature film produced in Italy from 1911,
which was a silent epic, reimagining Dante's famous poem. The visuals were considered
groundbreaking at the time, depicting the hellish landscape of Lardarello, an
area of Tuscany said to have been the inspiration for Dante's original work.
The region is beset by a confluence of geothermal forces,
producing geysers which spew deadly steam into the atmosphere. The site later
became the first place in the world to have a geothermal power station. 102
Years out of Sync combines original (or should that be copied?) footage
from L'Inferno with equally
breathtaking images of modern Lardarello, with its industrial pipes and
structures seeming to organically emerge from the great rocky chasms of the
landscape.
Even more striking than the visuals are the environmental sound
recordings that accompany them. They have a low, drone-like quality; they sound
primeval, mournful and guttural, as if the pipes are siphoning the voice of the
very earth itself. Karikis is of course also giving a voice to the previously
mute footage of L'Inferno, an arguably problematic endeavour despite the efficacy of the results.
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| AMAE and Pier Giorgio De Pinto, 58(+1) Indices on the Body, A Living Archive (2014) |
Another work combining performative and recorded elements
was art collective AMAE and Pier Giorgio De Pinto's 58(+1) Indices on the Body, A Living Archive, 2014 which engages
with the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's ruminations on the modern
corpus. The performance consisted of a man, stripped to the waist, covered in tattoos depicting different numbers (one presumes, 1-58). A second
man used a tablet computer to scan the different indices, causing a related text by Nancy to appear on a screen alongside the live feed of the tablet's camera.
The performer's body was thus literally and metaphorically
inscribed with meanings through the tattoos, though some of those meanings were
artificially projected. Scars, tattoos and other marks on our
bodies mean they are effectively living archives, but this piece took
that notion a step further by transposing literal discourses onto the physical
body.
The performance itself was unsettling. The performer's body was treated
like an object or test subject whilst he remained completely silent,
even complaisant. It raised all sorts of questions about the role of
technology on the modern body, with cybernetics and wearable technology finally
starting to take off in earnest. It also highlighted the power relations at
play in mediating meanings of the human body through language.
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| Imogen Stidworthy, Barrabackslarrabang (2010) |
Multimedia artist, Imogen Stidworthy's conversation with
curator Sam Belinfante offered an illuminating insight into a number of her
video works which focus on the presence of the human voice. The talk was
interspersed with samples of a number of her different projects. Particularly
interesting was her piece Barrabackslarrabang, 2010 exploring the almost forgotten
language of 'back slang' which was developed by dock workers in Liverpool in
the first half of the 20th century. The coded speech empowered working class,
often non-white speakers by giving them control over that ultimate arbiter of
meaning and power, language. It also helped to disguise any illicit activities from
the authorities.
Although 'back slang' is now little more than a relic of a
particular social/cultural moment, a handful of members of certain subcultures
still speak it with pride. It's a reminder that language is unstable, fluid and
constantly adapting in relation to social conditions but also fiercely
contested, reflecting wider power struggles in society.
There was a number of
performances which provided a comic counterpoint to all the philosophical
cogitation. Dante Rendle Traynor's laughably facile performance consisted of
him singing the refrain 'Cambridge: boring, London: busy, Thailand:
interesting' slightly off key to some cheesy Casio-keyboard style backing
track, accompanied by home-movie footage of the three locations. It seemed a
searing satire of the middle-class obsession with gap years and the idea that
you can 'travel yourself interesting'. Equally comical was Lina Lapelye's live
performance of what can only be described as post-industrial rave/pop music
with catchy one-liners like 'i am a snake' and 'I'm gonna edit
you' repeated to the point of absurdity.
That's just the (heavily)
edited highlights from the final day of the festival at Whitechapel Art
Gallery, with other events including a sound installation as part of
Spitalfields Music's Summer Festival at LimeWharf and an evening of video
pieces shown on two different screens at Rich Mix's cinema. If the final event
was anything to go by, the programming of the The Voice and the Lens was truly ambitious and richly varied, but
ultimately coherent. For me, the curators achieved their stated aim of
upsetting the traditional hierarchies which often place the original (or the
finished 'work') above the performance/process involved.
Joe Turnbull
It was held on 13 – 15 June 2014 at Whitechapel Gallery and Spitalfields Music Summer Festival at Rich Mix.
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