‘The House of Books Has No Windows’, a touring exhibition by Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller kicked off at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh- now on at Modern Art Oxford- is an apt title for a show in this most literary of cities. The eponymous installation is a wendy house made from an array of books, from novels to travel guides. Climbing inside feels safe, like entering a childhood den, and evocatively musty yet also claustrophobic and imposing.
The other six installations in the show see the pair entwine sound and movement. ‘The Dark Pool’, the couple’s first project together back in 1995, is a ramshackle room of seemingly disparate objects and speakers pouring out snatches of conversation. From this wellspring of vintage clothes, tattered books, old records, tea leaves and wax hands, a creeping sense of tension emanates; a pregnancy in the air as if something has happened or is about to. The pivot of the piece is a leather trunk, in which a scene has been constructed with miniature plastic model figures. They stand looking into a dark pool, a car lies abandoned while miniature lights twinkle overhead.
‘The Dark Pool’ anaesthetises you from looking for concrete connections between the objects and sounds in the room. Strands of meaning do coalesce and emerge, nudged along by snatches of conversation and the physical ephemera but, like an abstract poem, the whole hangs together without needing to be fully explained.
The Killing Machine
Partly this stems from duo’s ability to make the viewer suspend disbelief. This is repeated, most devastatingly, in ‘The Killing Machine’ (2007); a Kafka-inspired, kitschly sinister torture chamber, where robotic arms move as elegantly as long-necked birds, prodding and poking a dentists chair covered in pink fur, all sound tracked by screeching electric guitars. Again this bizarre scenario hangs together completely. The audience (mostly…) seemed to accept it on its own terms, becoming compelled by a murky narrative that so easily could have just baffled.
The less successful installations are the more explained ones. The slide show ‘Road Trip’(2004) for example, rambles without the sense of magic or theatre of other scenarios.
Opera for Small Room
One installation on its own justifies a visit. ‘Opera for a Small Room’(2008), a shed piled high with records and lights that synchronise to a chopped up soundtrack which covers everything from wolves howling to a full blown rock opera. It is the couple’s most recent work and sees them continue to generate the mysterious wonder that characterises the best of their earlier work.
Written by Priya Umachandran
Tags:
Art, exhibition, George Bures Miller, Installation, Janet Cardiff, Modern Art Oxford, The House of Books Has No Windows
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