Christian Marclay ‘s “Festival” at the Whitney Museum of Art is an experiment of the “fusion of image and sound through collage, performance, installation, photography, sculpture, and video.”  In other terms, it is a smorgasbord of all things musical.

In the first room, there are many objects related to music or with musical notes printed on them, like a hanger with clothing, a record collection, tin boxes, and “Sixty Four Bells and a Bow,” featuring bells from all over the world.  This room was well displayed and very satisfying to the musical-note-printed-paraphernalia-collector.

However, when you enter into the largest room, where there are two sets of movies showing and a blackboard of sheet music that fills its entire length, you really understand what Marclay’s ideas encompassed – audience involvement in music.

The chalkboard, the only physically interactive aspect of the exhibit, besides the room with the couch and loud music, was the highlight. It was entertaining to read what people wrote in chalk, and surprisingly, some people actually wrote musical notes.  Writing my own message on the board made me feel like I made my permanent mark in the exhibit, even if I could not demonstrate my nonexistent musical genius.

Marclay focuses on the way that music can be heard in every day activities.  Although it may not be physically heard, one might play music in ones head.  This is evident in the “Manga Scroll,” a series of pages from Japanese comic books that have onomatopoeic words, and in the two movies.  The movies have serene images, sometimes in black and white, of nature and of people, but one of them has sound and the other does not.  The silent movie was made that way in order to allow the audience to provide its own soundtrack.

A soundtrack was in fact provided for the audience at 4:00 p.m. in the large room when two women came out to play “Graffiti Composition,” a painful concert of sounds.  One woman played the guitar and the other played noises on her computer.

It was hard to picture what was expressed through the music, because the melodies did not fit well together.  The music was horribly loud and came from two speakers sporadically.  An introduction to the piece could have been appropriate, but no words were uttered by the musicians.

The musicians, May Halvorson and Iku Mori, were very focused on reading their music, or computer screen.  Together they created booms and crashes and other onomatopoeic sounds.

Upon closing ones eyes, one could try to understand what the music had to be.  In my case, it was obviously a mixture of: aliens arguing, birds chirping, water dripping, and crickets chirping.

The music switched from speaker to speaker, the woman banged hard on her guitar often, and the music would abruptly stop. For all of these reasons, one felt that one was surrounded by an alien invasion in a cricket-infested purgatory.

Perhaps the guitar would have sounded better by itself. Playing an actual song.

Out of all of the displays in the exhibit, the chalkboard with actual graffiti was the most memorable.  I realized the artist’s purpose and how important audience participation is in an exhibit or a concert.  If the exhibit only consisted of the display room and the large room with the chalkboard, I would have left satisfied. Instead, I couldn’t get that noise out of my head.

***

Check out a mini-documentary on turntable sound pioneer Christian Marclay: