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PHOTOGRAPHY ROBERT COLVIN.
Overview of the recent exhibition by Chelle
Macnaughtan. Three lines of prints hung in the
gallery space, while the plates used to make the
prints lined one gallery wall.
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One of the
series of prints hung across the exhibition space.
Pulled off the same plate and inked in a single
batch, the prints become darker over the series.
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Alex Selenitsch reviews a recent exhibition by Chelle Macnaughtan, which uses printmaking techniques to explore links between sound and architecture.
“Art is without noise (as that term is
employed in information theory): art is a
system which is pure, no unit goes
wasted…” Roland Barthes Image Music Text.
Barthes’ contemporary version of the
Renaissance idea of wholeness – where
nothing can be taken away or added –
emphasizes the artwork as a product, as an
object, despite the use of the word
“system”. Against this, architecture and
music (and theatre too) share a large zone
called production. In this zone, architect
and composer are parallel figures with
similar tasks.
The key document in this common zone
is the score. All artists must imagine
something before it exists, but in normal
practice architects and composers have to
put it in writing for others to realize. This
“writing” concerns both intention and fact
– both are couched in codes like plans,
sections and elevations, or five lines with
dots and symbols on them.
This is where Barthes’ proposition comes
unstuck. No score can fully describe the
facts, let alone the intent, of a creative idea.
Interpretation, addition and excision are
realities of performance. In Testaments
Betrayed, Milan Kundera writes a deeply
felt examination of the things done by
others to the music of composers, regardless
of the explicit instructions of the composer.
Similarly, all architects know the strange
feeling that swells up, 200 metres or so from
the site, before they inspect the difference
between the score and its performance.
Composers tackled these issues head-on
in the 1950s and 1960s. One of their aims
was to separate essential instructions, to be
precisely followed, from those that could be
observed in an arbitrary fashion (if at all).
The unique occasion that is every
performance switched into compositions
that could be different each time they were
performed, or different when they were
assembled into a score. Chance or hazard –
the unpredictable – became an aesthetic
issue. As well as the liberating effects on
performers and audiences, and a subsequent
shuffling of the traditional power relations
between composers, performers and
listeners, the 1950s and 60s produced lots
of visually appealing scores. Composers
invented remarkably individual graphic
solutions to the problems of notating the
production of sound. The magic of making
marks infused the research and shifted
music’s visuality into the same zone
that architecture, drawing, painting and
design occupy.
This is the zone explored by Chelle
Macnaughtan in a multiple work recently
installed at Melbourne’s Über gallery. Über
is a deep, shop-like space, with white walls
(of course). Nine printing plates, each 500
millimetres square, were fixed in line to the
long wall on the left-hand side of the
entrance. Twenty-seven prints were then
hung in the deep space, in three lines of
nine each, as if to dry. Over this played an
ambient soundtrack of Macnaughtan
walking through the Jewish Museum in
Berlin. On my visit it was particularly quiet
(“Probably the bit in the Holocaust section,” said the artist when I asked about the lack
of sound during my visit). The first line of
prints on the left was white, the middle one
grey, the right-hand side one black. The
move from white to black was steady and
consistent, all the prints having been inked
from a single batch made darker and darker
over the series. White, grey and black sets
were made off the same set of nine plates
creating three sets of prints, from white to
black, going through the whole sequence.
In the sequence, the biggest shock was the
jump from the first print, which was
embossed paper – a pure signal – to the next
print, which was the first to carry the noise
of the ink. Through the sequence the ink got
noisier and noisier, allowing the pure
system (to use Barthes’ term) to be seen.
This system was an overlaid field of lines
and numbers. The graphic image was
derived from two-dimensional
representations of the artist’s recording of
all sounds while walking through the
Jewish Museum, a combination of a specific
path and constantly total sound envelope.
This effect was easily seen in the prints:
they were all different, but all the same.
“All different but all the same” is a result
of their process of composition. This is a
method that selects pre-existing systems to
survey, extracts subsets of patterns, then
overlays these subsets to create new
patterns. Its vernacular or non-art talisman
is the map; its aesthetic principle is the
moiré or interference pattern. Images are
invariably over-determined; they have too
much data, which resolves into images of
crowds, flocks, clouds, galaxies and so on.
Daniel Libeskind has a ghost-like
presence in this exhibition. He is there in
Macnaughtan’s choice of sound source, in
her use of a quote and in the citation of
Libeskind’s Chamber Works in her artist’s
statement. But Libeskind is only the noisiest
of the architects who use this process. Many
other artists are also working in this way
across many categories and styles, and
Macnaughtan’s work could equally be
thought of as a walk through this kind of
compositional process.
The importance of the method in 74' 56"
is that it can apply both to architecture and
to music, and that the outcomes are not
illustrations or translations, even when
specific artworks are used as the system of
the initial survey. This makes
Macnaughtan’s installation pleasingly
difficult to classify. The prints could be
maps, images of sound (both as record and
as prediction), or images of dense space.
More importantly, these works are prints,
peeled off the nine plates lined up on the
wall of the gallery. The plates are the scores
of the work, and each print is itself a
performance, even a ritual, as anyone who
has been engaged with printmaking can
attest. Macnaughtan’s use of printmaking
provides a mediating arena between
architecture and music. The movement
from the survey to plate to print – from
score to performance to record of the
performance – is a model for a new process
that links a score to making to architecture.
This sounds conventional, except that in
Macnaughtan’s model of the sequence, as
offered through this exhibition, the score
and making are directly and physically
connected. The same person, the
architect/composer, makes the plate and
makes the print: imagine such a situation
for architecture.
ALEX SELENITSCH IS A MELBOURNE-BASED POET
AND ARCHITECT, AND A SENIOR LECTURER IN THE
FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, BUILDING AND
PLANNING, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE.
CHELLE MACNAUGHTAN IS A PHD CANDIDATE AT
RMIT UNIVERSITY. SHE RECENTLY RECEIVED THE
INAUGURAL RAIA LYSAGHT SCHOLARSHIP, WHICH
WILL HELP FUND RESEARCH EXTENDING THE
IDEAS EXPLORED IN THIS EXHIBITION.
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