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Rockwell Matters

February 04, 2008

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Recently, if you’ve found yourself, as I did, walking along the North side of Price Street between Mott and Mulberry, you would find yourself walking up against a red brick wall higher than your head height (and I’m 6′4″). This wall separates the sidewalk from the graveyard of the downtown St. Patrick’s Church. I was walking along and I suddenly heard these mysterious whispering voices. They said, “Who’s that?”, “Who’s there?”, “It’s not your imagination.” Now this was mildly creepy, because one might have assumed that these were voices talking from the graveyard of dead people. I may not see dead people, but I thought that maybe I was hearing them.

But then I saw another passerby looking up. And what she was looking at was an ad on the side of a building on the northwest corner of Prince and Mulberry, several stories high this ad, for a television show called “Paranormal State.” And on top of the building were two loudspeakers, and it was from there that these mysterious voices were emanating. I subsequently read that this is a technique called “holosonic speakers,” which can aim sound to a very particular location. What was interesting to me about this, other than the initial thrill of the creepy, was that this represented, by no means the first and by no means the last, commercial application of the work that sound installation artists have been doing for thirty years. Sound installation being a kind of aural music or effect which you come upon in an environment without necessarily having it trumpeted to you.

The best-known of these artists is the American Max Neuhaus, who now lives in Italy. And his best known works are at the DIA:Beacon museum, which, about five minutes before the hour, you start to hear a kind of strange noise, and it builds and it builds, and then at the hour it cuts off suddenly, and the shock of its cutting off is indeed the most thrilling part of the piece. His best-known piece is called “Times Square,” and is in the triangle between Seventh Avenue and Broadway, just south of where they’re now rebuilding the TKTS booth. And from the grate, from below, emerges a kind of steady-state organ chord, it shifts suddenly but it’s constant and, I think, quite beautiful. And it’s supposed to be forever (even though it went into darkness a few years ago for two or three years since somehow the maintenance issues of this piece down in a subway chamber below the street have not been worked out) but now it seems to be permanent.

There are other sound installation artists like Bill Fontana, who had a really interesting piece about fifteen years ago within the arch of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, or Maryanne Amacher. The best known is Brian Eno, the erstwhile rockstar-cum-avant-garde-artist who, with his “ambient music,” as he calls it, as in the album “Music for Airports,” has created a different kind of installation art meant to calm and focus your attention.

This all recalls the aesthetic of John Cage, who believed that if you just listened hard enough, you could find music in everything, any sounds, including your own heartbeat and functions in an anechoic chamber.

Now, most of this music that has come out is restful and consoling; it’s so subtle that people don’t even notice it. If you stand on Times Square, you watch people walking across this grate, they don’t even know there’s anything there, they just assume it’s part of the city noise. I actually the other day quizzed some people: “Did they hear that?” They didn’t know what I was talking about, until I pointed out what they had heard and then they sort of were puzzled and moved on. And yet, quite apart from commercial applications, I find sound and installations beautiful, subtle, and mysterious, and perhaps a promising future for a different kind of music.

— John Rockwell

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