Audible Light

MOMA until 19/03/2000

Audible Light, the current exhibition at Oxford's Museum of Modern Art, consists of six installation pieces by eight international artists - several of whom are also music industry professionals. The show's opening night saw the gallery packed by a mixed bunch, many of whom were no doubt attracted by the show's eyecatching club-flyer-style publicity, a testament to MOMA's recent efforts to increase the numbers of younger exhibition-goers.

Despite the fact that "Visual Sound" might have been a more revealing description of the exhibition, the title offers a good clue as to the show's heavily perceptually-orientated theme. Familiar objects in unexpected spatial relationships occupy the gallery's ground-floor spaces, the amplification of the background noise emitted by household appliances filling the air with a buzzing cacophony. If slight unease is felt in response to these pieces, it may not be attributable simply to the physical effects of the sound environment, however; the muted chimes of a fire alarm imprisoned in a decibel-dampening steel case seem somewhat desperate, and the secret language of the t.v. and stereo on standby is inappropriately invasive. The strangely anthropomorphic character of these objects can be sinister. On the gallery's upper floor, space-age objects communicate with their observers: parabolic dishes relay messages across a room in unpredictable ways; a cinema screen pulsates with a strobe-light translation of the decibel levels in a sound recording. An exhibit on specially-erected staging even communicates with itself, the pulsations of sub-audible sound causing motion in liquid in transparent vessels. Finally, an intense coloured spotlight throws vivid circles about a square room, the anticipation of where it would alight next providing considerable fun for the kids and a certain amount of blindness in the adults.

Except perhaps for the DJs spinning needle-sharp sonic sounds in the cafe afterwards (this did NOT provide an atmosphere conducive to eating, and is luckily not an ongoing part of the exhibition!), I loved Audible Light. The friends I went with weren't so convinced, however: some of them left MOMA feeling more than a little queasy. True, the aggressive presence of some of the pieces is reminiscent of the tendency of Op-art's swirling, flickering images to grab you by the jugular (or rather, the retina), and if you have a none-too-robust sensory constitution, Audible Light may not be your idea of fun. However, like MOMA's recent exhibition of Michelangelo Pistoletto's mirror pieces, appreciation may well be improved by a repeat visit. For some, Audible Light will be an interactive game for adults: the sensory effects are not necessarily unpleasant, and are certainly interesting, and you can say silly things into microphones and hear them project unexpectedly from the other side of the room... Need I say more?

Su Jordan