JUDITH BARRY

INTERVIEW

JUDITH BARRY / INTERVIEW

During the post-production phase of her installation VOICE Off, Judith Barry discussed the ideas underlying the work with the architect Ken Saylor.

Ken Saylor What does the title mean? VOICE Off recalls the titles of films such as Blow-Up or Blow-Out or even The Conversation. Descriptive titles that don’t give too much away, but which frame these films.

Judith Barry I was wondering how to find a title for something as intangible and as difficult to speak about as the voice. This project about the specificity of the voice within the body, a project that tries to make apparent the desire, complexity, tragic loss and estrangedness of the situation of the voice of the body, as it might be represented cinematically. It seemed to me that I needed a title which was declarative, but which also crystallized what was at stake. Like the titles you mentioned, and like the title of the Straub-Huillet film Not Reconciled, the one I found does that.

KS Why did you design the physical space of the installation in the manner you did?

JB The physical set-up is fairly simple. A room is built that is bisected by a wall which is positioned so as to divide the room in two equal halves. To go between the two spaces, the viewer must physically enter and exit the room. On each side of the wall that splits this bisected room, a video projection is seen, so that each space stages a different kind of experience of the voice. On one side, a dreamlike sequence unfolds that represents some of the personal, intimate and interior encounters that one might have with the voice—with your own voice, for instance, or with other voices. These are overheard bits of speech, interior monologues, snatches of songs, the kinds of things caught while moving through daily life. On the other side, there is someone in a different situation; listening and trying to come to terms with what is heard. At a certain point in the montage, these two sides come together in a narrative sense, only to be separated again.

KS What happens? And what is the audience left to reconcile?

JB On what I am calling the dream-like side of the wall, there is a woman. (Or maybe she is two different women, playing the same character.) And she has many stories, many encounters, all which have to do with her possession by different kinds of voices, her attempts to possess these voices, to make the voices sound at all. A lot of the action takes place on the soundtrack. Various things happen in voice-overs and voice-offs; sometimes a voice finds her and suddenly is speaking differently then before. There are also utterances, other languages, other sounds and songs. She is affected by the sounds she hears, enveloped by them. All these divergent sounds provoke different reactions in her, in essence, the viewer construes the narrative from these sounds. On the opposite side of the wall, in a naturalistic setting, we see a man working at a desk, walking around, reading, lying down. He talks to himself, he talks on the phone, he listens to music—and we hear the things that he does as exaggerated sounds. Drifting through the wall, from the other side, he hears something. It seems to get louder and louder, and he becomes more and more curious about where the sound is coming from. He is still trying to work, and after a while these sounds are quite annoying. He can’t tell where they are coming from. It begins to drive him crazy. He begins listening intensely all over the room. He sets up a reel-to-reel tape recorder and begins recording the sound, just to have it as evidence. Finally he can stand it no longer. Trying to trace the sound he begins to dismantle his office, disturbing the natural order of his life because of his desire to know where the sound is coming from and exactly what it is. Every so often he hears a voice of a woman singing, and there is something about her voice that haunts him. Finally, he decides that it has to be coming from his large bookshelf. He pulls the books off the shelves, all the while looking to see if someone is playing a cruel joke. Earlier he heard a car alarm again and again, and that had broken his concentration; now he hears various voices, a voice, her voice… it is too much to bear. By now the shelves are down and he is staring at the wall of his office. The sounds are still there. He thinks he hears someone laughing. He finds a golf club and begins battering the wall. Now he hears opera—a beautiful voice. He wants to find it. He continues to bash the wall, which crumbles bit by bit. And just as he succeeds in making a large enough hole to squeeze through, the song ends. He enters the other side, but no one is there. She has gone and he is all alone. At this point in the montage, we see him breaking through to “her” side and we see him simultaneously from the front on her side of the screen and from the back on his side. He lingers aimlessly for a while, and then goes back into his space. I am not asking the audience to reconcile what happens here. What I am trying to show what this loss, in all its many forms, might look like.

KS Can you describe how the staging is meant to work?

JB In a sense I see the actual structure of the installation as a kind of demonstrative room; similar to Lissitzky’s Proun spaces. The viewer can shuttle back and forth between two competing kinds of aural registrars, each with various scopic elements. I wanted to do more than just demonstrate how we are possessed by sound, by the voice, by our abilities to become what we hear, to be different because of it, and to transform through it as we do when we speak other languages or sing, for instance. Both sides of the screen stage a common occurrence, yet one I see as tragic. These two ideas try to show the attempt to possess the voice, and as the same time the finality of its loss at the moment when it no longer can be felt or heard. It tried to structure the installation to replicate the situation of this recurrent tragedy. I refer to this as “staging” because I am trying to foreground something that we take for granted most of the time about our own voices and the voices of others. All my installations are staged or architected to produce very specific effects in the viewers as the pieces unfold and act on the spectators. For instance, the fact that you physically have to go between the two sides of the bisected room in order to view the entire installation is very important. The spectator, seeing the projection unfold from both sides, has more knowledge than the characters on either screen, but also realizes that there is no possibility of affecting the outcome. The viewer can do nothing but watch. And in watching, the viewer feels both suspense and loss. When you pass from one side to the other, you lose the sense of mastery and control that you normally enjoy when watching a conventional film. You know that you are not seeing what is happening on the other side. You are experiencing a loss along with the characters on the screen. And in this sense, coupled with the storyline, that provokes a sense that provokes a sense of tragedy. In tragedy we usually know what will happen. What is at stake is understanding this outcome an feeling the effects. That is what I am after in this project.

KS Is it still a tragedy when a scream ends? Are we sad that the scream leaves? Of course, it is a tragedy when the scream ends and you are still in danger and cannot scream for whatever reason. You may already be dead!

JB In thinking about how to represent the status of the voice, I was struck most by the tragedy that is enacted at moments of possession and loss. I suppose I cold have tried to stage the experience of not reacting to possession and loss. I suppose that I could have tried to stage the experience of not reacting to the possession and loss; to some extent I do that on the side which is about the listener. The listener is a person who cannot do anything about what he hears, I wanted to underscore the listener’s knowledge of his loss. To have tragedy, in the sense that I am using it, requires that there be an implied agency, some idea of intention. I was most intrigued by the notion that a voice can possess us completely; or that we can find and lose identity in the various voices we can assume, or that we can have various reactions to the realization that the voice is gone and the multiplicity of identities has faded. So there is more than one kind of possession and loss at risk here. You mention affect and I think that is what is in jeopardy here. I was trying to unpack some ideas about the voice, aurality, and the primacy of the visual. When I began developing the project, I thought I was tracing all the ways that the voice had been used in the cinema, but as I began to do that, the project led me somewhere else. It seems to me that the aural and the visual affect the body very differently. (I am thinking here of Fredric Jameson’s distinction between affect and effect.) There is a way you can give yourself over to the voice when you tell yourself or cannot help yourself.