Tromping around the pavements of East London, visiting art galleries during a gray, cold, and wet winter, it's an appreciated thing to come upon an exhibition that includes seating as a component. Usually some variety of multimedia installation set within sleep-inducing levels of light, many hours of hypnogogic relaxation can be spent meditating upon works that may have never been given a second glance. Especially during the rush of a busy day, if it weren’t for a comfortable perch to slow one down, it would be all too easy to miss work that demands more than a few minutes attention. So, the gallery traveller’s aching feet will most probably be pleased to come across two simple wooden benches that serve as spectator’s pew’s in Stephen Vitiello’s recent exhibition Finding Pictures In Search Of Sounds.
Installed in the pokey space of the Museum 52 gallery in East London, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery builds upon his work with sound and music, investigating one’s physical and psychological interpretation of space and image. Comprised of a two-room multi-channel sound work, separated by a short corridor, the show departs from the artist’s light-hearted sculptural assemblage exhibited in his 2006 exhibition Night Chatter. There, along with a smaller multi-channel work, he employed found-objects such as logs and household plants along with a Fluxus inspired improvisational aesthetic, akin to that of fellow sound artist Christian Marclay. Vitiello produced a variety of jokey object & speaker sculptures, using recordings of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, transforming them into the sounds of small tinkling bells broadcast from crawling ivy.
This time the artist has favoured a stripped down approach and soberly focused upon a sparing installation, emptying the space apart from speakers and bare wooden benches. Upon entering the gallery one steps straight into a darkened room, lit by a single fluorescent light. Painted a dull and mottled silver, the atmosphere of the room is somewhere between the austere religious gloom of a monastic cell and the confused loneliness one finds in an institutional waiting room. A dense ambient collage of field recordings emanate from small speakers mounted at head height upon two facing walls. Further along in the second room sits another wooden bench. This room, darker than the first, contains two bare dark blue pulsing light bulbs hanging from the low ceiling. Three speakers built flush into the wall and ceiling broadcast an intimate composition of domestic sounds exacerbating the distinctly claustrophobic space.
Sitting in the middle of a room, sandwiched on either side by a 5.1 channel surround-sound hi-fi, it’s undeniable that Vitiello has a great formal skill with the material of sound. At points one could feel the textures and weightiness of the sounds modulate and shift about the small space, transforming a dingy room into a dynamic psychological experience for the visitor. Then again, if the exhibition purports (amongst other things) to invite “a reconsideration of one’s physical response to sound” along with attempting to elicit a consideration of the “transitory in-between”, surely movement and listening should be integral to the work.
Any consideration of this on the part of the visitor is undermined by Vitiello’s dedication to the integrity of his surround sound stereo image. With it’s conventional seating arrangement for the listener and minimal recording studio ambience, the work risks reiterating a prescriptive and everyday type of ‘spectator’ based listening. Couple this type of listening with the quasi-religious tone in the work, and the result is a kind of sonic Feng Shui that only addresses the particularities of the space as a problem to transcend, rather than the basis of an opportunity.
