It\u2019s hard to imagine a more seamless cross-purposing of an exhibition: as both a captivating extension of the Hayward\u2019s programming and as the perfect PR tool for the hip, hot-desking, coffee-fuelled creative entrepreneurialism that, at its worst, seems an all-too-perfect marriage between the concerns of contemporary art and those of speculative real estate. This is not to criticize the Hayward for finding alternative partnerships and, with them, funding streams. In an era of declining public support for the arts (particularly pronounced in the UK), these simply must be found. Rather, it is to question why it seems so difficult in this moment, in so many cultural sectors, to imagine anything else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of this aside, the show is full of excellent works and terrific twists and turns. And in spite of its pseudo-visionary, PR-centric tone, Eagle\u2019s quote above actually encapsulates something quite central to the exhibition: an interest, shared among many of the videos, in the paradoxical ways in which sound relates to images of place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The lush, catchy soundtracks that accompany many of the works\u2019 visuals double and deepen the sense of the depicted places we see: the tense, atmospheric streets of Compton, L.A. (in Joseph\u2019s m.A.A.d<\/em>, 2014); a high school yard in Cleveland, home to a German oak tree gifted to Jesse Owens by Nazi organizers of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games (in Gaillard\u2019s Nightlife, <\/em>2015); a neutral buoyancy training facility for astronauts (in Rose\u2019s Everything and More<\/em>, 2015); a suburban Alabaman middle-class living room (in Cameron Jamie\u2019s Massage the History<\/em>, 2007\u20139).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet as much as they pull us into such images of place, these works\u2019 soundtracks also carry us away. Their deft, delicious repetitiveness (a dub track sampling Alton Ellis\u2019 1970 \u201cBlack Man\u2019s World\u201d in Gaillard\u2019s piece; remixed Kendrick Lamar in Joseph\u2019s) extends and abstracts these places. Particularly in works in which the artist has chosen a soundtrack that is deliberately disjointed from the depicted locale (as in Jamie\u2019s piece, for instance, which features African-American Alabaman men sensually dancing with living room furniture, but substitutes their own music for a Sonic Youth track), this extension and abstraction of place by sound seems almost to reclaim the places from their rightful owners: their inhabitants. In doing so, these sound-tracked images speak to an uncomfortable territorial tension\u200a\u2014\u200aa quiet hint of violence\u200a\u2014\u200aand provoke thought about how such images of place (which, of course, carry with them history, race, class, gender, culture) should travel. Audiences unfamiliar with a specific locale, its histories and its subcultures must do some interpretive labour (to borrow a term from David Graeber) to try to understand these places. The music somehow lubricates this; it converts interpretive labour into the terms of pure feeling, giving the images an illusion of intimacy made of music, rhythm, and pure distance. Yet by facilitating this empathetic exchange of images of place, the music also seems to erase the very possibility of interpretive labour. How are we to understand a place, if it keeps slipping away in a rhythmic, empathetic echo? The most compelling works in this show seem to speak directly to this difficulty\u200a\u2014\u200ato the simultaneous empathy and violence that the soundtrack unleashes on the image of place. They remind us (as Eldritch Priest also does) that to listen to <\/em>something always also involves listening away<\/em>: bracketing out the incidentals, abstracting, and allowing certain elements to remain below the threshold of interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"89_CR13_Rosamond_CameronJamie_MassagetheHistory\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/89_CR13_Rosamond_CameronJamie_MassagetheHistory-scaled.jpg\")
Massage the History<\/em>, video still, 2007-2009.
Photo : \u00a9 Cameron Jamie, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"89_CR13_Rosamond_Gaillard_Nightlife\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/89_CR13_Rosamond_Gaillard_Nightlife-scaled.jpg\")
Nightlife<\/em>, video still, 2015.
Photo : \u00a9 Cyprien Gaillard, courtesy of the artist and Spr\u00fcth Magers <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n