Deep/Listening

Deep

You can’t train the ear; it does what it does. But what can be trained, I think, is listening, which is very close to what we might call consciousness.  

Think of it like this: tones in the room affect our mind and our body. The latter responds by creating new tones. What I am calling “perceptual geography” is the interplay, the meeting of these tones, our processing of the given. 

It is about, in works like this, appealing to the better of consciousness’s dual key instincts. Where the Death Instinct is separation, the Life Instinct is unification. The idea is to create an atmosphere that gives the drama of being inside a cinematic closeup, a form of “sonic theatre” in which architecture magnifies the sensorial presence of experience, enabling things to come together to teach people to see things afresh, anew.

It’s important to remember that violence is nurturance turned backwards, and that nurturance—it is the benevolent turning of violence. Both are terribly intimate acts. And so I hope that in this work, by combining a direct, visceral representation of the aftereffects of violence with a contemplative space, I'm hoping to bring things to fever pitch in the sense register and then give space for consideration. The challenge has always been to provide little gaps of solitude and silence in the work, through which the audience might find something new to say. 

Purposeful spaces like galleries are ripe for the practice of deep listening. For what is deep listening but a process engaged fully and completely with hearing, attention, and awareness? It means engagement of all the sensory organs of the body, engagement with the vibrations of all that there is—everything! Sometimes, in my exercises, I’ll ask people to listen with their eyebrows. And once they figure out how to do it, then they’re getting close to understanding what I mean when I equate listening with consciousness, with insight, with what makes us human.

Amacher 2004, 1977; Deleuze 1977; Louttit 2022; Oliveros 2014, 2016; Samaran 2016; Ukele 1969.

Listening

Trust me when I tell you this: even over Google Meets, that last remaining artefact of a failed social network, even there does Michael Louttit’s practiced deep listening shine through. Although I was there with an explicit purpose—to listen to him, and to learn about listening from him—I got the sense that at a mere moment’s notice he would more than happily begin listening to me.

When Louttit and I first met at a QCA grad show, it was loud. Of course, this is unsurprising for a grad show, but it is important: it was loud, and we spoke anyway. We made do with what we had, which was a crowded white-wall gallery having what would traditionally be considered bad acoustics. Now, in Violence/Nurturance Louttit has done one better than we did that night, going beyond mere making-do with the space in favour of elevating it, enabling the acoustics of the rooms here to express themselves through sonic architectures meticulously crafted for the two confluent installations of this new work. 

The first installation comprises a crushing space, where headphones and thick curtains confine the listener to the experience of just themselves alone, to the ghosts of neuroses, to a barrage of spoken inner-conflict eerily looped like an avant-garde trance beat. This harrowing, diaristic work is a raw, violent, and priming contrast for what’s about to come: an open space, a space of brighter lights and impressionistic painted works anchoring a space in which the listener has freedom to move as they see fit, to look and listen with their whole body, to engage as an instrument in the experience of the work.

But make no mistake: this freer space does not exist as an ideal. The sonic space Louttit has created for reflection is not perfect—and nor should it be; nor can it be. To reflect on and heal from violence is messy, and jagged, and uneven, and so many other difficult things. The white wall gallery reflects, as we do, imperfectly, and its use here reminds us that there are no ideal spaces, no ideal acoustics—only the uneven contexts in which we are able to exist, and in which maybe, if we try our damned hardest, we can really, truly listen to space and to ourselves and to each other. Perhaps even with our eyebrows.