Janet Cardiff

http://publicartfund.org/pafweb/projects/04/cardiff_J_04.html

An audio walk in Central Park

June 17 - September 13, 2004


Janet Cardiff, "Her Long Black Hair" Photo: Jessica Kuhn


Janet Cardiff's Her Long Black Hair is a 35-minute journey that begins at Central Park South and transforms an everyday stroll in the park into an absorbing psychological and physical experience. Cardiff takes each listener on a winding journey through Central Park's 19th-century pathways, retracing the footsteps of an enigmatic dark-haired woman. Relayed in a quasi-narrative style, Her Long Black Hair is a complex investigation of location, time, sound, and physicality, interweaving stream-of-consciousness observations with fact and fiction, local history, opera and gospel music, and other atmospheric and cultural elements. At once cinematic and non-linear, Her Long Black Hair uses binaural technology--a means of recording that achieves incredibly precise three-dimensional sound--to create an experience of physical immediacy and complexity.

The walk echoes the visual world as well, using photographs to reflect upon the relationship between images and notions of possession, loss, history, and beauty. Each person receives an audio kit that contains a CD player with headphones as well as a packet of photographs. As Cardiff's voice on the audio soundtrack guides listeners through the park, they are occasionally prompted to pull out and view one of the photographs. These images link the speaker and the listener within their shared physical surroundings of Central Park.

Artist Bio
Janet Cardiff is perhaps best known for her signature audio walks, which she has made in London, Florence, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, St. Louis, and elsewhere. Her gallery installations--often made with George Bures Miller, Cardiff's husband and artistic collaborator--use the narrative and technical language of film noir to create lush, suspenseful sound and video works.

Janet Cardiff was born in Canada in 1957; she and Miller currently live and work in Berlin. They have recently had exhibitions at Luhring Augustine, New York (2004); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2003); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2002); and National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2002). A recent mid-career retrospective, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works, Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller, opened at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, Queens, in 2001 and has since traveled to Montreal, Oslo, and Turin.

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.