Feasts For The Eyes And Ears

By Richard Lacayo

Almost every art has its technology. Painting is an ancient mud process. Welded-steel sculpture required the invention of the welding torch. Janet Cardiff's breakthrough work required--the Walkman. Ten years ago, while thinking about a new artwork, she was walking through a cemetery in the Canadian town of Banff, reading into a tape recorder the names she found on old gravestones. At one point, she rewound the tape, then replayed it to find where she had left off. That is how she first had the disorienting experience of hearing herself describe a walk while she was still in the setting where she had taken it. Listening to the recorded sound of her footsteps, she thought, "This is really weird."

Remember--in art, sometimes, weird is good. (Words to that effect must have gone through Georges Braque's mind as he found his way into Cubism.) From that lucky accident, Cardiff got the idea for an artwork that would be a kind of surreal tour through the woods, one in which her stream-of-consciousness monologue would course idly through the trees. She offered cassettes to friends, who could play the tapes on a Walkman while they followed her path on a map. As she free associated and dreamed out loud, the trusty woods would be unsteadied a bit in their minds.

Her friends didn't always get it. But times have changed. Earlier this year, Cardiff, 44, who grew up on a farm in Brussels, Ont., represented Canada at the Venice Biennale with a sound-and-film installation that she produced with her husband George Bures Miller. Next week a mid-career survey of her work opens at P.S. 1, a New York City museum affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art. "It's amazing," she says, "what 10 years will do to public understanding of what is art."

Digitally manipulated photographs and the crafted "realities" of reality TV have prepared us all for The Telephone Call, a Cardiff video walk available at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. As you roam through galleries and into the museum's back stairwell, you watch prerecorded images of that route on the foldout screen of a small video camera. But that pedestrian journey is transformed by Cardiff's deadpan reveries, choral music and the sound of ghostly footsteps.

Cardiff is a technogeek. To produce the illusion that her voice is emanating from a point within your brain, she uses special microphones that she builds herself. She loves electronics for the possibilities it provides her. "In some ways, technology has directed the content of my art," she says. What she means is, things give her ideas.

--By Richard Lacayo