Sound sculpture … Bruce Nauman’s sound art installation Days at the ICA. Photograph: Stephen White/Courtesy of ICA
Where are you and what are you doing? What does it feel like? Say you are in a hotel lobby waiting for a lift. You wait for the machinery to ping. Behind you, voices come from the reception desk.
Or you are on a boat on a rough sea. Waves crash against the side, a bird cries above.
Or you are in an English country meadow. It is raining. Water cracks on upturned leaves.
Sorry to wax poetical … But in all these situations, the experience of being there is defined by sound as well as sight. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, close your eyes and sense the way sound shapes your location and contact with the world.
I am writing this in the ICA in London and when I close my eyes I can still hear Bruce Nauman’s audio installation Days. No, wait – they have just turned on the music in the bar, drowning it out with light jazz.
Nauman’s work is a room empty except for twin rows of white panels that are in fact funky speakers. What at first seems a babble of noise fills the place, but as you walk down the corridor of sound formed by the speakers, individual voices loom and fade. They are all reciting days of the week. Monday, Tuesday …
Different voices with American accents, men and women, adults and children, all utter different samples of days of the week (“Monday, Wednesday, Sunday …”) on different schedules. The sounds merge and collide, the crowd of noise is overwhelming yet negotiable: it is a city of sound. Nauman’s litany of days evokes a feeling of urgency. I picture the sidewalks of LA or New York, people going to meetings. Crowded diaries. Thursday, Monday … Red letter days, ordinary days.
But most of all I am aware of Nauman’s sound work as a sculpture. Its chronicle of time is mapped across space. The voices of absent people sculpt this room, give the air a solidity. Sound is literally physical, a wave moving through space. In this work, it creates corridors and tunnels to negotiate, invisible walls and roads. It is substantial. This physicality is the fascination of sound art. Nauman is a master of it, and Days works like all his pieces to make you aware of your own body and your ever-changing place in the world. It is calming and provocative at the same time. After experiencing it, I seem to be hearing every city noise more intensely.
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