Gossip is universal. In cafés, workplaces, schools, party offices and canteens. It’s one of our social conventions, functioning as social glue, making intimates of us all. In all gossip, the story grows in the telling, and in conversations forming part of this piece – a table in Karriere that Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller have fitted with a microphone – the listener needs a grain of salt or two. Everything said across the table is relayed straight to Karriere’s website under the title I’m a Voyeur Baby. By clicking on the title, up to 50 people can listen in at one time. I’m a Voyeur Baby thereby gives the word ‘contemporary’ – in the sense of ‘concurrent’ – in Karriere Bar’s subtitle “Contemporary Art and Social Life’ a heightened meaning. The presence of the microphone is so clearly indicated that no one who chooses to sit at that table would be in any doubt about possible bugging or being overheard. The scenario launches the notion of the work as a sort of confessional zone where skeletons can be hauled out of the closet and secretly harboured love declared. With the title as an entry point into the work, the Internet user clicks on as a voyeur, as one who sees despite the fact that the work, strictly speaking, transmits only sound. This doesn’t prevent it being a voyeuristic situation – which is to say, a visual one. Sentence fragments and isolated words that are semi-drowned out in the general hubbub will invariably conjure images in the mind of the listener. What do the guests look like? What ages are they? When listening to a conversation without knowing its context you automatically seek to fit it into some sort of narrative. These may be love interest stories and family stories, lyrical fragments torn from everyday life and absurd radio-style dramas. Not to mention how the surveillance element injects an aura of crime detection into the listening situation. The voyeur in this work is no Orwellian Big Brother. It is a case of everyday voyeurism involving those who allow themselves to be heard and those who listen in – a kind of tacit contract obtaining between them. A closet play with performing actors at both ends of the communicative thread, in each their space. (PKE)
Janet Cardiff, born 1957, Canada
Georges Bures Miller, born 1960, Canada
www.cardiffmiller.com