February 26, 2004
Cardiff and Miller at Luhring Augustine
Here is an Artforum.com review of the Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller exhibition at Luhring Augustine. The link will die in two months, so here's the full text:
In their second collaborative show at this gallery, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller present new works that depart from The Paradise Institute, 2001, their prizewinning, semi-immersive miniature movie theater. With The Berlin Files, 2003, they return to a more conventional cinematic scale. Projected in a darkened room, the work is a thirteen-minute single-channel video that displays many of Cardiff's motifs: overlapping, forebodingly ambiguous narratives (in this case involving a Nico-esque young woman who weeps in a karaoke bar's washroom and lies in bed with an unseen lover); incredibly precise multichannel sound delivered via a dozen speakers; and a female voice whose whispers are an urgent, direct address. Cabin Fever, 2004, on the other hand, is scaled down. It presents a nighttime forest scene as tabletop diorama; viewers don headphones to eavesdrop on an unseen couple's domestic disturbance. In the back room, Feedback, 2004—a Marshall amp that plays Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock national anthem when the viewer presses a foot pedal—seems anomalous to a practice marked by nimble, carefully predetermined surround-sound audio tracks. The iconic solo has a direct, forceful presence, filling the room and conjuring historical and contemporary political associations.
The brevity of the Critics' Pick format didn't allow for an elaboration of the last point. Essentially, I felt that The Berlin Files acted as a summation of the main branch of her work to date. It employs many of the stylistic and narrative tricks central to her previous videos and 'audio walks.' It is enjoyable but does not really have a potency beyond earlier, similar works. Feedback, much like Forty-Part Motet, 2001, is stronger because of its idiosyncracy, showing an avenue away from the works Cardiff has made since the late 1990s. The tactile force of Feedback's sound is key, and serves as a wonderful counterpoint to the potentially intimate encounter between sound and listener, with its one-singing-voice-per-speaker setup, in the earlier installation. (Forty-Party Motet has traveled the world: click here, here, and here for other views.)