ARTICLES

'Further on I listen back…'*

A review of ‘The Whisper Heard’ by Imogen Stidworthy, Matt’s Gallery
24th September – 16 November 2003

By Kelly Large
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In ‘The Whisper Heard’ Imogen Stidworthy has worked with two people who have an unusual relationship to language – Severin Domela who is learning to speak and Tony O’Donnell who has aphasia, a condition commonly experienced after a stroke, which has affected his language skills, leaving him unable to recall many words. Stidworthy uses these two people’s experiences to explore meaning in language.

The sculptural installation at Matt’s Gallery is made up of a number of spacial and media elements. The room is temporarily divided into two and on entering the first, lightest chamber there is not much to see but lots to hear. I am surrounded by disembodied voices. I can hear a child’s voice speaking nearby and further on a man’s voice, sometimes quiet, sometimes loud occasionally interspersed by the voice of a woman. The two adult voices are located in the second, dimmer space in a complex arrangement of sound and video. A monitor resting on the floor scrolls text. A second monitor placed on top of the first, plays O’Donnell’s talking head. Opposite, projected onto a parabolic dish, is a video of O’Donnell’s hands, gesturing as he talks.

As I watch O’Donnell speak I am confused as to the location of the sound of his voice. It isn’t coming from his mouth on the video or the loudspeaker on the stand to my left but from behind me, bouncing off the parabolic dish. The relationships created between sound and image produce a focal uncertainty within me – I don’t know where to place my attention and instead my concentration flits from one element to another trying to figure out how they relate. From another part of the space I hear a woman’s voice directing my attention away from the intense configuration of sound, video and text. She repeats parts of the scrolling text and at times O’Donnell’s words correspond or are similar to hers. It is difficult to understand what O’Donnell is saying but with direction from the female voice (which I assume is the artist’s) it becomes clear that he is attempting to translate the text which is taken from ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’, by Jules Vernes. It describes how the protagonist, lost in a maze of underground caverns, dislocated from the outside world hears his uncle’s voice and uses it to guide his way, only to fall down a hole unconscious.

As I move round the installation there are times when the effects of the parabolic dish makes O’Donnell’s voice vibrate inside me or changes the sound of my own voice and I become another dislocated element within the work. Sometimes it feels like O’Donnell is speaking directly to me but mostly I feel as if I am witnessing an internal dialogue. He is deeply absorbed in his own mind, selecting and discarding words in an attempt to construct sentences that have a similar meaning to those in the text.

This lack of a fixed point of coherence in the installation, as all the different elements shift in and out of the viewers/listeners consciousness, denies a definitive understanding of what is being spoken, bringing into question the relationship between language, meaning and experience. The meaning of the words are constantly questioned at the points where the spoken, visual and textual translations diverge and the speakers use different words, ranges of timbres and shapes of sound, visual gestures and expressions in an attempt to say the same thing. The authority of any one form of language present within the work is circumvented by the existence of all the other translations. This interplay between language as a cerebral idea and a physical experience creates a powerful relationship between the viewer/listener and the installation. The physical sensations provide a way of thinking about the ideas within the work.

The sound and acoustic definition of the three voices present avoid being dramatic or poetic. Every aspect of their use and placement is considered. Each one issues from separate areas of the gallery space, signifying different linguistic relationships with the original text. These zones formally re-shape the architecture by creating invisible demarcations. Simultaneously the sounds breach the boundaries they create as they slip in and out of each other.

My only concern is the relationship between O’Donnell’s and Domela’s voice. The two translations express different experiences of language succinctly but also bring to mind, whether unintentionally or on purpose, a value relationship between gaining or losing ‘wisdom’. In part I think this is because of the differences in lighting and loudness in the two sections but also that Domela’s voice is separated out from the complexity of the rest of the installation.

‘The Whisper Heard’ is not an installation about having aphasia or learning to read. It is a work that in many ways makes any description of it slippery because it questions the certainty of any meaning assumed by language. The work opens up philosophical debate around the meaning of language in a very human way because the experience of searching for the right word or phrase to communicate our experience of the world is common to us all.

* Part of a translation by Tony O’Donnell of the phrase ‘…voices in the distant depths’. Taken from dialogue in ‘The Whisper Heard’.