Lost in the Memory Palace | The Dark Pool
I N T E R V I E W I N T E R V I E W Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have created, each in their particular way, a contemporary version of son et lumière. Not for the sake of spectacle, although the theatrical is a tool they find engaging and functional, having used it to good effect in many of their pieces. In fact, Janet Cardiff's voice in your ears, winding through your cochlea, insinuating itself thoroughly into your cognitive operations, is as theatrical an event as the average person would wish to experience. It's a cousin–for effectiveness–to another theatrical use of the ear. Think of Claudius, uncle to Hamlet, pouring poison in the king's ear and how direct a device that was. In the case of Cardiff and Bures Miller, however, we have an intimate, not toxic, potion coiling to the consciousness of the listener.Janet Cardiff said, in the interview that follows, that the primary thing about her work is the "physical aspect of sound," its effect on the body, not the work's narrative quality. Cardiff's and Bures Miller's intention is to build with sound and make the aural material, give it the dimensionality of sculpture, realize it synaesthetically. And this they do.Fix the headphones to your ears, turn on the portable CD player, and what you have is the ear quickening the heart, the ear tightening the belly. One sense is stimulated, another feels the probe. You follow the recorded voice, you do as you're told, you're walking but you wouldn't say you were a flâneur. This is not idle strolling; it is directed. When you pressed start you gave up control. It's the way they want it, these collaborators, well-schooled in the techniques of film noir. While you're wearing the headphones they are the directors and what you see as you look out from the space inside your head–this real world that you see–accommodates their production and becomes the "visual" of the film they're directing. For the duration of the audio walk, the world is their temporal theatre. There is a sense of menace, there's the sexual frisson of having yielded control and then there's the unavoidable intimacy of someone's voice, someone's breath soft in your ear. There's the startled dissonance, the anxious confusion you feel when what you hear is betrayed by what you see, and then–what is to be believed? That disorienting rush triggers the adrenalin that moves you to startle or smile or cry out–exactly the mix Cardiff and Bures Miller are after. It's their gift to you of making things fresh, of heightening your awareness.What they do in their work is juxtapose sound and sight, and the sensory information received from ear and eye builds a new structure, a montaged and layered perception. It's this subtle complexity, this layering that gives the work its pull and weight. Apprehending it, then, becomes a process of archaeology as the various strata reveal and yield up their histories.Seeing is believing. We know that. And Cardiff's and Bures Miller's work urges us also to utter, 'I can't believe my ears.' They offer a richness and confusion of senses that up-ends the platitudes we draw on for comfort and when we've experienced their pieces we recognize that indeed they perform as art ought to do. They take you away, move you along, show you things fresh, enchant you, transport you and return you safe. And most remarkably–safe, but not unaltered. Robert Enright interviewed Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller in Toronto in November 2000 when they returned to Ontario to film footage for their Venice work, The Paradise Institute.BORDER CROSSINGS: I want to start with how you began to collaborate.JANET CARDIFF: We started collaborating when we first met. I was a grad student at the University of Alberta and George was an undergraduate. He was a painter and I was doing printmaking and we met through a friend. George had this idea that he was going to quit and go to film school in Montreal. We both had an interest in narrative film, so we'd go to screenings together. We'd do things with experimental sound and then we started doing these short films with George's friends from high school. Ironically, they ended up going into film school and we didn't.GEORGE BURES MILLER: Those were just experiments. We also did this super-eight feature film called Guardian Angel; it had a really bad plot that we don't want to go into.JC: It had a car-chase scene in it and detectives.GBM: A movie is not a movie without a car chase, in my opinion. Actually, we discovered from the experience that we weren't really interested in becoming filmmakers because of the whole collaborative aspect. You have to get so many people involved. Even with super-eight it's still a huge process. But our first official collaboration happened with The Dark Pool.JC: You know how it is, living with someone who's working on a project; you help them out and they help you out. I was doing printmaking and George was very involved in helping me print. I'd say, what do you think of this? I'd be going on and on. In many ways our whole practice is still based on the same model. We work individually on our own stuff but if I need someone to do camera work or help out in any way, then George helps out. I do the same when he needs help. The only problem is I'm not as useful as he is.BC: Is it the project that determines when you do individual work as opposed to when you collaborate, or do you set out from the beginning to say, I think it's time we collaborated on something?GBM: No, it's a development. We're always talking ideas, but if we develop an idea together, then it becomes a collaborative project. With The Dark Pool I think Janet had been asked to do a residency at Western Front. We'd been talking about this larger project for a long time but because we were both busy with our individual work, we'd never had that chance. Then Western Front basically said, if you want to do a collaborative piece, that's fine. But it developed out of discussing whether an installation involving all these diverse materials would work. What was interesting about doing The Dark Pool was we'd been working separately for 10 years, but when we started to collaborate, it became a bit confusing. When I work for Janet or Janet works for my projects, there's always a boss. I throw in all kinds of comments about her work but if it's her project she makes the final decision. When we were working on The Dark Pool we'd have arguments and there was no one to make the final decision.BC: Because nobody was the boss?GBM: Exactly. Also I think we discovered a lot about how we individually approach making art. We work very differently.JC: It's a very subtle difference if someone's leading a project or if someone's giving creative input. For my walks I lead the project and then George does the editing. I couldn't use anyone else because George is really a very 24 25 below: Janet Cardiff,In Real Time, 1999, audio, video walk, Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh. Photographcourtesy Luhring Augustine, NY. Robert Enright, "Pleasure Principals: The Art of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller," Border Crossings (78) 2001.