Oh So Quiet
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Dia:Beacon Two installations commemorating artists now gone: Tacita Dean’s is six films with Merce Cunningham, honoring John Cage’s “4’33””.
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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Imi Knoebel’s paintings in homage to Blinky Palermo.
Instead of music, or not-of-this-world silence, the audience hears itself: coughing, jangling, whispering, tittering and eventually, depending on the general mood, erupting into boos or applause. As scored by Cage, silence is the sound of life as we live it in real time. We just never stopped to listen before.
A filmed variation on Cage’s score is playing this summer at Dia:Beacon; it’s well worth spending time with. It’s one of two Dia installations that, in very different ways, quietly commemorate artists now gone whose names have a magic ring to contemporary ears.
The Cage piece is by the British artist Tacita Dean, and is loquaciously titled “Merce Cunningham performs Stillness (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six Performances; six films).”
The six projected films run simultaneously in Dia’s wide, cryptlike basement gallery, and Mr. Cunningham, now almost 90, appears in all of them. A radical sovereign of American dance, he was Cage’s lover and creative collaborator for nearly half a century, until the composer’s death in 1992. Their collaboration continues here.
In all six films Mr. Cunningham, wearing sneakers and a lavender shirt, sits in a chair in a rehearsal studio against a smudgy wall-length mirror. He is shot from a different angle and distance in each: face front and close up, full length from the left side, and so on.
He is partnered by another performer, Trevor Carlson, who stands, sometimes in camera range, sometimes not, with a stopwatch. Periodically, he holds up a hand to mark the movements in the score. At each signal Mr. Cunningham changes position. He turns slightly, adjusts his weight, rests his head on a hand, resettles himself. The films are silent except for the recorded ambient noise picked up during the filming — Manhattan traffic, the squeak of the chair, maybe a sigh — and the whirr of projectors and whatever contributions viewers at Dia may add. But in this performance of “4’33” ” the emphasis is as much on the movement packed into stasis as on the sound in silence.
Along with Mr. Cunningham’s timed shifts of position there are countless chance actions: the twitch of his eyelid, the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, now a little faster, now more slowly, the flickering shadow cast by the ghostly Mr. Carlson. We are pulled into the performance because our perceptions stay unstable. Are we looking at one performance filmed from six angles, or six separate performances, adding up to one long one? (It’s six adding up to one.) Which movement of Mr. Cunningham’s version of Cage are we seeing at any given time? Where and when does Ms. Dean’s piece, with its staggered comings and goings of images, begin or end?
It ends, of course, when you shut off the projectors and turn on the lights. But even then at least one part of it, sound — random and ambient — continues, after we leave the gallery and after Dia locks up for the night. (The work previously installed in the same basement gallery was Bruce Nauman’s surveillance video of “after hours” activity of cats and mice in his studio.)
Mr. Cunningham’s choreography has always had an existential dimension. “Stillness” is about duration and change, which are the same thing and are also the substance of life and history. Ms. Dean’s film of Mr. Cunningham’s performance is about the sound and motion of history in action: the personal history of one man’s fidelity to the memory of another; the cultural history of a living artist transmitting and rejuvenating the creative essence of one who has died; the contemporary history of a younger artist preserving and honoring all this, and the two men (the piece is above all a portrait of Mr. Cunningham) in her art.
The second homage on view at Dia:Beacon takes the form of an installation of two dozen large abstract paintings titled “24 Farben — für Blinky” (“24 Colors — for Blinky”), 1977, by the German artist Imi Knoebel.
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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Blinky Palermo’s “To the People of the City of New York,” top, painted after a stint living in the United States.
Roughly the size of album covers, done in bands of red, yellow and black, the colors of the German flag, they suggest a cut-up version of Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie.” The series is Palermo’s best-known work and his last. (Dia owns it, and it is on permanent view here.) Palermo died at 33, in 1977, and almost immediately Mr. Knoebel began work on his tribute.
Like Mr. Cunningham and Ms. Dean’s adaptation of Cage, it constituted a transfer of energy and influence. Before 1977 Mr. Knoebel had worked primarily in painted sculpture using a palette of white and black. In his Palermo piece he turned to painting and to color.
Not that their work is at all alike. In contrast to Palermo’s small foursquare panels of bars and stripes, Mr. Knoebel made large monochrome cutouts in bizarre shapes, some hinting at recognizable forms, like curled-up animals or distraught figures, but no two the same. Although he conceived “24 Colors” as a single work, its parts are not in sync. It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle with pieces that can’t interlock.
In place of Palermo’s bright colors Mr. Knoebel chose bland, indeterminate hues: milky pinks, detergent blues, dull greens, very dusty roses. His goal, he said, was to create shapes and colors so vague in their oddness that they would neither hold the eye nor lodge in the memory. The Beacon installation reinforces the air of irresolution.
Paintings tumbling across a wall are interrupted by blank-looking stretches of empty space. Paintings that might have filled the spaces lean, unhung, against a gallery wall, in a stacked format Mr. Knoebel has used in sculptural pieces. The result is a sense of work in progress, or of a show being disassembled and destined for the warehouse.
In fact “24 Colors” was in storage for some 30 years, and when it was finally retrieved, Mr. Knoebel decided that it was in such bad shape that it was beyond salvaging. So he made a new version from scratch, which is what we see at Dia. This means, of course, that the thin line between restoration and re-creation has been breached, and you can almost hear the sound of voices raised in protest. Shouldn’t the original piece have been shown, whatever its condition? Isn’t a re-creation, even by the artist, historically inauthentic, an expensive fake?
I have no problem with the remake. The original was always meant as a conceptual gesture, a complicated act of self-assertion and self-abnegation, an exercise in loudness and dumbness, volubility and silence-seeking. The new version seems faithful to that. It will look old and “authentic” soon enough, and may then acquire a kind of authoritative voice it was never really meant to have.
Meanwhile it serves, as it was meant to, as an amplifying backdrop for Palermo’s voice, which is intense and distinctive. What is it like? Somewhat manic, tender and brash, evident in paintings that look as though they were alternately scuffed up as castoffs and coddled like pets. “To the People of New York City” is the visual equivalent of a heartfelt cheer, but also a passive-aggressive chuckle, with all those German flags.
In any case the sound of that voice is muted now. The paintings have become relics, and New York is no longer the city Palermo knew, though it still is a little. Friends still gather, lovers murmur together, cats purr in their sleep, birds fly over calling on their way to somewhere. All that’s there in Palermo’s kitchen table-size pictures, with their stripes like streets and their colors like the song of sirens on late summer nights.
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