TO START: This exhibit is already over and all, but nevertheless: Below are some thoughts and photographs from the second time I visited the installation and did not wait in line to play. In that light, the photos are lacking in the specifics mentioned below.
* * *
ONE: SURROUNDING ROOMS
fig. 1a
fig. 1b
Playing The Building was held in The Battery Maritime Building at the southernmost tip of Manhattan, in what used to be the ticketing and waiting rooms for the Brooklyn Ferry (before there was a Brooklyn Bridge). The outer facade of the building looks like a gold-dipped modest Taj Mahal, a Modernist stake in the ground, surrounded by the crassly practical gray box shapes of the Financial District. The exhibit was on the second level, and upon entering the room thru a construction-lamp-strung stairwell, the right side of the room opened up onto the harbor by way of two giant metal gangplanks for the old ferries, which were bent up to the sky, closed down. These towering windows and for some reason, a noose, were there waiting for me (figs. 1a, 1b).
* * *
TWO: HOW TO PLAY THE BUILDING
fig. 2a
fig. 2b
fig. 2c
The instrument worked like this: The cheap gutted organ (fig. 2c) was filled with generators, the generators were strung with wires, the wires were hung and pulled throughout the entire room. Door-knocker-type machines were attached to every wall, pillar, and radiator. Other wires and wind-generators were wired to pipes. Humming electronics were wired to the crossbeams that cut across the giant skylight. All of these things were manipulated by keys on the organ, and each type of noise was grouped and marked on the keyboard (PIPES, GENERATORS, KNOCKING). On the floor, just in front of the organ bench, were the words PLEASE PLAY.
It was impossible to make a Song, or a concerted effort at Melody--that was the point: Playing the building was an equalizer, meaning no one could play it better than anyone else. Nevertheless: I sat and added each one of the pipes on top of one another, and they sounded like eternal flutes, blown through by tireless choirs. The door-knockers produced clangs and clacks. The generators gripped on the crossbeams made a rattling hum that no one let go for long, they came on like throat clearings or alarms.
It wasn't music, and if it was noise, it never stopped for the line of patient orchestrators. But, walking around in this bare, 3-storey, historied room trying to watch the machines snap on and all the while hearing every clap and whistle echo around was somehow comfortable, both fore- & background, both created and (in that city) natural. The first time I went and actually sat down to play, I wished I had some way to record it. I wondered if DB had even taken that opportunity. I wondered if some of these sounds would ever get on to a recording. The exhibit was only open for a couple of months, and to my knowledge, the room it was in has been bare since. It was even free, it only took a signed waiver excusing the City from responsibility should you get yourself hurt. Why isn't it still open? What would be the harm in trying to make Manhattan artistically significant again?
DAN.
Here's another thing I was thinking of while I was standing around with a friend: The finite number of photographs available in the exhibit.
Susan Sontag, in her book On Photography, wrote about the aggressive language of photography. An example of which is how one takes a photograph, ETC. So, to my mind, what was happening in that room--which was filled with 40 or 50 other tourists and Talking Heads freaks--was the fixed and possessive taking of photographs.
And, in a room that had nothing in it but some wires, reverberating machines and an old organ, how many photographs could there be? The whole room was art in a barrel. All the guess work was gone by way of the natural aesthetic of the space--there was no wrong photo you could take, and on the organ, no wrong noise. And is that capital-a art? A controlled environment where nothing can be wrong, imperfect, or pointless? So good art is without guesswork--or with certainty, and bad art is another dense layer of not-knowing, another small failure that sticks to others.
Whatever all this means, I know while holding my camera up I felt the impotency of the action, and thought I should just go up to people and arrange for their pictures to be e-mailed to me.
END.
