The Christian Marclay: Festival exhibit currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art is a multimedia performance of the artist’s “graphic scores” through sounds and images, but in fact, it seems more like a session of marriage counseling between two of the most uneasy partners in human history: music, and the mundane, insane, or just downright silly ways that humans try to codify it.

Truly, nowhere else does there exist such a bizarre disconnect between form and function. There is music, transcendent, untethered, that which “all art aspires to,” and then there is the way it’s written, all skinny lines and stick-figure shoes.  Compared to listening to a song, looking at sheet music is like staring at an eye chart at the optometrist.  Even written words, which so lack music’s juiciness, achieve their charming moments of visual onomatopoetry, the swoosh inherent in ‘swoosh,’ the hurt that can be found in its own hunched shoulders like a deflating balloon.

Marclay’s gallery is jam-packed with evidence of the estrangement: in a room off of the gallery filled with chic white couches, music plays while people look at a plasma television screen with the image of an empty horizontal bar being filled in to represent the passage of time.  Now they’re listening to shrieking fiddles, now, cool bossa nova, and yet the image is the same, that ubiquitous sideways sand timer that’s on everybody’s iPods.  This is how we look at music.

In another room, there is a comic strip depicting a man shouting in pain.  “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH” he cries, the AAAs spanning three full panels.  And yet, all the vowels in the world couldn’t convey the man’s anguish as well as the simple sound of his yelp.  This is how we look at music.

Small black words run around the perimeter of the same room, seemingly excerpts from music reviews.  “With soft caresses, the guitar meows,” they say.  “Pointillist explosions of shattering sound.”  These words fall together like beat poems, expressive and interesting, and yet they no more evoke the true magic of music than a person can punch a rainbow.  This is how we write about music.

Then the performance element of the exhibit begins, a screechy half-hour long duet between a guitar and a MacBook.

The sounds are not pleasant, and nobody appears to be having any fun, least of all the young woman dourly plucking her instrument, but the piece is consistent with the rest of the exhibit and takes its message even further.

Isn’t it weird how music happens physically, how this violent tweaking evokes hopping frogs, how that one evokes a sunset?  Throughout the performance, I winced, I cringed, I clenched my jaw when subjected to the most grating high pitches.  If somebody had watched a silent video of the audience, they wouldn’t understand why people’s bodies were twitching in unison, because music is invisible, but so much more potent than the somber yellow bars that went up and down on the amp to indicate an increase or decrease in volume.

Not to be too dramatic, but I was reminded of the recent news story about how prisoners of war in Guantanamo Bay were tortured by being forced to listen to Britney Spears nonstop.

The merits of Ms. Spears’s music aside, it’s interesting that certain combinations of sound and rhythm have the power to evoke such extreme responses in people.  Music is at once less and more than physical. It is nourishing, like food, and yet invisible, like gas. Is music a fart?

The question of what, precisely, music is has stumped philosophers for centuries, and Christian Marclay’s attempt to solve it through process of elimination doesn’t provide a satisfying answer.  Still, the exhibit has enough of a sense of humor about itself to have some moments of real wit.  It’s hard not to feel some warm fuzzies looking at the way the little stripes and golf clubs cover a pair of bowling shoes, or the sleeve of the Mostly Matzo LP.

It may be that music has no perfect facsimile, but that’s what makes it so marvelous.  Maybe all the signage acts just as it should. Maybe it’s just a sign that says ‘listen.’

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