“Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.” Flash Art International 37:236 (May-June 2004): 139.
Cardiff and Miller at Luhring Augustine, February 14-March 20
Reviewed by Melissa Pearl Friedling
There is a recycled staple Hollywood plot (used in Copolla’s 1974 The Conversation and De Palma’s 1981 Blow Out, to name just two) in which a character overhears something he or she shouldn’t have heard and thus becomes implicated in some criminal scheme. Janet Cardiff and her long-time collaborator, George Bures Miller, have appropriated this basic premise for many of their installations and in this exhibition, "Cabin Fever" (2004) trades most obviously on the drama of purloined listening. As one peers into the forced perspective diorama of a cabin in the woods, a violent incident is overheard through headphones and compels the audience to reflect on their own passivity and the pleasure in covert listening.
In the installation "Berlin Files" (2003), one gets a similar feeling of having eavesdropped on something that was meant to be private. The artists construct a three dimensional sphere of sound that accompanies a single channel video in which obliquely narrative fragments proceed like a stream of nostalgia, visualised through fluid, mobile, highly resolved cinematography and intermittent moments of blackness. While forfeiting some of the intimacy achieved with the use of a binaural soundtrack played through headphones, "Berlin Files" aurally enfolds the audience in an uncannily subjective experience.
In a conceptual departure, the artist’s offer the new work, "Feedback,” an unsubtle attempt to shock the audience into an awareness of the politically charged present. When the pedal in front of a large amplifier is depressed, one is jolted by a high decibel blast of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar version of "The Star Spangled Banner," resonating with all its historical and current significance. While the artists’ interest in moving their sites towards an engagement with the politics of the present is a righteous one, it misses the mark in the context of the hauntingly dissociative effect of the other works included in the exhibition.