In 1952, American composer John Cage composed ‘4’33”’. This four-minute-thirty-three-second-long piece sees a performer come on stage, sit down at a piano, open its lid, flick through a few pages, then bow out. In 2013, the BBC broadcast an orchestra performance live at the Barbican, dividing the piece into three movements. Lawrence Foster conducts. He does not move, but you can see his chest, left hand flattened over it, quivering ever so slightly according to his breath. At the end of the first movement, he lowers his hands, gesturing in a circular motion. It’s as if the action unfastens an invisible ribbon that ties the silence together. The audience, having spent the whole time completely quiet, now feel able to cough and fidget, to adjust in their seats and fix their coats.
Site Gallery, Sheffield, hosts Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom’s latest exhibition, Before, During & After: Here Now (How to Keep the Balance). Like Cage, Boakye-Yiadom works against the expected performance of the body. The work is a video installation that documents the process of learning to play the drums over a period of three months. Through audio recordings, moving image and photography, it documents fragmentation, sound and silence. Visitors are met with a pitch-black room framed around a cluster of cushions on the carpet. We’re given two standard-definition televisions, one plasma screen, two stand-up screens and one projector that takes up the entire back wall of the gallery. Media is cut up and scattered across the space. Each screen focuses on a different part of the same room – one on a pick-up mic looped inside a drum, another on a microphone stand that extends out of shot, another on the corner of a wall and the edge of a black picture frame. A steady rhythm on the bass drum, playing on strokes one and three, punctuates the gallery space. Taken in isolation, the parts don’t equate to much. There are never any faces on show, only ever torsos and undulating hands.
But this, as I later discover, is a film that is four hours eighteen minutes long. (I don’t find out from sitting through the whole piece; after about an hour, when the work still hasn’t looped and my stomach starts grumbling, I tap out and go to find out how long it is.) Afterwards, I move in and out of the display, catching it at various points. At one stage, there’s a music lesson between Boakye-Yiadom and his teacher. Using rhythmic phrases, the latter instructs: Ham-bur-ger-with-cheese, then cor-fee and leh-mon-and-tea. Boakye-Yiadom follows, playing the section according to each phrase, placing emphasis, sometimes stumbling, sometimes pausing for a second too long. At another point, the camera focuses on orange foam eggboxes, their rolling shape reminiscent of coral. Elsewhere, we’re given the in-betweenness of practice. Before the lesson begins, snippets of conversation are overheard: ‘Ah, professional!’ a voice jokes. ‘I’ll put my bag in this one.’ A front door struggles to close, then slams shut, before there comes a clattering of drums. ‘Where shall I sit?’ One small screen lights up. ‘Let me show you where I’ve got up to.’ The backing track plays, then someone laughs cautiously: ‘It just completely left me!’.
Fifteen minutes later the screens change again, this time transitioning to shots of hedgerows and tangled undergrowth. The camera pans, focusing on flat green leaves and light pink flowers. Next, the sound of a plane overhead, its roar causing the plants to shake, their blades folding and unfolding. Then a burst of purple clematis, the sound of a chattering magpie, a muffled cough, someone readying their things to go out, the tinny clang of a plate being stacked. Ambient noise is inescapable – these are the rhythms of everyday life, studded with inflections of industry and human activity, recurring infinitely.
The thing is, regardless of what is written here, you may go in and see a very different show. You may catch it at the start, or forty minutes in, or when I had a lunchbreak. The other thing is, this is also a show about audiences. For instance, you might not get a man walking around the exhibition, touching various sound-absorbing panels. Or a couple sat on the floor, a man with his head in his partner’s lap. Or a group of university students strolling in, gently laughing as they take a selfie, camera flashing. The media is continuous and always present, as the title of the work suggests, but it’s both there and not there: you are pulled in, but also free from it. Cage’s ‘4’33”’ engages with this idea – that we can’t anticipate or control what ambient noise will happen, if someone will cough or sneeze or be shushed. It runs slightly counter to Cage’s intention that a performance of ‘4’33”’ is now often watched with bated breath.
Boakye-Yiadom creates something looser, something rooted in the awkwardness of learning. Before, During, After is an installation you fall into as your mind begins to wander, filling in the gaps between conversation and drumbeats. Indeed, there’s something a little unsettling about watching an adult learn to play. The temptation to revisit memories of secondary school music lessons, forty-minute sessions in damp grey rooms, is strong. According to the wall text, the work seeks to highlight ‘how infrequently we are permitted to fail’, and to disrupt ‘the idea that artists should be masters in a skill or craft’. What is underneath is a shaky, skeletal thing – a set of recordings filmed in a shed at the end of Boakye-Yiadom’s garden. We are reminded of how difficult it is to go up against a rhythm, to pull the necessary dexterity together to coordinate our arms and legs, and how difficult it is to be in sync with the changing environment around us, the constant activity, the relentless noise. Boakye-Yiadom presents not a performance, but a body in fragmentation and uncertainty, attempting again and again to get it right. This does not happen, but we’re shown that it’s okay. As an audience we can listen or refuse to; we can sit on a cushion and close our eyes; we can walk in, take a selfie, walk out; we can fidget and adjust. We can miss the most important parts and still be permitted to return – it’s a space where these out-of-sync conditions are precisely the point.
Before, During & After: Here Now (How To Keep The Balance) is on at Site Gallery, Sheffield, 28 September 2023 – 18 February 2024.
Chloe Elliott is a writer and poet based in York.
This review is supported by Site Gallery.
Published 24.11.2023 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
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