Paul Good and Kirsty Wood

Writing by Nicolas de Oliveira and Nicola Oxley for the exhibition Stale Air, In A Room, Before Motion.

Somewhere in the Nowhere [1]

Two peregrine falcons are suspended in flight above a fractured landscape of blue
resin shards punctuated with pools of indigo ink. Their claws are entangled in conflict as they hurtle towards the ground. The tableau memorialises a real life incident witnessed by the artists Paul Good and Kirsty Wood, whilst living in a high-rise tower block whose roof was occupied by the mating birds of prey. Engaged in what appeared to be a fight to the death, the falcons were hurtling down, oblivious to grav- ity, finally pulling away from one another a split second before impact, as if testing a sublime death drive.[2]

The sculpture is accompanied by a score of layered electric guitar chords that plays inter- mittently, adding dimension, scope and mass - extending the terrain outwards. The artists describe these recordings as sculptural and spatial soundscapes. In particular, the sonic dimension grows out of the studio and links back to their interest in installation, under- lining the porous nature of perimeters in an expanded creative field.

The new work for the exhibition Stale Air, in a Room, before Motion is the result of a long-standing creative and personal relation- ship whose collaboration encompasses art and music. Though these studio-based and sonic activities are pursued separately, they are on occasion brought together to form a single entity. In this instance, this combination cre- ates a ‘sensorium’, which stresses the input of different sensory faculties. The desire to eliminate the boundaries between different disciplines to address the complexities of art dominated by visuality was a constant aspect of avant-garde art as outlined by the artist Joseph Beuys nearly half a century ago:

The term ‘visual arts’...is really a symptom for the reduction of perceptual categories within the human creativity as a whole. An anthropo- logical conception of art [asserts that] you hear a sculpture before you see it; consequently, the auditive element is not just an equal part, but a constituent of the perception of plastic art – con- fronts you with the task of exploring the concep- tion of creativity in all directions, of spreading it out and substantiating it anthropologically.[3]

Sculpture, accordingly, is sonic as much
as visual, as its existence alters the acoustic experience of a given space. By adding an actual sound element or soundtrack to the three-dimensional work, its spatial presence
is extended into the fourth dimension – time. The static work may depict motion – the falling pair of falcons – but it is the soundwaves that introduce actual movement, underscoring the duration of of time and its connection to the space. Sound is immersive since it fills its host, the space. According to composer David Toop ambient soundwaves favour a type of immer- sive listening since, ‘like the ocean, you’re deluged by music’. [4]

Visual and sonic immersion is a condition experienced by the audience, and has atmo- spheric substance. It might be said to function in the manner of the concept of ether, a new kind of material popular in the 19th century: Something amorphous, that’s like the air but is a kind of substance, and it symbolized some- thing without form, without shape and it’s sim- ilar to music. Music is in a way like smell, like perfume or smoke. The insubstantiality of music is a part of its appeal. In a way, it’s a material substance.[5]

The iconography employed in the work
for Stale Air, in a Room, before Motion recalls the emotional sublime present in works by Romantic and Symbolist paintings from the 19th Century such as Caspar David Friedrich’s Das Eismeer (The Polar Sea) (1824) and Arnold Böcklin’s Die Toteninsel (The Island of the Dead) (1880). It is the fusion of palpable human sen- timent and overwhelming dread of the infinite that maintains their impact across the centu- ries. Philosopher Immanuel Kant had asserted that the sublime revealed a reality character- ized by indeterminacy and undecidability. This power of disturbance referred to continues to lie at the heart of the sublime, argues postmod- ern philosopher Jean François Lyotard, and extends to present day art since it ‘attempts to present the unpresentable’.[6]

We can trace a continuing interest in the artistic sublime in the early 21st century in particular through exhibitions such as Sublime: Tremors of the World at Centre Pompidou, Metz or Toxic Sublime at White Cube, London – both shown in 2016. The contemporary is a period supposedly dominated by connective tech- nologies, which might privilege evidence and reason, but is instead marked by a resurgent interest in hidden practices such as spirituality, mysticism and the occult, which promote the unseen and the imperceptible. Bruno Latour argues that Western philos- ophy is strongly influenced by the culturally specific tradition of the still life, which he terms the ‘Disease of the Dutch’ that fixes objects for the point of view of a spectator: Vision science reveals that an object is actually a transitory event in perception. It has a trajectory, which means that, to even meet an object and turn it into a matter of fact, you have to interrupt it in the middle of that trajectory. Then you have to create this very strange idea of a plane in between you and the object, where the object can be fixed.[7]

Arguably, the work in the exhibition plays with the petrified tableau of the still life, but it adds multiple points of view for the spectator, an environmental quality that is enhanced by the addition of the soundtrack. Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s monumental trilogy Spheres discusses Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial project which prior- itises an ‘archeology of the intimate’.[8] Conse- quently to be in the world means we are inside something, some sphere, some atmosphere. This quality of encapsulation typifies spatial ideas throughout the 20th century. For exam- ple, Jakob von Uexküll‘s 1934 popular science picture book Umwelt and Interior World of Animals proposes to blow a bubble around each depicted animal’s own world; it counters the widely held notion that all things exist in
a single, unbroken spatio-temporal environ- ment, rather than in a series of separate phe- nomenal life-worlds.[9]

In the exhibition setting, the atmo- sphere created by audiovisual inputs forms a micro-environment within the space. It is not, however hermetic in nature, since the boundary between what is explicitly part of the artwork, and what is extraneous to it remains in constant flux. Background noise, visitor movement, and institutional operations form
a background to the work, augmenting and interfering with its reception. In particular, argues art historian Helmut Draxler ‘the history of relations between music and the visual arts since John Cage cannot be read as one of fusion in the sense of the total artwork...but rather as the history of the shift in the direction of the fields of sound and museality. [...] Unlike music, sound ...can only be placed in concrete situations again and again, each time afresh, and addressed in such a way that visual and acoustic, aesthetic and institutional space can be distinguished and then...related again.’[10]

Nicolas de Oliveira and Nicola Oxley

1. Chrysta Bell & David Lynch, EP, Meta Hari, 2016.

2. In the introduction to The Sublime author Simon Morley asks to ‘what extent is the sublime ultimately embracing the death drive?’ http://www.simonmorley.com/biography/The_Sublime-An_Introduction.pdf

3. Werner Nekes and Dore O, Joseph Beuys (Documentary) (Germany: Werner Nekes Filmproduktion 1981).

4. David Toop, quoted in Jean-Yves Leloup, Digital Magma: From the Utopia of Rave Parties to the IPOD Generation, Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 2010, p.45.
2 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, P.A.Brault and M.Naas trans, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1990, p.3.

5. David Toop, ibid, p.46.

6. Ashley Woodward, http://www.iep.utm.edu/lyotard/

7. Bruno Latour, Sensitizing, in: Caroline Jones et al eds., Experience: Culture Cognition and the Common Sense, MIT Press, Camb.Mass, 2016, p.316.

8. Peter Sloterdijk’s, Spheres I, Wieland Hoban trans., MIT Press, Camb.Mass., 2011.

9. Jakob von Uexküll, A Stroll through the worlds of animals and men, in: Claire H.Schiller ed., Instinctive Behaviour, International University Press, New York, 1957 (1934), p.12, op.cit.

10. Helmut Draxler, How can we perceive Sound as Art? The Medium and Code of the Audible in Museum Envi- ronments, in See this Sound:Promises of Sound and Vision, Cosima Rainer et al eds., Walter König, Cologne, 2009, p.28-31.