Janet Cardiff

When Thomas Tallis wrote Spem in Alium (whose title derives from a line in the motet: “Spem in alium nunquam habui praeter in te Deus Israel”/“I have put my hope in none other than the God of Israel”) in 1570, he was 65 years old. It is regarded as one of the masterpieces of the Western musical canon. Janet Cardiff, the Canadian multimedia and sound artist, produced a reworking of the Tallis piece as Forty-Part Motet in 2001 for the National Gallery of Canada. The piece is constructed to separate individually the 40 (five groups of eight) voices in the initial Tallis score. Loudspeakers are set in a round for maximum acoustic resonance, each transmitting one vocal line of the larger work. Forty-Part Motet is permanently installed in the National Gallery’s sumptuous Rideau Street Covent Chapel, where Tallis’s music of devotion appears to have found a congenial home, and the piece has been realized since in numerous venues across the world, including Inhotim (Brumadinho, Brazil) and the MoMA in New York. Now it finds itself at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

The space in which the WAG has installed the Cardiff piece is entirely different from the Rideau Chapel. As with all Cardiff’s installations, the architectonics of sound, how the audience moves throughout the location and interacts with the physical presences encountered while moving, is foregrounded. (Cardiff became best known in 1995 for a series of “soundwalks” where participants move through real landscapes directed via headphones by Cardiff.) For the WAG show, the 40 speakers are arranged in a round in one of the darkened gallery spaces. Heard collectively, listeners can experience the entirety of Tallis’s work. (Seating arrangements have been made in the centre of the speaker-circle for those wishing to sit.) More interestingly, though, is the opportunity the piece affords to move around the circle, exploring each of the single components of the larger chorus. Sometimes the results can be quite uncanny: standing at one side of the circle they seem to grow still before bursting out again into song at the far end of the room, behind the listener. Indeed, when I was there, I often had the auditory illusion that there was someone actually in the room with me, singing.

Compared with the Rideau Chapel installation, this particular iteration lacks a certain visual pleasure; we are in a fairly standard WAG gallery space, with little more than a circle of mounted speakers at which to look. But there is an intentional neutrality at work here—the white walls, grey floors and black speakers with cables running from them. This might be construed as an impoverishment. However, I would argue that the minimalist presentation is actually a strength. With all due respect to the National Gallery’s Rideau Chapel, the apparent presupposition that religious music like Tallis’s motet should only be heard in places of Christian worship, subjected to an aesthetic/ theological cordon sanitaire, might be a bit narrow or limiting. One might also point out the contiguity of function between the pre-19th- century Church and the modern art gallery. But I think something even more interesting is revealed by the manner in which the presentation compels listeners to focus on the 40-part choral’s splitting in a way that cannot be ignored. On one hand, the distribution of 40 singers’ voices through individual speakers might give an effect that there were, in fact, 40 people in the room with the listener. (This is no doubt the source of the auditory illusion I referred to earlier.) But I think Cardiff is making a more crucial point about the (non)relation between song and subjectivity. In his most recent book Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Verso, 2012), Slavoj Žižek refers to an ancient Egyptian sacred statue that issues a deeply reverberant tone each sunset, noting that “the object is there as long as the sound remains silent; the moment it resounds, the moment it ‘spills out,’ the object is evacuated, and this voidance gives birth to…the [Lacanian-] barred subject lamenting the loss of the object.” This, I think, is what the bare presence of the speakers in the otherwise empty and neutral gallery space allows us to realize: the voices emerging from the inanimate speakers, with a minimal gap between them, stir in their auditors a sense of this lost object of desire, this lost sense of unity between subject and object. In the space of this loss, the full sense that the singing voice is uncanny (unheimlich) in relation to its location of utterance is revealed though Cardiff’s work. ❚

“Janet Cardiff: Forty-Part Motet” was exhibited at The Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, from February 1 to April 28, 2013.

Tom Kohut is a critic and curator living in Winnipeg.