Notes On: Rock Music

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9 Nov

Connie Brown on Yukari 海堀 Kaihori’s Touching Time; Audio Foundation, 20 October – 16 November 2022.

A religious service is one of few other places you might find a quiet of the quality that Yukari 海堀 Kaihori’s Touching Time extends. Stones are lined up like parishioners in pews, shortest to the front, and the sound system does what it can to make the small, spartan chamber of Audio Foundation’s gallery space feel cathedral-like.

At the centre of the exhibition’s first room, Kaihori has placed a small perspex aquarium in which she invites visitors to submerge the sandstone chunks. As they dissolve and release the gas compacted within their inner pores and tracts at the time of their formation, the stones pop, but the sound comes infrequently and irregularly, and almost imperceptibly; indeed, so obscurely that the sophisticated sound system engineered to amplify it feels somewhat ridiculous, yet in that way reverent.

How else but with reverence to bear witness to these quiet processes of life, to the undoing of aeons in seconds and the brief tangibility of time?

In the final book she completed before her death last year, Etel Adnan wrote that, Thinking is dimmed when familiar forms of reality disappear. This is not a loss.[i] Kaihori is invested in a similar sentiment. Her practice is trained on disappearing familiar forms, on working with dimmed, hushed, shrunken objects and atmospheres. Here, the sandstone; but also the slowly contracting clay slip and thin sheets of paper laid on the floor in the back gallery, the latter wrinkled with the shadows of quartz sand from 30m below ground; and the cast bronze Phoenix Palm seeds trailed around the building, down the staircases, on the windowsills, in crevices in the concrete floor.

These gestures unlatch attention from its usual resting place, prodding it to the gallery’s surrounds and geological make-up. Much art that works in an ecological register attempts something similar. Much of it, including Kaihori’s, does so successfully—but enduringly? That is rarer. Often these shifts rely on the conditions in which art is viewed—conditions of exception, remoteness, transport—by which the latch is already oiled and fit to come smoothly loose. (Descending Audio Foundation’s steep and echoey staircase definitely instigates such a shift.)

Artgoers are thus faced with the task that has long vexed churchgoers, the hallmark of all faith: how to live ethically, in this case ecologically, consistently, not just exceptionally in spaces where the conditions are just-right and coaxing your reverence, your kindness or your attention? How to keep attention ajar?

Footnotes
[i] Etel Adnan, Shifting the Silence, (Brooklyn, NYC: Nightboat Books, 2020).

All images: Yukari 海堀 Kaihori, Touching Time. Installation view at Audio Foundation, Tāmaki Makaurau, October 2022. Photography: Grant Priest and Yukari Kaihori

Yukari 海堀 Kaihori, *Touching Time*, 2022. Installation view at Audio Foundation, October 2022. Photo: Grant Priest

Yukari 海堀 Kaihori, *Touching Time*, 2022. Installation view at Audio Foundation, October 2022. Photo: Yukari 海堀 Kaihori

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