The whole gallery screams and screeches with fragments of clashing sound. A room is filled with sand and blankTV screens, robotic fingers play dissonant chords on an electric organ, traffic roars as glass shimmers with images of the Empire State building. Raven Row has been turned into a Lutz Bacher jukebox, and it’s playing all the hits.
The American conceptualist (1943-2019) was a magpie, a thief, a sampler, picking up bits of visual and sonic culture to reassemble, twist, break and make into something new.
Gentle piano notes and soft romantic voices greet you in that room full of sand as four screens show nothing but white light, like you’re watching a love film after the apocalypse. Upstairs, a tiny split-second clip of Leonard Cohen loops and stutters, two radios blare pop hits at each other, a massive speaker spreads the gospel of Matthew out of an open window onto the streets below.
It’s brutal, weird, physically affecting (though the two rooms of sculptures lack the impact of the audiovisual work). The gallery’s been left disorientating and maze-like, you stumble through endless doors, going from room to room, accidentally looping back on yourself, encountering all these dizzying fragments of sound that are familiar but somehow unplaceable: traffic, bible passages, human voices, but all ripped to shreds, stripped of meaning and intent.
What you're left with is an incredible portrait of countless things: the city, the body, popular culture, religion, the past and present, here and now, then and there. It’s a portrait of being, of existence, in all its delirious, confusing, confounding messiness.
