Installation view of The Last Resort, 2017 by Anri Sala. 42-channel sound installation including 38 altered snare drums, loudspeaker parts, snare stands, drumsticks, soundtrack and 4 speakers; 58 min. 28 sec.

When you step into the Marian Goodman Gallery on 57th street, you walk into an open room carpeted in soft grey and hear low music. Entering further, you see 30-odd snare drums installed on the ceiling, seemingly playing themselves to a Mozart concerto being broadcast in the space at the same time. A soft but dramatic light shines up and across at the reflective drumheads, which reflect back the grey of the carpet. There is a quirky joy in the upside down, mechanical drummers and a beauty to the classical adagio that almost seems like sleight of hand, keeping hidden the concept that led artist Anri Sala to create the piece, called The Last Resort.

Installation view of The Last Resort, 2017 by Anri Sala. 42-channel sound installation including 38 altered snare drums, loudspeaker parts, snare stands, drumsticks, soundtrack and 4 speakers; 58 min. 28 sec.

The Last Resort is more complex than it seems—it consists not only of 38 snare drums, but a 42-channel sound installation in which the drumsticks respond to the vibrations emanating from the speakers. The specific piece of music is an adagio from Mozart’s Clarinet concerto in A major.  The concerto was written at the end of Mozart’s life, just before the English colonized Australia, and it incorporated a new instrument, the clarinet. Commissioned and first exhibited in Australia, Sala was thinking not just of the Enlightment-era politics that surrounded it when it first was played, but its physical and temporal journeys since then. Sala altered Mozart’s composition based on a journal by a passenger on a ship from England to Australia in 1838, letting his copious notes on the wind during the voyage replace Mozart’s tempo indicators. In this way, time replicates a journey in the work. The press release states:

Sala wanted to imagine how a fictional journey through the winds, the waves, and the water currents of the high seas would affect a musical masterpiece of the age of Enlightenment; what would become of Mozart’s Clarinet concerto if it were to float and drift like a message in a bottle.

A lovely analogy, which, to me, begs the questions: does that message becomes blurred or lost along the way?

Sala’s body of work has been described as examining supra-linguistic forms of communication through installations with moving image and sound. Such a description fails to indicate the gentle humor and homage to beauty that envelop his complex ideas and forms; he has a great talent for synthesizing, so much so that an underlying complexity might go unnoticed. At the same time, the work is indeed supra-linguistic, in that he tries to convey big ideas without words, or perhaps as if they were beyond words. The title The Last Resort suggests a kind of desperate hope—that the message in the bottle may indeed reach anyone, that the music transformed over time still makes sound even while reception is not guaranteed. It suggests a belief in the permanence of the thing over time and in the sea change it must undergo, perhaps also implying the wreck of Enlightenment dreams such as reason, nation, and the colony.

Installation view of Anri Sala at Museo Tamayo; September 6, 2017-January 7, 2018.

I had the pleasure of seeing a solo exhibition of Anri Sala at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City in December. A few similar drums made an appearance there, forming a coda to five film and video works that explore the relationship between music, politics, and social space. There was a similar emphasis of an experiential level of hearing, as if to get at the nature or texture of sound itself. Why the mechanical operation of the drums? Whose unseen hand is at play, animating history across time? To me, the hand is the anonymous forces that shape our histories and our cultures, a turning away from the solitary genius of a Mozart and toward broader collective movements.

Anri Sala, If and Only If (pair), 2018. Film still milled on wood textile printing stamps

The exhibition includes a new video installation and three objects by Sala in addition to The Last Resort. The viewer encounters a room featuring reliefs by the artist before coming upon Sala’s new video If and Only If at the end of the corridor. The forms of a snail and a bow—protagonists borrowed from the new video—are carved into vintage wooden plates. These relatively simple sculptures translate new and immaterial footage into a seemingly weathered object that suggests fossilization and age.

If and Only If charts a musician playing a viola with a snail on its bow. It is a sumptuous experience—the light, the wood of the instrument, the sound of Igor Stravinsky’s Elegy for Solo Viola as it is played, the slow movement of the snail. The narrative, if it can be called that, is the snail journeying up the length of the bow. The violist Gérard Caussé and the garden snail are caught up in an intimate dance, both in movement, both slightly disturbing the movements of the other as they go about their own tasks. The snail’s presence intervenes in the musical score, lengthening the time it normally takes to play the piece. Like the position of the drums on the ceiling in The Last Resort, the effect is absurd. It is also affirming to watch the expertise of Caussé humbly account for the path of the small and common snail, evoking a harmony of relations between the civilized and natural world that is admittedly precarious, brief, but beautiful.

Anri Sala, If and Only If, 2018. 2 channel HD video and discrete 4.0 surround sound installation, color
9 min. 47 sec

On view at Marian Goodman Gallery through April 14, 2018.