Hearing, Loss, and No Comment | Thomas Ragnar, Bridget Chappell & Joel Sherwood-Spring
Over the months of February and March 2020, I organized a series of group-work sessions with approximately 25 artists and non-artists in Wurundjeri country. These sessions ran in conjunction with Bridget Chappell’s exhibition No Comment, a project commissioned with Liquid Architecture for Blindside Gallery. Throughout these sessions Joel Sherwood- Spring’s video work Hearing, Loss (2019) was held closely in mind. Consider this conver- sation one of many extensions from those sessions.
Joel is a Wiradjuri man, raised between Redfern and Alice Springs and trained in archi- tecture, whose work focuses on the contested narratives of Australia’s urban culture and Indigenous histories in the face of on-going colonization. Bridget is an artist working with sound from Aotearoa (New Zealand). Their work concerns magical realism, rave culture, and abolition. I invited Joel and Bridget to work through a set of positions that concern their distinct artistic investigations into the sonic armature of state surveillance and control. By emphasizing sound, we’re pivoting away from predominant assumptions that center sight and image in discourses concerning these surveillant regimes of power and their racialized applications.
Thomas: I want to start this exchange with a work from outside of it. C: AR (BP) + TA (AP) is a black monochrome painting by Karin Schneider from 2016. It constitutes the letter “C” in her A–Z lexicon of black monochromes. C is for “cancellation” and is fol- lowed by the initials of Ad Reinhart (Black Painting) and Tarsila do Amaral (Abaporu). The painting foregrounds and annuls the two artistic programs. Reinhart’s style of black painting (1953–1967) is the predominant image; however, as you move your body around the canvas a second image, the figure from Tarsila do Amaral’s 1928 painting Abaporu, becomes visible through its contours in an almost indiscernibly lighter shade of black. Abaporu inspired Oswald de Andrade, Tarsila’s husband at the time, to write the Manifesto Antropófago. Andrade wrote of a Brazilian drive to “swallow” colonialist European culture. He emphasized the metaphor of cultural cannibalism in developing an aesthetic practice and social critique of Brazil’s cultural and economic dependence on Europe.
C: AR (BP) + TA (AP) is deceptive in its historical lineage: only after an intimate appraisal of the painting’s surface do its cannibalistic phantasies press into view. Schneider represents these phantasies of critique through embodying and redeploying those instru- ments and technologies of aesthetic and historical power, in this case black painting, directly.
Both of your works figure themselves within such an exchange in a similar way. As I see it, both emphasize this “swallowing” method of cancellation by using and inverting instruments of power directly, from an embedded and embodied position. For Joel it’s the otoscope and for Bridget it’s the police siren. I’m cautious to draw a line between black paintings and cops or racist teachers but they hold similarly valorized positions of omnipotence within their respective fields.
To start, could you both briefly describe Hearing, Loss and No Comment respectively? Joel: Hearing, Loss is a two-channel video that comprises a recorded conversation between my mum, who worked as a researcher, educator and activist within the Indigenous healthcare systems, and me. The conversation covers her work treating otitis media, an inflammatory disease of the middle ear that afflicts Indigenous children at higher rates than any other people in the world. The audio has been treated with a series of manipula- tions that attempt to reproduce the disruptive effect of otitis media on auditory function. The video is of both of our tympanic membranes captured through an otoscope.
Bridget: No Comment is an exhibition project that collects studio experiments and specu- lations toward a life sonically exempt from the police. Informed by rave, graffiti, and protest cultures, it reimagines the dub cornerstone “mobile sound system” as a large- scale phase-cancellation device that’s based on the same design principles as noise-cancel- ling headphones. The sound system is supposed to be aimed at police sirens. Basically, a grid of microphones picks up the siren, which is sent to the speakers and then the sound wave is flipped, sending the original signal back on itself creating an instance of active muting through phase cancellation. No Comment asks what space is made available in our minds without the instinctive reflex fear of the police that’s largely initiated by sirens.
But Covid-19 canceled the show.
T: Both your works concern themselves less explicitly with models of aesthetic phenom- ena, but they both are so deeply rooted in the visceral and felt dimensions of perception. That dynamic of both of your projects, the visceral, is not usually foregrounded. Instead I think their educational function is emphasized. Joel, your work takes place literally inside the body; in some sense, Bridget’s does too.
J: Consumption of resources in colonies and colonialism is limited and controlled. It is also internal; it happens inside. The distribution of those resources in the present makes it dif- ficult to listen to ourselves and to each other.
Thomas, we’ve considered “hearing” as a resource together before; in this way, hearing is operational in relation to colonialism. Embedded in the work is the assertion that the ear is a site of contest in colonialism. The ear is an architecture sure, but it is a site and a threshold of historical, colonial, political, social, and aesthetic struggle. Aesthetically the ear is just the frame through which otitis media is observed, where symptoms of infec- tion are witnessed. The ear is also a site, spatially, for the transmission of information. Mum saw a lot of kids go undiagnosed for a long time, with terrible health consequences because teachers often understood the complaint of an Indigenous kid as a means to be dis- ruptive rather than a legitimate complaint of pain or discomfort. The complaint would be heard differently if it were a white kid.
I’m interested in “address”: who do you “address” in the work you make? Hearing, Loss explicitly reminds you, the viewer, that you are listening in. There’s power in not addressing white people or whiteness directly. Most media is addressing the white straight gaze duh, but the product of that is anyone who doesn’t occupy that subjectivity is forced to develop empathy, or a sympathetic ear, in order to “participate” in that media. Pretty quickly too, that forced empathy is needed just to enjoy a T.V. show or a movie or an artwork. So not addressing certain people is a productive and generous thing, I’d even say an act of love, in the James Baldwin sense of love and art in that it “makes you con- scious of the things you don’t see,” or hear (1973, 41).
T: As an artist working with sound, your casting of it as a material resource, a thing, is important to stress. And in identifying the ear as a “site” of contestation the ear is cast as a frontline or blockade. I’d say a similar valence is present in No Comment, where there is a realignment of what we imagine the historically persistent “frontline” to be.
B: Address is especially important when sound is the medium because you can’t close your ears as you can your eyes. There’s a type of captivity to hearing then. When Indigenous kids with otitis media are getting in trouble in class for not listening, obviously “listening” is perceived as always intentional and facilitated by a passive ability to hear ... to hear the imperative voice of colonialism in the classroom. So colonialism requires a perpetual openness and passivity or susceptibility to its voice.
In the development of No Comment I often wished for a sonic frequency that only police could hear. But it’s an oversimplification of what the police is conceptually, right? Given that assisting or colluding with them is enabled in so many who don’t wear a badge, I guess theoretically it’s a frequency any of us could hear.
The “cultural cannibalism” concept was developed prior to Edward Said’s “oriental- ism,” and I wonder how they might interface.
T: I see the cannibal as having a relationship with orientalist phantasies, but it’s not a relationship I’ve specifically considered before. Maybe the cannibal eats the orientalist and then through digestion produces new models and images, as waste, that are distanced from their originating and orientalizing typologies. Bridget, I see you as eating the cop in some regards, maybe eating the cop in the heads of your audience as well.
B: Yes – what my machine sets out to do is eat the cop and spit them back out at themselves.
It can be a bit of a slam dunk in any conversation about resistance to power but Audre Lorde’s famous maxim “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is present in our discussion. What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? The masters’ tools may be almost every- where we look. How many of the master’s tools were stolen to begin with?
Maybe the cops should be forced to eat themselves – that could end the redundant discussion of whether violence is a legitimate tactic.
T: Both projects center the absence of sound instead of the production of new sounds, and they use that absence tactically. Your projects differ from a Cageian silence, in that they don’t foreground context, or the activity of listening. The composition 4′33′′ has more to do with the ritual of gathering for live music than it does with the materiality of silence as such. In contrast, these works demonstrate the capacity for selective and purpo- seful applications of silence in an effort to allow other sounds that may otherwise not come into audible range.
J: After making Hearing, Loss and recording many more interviews to be placed in con- versation with the first piece, the idea of “hearing loss” has become a method to investigate many other things. Listening to silence and what is implied by the absence of sound, be it a voice, an ecosystem or a language that contains them opens up avenues for other inaudible, untold, unheard stories and counter-narratives.
B: Some pastimes that inform my work depend heavily on “spotting”: the role of active watching and listening for cops and to alerting those with you when doing graffiti writing, or protest actions or at illegal raves. The second you hear a siren, you are the most law-abiding version of yourself. In that way, sirens are a shorthand for policing. Obviously they’re useful for us to hear sometimes too: we can use their information to protect ourselves in that same moment. But if their presence only in our ears represents the cop in our heads, I’m pretty interested in what its silence could mean.
T: That silence would mean non-compliance most directly – which is a net positive if you’re cognizant of your own non-compliance. An aspect of the phase cancellation speaker system that I think was missed in some of the working groups we had was that the machine doesn’t mute the sounds of policing generally. Someone needs to operate the speaker system. There was a lot of conversation about how not hearing police puts people in danger. With phase cancellation, you are in full control of that silence: it’s not that you can’t hear them, it’s that you’re taking away their capacity to produce sound in the moment of your choosing.
J: While I was developing Hearing, Loss I was reminded of a story from [the artist] Vernon Ah Kee, as he’s done a lot of work on cops in Palm Island. There was a time when the riot police showed up: a lot of the kids there have suffered hearing loss, and because the cops were wearing masks the kids couldn’t read their lips. From that perceived non-compliance a lot of kids were tased – kids who didn’t necess- arily realize that they weren’t following instruction. From my perspective that’s what makes hearing operational in colonialism and that’s why all these questions around access to language are so urgent.
T: It was potentially the first time that we had met, Joel, when you told me that of the over- whelming 100% of incarcerated youth in the Northern Territory being Indigenous, 90% of them have suffered mild to severe hearing loss. Unlike tasers, the application of sound to inflict harm is indiscriminate. That, tied into machinations of surveillance and police powers and their increasing efforts to police the soundscape, produces these types of weighted numbers. Those statistical distortions are the product of the ongoing and omnipresent assaults and homogenizing pressures of the colonial project and its narratives. The capacity to organize the ways that sound, as a material resource, is distributed can’t remain as solely within the domain of the state. This is where both of your works intervene – and importantly for a critical art practice, this intervention is at both the material and sensorial level.
Notes on contributors
Thomas Ragnar is based between Singapore and Melbourne and works with artists and others in the development of exhibitions, artworks, publications and events. He is currently a graduate student in Curatorial Practice at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Media and Design and the Centre for Contemporary Art.
Bridget Chappell is a raver and theory bro currently living on the unceded nations of the Latji Latji and Nyeri Nyeri people. They make music as Hextape and organise parties in drains, observatories, and other natural amphitheatres. They founded and run Sound School.
Joel Sherwood-Spring is a Wiradjuri man raised between Redfern and Alice Springs with a practice based in architecture and interdisciplinary research focussing on the contested narratives of Sydney’s and Australia’s urban culture and Indigenous history in the face of ongoing colonization.
Reference
Baldwin, James. 1973. “The Black Scholar Interviews: James Baldwin.” The Black Scholar 5 (4): 33–42. Accessed January 30, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41065644.