The House of Books Has No Windows: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

Modern Art Oxford in collaboration with The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (15 October 2008–18 January, 2009)

One way in which visual art seduces its spectators is by appearing to invite the creation of stories. Whether in the form of novels about paintings, socio-historic and biographical interpretations of artists’ works, or attempts to describe the personal impact of imagery, spectators frequently seek to understand and to convey the meaning of art objects by releasing what they suppose to be an underlying narrative. While such fabrications may be misguided or unwarranted by the work of art itself, they demonstrate that one means of deflecting the confrontational aspect of visual art is through the transformation of objects into stories.

The recent exhibition of collaborative works by Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller at Modern Art Oxford and The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, tempted spectators into a world of narrative, but simultaneously undermined the use of stories as a means of making sense of the world. Displaying seven installations not previously seen in the United Kingdom, the exhibition invited spectators to explore spaces filled with the traces of imaginary lives and to tease out links between the works and their literary sources of inspiration.

Whose story, which life?

The exhibition began with an installation that took up the space of an entire room. The Dark Pool (fig. 1) is a collaboration between Cardiff and Miller from 1995 that allows the spectator to rummage through a softly lit room filled with books, boxes, clothes, suitcases, crates, glasses and bric-a-brac. As is typical for works by Cardiff and Miller, sound plays an important role in the creation of the space. The spectator investigates a variety of curios while short soundtracks are whispered from antique speakers. Fragments of conversation, a child’s voice reading from a book, and the steady counting of steps cut across each other or play alone depending on whether a spectator unwittingly triggers a soundtrack.

Fig 1: ‘The Dark Pool’, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (1995). Photo: Cardiff & Miller.

What went on this room and how are we to make sense of the disparate objects? Chipped and stained teacups, a half-eaten sandwich, and books propped open testify to the presence of someone at sometime. We are invited to think that a series of scientific experiments might have been carried out in the room. Like the discarded model for an anatomical drawing, a bird’s wing lies outstretched on a table; a speaker stands submerged in a glass tank; and in a corner of the room we find the most fully realized of the scientific projects, namely, a ‘wish machine’. The small apparatus is constructed from copper plates and pieces of stereo equipment. A short set of instructions is helpfully included to assist users who hope to have their desires realized. And spectators did avail themselves of the pen and paper on which to submit their wishes. In an ironic quotation of votive offerings, ‘wishes’ had been written down and placed between two copper plates in accordance with the machine’s instructions, suggesting that religion, art and science are never too far apart.

As spectators fantasize about how they come to find themselves in this strange environment and whose possessions they have stumbled across, a small type-written card on one of the tables breaks through the fiction:

George said to me ‘What about the people, when did they stop existing? I thought we were going to have it about two older people that had lived in this room?’

I said I didn’t know what happened to them.

The note recalling a conversation between the artists is just one of the objects in the room that testifies to the artifice of the setting. The spectator is at once a participant in, and observer of, a fictional world, alternatively stepping inside and outside its boundaries. This effect is enhanced as the spectator notices that the boxes and suitcases strewn about the room carry the names of the artists themselves. Even the crates in which the installation was packed and transported lie piled up in one corner, leaving the spectator to wonder where the artwork begins and ends. The artists implicate themselves in the room’s narrative and hint that in some future past they could be the two people who ‘owned’ these objects. The stuff of individual lives is transformed into a vision of art as little more than the leaving behind of traces.

Fig 2: ‘Road Trip’, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2005). Photo: Anton Bures

Questions concerning what we know about other people, particularly those who are absent, come to the fore in Cardiff and Miller’s more recent work, Road Trip (2005) (fig. 2). In this automated slide show, spectators follow a family journey from Calgary to New York City through a series of faded images. A taped dialogue between the two artists accompanies the slides, and we learn that the pictures were taken by Miller’s grandfather. Once again, however, the narrative that underlies the images is ambiguous. Miller states that he never knew his grandfather. We watch the images and listen as the artists try to order the slides and to recognize locations that have been photographed. The voices struggle to understand a person’s past through ambiguous imagery and, in so doing, dramatize the processes of selection and placement that underlie the making of a work of art.

Limits and labyrinths

The most recent work included in the exhibition, and the one from which the exhibition derived its title, was The House of Books Has No Windows (2008). The work is a small house made entirely of books. The artists explain in the accompanying catalogue that the inspiration for the work was Jorge Luis Borges’s story, The Library of Babel. In that story, Borges describes an infinite library comprised of an indefinite number of hexagonal galleries housing all books and, as a consequence, ‘all that is able to be expressed, in every language’.

In contrast to Borges’s limitless library, the space created by Cardiff and Miller is tiny. For spectators intrepid enough to crawl into the small edifice, a change occurs in how the books signify. With the spines of the books facing the exterior, the spectator inside the work is unable to distinguish one book from another. Upon entering the house, the books exclude the reader as their titles and texts remain inaccessible. In this respect Cardiff and Miller’s house of books is the inverse of another house of books, namely, Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust Memorial in Vienna. In Whiteread’s memorial, based on the model of Viennese private libraries of the early twentieth century, books form the walls of the structure, but their spines face inwards. In this case, it is the spectator external to the structure who remains excluded from the stories contained in the books that comprise the architecture of the closed library.

In Cardiff and Miller’s installation the roles of books as texts and as building blocks are pitted against each other. On approaching the work, spectators invariably walked around the structure, keeping close to the books in order to read their titles. This is a perfectly natural response and typifies the experience of browsing among bookshelves in a library or bookstore. However, a tension exists between the spectator’s interest in the books as vehicles of language and as constituent elements of the work’s physical structure: if the spectator were to pluck a book from the roof or wall, the installation would collapse. In her catalogue essay, Fiona Bradley argues that the closed space of the work figures infinity by emphasizing the role of fantasy in the activity of reading about and imagining other worlds. However, this view is at odds with the inaccessibility of the texts themselves. An alternative interpretation is that Cardiff and Miller’s house of books suggests infinity by being only one instantiation of an infinite number of possible structures involving the books. The motif of infinity arises not through the suggestion of a real or imaginary space, but through the possibility of indefinite structural recombinations.

This idea finds resonance in Borges’s Library of Babel. Wondering whether the origin of the Library and of time could be expressed in language, Borges’s narrator states: ‘if the language of the philosophers is not sufficient, then the multiform Library must surely have produced the extraordinary language that is required, together with the words and grammar of that language.’ In Cardiff and Miller’s installation, books are used not as vehicles of language or of storytelling, but as components of a wholly different grammar, namely, that of sculpture itself. Like Borges’s library, the House of Books stages the production of its own language.

Fig 3: Opera for a Small Room, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2005). Photo: Markus Tretter (Kunsthaus Bregenz).

Cardiff and Miller’s Opera for a Small Room from 2005 (fig. 3) features an enclosed space in the form of a single room populated with two thousand records, a table and chair, eight turntables and twenty-four differently sized speakers. The exhibition of this work at Modern Art Oxford was particularly successful in that sufficient space was left around the installation to suggest both the isolation of the cabin and the solitariness of its one-time inhabitant. The artists note that this work also has a literary inspiration in the form of Samuel Beckett’s monologue, Krapp’s Last Tape. However, in Cardiff and Miller’s Opera, we do not see the protagonist, but only hear his voice. As in The Dark Pool, the spectator is invited to piece together a person’s history and character through sound, speech, music and a miscellany of objects.

As the narrator recounts a tragic incident from the past, sound effects, opera excerpts, and piano music overlap and merge into each other. Occasionally, the sounds collide to form a cacophony. At other times, effects are reduced to an eerie silence that mirrors the psychological isolation of the narrator. Just as we attempt to find a way into the man’s story, so too he worries about time and presence. ‘I’m disappearing,’ he announces amidst the interplay of soundtracks that reduce his voice to little other than one echo amongst many others.

Like the small-scale work, The Muriel Lake Incident (1999), Opera for a Small Room is theatrical in style. However, whereas the former work permits us to overhear an event that takes place in a miniature cinema auditorium, Opera for a Small Room exploits the grandeur of the operatic stage. The incongruity of a chandelier glittering over a shabby interior emphasizes the contrast between the meagre narrative and the expansive means of its expression. The soundtrack begins with applause and ends with a rousing ovation. Ultimately, this artifice reminds us that all artworks have a theatrical basis requiring both artist and spectator to perform their roles as makers and observers of, and occasionally as participants in, fictional worlds.

‘a remarkable piece of apparatus’

The Killing Machine (fig. 4) is described by Miller as the most overtly political work by the duo. Taking its inspiration from Franz Kafka’s story In the Penal Colony, The Killing Machine is an elaborate instrument of torture. A dentist’s chair covered with a soft, inviting fabric stands in the middle of a large frame attached to which are various lights, screens and monitors. On approaching the device, the spectator has two options: either to examine the machine as it is or to activate its mechanism by pressing a large red button. Inevitably the spectator presses the button and thereby becomes complicit with the imaginary process of torture and execution that follows. More adventurous spectators may sit at the desk placed in front of the machine and assume the role of administrator of the process. But even those who choose to stand cannot escape a moment of self-reflection as they catch a glimpse of themselves in a strategically positioned mirror attached to one of the side struts.

Fig 4: ‘The Killing Machine’, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2007). Photo: Seber Ugarte & Lorena Lopez.

Once the machine is activated, two mechanical probes bearing small torches begin their investigation of the absent body. The chair tilts slowly backwards giving the probes maximal space for movement and extension. Those familiar with Kafka’s story will know that the machine of execution described in the work operates by inscribing the victim’s body with a text relevant to the crime committed. It is only during the lengthy process of execution that the ‘culprit’ learns of his crime physically; language is not understood cognitively, but rather through the absorption of written text into the body. In a final play on the relationship between narrative and artwork, Cardiff and Miller’s killing machine is based on the transformation of the body itself into a story of its own crimes.

The repeated piercing of the body by a series of needles described by Kafka is replicated in Cardiff and Miller’s installation through the transformation of the probes into mechanisms for the infliction of bayonet-like stabs along the victim’s body. As is typical of the artists’ works, sound plays an important part in this aspect of the machine’s operation. Accompanying each needle stab is a resonant staple gun effect that jolts the spectator’s attention. In a garish addition to the process, a disco ball spins at the top of the apparatus, sending ripples of light across the walls in gruesome echo of the puncture marks inflicted on the absent body.

Like Kafka’s explorer, the spectator is suspended between fascination for the functioning of the apparatus and moral repugnance at the thought that technology can be put to the use of inflicting pain on others. Overriding this tension is the spectator’s aesthetic interest in Cardiff and Miller’s installation as a work of art. The roles of spectator and by-stander converge as the work poses uncomfortable questions concerning the ethics of looking. Occupying a space between Kafka’s fiction and the political reality of a world in which torture and capital punishment are allowed to exist, the exhibition concludes with a story that the spectator may not want to hear.

A two volume catalogue, edited by Fiona Bradley, containing essays, colour illustrations of exhibited works and a series of unrealized projects accompanies the exhibition and is published jointly by The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and Modern Art Oxford (ISBN 978-0-9479-1254-3).