Paper #2

Janet Cardiff’s To Touch piece at the Milwaukee Art Museum really surprised me in the sense of what it evoked in me emotionally and physically. As a whole, the piece felt very voyeuristic. So many aspects of the piece contributed to this feeling, and it seems I’m not the only one to feel this way. In an interview with Janet Cardiff, Atom Egoyan says "Your characters occupy our physical space. The degree of interaction is profoundly respectful, yet extremely invasive" when talking about Cardiff's piece "Whispering Room." But I found it the opposite with To Touch. I felt like I was the visitor, invading these voices' space.

The obvious, and for good reason, aspect of the piece that I remember well and brought something mysterious to the table (pun intended) was the man and woman voice telling their story of (what sounds like) infidelity. The volume of their voices are soft, but above a whisper, it entices the viewer to listen in, trying to drown out all the other noises that might be playing. It plays with the idea of gossip: hearing a story about an affair is juicy, people want to hear more, rather than just hearing about a baseball game or what happened at the office. And that's exactly what happened to me. There was something mysteriously erotic, because these people didn't know we could hear them (well, theoretically) describing these sexually charged but tamed images like 'the way you touched my wrist' and so on.

At first I was going to discuss another sound that added to this realistic voyeurism, but after starting to write about it I realized that it was the room itself that created a sense of escape for me rather than the sounds. The sounds set up the story and gave me ideas, but if the table and sounds were set up anywhere else, I don’t think it would have had the same effect. The table was placed in a dark room and the noises came from all over. But the fact that it was a dark, empty room without décor, or even speakers to see, made the viewer listen more, and better; it was easier to escape into the sounds. Instead of concentrating on what I was seeing, I was able to concentrate more on the sounds, and thus, I was able to create an image in my head without the distractions of visuals already made for me. It made me feel like a voyeuristic as if I was sitting in my room, heard the neighbors talking, and turned off the lights because I didn’t want anyone to see me.

Cardiff was quoted "We create a reality within a piece" when speaking about hers and her partner George Bures Miller's installations. And rightly so. The way the sounds and the exhibit are presented together create this new reality, and more specifically with the piece, 'To Touch,' voyeurism. You enter a dark room, already you feel like you're hiding, and then sounds are produced and it is almost as if you are trying to see through the dark but really are just imagining what the voices are saying, and in the case of my example, an affair.