The Hirshhorn Museum announced on Tuesday the finalized plan for Janet Cardiff's "Directions" show—an audio walk on the National Mall:
Visitors will individually start out from the Hirshhorn’s lobby with an Apple iPod shuffle that delivers audio directions instructing the visitor where to walk. Directed by the voice of the artist—which is interspersed among enhanced recordings of ambient sounds, a cappella music, excerpts from historic speeches and snippets of interviews with individuals who recount their Mall experience—participants will pass through the Hirshhorn plaza and Sculpture Garden, along the National Mall and through other Smithsonian museums. Cardiff’s voice-over also includes instructions and references to specific artworks, buildings and vistas as visitors approach them on the predetermined route. The work is designed to be an individual experience and will be administered in a way that prevents participants from overlapping at any point along the route of the walk.There was talk about Cardiff creating an open sound installation for the Mall, which brought to mind Bruce Nauman's Raw Materials for the Tate's Turbine Hall, but the rumor had it that that project got canned—something like that.
Regardless, I want to be first in line for this. The playful take on "directions" is smooth, and I loved Cardiff and George Bures Miller's The Paradise Institute, a cinema installation for the Canadian Pavillion at the 2001 Venice Biennale and a work I've had a chance to see a few times since then. (It's a real crowd-pleaser wherever it goes.) Probably we'll hear more talk about how Apple is horning in on the museum, once the show goes live.
Incidentally: Has anyone seen/heard Cardiff and Miller's Pandemonium sound installation at Eastern State Penitentiary near Philly? I'm going to make my way up to see it in the near future—obviously I need to time this trip to coincide with the opening of George Romero's Land of the Dead, since any creepy sound installation set in a prison ultimately describes a zombie escape.
Posted by Kriston at June 3, 2005 1:27 PMi don't understand how they keep people from overlapping. what if i decide to stay in the same place for a long time?
what i think would be really really cool would be if they generated the instructions on-the-fly before uploading them so as to control the distribution of people in the mall....
Posted by: seth at June 8, 2005 5:47 PMThe Pandemonium exhibit at Eastern State, my first experience with Cardiff's work, really left an impression on me. Though it was advertised as scary and gloomy, I really found it to be mostly uplifting, with only a touch of eery, forlorn, longing. Here was a place where prisoners, confined to small cells, found a way to entertain themselves, perhaps communicate, and probably irk prison guards. The sun beamed in through the open roof the day I visited the prison. The thumps and rat-a-tat-tats ricocheted through the long, open, empty space. A friend said he thought this exhibit wasn't as intimate or personal as Cardiff's Central Park headphones walk from last year. I think that was just the point: to take in the exhibit and share the resonance of the sounds, lights, and smells with others -- just like, perhaps, the prisoners once managed to do themselves while locked in solitary confinement.
Posted by: tma at June 13, 2005 2:13 PM