While in London last month I inadvertently came across "
The Most Exciting Contemporary Art Show in Town" at the White Cube in Bermondsey. This exhibition of the latest work by
Christian Marclay included a video installation called
Surround Sounds. The work is a silent video projection filling all four walls from floor to ceiling, with words that
bounce and dance continuously up and down and allover the room. I had not truly understood the meaning of synestheshia until I stood in the middle of this space watching the rapidly moving onamatopoeic words: BOOM and BAM appear to explode, SHH slowly slides down the wall like a quiet whisper, KRAK aggressively racks in half, and RUMBLE bobbles about at the bottom of the walls like an angry wasp in a bottle. In the silence of the space, the words are loud and clear in our vision.
"To make the work, the artist collated a lexicon of the sound effects made by characters in superhero stories. The scanned swatches were then animated using the software programme After Effects in a dynamic choreography that suggests the acoustic properties of each word. 'Boom', for example, is no longer static on the page, but bursts into life in a sequence of colourful explosions, while 'Whooosh!' and 'Zoooom!' travel at high speed around the walls. The work fuses the aural with the visual and immerses the viewer in a silent musical composition."
The White Cube Gallery, Bermondsey LondonI made it to this exhibition the first day it opened. While Marclay's new work filled the 48,000 square feet of the gallery,
Surround Sounds was by far the strongest work in the exhibition. There was two rooms of paintings that seemed trite and lifeless compared to the strength and power of
Surround Sounds. At first, the experience of the room overwhelms with neon words chaotically bouncing around the walls, but quickly you realize that there is an order to this chaos. At any given time the walls are only filled with one word (in the image above, it is the word "BEEP") and the chaos quickly transforms into an elegant and playful cacophony of images and movement.
Marclays's bouncing words reminded me very much of
Norman McLaren of National Film Board fame (if you don't know who Norman McLaren is, I recommend checking him out and experiencing one of his early, very innovative animations made by drawing directly on the film:
Boogie Doodle 1940).
For more work on Christian Marclay, watch this short excerpt of his world renowned work, called
The Clock. This montage of thousands of movie clips forms a seamless 24-hour day. A prelude to this work, is a seven-minute piece called
Telephones. If you cannot get to London to see
Surround Sounds, these links will reveal Marclay's unique method of working with found sound and images.
The White Cube's huge exhibition space also includes a
mobile vinyl record factory (first of its kind in the world), factory and a silkscreen press for one-of-a-kind album covers as well as a performance area for bands. Recordings of the music performances accompanying Marclay's exhibition are produced throughout the duration of the exhibition. For more information on the other work in the exhibition:
White Cube
