Recently whilst reading up on Sound Art in Japan, I came across the work of Yoko Ono. Being a huge fan of The Beatles I was really interested to listen to her work.
I decided to listen to ‘Voice Piece for Soprano’.
On first impression, I didn’t like it. It caught me off guard and I didn’t know how to react – To me, it just seemed like someone shouting into a microphone and I couldn’t see a meaning to it. In fact, I could’ve sworn I’d been sent this by my friends as a joke before?
So I decided to research further.
I wanted to know the concept behind the piece, and I found that the ‘score’ for it was simply a note with three instructions. These were:
1: Scream against the wind
2: Scream against the wall
3: Scream against the sky
From what I could gather, the piece was intended to be freeing – the idea was that anyone could perform it and sort of use it as a form of catharsis. The microphone had been set up in the Museum of Modern Art and left there for anyone to scream into, and apparently it was so loud that it could be heard from five stories above.
This was where it became problematic. I found this article by Julia Halperin for Observer on some of the negative impacts of the piece:
In the article Halperin describes how “the loud, sporadic screams that resulted startled visitors, while staff members strained to speak to museum-goers over the noise.” According to one anonymous employee, “‘It was disturbing to the staff at the information desk'”. Eventually the piece ended up having to have its volume turned down, against Ono’s wishes.
This got me thinking about the need to create a sustainable practice in art that doesn’t negatively impact on people’s lives. One example not necessarily related to sound art is the Goldsmiths carrot fiasco from last year, where 240,000 carrots were dumped into a courtyard at Goldsmiths University for a student’s MFA piece titled ‘Grounding’. Although the piece was in a way supposed to highlight issues surrounding food production and farm labour (dumping lorries full of vegetables onto main roads is a way of farmers protesting and creating roadblocks in Spain, where the artist Rafael Perez Evans is originally from), it was surrounded by controversy, particularly by fellow students who deemed the work an “incredibly wasteful art piece” – this was a direct quote from the @goldsmithscarrots instagram, which was set up to protest against the piece. They quite rightly argued that “Lewisham is one of the poorest boroughs in London and this mass dumping of carrots at Goldsmiths is beyond insensitive.”
It does have to be said that Evans purchased the carrots from a bulk animal feed provider and he intended to donate them to farms to feed livestock. He also stated that the carrots hadn’t been deemed fit for human consumption. The students, however, begged to differ, and started to collect carrots from the piece to use for a stall selling vegan carrot cake and carrot soup with ‘pay what you can’ pricing.
Evans has since gone on to flood a gallery with a lake of milk.
Although in different ways, these two pieces of art have both caused considerable discussion around them regarding their unintended impacts. Ono’s Voice Piece for Soprano caused irritation for staff at the museum and made their jobs considerably harder, whereas Evans’ ‘Grounding’ raised concerns about the ethics of using 31 tons of carrots for an art piece, and whether this was just a waste of food in one of the most deprived areas of London.
Personally I think in the case of Ono’s work, perhaps some measures such as soundproofing could have been taken to alleviate the stresses on the staff at the museum. This could’ve meant the art stayed at its intended volume, instead of having to dilute Ono’s message somewhat. However this would have been costly and would also raise concerns about how much money was being spent on the piece.
In the case of Evans’ work, I think it did not need to exist. His method of trying to highlight issues around food supply chains and the wastage of food completely backfired and ended up doing more harm than good. Most casual observers would most likely not even know that these carrots had been designated as animal feed, and would just see it as an example of arts universities wasting money on insensitive projects – making the world of art seem even less accessible to those from non-privileged backgrounds.
References
- Halperin, J., 2010. MoMA Turns Down the Volume on Yoko. [online] Observer. Available at: <https://observer.com/2010/07/moma-turns-down-the-volume-on-yoko/> [Accessed 12 November 2021].
- Cascone, S., 2020. A Goldsmiths Grad Student Just Dumped 31 Tons of Carrots Into the School’s Courtyard for His MFA Exhibition. [online] Artnet News. Available at: <https://news.artnet.com/art-world/31-tons-of-carrots-goldsmiths-mfa-show-1912145> [Accessed 12 November 2021].