Janet Cardiff:
Her Long Black Hair
an audio walk in Central Park presented by Public Art Fund
June 17 - September 13, 2004
35 minute audio
kit available at a kiosk at 59th Street and Sixth Avenue, Thursday through
Monday, 9:30am to 5pm. The last audio kit pick-up time is 5pm. Reservations
are recommended and can be made by calling 212-446-9529 by 4pm the day
before.
By VICTORIA
LUDWIN
One of the delightful aspects
about seeing New York in the movies is watching how someone else can
take the landscapes and buildings we see every day and show them from
a new perspective. Through film, everyday New York can be transformed
into art. The quotidian becomes notable. With her 35-minute audio tour
through Central Park entitled "Her Long Black Hair," Janet
Cardiff transforms a place frequented by thousands of people per day
into a series of spontaneous glimpses of beauty shadowed by the imprint
of history. Despite that Cardiff provides only the audio and a few snapshots,
the overall effect she invokes is filmic: our eyes become the camera.
For New Yorkers, a walk in
the park is a commonplace event; we do it on a regular basis, alone
and with others. Walking seems to loosen something in our heads and
tongues; it gives us space to try out ideas and ruminate. In the park
on a stroll, we can have very private conversations or thoughts alongside
thousands of people, who may also be doing exactly the same thing. Janet
Cardiff capitalizes on this privacy in her audio walk; she intimately
draws us in to a monologue that appears to meander from topic to topic,
although these fragments of ideas and stories have been as deftly placed
as stones in an archway, each supporting the whole.
In a dreamy, pondering voice, Cardiff directs us step by step through
the park, pointing out characters in and aspects of the landscape. She
begins by asking us to take out a picture from the set of five she's
provided. It is a scene at the corner of 59th St. and Sixth Avenue,
where a crowd of spectators sits and listens to a band play. The women
in the photo wear hats, dating the image to the nineteen sixties. To
evoke the scene, Cardiff plays the sounds of the crowd as well as the
band while our eyes travel back and forth from the photo then to the
corner today, void of spectators yet seemingly full of the band's sound.
Cardiff riffs on this play between what's there and what isn't, visually
and aurally, throughout the entire walk. She points out details, such
as the pond, that are there and others, such as the ducks on the pond,
that may or may not be. At first we think we have missed something that
Cardiff sees, until quickly it becomes apparent that Cardiff isn't talking
about our present experience but someone else's at another point in
time. She uses binaural technology in order to extend this game to our
ears, by placing sound in three dimensional space outside us. Sirens
approach and pass us; conversations happen just over our shoulders;
Cardiff's aural scenes blend in with the real sounds of Central Park,
mixing past and present, real and unreal.
In five places during the
walk, Cardiff asks us to stop, pull out a picture, and compare it with
the setting in front of us. Each time we see the same landscape in the
present as we do in the photograph, but the foreground is always different.
The effect reminds us of how frequented Central Park is, and although
we feel we are having a singular, private experience, many other people
have felt the same way and have recorded it in photography (so we are
led to believe). Thematically, the photographs reinforce time and again
the idea of events and history imprinting themselves on a particular
place.
This theme Cardiff exercises several times throughout the multiple narratives
she introduces during the walk. What initially feels like the tangential
monologuing of a late night phone conversation starts to coalesce into
hints and scraps of several overlapping narratives: Orphée's
and Euridyce's walk from the underworld, a slave's escape on foot to
the north, a lover's declamation, the photographs of the woman with
long black hair, and references to Baudelaire. The delicate balance
of these narratives together give structure and shape to the piece while
bearing the load of Cardiff's thematic overtures. They also give the
mind a place to follow and mysteries to pick through as the feet move
through the park according to Cardiff's instructions.
The partial narrative and
its inherent intrigue have turned up frequently in Cardiff's art. However,
with so many threads tramping over the same thematic ground in Her Long
Black Hair, Cardiff's message comes out perhaps too clear. More than
once, she compels the viewer not to look back on the walk. Then she
explains the mythical story of Orphée, who could not look back
at his wife when retrieving her from the underworld. Then she uses sound
to make us feel as though someone were right behind us. Her use of photographs
is compelling, although midway through the walk she states outright,
"There are so many layers
in front of my eyes" and we can't help but feel we got that message
a while back. Even though the audio walk is evanescent in nature, the
themes are overtly and repeatedly pronounced, which is unusual for an
artist who has in the past relished in the mystery of the inchoate.
The narrative about the woman
with the long black hair is the least formed and the one of the few
tied to Central Park. Cardiff asks the viewer to take out photographs
of the woman with long black hair at different points, exact places
where the photos of the woman were taken. Cardiff wonders about the
woman and her life, tries to eke out hints from the photographs about
who the woman was. Since Cardiff spends much of the audio walk exploring
the idea of history marking itself on a place, it's surprising Cardiff
didn't choose to tie all her narratives specifically to Central Park
and its history; the story of Orphée and of the slave's escape
could be used in any audio walk placed anywhere in the country. We can
only assume she chose universality over specificity.
Be that as it may, Cardiff
creates magic for long-jaded New Yorkers: turning the most quotidian
of places into somewhere new, studded with beautiful but fleeting detail,
while also haunted by not only our own pasts, but those of everyone
before us. The pensive journey encourages us to divine beauty from the
present, visually and aurally, before it slips away to the past.
Victoria Ludwin's
fiction and non-fiction have appeared in BOMB, CITY, Riotgrrl, River
Oak Review and other publications. Currently, she is finishing her novel.
