In 1993 Beligum Filmmaker and artist Chantal Akerman released her 16mm experimental documentary D’Est. In addition to its theatrical screening, the film was also presented as a multi-screen art installation. In an interview with art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, the filmmaker discusses the change in spectatorship that the gallery setting provides, allowing for a more physically active engagement with the work:
“The aim of this installation is to enable people to move around […] [a] desire to get the spectator physically involved in the installation space, which is why you had to arrange the screens not in a straight line. By which I mean that the video has often been reproached for inducing a contemplative and hence passive attitude in viewers, due to the frontal arrangement of the monitors. The idea of distributing what is to be seen in different directions is an effective solution to the problem.”
Tate Modern Turbine Gallery Space • Incoming [2017] by Richard Mosse
In the pure white cube of the art gallery the visitor is invited to stroll around. Film works repeat on loop, installed in a physically temporary space for the duration of the exhibition. With considerable effort and finance, an isolated black box can be constructed inside the gallery.
In a 2005 interview Christian Marclay commented on the nature of sound in gallery settings:
“Well, I think it’s great that there is this interest in sound and music, but the overall art-world structures are not yet ready for that, because sound requires different technology and different architecture to be presented.”
The gallery is dynamic, unwieldy, impossible to tame. A bare interior endlessly reflects; voices reverberate, strolling bodies are audible bodies, neighbouring artworks sonically invade.
Now [2015] by Chantal Akerman • m.A.A.d [2014] by Kahlil Joseph
No space is the same, the conditions are constantly changing. Touring exhibitions, like film screenings, always sound different from place to place. To meet the economic demands of an ever-changing schedule of exhibitions and events, the gallery remains a highly adaptable physical space. Its spatial arrangement - the way in which it might guide its visitors - is quickly rearranged with movable wall partitions, hanging fixtures, sculptures and mobile lighting. The acoustic properties of the gallery space are in continual flux.
Sound is everywhere, emanating from nearby artworks or the noise and background chatter of strolling visitors and nearby traffic. Headphones provide a certain type of soundproof solution but at a potential cost to the spatial experience of the work itself.
180 Strand, London • Broken Spectre [2022] by Richard Mosse
Video artworks can be conceived with the exhibition site in mind. Or, in the case of particular types of sound art, directly engage with and emerge from the spatial properties of the space itself. The video work of Bill Viola transforms gallery rooms into resonant chambers. Low subterranean murmurings swarm around the space, complex masses of water fill the room with an incessant, overwhelming rapture of noise. Viola describes these works as “total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound” - an immersive experience of the gallery space itself.
Source: Chantal Akerman interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist