"The notion that art should provide a window on the world has been well established at least since the mid-fifteenth century, when Leon Battista Alberti laid out the principles for representing space through the system of one-point perspective. Conceiving the picture plane as a stage on which objects were arranged in diminishing scale, the artist drew the eye into the painting and hence away from any of the distracting apparatus that might have dispelled the illusion."
This idea of a singular perspective is similar to the establishment of the institution and its one-way path to success, its ability to ignore the ‘distracting apparatus’ that is art unbound by rules and conventions. Since the early 1990’s artists have explored this symbolic relationship between art and its institutions within their practice. Questioning and observing the hierarchy between curators, collectors, and artists; the commercialisation of art; the role of the audience; the housing and display of art. ect. Canadian artist Janet Cardiff is one such artist who is exploring the role of the physical gallery space of the institution. Cardiff works with sound and video within her practice and is perhaps best known for her signature audio walks, which she has made extensively internationally. Her gallery installations - often made in collaboration with George Bures Miller, Cardiff’s husband - are narrative and suspenseful sound and video works.
Cardiff’s audio walks transform an everyday stroll into an absorbing psychological and physical experience. In these walks Cardiff reinvents the audio walks offered at museums that explain current exhibitions, focusing not on the exhibition itself but instead a fictional narrative. The viewer is given a headset and simply follows the instructions of the voice. Most walks begin in an institutional space then either diverges outdoors or inwards into classified parts within the institution. The viewer is enveloped within a cinematic and non-linear experience as retrace the footsteps of another with no idea of what is to come. Cardiff’s audio walks invite and guide the viewer to notice and appreciate something from a different perspective. By removing her works from within the institution Janet Cardiff’s exploration in the physicality of art and the housing of art is clear.
Bibliography
Books
Phoenix Art Museum. Constructing New Berlin: contemporary art made in Berlin/Phoenix Art Museum; [transi. From the German by: James Roderick O- Donovan], Munich: Prestel, 2006.
Art and its institutions: current conflicts, critique and collaborations/edited by Nina Montamann, London: Black Dog Publishings, 2006.
Heartney, Elenor. Art & Today. New York: Phaidon Press Ltd. 2008. Art and it’s Institiutions
Websites
City Gallery Wellingtons, Janet Cardiff: The Forty-Part Motet Exhibition Notes Issue #01, http://www.cardiffmiller.com/press/texts/Curatorial%20Notes JCardiff Web.pdf
[Accessed 19 sept 2010]
Janet Cardiff Bures Miller, http://www.cardiffmiller.com/index.html
[Accessed 19 Sept 2010]
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