Join us for a new sound installation by Laurence Williams
Covid safe event
*RSVP for session times - 18 people in the space per hour.*
*Please bring a mask.*
Clamorous and droning, chattering and fizzing, sonorous and sibilant: the massed voices of an uncanny choir converging on a singular space.
The experience of sound can sometimes take us by surprise, skirting our critical faculties and racing directly to some preverbal inner sanctum, squatting in the midst of all this decadence. While learned behaviours and the enormous crushing weight of culture furnish us with tools to rationalise visual stimuli, auditory phenomena yet elude our grasp. Even after all these years of living in the world, there’s something magical about the way sound emanates from mere physical objects. As David Toop notes in his Sinister Resonance, sound is “out of sight, out of reach” - a haunting of the physical realm by something that seems beyond it. It’s an absence produced by a presence.
Laurence Williams’ work zeroes in on the unheimlich nature of sound, this protrusion into reality of unguessed-at proportions. Not too dissimilar to the cicada-laden summer Sydney is currently experiencing, the teeming insectoid sounds at play tend to twist and transform reality itself, like a mirage. Moving through the sound field, one is temporarily unmoored from the here and now.
Constructed of cast-off electric and mechanical detritus, one might think at first these objects have been chosen merely for their resonance. But there’s a crooked poetry at play here too, a secret language that courses through each object and adds to the dazed unreality of the sound field. In animating and amplifying this odd assortment, the artist has prised object from function, signifier from signified. It’s an eerie mise-en-scène, wired for sound, achieving a compositional coherence unique to itself.
Rosalind Krauss’ ancient (but still relevant) essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field gives us some frame of reference with which to tease this out further. Historically, according to Krauss, sculpture has spoken “in a symbolic tongue” and is therefore “a marker at a particular place for a specific meaning”. However, the subversion of the logic of monumentalism led to a kind of “sitelessness” where the work turned in on itself in a kind of frenzy of self-referentiality.
Krauss wasn’t talking about a sound field per se, but her comments on the so-called ‘Expanded Field’ have particular relevance to the piece in question. With a minimum of reference to its surroundings, the work instead creates its own environment. Rather than speaking to the outside, it talks (incessantly) to itself.
Without reference points, without anchor, Laurence’s work abounds in blurred symbolism and half-completed gestures. He deploys signifiers in a cavalier, almost flippant manner, mixing together corporeal form and formless emanation in an orgy of ambiguity. It’s an undecidable proposition that nevertheless retains a delicious fascination.