Just checked out “The House of Books has no Windows” by Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, the Canadian husband ‘n’ wife-style installation art team so beloved by Documenta-style curators, and after doing so I wished I hadn’t bothered. It’s just ending at Modern Art Oxford, although I still prefer to call the place by its old name Oxford Museum of Modern Art. According of MOMA, Janet ‘n’ George “create visual and spatial theatres that invoke altered states of perception”. I’m not entirely sure what an “altered state of perception” is, but if it is a synonym for an “altered state of consciousness” then whoever wrote the blurb can’t be faulted on the accuracy of their assessment. The boredom this show induced in me was a major alteration from the state of psychedelic curiosity and alertness that I’d been enjoying before I arrived at MOMA.
In the lower gallery is the installation “Dark Pool” dating back to 1995. The room is littered with debris and as you move around it, bits of pre-recorded music and speech are triggered but fail to amount to anything much. Upstairs is “Opera For A Small Room” (2005) in which a load of junk is piled up in a shop-like construction: records spin silently while a poorly edited sound collage blares, at one point it moves from awful opera to the Percy Sledge soul classic “When A Man Loves A Woman” and back to awful opera. Janet ‘n’ George clearly don’t know how to use sound, or do installation, and their work is unnecessarily fussy and complicated. Presumably we’re supposed to admire their effort and industry, but since the work itself falls flat on its face, I don’t see why I should be wowed by the technical difficulties this art world insider-outsider couple confront in realising their (party) pieces.
Next up is “The Muriel Lake Incident” (1999), a piss poor piece of video art that plays back on the screen of a miniature cinema. On the soundtrack Janet whispers at ‘silent George’ as if we are sitting through a ‘real’ movie screening. There is a psycho loose among the imaginary audience at this fictional film screening, and eventually we hear gunshots followed by male laughter. Incredibly, this actually succeeds in making the exceedingly crass Sid Vicious “My Way” audience murder sequence in “The Great Rock N Roll Swindle” (1980) look sophisticated by way of comparison.
After the previous works, the simplicity with which “Road Trip” (2005) is executed comes as a great relief. MOMA describe it as taking “the form of an automated slide show. It is accompanied by the voices of Cardiff and Miller discussing the slides and how they might make a work out of them… The slides were taken by Miller’s grandfather on a trip that he made from Calgary to New York City… While looking at the slides the artists discovered that they could trace his journey by recognising landmarks.” “Road Trip” is not a great work, the audio pretence that Janet ‘n’ George are looking at the slides for the first time as they speak is overly contrived and becomes grating, but at least this piece isn’t embarrassingly bad.
There is a family guide to the exhibition with things to get children to do and questions to ask them. I can’t be arsed to answer all the questions here… but I’ll take them up on “Road Trip”:
Q. What was the last big journey you went on?
A. It was on the Oxford Express bus service from Baker Street in London to Oxford.
Q. Where did you go?
A. I went to the Oxford Museum of Modern Art to see “The House of Books Has No Windows” by Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller.
Q. Did you take any photographs of that journey?
A. No.
Q. See if you can find old photographs, they could be family snaps or ever old postcards. Choose a selection and create your own story.
A. Are you taking this piss or what? I already did this and before Janet ‘n’ John, oops I mean George, in my 2004 film about my mother “The Eclipse & Re-Emergence of the Oedipus Complex”. For more information see:
http://stewarthomesociety.org/art/film.htm
The show takes its title from “The House of Books Has No Windows” (2008), which is a child’s playhouse constructed from old books. Thankfully this piece has no sound. But it isn’t particularly impressive, just a little construction for kids to play inside. In a failed attempt to hold viewer interest, the books are piled up with the spines facing outwards, so that the audience can glance at the titles. If I’d seen something I’d wanted to read I might have pulled it out, but I’d already read plenty of Thomas de Quincey and I was unable to spot another author who interested me. Besides, the construction would have been better if the spines had faced inward, since the books were hardbacks and would have resembled bricks if they’d placed this way around.
Finally there was “The Killing Machine” (2007): “an electric dental chair draped in pink fun fur… encircled by a megaphone speaker and robotic arms that move attacking an invisible victim. Revolving lights flash from a suspended glitter ball and an ominous soundtrack is heard. Activated by pushing the red button, we have the choice of merely observing or becoming an active participant in the sinister performance.” Virtually nothing in the description provided by MOMA is correct. Most of the time since this piece was first put on public display it hasn’t worked; it has suffered an ongoing series of mechanical breakdowns. The Janet ‘n’ George show was previously on at Edinburgh Fruitmarket and I understand “The Killing Machine” was almost permanently broken in Scotland. But the time it arrived in Oxford, some technical improvements resulted in the work mainly breaking down at the weekends, because higher visitor numbers on Saturdays and Sundays resulted in the red button being pressed more frequently then; but this would also put it out of operation in the early part of the week as it underwent repairs. Clearly Janet ‘n’ George should have refrained from exhibiting this work until they’d worked through the technical problems it raised. I went to MOMA on a Friday and seeing the work in action I was left underwhelmed. The soundtrack in particular is dreadful. It is stuffed full of cheap horror film theatrics that even a below-par straight to video director would reject.
The family guide to the Janet ‘n’ George show pretty much ends with the following provocation:
Q. If you had to use one word to describe what you have seen today, what would that one word be?”
A. Crap.
Okay that’s a cheap shot but it is exactly what this extravagantly expensive flop deserves. MOMA has hosted some incredible shows such as the “Gustav Metzger Retrospective” (25 October 1998-10 January 1999), and I bet that only cost a fraction of the money spent on the Janet ‘n’ George fiasco. This exhibition sucked like an infant that had missed a milk feed! If you avoided it then you’re very lucky!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ – you know it makes (no) sense!