NYAB Event - "Silence" Exhibition

"Silence" Exhibition

Masters & Pelavin

This event has ended.

In reference to spiritual connection, a silent mind, freed from the onslaught of thoughts and thought patterns, is both a goal and an important step in a number of spiritual teachings. Many religious traditions imply the importance of being quiet and still in mind and spirit for transformative and integral spiritual growth to occur. In Christianity, there is the silence of contemplative prayer; in Islam, Sufis insist on the importance of finding silence within. In Buddhism, it is implied as a feature of spiritual enlightenment; and, in Hinduism, silence, or “Mauna,” it is taught for inner growth.

In these traditions, spiritual tools, such as mandalas, may be employed for focusing attention of aspirants and adepts. Mandalas, or concentric diagrams, have spiritual and ritual significance in both Buddhism and Hinduism. Even in Christianity, forms which are evocative of mandalas are prevalent: the celtic cross; the rosary; the halo; the aureole; oculi; the Crown of Thorns.

In common use, “mandala” has become a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the Universe from the human perspective. In Estonian artist Jaanika Peerna’s Murmuring Silence, thousands of infinitesimally thin lines, spaced so closely together that they are barely distinguishable from one another, combine to create a densely layered mandala. Scale and perspective are rendered extraneous, unimportant; we could be looking at atoms or stars, and that ambiguity is it's power, keeping our viewpoint in motion, fluid, subjective. As an aid to meditation, Murmuring Silence establishes a sacred space, both for the artist and the viewer.

According to the psychologist David Fontana (1934 – 2010), the mandala’s symbolic nature can help one “to access progressively deeper levels of the unconscious, ultimately assisting the meditator to experience a mystical sense of oneness with the ultimate unity from which the cosmos in all its manifold forms arises.” The psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1871 - 1961) saw the mandala as “a representation of the unconscious self,” and believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to identify emotional disorders and work towards wholeness in personality.

Recent neurological studies have found that such emotions and behaviors as goodwill, security, fear, anxiety, self-protection, gravity, sexuality, and compulsiveness, generate from humans lower cerebral core. American artist Anne Lindberg’s works inhabit a non-verbal place resonant with such primal human conditions. In Sleep (2005), Lindberg presents the viewer with a white cantilever bed, just large enough for one person to rest on, which hangs from the gallery wall. The fabric, white sheets and pillow cases, are covered in hand stitched texts from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, 1975: “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow—I feel my fate in what I cannot fear—I learn by going where I have to go.” Systemic and non-representational, Lindberg’s work is subtle, rhythmic, abstract, and immersive.

In Western cultures, it is still sometimes difficult to interpret non-verbal messages, especially those being sent by a person being silent (i.e. not speaking). The act of not speaking can mean anger, hostility, disinterest, or any number of other emotions. Because of this, people in Western cultures feel uneasy when one party is silent and will usually try their best to fill up the silence with small talk.

In Das Schweigen (2011), a video work by German artist Peter Baumann, the viewer is presented with an awkward lack of conversation in a café between a man and a woman. The portrayed couple seems to embark on sharing of moment of intimacy or importance that never quite happens. Each person seems desperately afraid to offer up any word at all. Silence in speech can be the result of hesitation, stutters, self-correction, or the deliberate slowing of speech for the purpose of clarification or processing of ideas. These are short silences. Longer pauses in language typically occur in interactive roles, reactive tokens, or turn-taking. Baumann’s video humorously makes use of the awkwardness found while being silent within Western context.

Other artist have struggled with making use of silence within Western Culture. The first time avant-garde composer John Cage mentioned the idea of a piece composed entirely of silence was during a 1947 lecture at Vassar College, A Composer's Confessions. At the time, Cage felt that such a piece would be “incomprehensible in the Western context,” and was reluctant to write it down: “I didn't wish it to appear, even to me, as something easy to do or as a joke. I wanted to mean it utterly and be able to live with it.”

Music inherently depends on silence, in some form or another, to distinguish other periods of sound and allow dynamics, melodies and rhythms to have greater impact. Most music scores feature rests denoting periods of silence. However, Cage eventually took the use of silence in music to an extreme. 4’33” (pronounced “Four minutes, thirty-three seconds”), was composed in 1952 for any instrument (or combination of instruments), and the score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece.

Estonian artist Kaido Ole's large-scale trompe-l'œil paintings of speakers, The Band ( 2003 ), like 4’33”, presents the viewers with an an experience in which they expect to hear sound but do not. In consequence, attention may be drawn to the sounds of the viewers surrounding environment. This ‘awareness’ is also induced by the sculptures of Japanese artist Kazumi Tanaka—a tiny piano, Seperation ( 2001 ); a miniature turntable, Recording ( 2012 ), each instrument laboriously hand crafted from such materials as craved wood, ivory and the artist own hair. These works, as well, do not produce sound. However, it can be argued that they are also not silent.

The works of Ole and Tanaka have the ability to allow the viewer to focus on the impossibility of silence, as long as the viewer is open to the idea of doing so. As Cage wrote about the premier of his first silent composition: “There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”

4’33” is an example of automaticism. Since the Romantic Era, composers, like Cage, have been striving to produce music that could be separated from any social connections, transcending the boundaries of time and space. In automaticism, composers wish to completely remove both the composers and the artist from the process of creation. This is motivated by the belief that creation without social pressure is impossible, there is no way for us to truly express ourselves without infusing the art with the social standards that we have been subjected to since birth.

Contemporary Estonian artist Krista Mölder’s demonstrates a similar conviction through photographic works with meanings that are not strictly tied to the visual image. In PIND / LIND (In between internal & external; 2D ↔ 3D) (2011), the viewer is presented a minimal; yet, surreal diptych. The left panel, a total abstract—autonomous—the visual equivalent to the idea of free association. The right panel, a seemingly dream inspired image—a color photograph of a white origami bird, simply; yet, elegantly lit upon a white background. The work has nothing extra, the visual language is minimal yet open and it successfully evades any one-to-one correspondence with the literary or theoretical.

One cited influence for 4’33”, was Cage’s first experience in the anechoic chamber at Harvard University in 1951. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than reflecting them as echoes. Such a chamber is also externally sound-proofed. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, “I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.” Cage had gone to a place where he expected total silence, and yet heard sound. “Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death.”

A related experience is found in Estonian artist Jaan Toomik’s Waterfall ( 2005 ), a video portraying a man standing in front of a large waterfall. The noise of the waterfall and the environment portrayed is muted. The viewer is presented with a seemingly silent film. Rising-action quickly builds, as does the anxiety within the viewer, when the protagonist’s opens his month preparing to scream. The anticipation is that the video will resolve in an anti-climax—that the film will remain silent. The scream is indeed, left unheard; but, silence is replaced by the ambient rushing sound of the waterfall in the background. This roaring white noise is amplified, along with the tension of the viewer, for just a moment. The video ends as the man closes his mouth and walks off the screen.

Another cited influence for 4’33”, came from the field of the visual arts. Cage’s friend and sometimes colleague Robert Rauschenberg had produced, in 1951, a series of white paintings, seemingly “blank” canvases (though painted with house paint) that in fact change according to varying light conditions in the rooms in which they were hung, the shadows of people in the room and so on. Norwegian artist Janine Magelssen pushes this further in her diminutive wall relief, Wallconstruction V (2012)—small white objects against a white wall, which create effects of light and shadow on their smooth surfaces. The installation and the space changes character according to the shadows of the passing audience.

At first glance, French artist Thomas Fougeirol’s artistic technique can be linked as a similar dramatic art of the absence. In Untitled (2012), the spectator feels invited to mentally shed their habits. He dives into the complexities of an intimate narrative where disappearance and silence map out the space like two impassable banks. Equivalent to Rauschenberg and Cage, Magelssen and Fougeirol use silence as an aural “blank canvas” to reflect the dynamic flux of ambient “sounds” surrounding each piece. Rather than thinking of these work as destructive reductions, it might be more productive to see them as hypersensitive screens—what Cage suggestively described as “airports of the lights, shadows and particles.”

Within Western culture, silence is defined as the relative or total lack of audible sound. By analogy, the word silence may also refer to any absence of communication, even in media other than speech. Yet, silence is used as total communication, in reference to non verbal communication and spiritual connection. It is the absence or omission of mention, comment, or expressed concern. A freedom from the onslaught of thoughts and thought patterns. A state of being forgotten. A bringing to rest or stillness. A hush. A quell. A muzzle.

Media

• Painting
• Photography
• Sculpture
• Installation
• Video installation

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