Essay by Noel Sheridan from the liner notes to Evening Echoes, 1994.
Outside the side gate of St. Kevin’s Chapel in Dublin every Sunday morning a newsvendor known as “Man’s Voice” – a red-faced, hoarse, over-weight, shirt open to the waist in all weathers, lathered in sweat and usually eating raw sausages – roared at the throngs who passed him on their way to Mass…
SUNAYPRESSINOPLPLSUNNAYYYY
Near him a small, mild man, conservatively dressed, overcoat and hat in all weathers, muttered his sole title in a sharp bird-like tone:
CATHOLIC STANDARD, CATHOLIC STANDARD
I remarked to a friend of mine that this was ridiculous. No one could hear the small man against the roar of Man’s Voice. “Still, you heard him, didn’t you”, said my friend. It was then it struck me, there was definitely an art to this. When as a child John Carson travelled with his father the ten miles from his home town of Carrickfergus to Belfast, one of the things that stayed most sharply in his memory from within the bustle, the movement and the lights of the big city were the strange compelling cried of the newspaper sellers.
For him they mapped the city; they sign-posted and anchored location as they lifted and punched energy into the general excitement of the metropolis. They made the ordinary magical.
I remember what it was like to be in the centre of Belfast with all the busy people and the trolley buses. In the winter there might be a bit of drizzle. It would be getting near to Christmas and getting dark early and the shoplights would be on and through all of it you would hear “TELEOLEH” – like a grand announcement completing the whole picture.
When Conor Kelly played guitar in rock-and-roll bands around Dublin, he also found himself listening to another music, the one that life makes; the sounds of foot-falls, traffic, chance silences, bursts of random noise, ineffable whispers, sporadic crying – the entire untranslatable mystery and magic of the noise of humanity at large.
I am interested in accident and a rolling sense of sound that will never happen twice. Often very small sound details make up the character of a town. I try to capture that. I like the idea of an unkempt reality.
In their collaborations for Evening Echoes both artists bring to the work beliefs about the wonder of ordinary things and, as professional artists, an awareness of how easily we can miss the art in life in pursuing a life through art. It is those occasions when art and life seem to pass through each other that Carson and Kelly try to fix, or rather, hold in suspension so that we see: now one, now the other and, at the best of times, one in the other.
While the main aim of Evening Echoes is to celebrate a living culture, in bringing that culture from outside to inside a gallery context, the freight is not simply one-way – forms mix and each world throws the other into sharper focus as signs, symbols, and languages contrast and clash. These cultural collisions drive the discourse of contemporary art work “Evening Echoes”, but, in a more abiding and radical way, the work is about memory.
One role for art is to preserve for us the memory of things; how a cup looked in Chardin’s day, or, as with Bruegel, how people dressed and what games they played. There is a recent art too that views the past as the subject of its desire and a great deal of post-modernist appropriation is often about limpid trawlings that search for the lost memory of things.
Evening Echoes is centrally about memory, but it is not about a soft nostalgia for the past. As it cuts a cross-section through a living historical tradition this wrap-around installation comes closer to the true nature of memory; the mildly hallucinatory tension of the present modifying and reinforcing the past. As art should, it brings to the forefront of our minds a knowledge we seem always to have had, an intuition, in this case, of a strange culture of elemental human cries. We somehow recognize these people, we seem to know these sounds. But who are they? And what languages are these?
The artists surface the evidence with the intention of heightening this sense of questioning in the viewer, but labels seem awry, categories shift and even the context seems uncertain. Is this art for a different public or public difference for an art public? “Yes” may be the answer to both questions.
Bringing the street into the gallery is another way of doing public art. Also, we hope it will bring another audience, newspaper sellers and their customers, into the gallery. So we are mixing up the audiences as well as the formal art world conventions.
Within this flux and transformation, one thing we may notice about this other culture is that it is democratic; there is no hierarchy here that makes London, for instance, a centre of excellence above others. Each region establishes its own standards of what is authentic.
This phenomenon exists in London, but it also exists in Aberdeen and Birmingham and Cardiff and Cork. So we are celebrating regional particularities, enjoying the commonalities and differences. Within the installations we are removing the sounds from their sources and intermingling them in a non-hierarchical way and transposing sounds to places where they were never meant to be heard. How strange to hear the cry of the Newcastle Evening Chronicle in Dublin.
How strange a cultural world this is. Imagine an art world like this; embracing this degree of regional diversity, this range of provincial utterance, this energy, this unselfconscious directness. Remote, overwhelming, eccentric and irrelevant maybe, but then again, perhaps the artists are putting the question: think of how the art world looks to newsvendors.
Turning the mirror yet again: At the most elementary level we may consider basic definition of an artist as someone who takes a stand and says “Now hear this”. This installation has many people doing that and they too strive to communicate, through sound, performance and an established tradition.
Such unlikely conceptual jumps are part and parcel of the work of two artists with a drive to decentralise, to open out to other voices, to take alternative journeys and to search out what is exciting and special “off the beaten track”. Humourous models of incidental realities are central to John Carson’s practice. And maps:
I love the abstraction of maps. They are like artworks – sets of visual codes and cues that trigger the imagination. They offer routes into knowledge. The deeper you explore the more you discover detail within, and incidentals around the edges. Then you might just end up getting some real insight as you start to probe quite deeply into one particular aspect.
As an art student in Belfast in 1976 Carson arranged for a local radio DJ to play a common request for three people in different locations. He asked the presenter to explain to the listeners that this was a conceptual artwork, an invisible linkage making an imaginary triangle. What he didn’t say, but what he hoped for was that the listening audience might probe more deeply and notice, for instance, that the triangle crossed the religious boundaries of Belfast.
Evening Echoes too is an alternative more complex mapping that crosses boundaries. Its focus is centered not on one but on many cities, simultaneously pitching to the common crescendo that erupts between 3 and 6 p.m. all over these islands. The clamour contracts the standard geography of distance, as it leaps the barriers of class and dialect to form a communal “here comes everybody” hooley of a thing.
In his work “Forty Shades of Green” Carson walked from Cork to Larne stalking the truth of the popular song by Johnny Cash and he documented his journey with photographs. At one level this was a playful version of Richard Long’s walking projects but this one was grounded in popular culture. The colour poster of the photographs he made to map his journey showed that he had indeed found green everywhere, in all kinds of everyday items including the camouflage colour of the tanks and soldiers that were a feature of the Irish landscape. The work knocked on the hollowness of official tourist brochures and posters that often represent Ireland as a species of “theme park with shamrocks and shillelaghs” and it asked “what about the unholy mess?. the confusion? What about real life?”
That he manages to ask pertinent questions in a life affirming and humourous way is Carson’s special talent. Something of the influence of John Baldessari and Douglas Heubler, two off the more laid-back early conceptualists with whom he did postgraduate work in California, mixes with his native undeceived Protestant pragmatism to unearth astonishing surrealisms in everyday life.
Within the larger intent of the Evening Echoes Carson’s photographs of newsvendors with poster headlines may echo familiar “image and text” art works. (Heubler’s writing, for instance, “I have an instinct to kill” and asking someone to hold up the text without their knowing what it reads). By contrast the juxtapositions in Carson’s photographs are completely random, yet some conjunctions of individual newsvendors and text are so startling they seem staged. Once you begin, for example, to connect the enigmatic couple outside under an umbrella with the “Guide to Homes for Sale” text in front of them you find other tableaux in the installation making a kind of sense.
These art/life glitches surface often in another Carson work “American Medley”, a journey the artist made between 1981 and 1983 following the trail of popular American songs. In his performance of the work he drives the narrative along, brightly singing the songs, as the accompanying slides show the actual places and how often the reality falls short of the dream: so many missile sites, so much pollution, so much schlock and lives of quiet desperation. (The only authentic encounter came in Arizona where the cactus trees matched those in the Desperate Dan comics of his youth. A long way to go for a fictional Eldorado!).
A telling anecdote from “American Medley” tells of how a supermarket check-out girl in Texas remarked to him “Hey you’ve got an accent”.
“So have you”, he replied.
This sense of the regional voice standing its ground, just like the voices and accents in Evening Echoes, characterises a great deal of Carson’s art practice; it is at the very heart of Evening Echoes.
Conor Kelly’s practice has been mainly to do with composing soundtracks and music, but like Carson, he too is intrigued with the ways that art forms fold into life and life forms may be read as contemporary art. Duchamp’s readymades and John Cage’s sound works seem central to this aesthetic. But Kelly brings a new spin too these modernist classics. Duchamp brought a urinal into art; Kelly brought art to a urinal. In the work “The Width Thickness and Viscosity of Ghosts” which he made for the Public Lavatory in Spitalfield’s in London in 1994 he installed recorded sounds of traffic to play against the sounds of the traffic that filtered through the grating above the urinals. This was an orchestration that subtly modified the classic Cage work “4 minutes 33 seconds” where Cage simply directed open ears to the sounds that occurred by chance in any 4 minutes 33 seconds of life. Kelly used this idea of real time feedback as a base against which he played sounds of traffic which he had arranged. He was intent of the experience that lay between the differences of the sounds. He worked for the slippage between a recorded time past and a real time present to capture the eerie resonances of memory or as he put it: “the width, thickness and viscosity of ghosts”.
Conor Kelly’s interest in the sculptural qualities of sound in Evening Echoes is characteristic of his previous installation work. In the “Eye Witness” exhibition in London in 1993 he defined the space of an empty office by strategically concealing speakers in the ceiling to play back the sounds of footsteps that measured and articulated the space as they circled the viewer. In animating the space with the precise use of such an everyday sound and concealing the source, Kelly held attention and charged the room. The shifting sounds invisibly defined the space and their resonances evoked a sinister or mischevious pervading presence; as well as conceptually patrolling the plethora of unused office spaces across the city.
These time and sound shifts pervade “Evening Echoes” as the ambient noise of London segues into that of Glasgow and around the other cities, artfully underpinning and counterpointing the differences in the essential character of various places. While the differences in location are more highly defined by the idiosyncratic voices of the indigenous newsvendors, it is the merger of background and foreground that forges the final integrated language of place. Kelly in reconstructing the primary elements of his soundtrack hints at the processes that are live within this subtle synthesis.
If you were to do a second take on the ordinary music of the street, it can seem unusual, or even complicated. Not what it is, but how it became what it is. It is as if the news seller has invented a language with only a few words represented in its vocabulary. You can’t help but imagine what all the other words what have sounded like, styled by the same strain and economy. I’m interested in the vital music of weathered language, outside words which have never been inside.
Knowing each others work, both artists took a journey, pursuing the magic of the mundane through space and time. The process of their interaction is intrinsic to the work.
Working and travelling together on the project was very important. It gives the kind of vitality that would not be there if we were working individually. On the road the car became our office and many of our ideas were discussed on the way from one place to the other. We didn’t always agree but were prepared to give and take. It was great to have these concentrated travelling periods of recording and documenting and focussing on the spirit of the project.
A wry theory of relativity pervades ideas of space and time in Evening Echoes; here; not just the physical but the conceptual location of the viewer is held to be part of the equation. The work can read as art or social history depending on the point of view of the perceiver, but more crucially it is the work’s capacity to subsume and transform these category fictions, raising new questions about ideas of art and culture, that sets its value and shifts our perceptions of both art and life.
The “echoes” of this installation sound backward and forward in time. From town criers, remote in time, declaiming in measured tones the news of the day to a spellbound all and sundry; passing through an industrial revolution and a degeneration of language to the primal cries of a diminishing number of criers whose sole desire now is merely to hook fold-up news into passing shoals of noisy indifference. Will they soon be silent; making way for modems, barely audible and at unimaginable speeds, processing information on to computer screens to an immobile and once more spellbound all and sundry.
It is the present moment condensed and captured from within this trajectory that Carson and Kelly celebrate in Evening Echoes. They celebrate what is human and confirm that finally it is the most ordinary that is often the most marvellous. And “the marvellous” is always news. With this installation then we see yet one more turning as artists become newsvendors with the news about newsvendors – and the cry is Evening Echoes.