What a miraculous thing art is. Just when you thought you knew what it was, it becomes something else. Perhaps transformation itself is the essence of art – or perhaps it has no essence at all, but is simply a name we give to whatever heightens life and reveals its beauty. Apologies for these wandering thoughts but the work of Susan Philipsz induces contemplation and reverie, provoking the mind as it enthrals the soul.
A Single Voice is her most obviously art-like work of art yet, in that it gives you a film to look at. Philipsz won the 2010 Turner prize with a room that was empty except for sound, and her work is primarily aural, even if her recent Tate Britain installation remembering the first world war did feature a collection of battered musical instruments.
At Baltic she shows her film of violinist Leila Akhmetova playing, and waiting to play, alone in a studio. A camera mounted on a circular dolly track pans endlessly and restlessly around Akhmetova, closing in as she studies the score on a computer screen, panning away to see her sitting upright playing a prolonged note. It is a compelling, hypnotic study of an orchestral musician taken out of the orchestra, playing alone with strange dignity and wondrous discipline, as the camera silently watches.
There I go again – feasting on the visual. A nice motion picture to look at. The film Philipsz has made is alluring, projected on a huge screen in a vast darkened hangar of a space. Yet it is perhaps not the real artwork at all. The heart of her installation is the sound that moves between isolated speakers placed along two sides of the long, post-industrial gallery. As Akhmetova waits to play her part, rich or shrill string notes are heard from different parts of the shadowy cavernous gallery. Then she raises her bow, and as she brings it down you recognise her note streaming from her speaker.
As the sound builds up, you are drawn from speaker to speaker, pacing around the installation even as the camera pans around the violinist. The film can be watched from both sides of the screen, making it even more entrancing to move through a space that starts to feel increasingly solid and substantial as it fills, bit by bit, with sound.
Science has recently entered the age of gravitational waves, as the latest astrophysics proves Einstein’s century-old theory of space-time. Philipsz too is Einsteinian, it strikes me, as the air vibrates to lonely notes. Sound is a wave in space. Philipsz uses that physical fact to sculpt the very air we breathe. A Single Voice seems to isolate soundwaves and make you feel their reality in space-time.
If that seems like science fiction, it is science fiction that has inspired this work. A Single Voice uses the score of Aniara, a 1959 modernist composition by Karl-Birger Blomdahl based on an epic poem by Harry Martinson about a group of would-be colonists of Mars who get stranded in space. The desolate notes of the violin, keening from one speaker to another, represent the doomed astronauts’ soliloquies as they drift in the vacuum.
Yet it is not the narrative of astral travel that makes this work of art so powerful as the tension it creates between sound and vision. Music, it makes you realise, goes straight inside us in a way that images cannot. Looking at Akhmetova on screen, we see her from the outside. The camera almost voyeuristically studies her face and body as she sits attentively and plays her part. Yet while the eye scrutinises, the ear empathises. The music seems a direct unmediated link between souls.
In a darkened chamber at the end of the gallery, Philipsz sings alone. She is giving her rendition of every song on David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Not only does this earlier work (recorded in 2001) fit nicely with the sci-fi theme but once again it makes you feel the emotional mystery of music. Here is a fan offering her homage to Bowie, sending a message across the stars to him. It also reaches you, standing in the shadows, absorbed by this strangely intimate work. If Earth was really dying and we had five years left to live, you could do a lot worse than spend some of that time with this visionary artist.
- At Baltic, Gateshead, until 4 March
