ART REVIEW
“Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet”
Through Jan. 18, 2015. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays and Saturdays; until 9 p.m. Fridays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. $19.50; $16.50, students and seniors; $12, ages 6-17; free, children 5 and younger and members. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-4444, www.high.org.
Bottom line: A transcendent, immersive sound installation that makes one long for more such adventurous programming from the High.
The High Museum makes great use of its distinctive Renzo Piano architecture with the sound installation piece by Canadian artist Janet Cardiff, “Forty Part Motet,” on the museum’s Skyway Level.
Visitors to the Skyway Level in the Wieland Pavilion won’t be able to miss Cardiff’s piece. It is installed right outside the elevators, which means your vision of the museum as a silent, solemn space is instantly, and gloriously, shattered by the rising crescendo of music in 16th-century composer Thomas Tallis’ choral work “Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui,” which translates from the Latin to “In No Other Is My Hope.”
That front-and-center placement in such a well-trafficked space forces an engagement with the piece, and most visitors seemed genuinely receptive and eager to give themselves over to Cardiff’s work, with many lingering and revisiting the piece. It’s hard not to be seduced by “Forty Part Motet.”
In “Forty Part Motet,” which deconstructs a chorus into individual voices, 40 speakers are placed in an oval in an open space immediately outside the elevators. Each high-fidelity speaker plays an individual voice in the Salisbury Cathedral Choir singing a part in Tallis’ 11-minute choral work.
Cardiff’s thoughtful, joyous interpretation of Tallis’ extraordinary work finds a fantastic berth in this room whose conical skylights drench the space with soft light and offer a feeling of ascendance and abstracted connection to the world outside. The placement plays with the similarities between the contemporary museum and cathedral, both spaces founded on glorious, inspiring architecture, contemplation and solitude mixed with communal experience.
This placement serves “Forty Part Motet” very well. Two benches allow visitors to take in the choral work as a whole, from a distance, so that the voices blend together. But visitors can also walk around the perimeter of the space and experience the sound of the 40 individual voices — each projected through one of the speakers: a bell-like child soprano, a rich, resonant bass.
The experience of listening to those voices one on one is thrillingly disarming. Standing by one of the speakers and experiencing the breathing and sound of each voice, you have a sense of being next to an actual human presence.
Cardiff has said that part of her objective in creating “Forty Part Motet” was to show “how sound can physically construct a space in a sculptural way,” a vision that certainly comes to fruition in the piece, where sound becomes an almost embodied presence in the room. Technology is often bemoaned as an alienating, distancing device, but here it allows for an incredibly intimate experience shared between a Canadian artist, a 16th-century composer, a multigenerational range of British singers and the audience itself.
“Forty Part Motet” is a meditation on many things, including an exploration of the power of art to shape and move us beyond time, generation, geography and culture.
It would be nice to see the High integrating immersive, experiential, challenging pieces like “Forty Part Motet” into its programming more often. Seen alongside the disappearance of the High’s curated film series and in the context of the beleaguered Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, “Forty Part Motet” offers a passionate reminder of the power of communal artistic experience and the unique frisson of art experienced both individually and as a group.
