Judith Williamson
Some thoughts about Ringing
Judith Williamson is a freelance writer living in London. She is the author of Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising and currently writes regularly on cultural and political issues for the The Guardian.
[Disc 2]I was basically going to raise, some things to think about in terms of the title of the show 'Ringing', which is obviously chosen because it's held in a Bell Tower. And I want to think about social space and the individualisation of social space through that and I'm going to raise some issues that I'm preoccupied with. They very kindly, the people who were invited, were told that they could talk about their own work, or what ever they were doing, and this is something that I have written about quite a lot. And then I want to talk a bit about the show. I thought that what would be nice would be to talk through some of the work in the show in terms of some of the issues that I've raised.
[01:22]I wanted to think about the bell, about ringing as the title of the show, but in the literal sense of the bell and the tower which the show is in obviously had a life as a bell tower and I'm hoping that the speaker after me will speak about the actual history of the tower and the history that surrounds it. But I'm going to think more generally about ringing and the bell. The role of the bell in really the whole of pre industrial society in Britain, in Europe and around the whole world, the bell was absolutely central as a one form of communication within a community. The ringing of a bell, the ringing of a church bell, or the bell of a Mosque or a tower, or any kind, is the one sound that can be heard.
[02.55] It may seem in a way like a banal and obvious point but it isn't really when you start to think about what I think is the most interesting of all cultural issues - what it actually is to be a person in a particular community or a society, the extent to which one feels like a social member of the world or the extent to which one feels like an individual person within the world. And imagining a situation whereby the communities were defined by their relation to a bell. I don't mean metaphorically, but quite literally, the circumference created by the sound of the bell, is in a sense what defines a community. In the countryside, with no other forms of communication, the sounds of a bell, the bell that you can hear, in the fields that you work or in your cottage or wherever you are, is actually your parish church bell, within the British traditional culture here, or different communities of different natures of worship or centring, but never the less it's the actual sound, it's a very, very important thing when you think about the way, which isn't the case anymore, but the issue is in a sense a definition of a community. Not a predefined community which then hears something, but a community which is actually defined, quite literally, by its ability to hear that sound. So in a sense, the people in the next parish are hearing the next set of bells.
[04:17] So although there's maybe a small overlap, you can imagine a sort of sonic chart with centres, like dropping a pebble in water. and that sound is in a sense the definition of a community where there is no other kind of central way of marking time and of sharing commands if you like. And that's obviously still the case in many places today. What that means is that the physical experience, the actual experience of hearing the sound, the ringing, is the very thing that binds you into that community. you can't sort of think, mm, I can hear my church bells striking three, nothing to do with me, I didn't hear it, you actually do. Its one of those things that is not about choice, its not a sort of ideological choice that you can make one way or another.
[05:12] in a sense it's about being actually physically incorporated into something, that defines you as part of that community. Whatever your response is, in a sense you can't not hear it, unless I guess you're deaf. So we're talking about a physical experience that defines a social space, which I think in itself is a very interesting concept. It's a very interesting concept for artists to think about, a very interesting concept for anyone who, like myself, wants to write about culture to think about.
[5.45] They physical experience itself is what defines the social space and defines a community. and community is now such an over bashed word that I'm loathed to use it too much, because it's become a kind of excuse for all sorts of tings, but nevertheless, if one thinks of a community that is defined by a shared physical experience, it's not an abstract definition, not even something that's written down on paper but an actual experience. That is a very profound form of social definition and of self definition and a sense of ones self in time and in space.
[06:28] Time I'll return to because obviously the ringing of a bell is a way of marking time, again it's a very simple point but its such a brilliant, such a resonant, if I may say so, image - and also how appropriate that its being recorded for resonance fm, but the fact that it is a spatial event that also marks time is something that is very simple but again, when one thinks about the present and the extent to which those things have pulled apart, and I suppose also the way that people are also sort of automatically addressed by the bell, by ringing as social beings, everybody is hearing the same sound no matter where they are near or far that belong within that radius of the bell.
[07:26] I'll come back to time, but thinking about the heritage of that kind of social experience, there are some which obviously aren't a bell sound, aren't ringing but do have a shared function. I suppose the siren (7.38) I mean an air raid siren in the war, a shared signal to people within a particular area, again, the siren functioned with actual space within (7.50) which it can be heard. Its function is to be heard within a particular space. Or factory sirens as well, which aren't nearly so pleasant an image as church bells. Which you almost never hear now. in my own childhood, one would hear a siren and know that people in a factory were now clocking on or clocking off. Again, something about what you were doing, being in a social place. I feel that I'm saying a lot of things about something which is basically very simple. But I think it's very rich, and the ways that one can think about this within our society today are very productive for all sots of art and cultural practice.
[08:43] I said I'd come back to clocks, to time, and I personally am quite obsessed, with the way that there's a kind of moving away from social space. the simplest form of marking time in a way that can be physically experienced and shared is the ringing of a bell. Which is still very common, in the middle of London you hear Big Ben, its used on the news a kin of symbol of that form of understanding of time and address, and in all sorts of places.
I was telling a couple of you in the show the other day, I went on holiday in a small village, in Mallorca where every single quarter of an hour the time was marked absolutely, precisely by a sort of ding dong ding for the quarter, ding dong ding dong for the half hour, ding dong ding dong ding for the tree quarter hour then on the hour, the whole ding dong and ten the number of beats for the hour, and I couldn't sleep at all, for the entire time but everybody who lived there was absolutely used to it but they could hear it they could hear the time, without having a watch they knew what time it was but at the same time, the resonance was so inbuilt they could also sleep through it. Clearly it was a problem for me but that I found very interesting. its almost like living inside the workings of a clock, like living inside the mechanism. that your part of its beating al the way through the day. its there the whole time and it's a resonance, it's a physical sonic event.
[10:18] But it's a particular bug bear of mine as a sort of cultural commentator, the way that, not only obviously bells are now much less common as a way of marking time, but even the public clock, most bell towers often also have a clock face on them and the clock face is a spatial way o marking time, actually the way the space is organised on the clock face that marks time, you don't need to have the numbers written around the edge, you can just see the kind of slice that's made by the hands. So it's a spatial organisation of something which tells you about time. You can see it from a long way away, you don't have to see the numbers and work it out, you can just see the shape. It's modelled on the sundial turned upright, again, a way of space and time coinciding which is completely different from the mode of a digital watch or a digital clock which you have to actually be able to see and read the figures in a completely different way. Or the absence of public clocks is an event of the last hundred years that essentially people are now expected to have a watch. I think you would probably say that the idea of a hundred 150 years ago, the idea that every single person would have a miniature clock strapped to their body would have seemed absolutely surreal.
[12:06] That takes us into other aspects of modern life, ones which I'm preoccupied with and have write about, not to plug my own work, but I've written an essay about the walkman, quite a long time ago when they first emerged, in a collection of writing called Consuming Passions, which I found almost as surreal, although we're more used to them now, as possibly the personal time piece might have seemed to someone used to an earlier sort of shared way of experiencing time and the idea of public space as something in which time and space can be understood and can be merged. thinking of the resonance of the bell, and thinking of the meaning of the bell as I first outlined it, as a thing which everybody shares, it seems to me that the Walkman is the exact antithesis, its the exact opposite, its actually being in a public space and having a sound in your ears that nobody else can hear apart from you, well actually that's not true, a lot of extremely irritated people can probably hear it in a horrible tinny, gnat like way, or at least they can hear the beat of it.
Anyway, the concept of it being something that is completely private. It's again something which is familiar, I suppose most of my work as a writer is to do with thinking about things that are familiar every single day and trying to make them strange and trying to think how utterly bizarre. I couldn't imagine when I was ten years old, or even twenty years old, somebody saying people will have little things in their ears and they'll go around listening to little secret bits of music all on their own. It would have seemed absolutely fantastical and yet that's something that we accept and can often be useful or whatever, it's not a question of saying its bad but actually asking what that means about the ability that we have now to inhabit public space completely privately
[14:05]One can go through public space, one can make a journey, go through area outside of ones own home and yet in some ways be like a snail, be inside a shell of an individual. And those are in a way both real things that really effect the way we experience public space, but they're also in a sense, and this comes onto the artwork, they're also like metaphors I'm using for ways of thinking about public space and being individualised with something that could otherwise be social. Actually I had a very creepy experience the other day of being down at the shops and seeing a neighbour or mine, a very good friend of mine, on a bike and shouting out, going 'Nigel' and he had his walkman on and didn't hear, it was completely bazaar because we were as close as I am to the people in the front row of the audience (3 meters) so calling out to someone cycling past and them not hearing, was like suddenly coming up against the wall of this individualisation, of not being in the shared space that we are bodily inhabiting but increasingly aren't inhabiting in other ways, inside our heads.
[15:33]Anyway, those are all things that I find very interesting, very resonant to keep on using that word as a metaphor. One of the things which I think is interesting today when you think about culture and contemporary forms of culture is the ways in which they both have and haven't taken on aspects of the bell, of ringing. And the most obvious one is broadcasting. Broadcasting in a sense does span out from something central and there are elements to both sides of what I've said. If the bell is one extreme, that's something else, the private phone ringing in the public space, another kind of taboo (laughter from audience) like being in the theatre or something. These is quite interesting axis to plot things on and see how they work.
[16:34] What I wanted to say about broadcasting is that it takes on some of the aspects of the bell side of the spectrum, and it has other aspects of the walkman side of the spectrum and in a sense is perfectly encapsulated by that war time image of the family huddled around the radio. Everyone listening to the same broadcast at once, the whole nation listening simultaneously to the same words, which is actually a very 'bell like' thing, it's simply expanding the orbit beyond the circumference of a church tower to a completely national one, but its defining a community. Anyone who think to any extent about broadcasting, and in various ways the press, is that similarly it defines a community by whoever is within the reach of what it offers.
[17:12]You can say that one of the things that's happened since the Middle Ages is that the sense of community or the way it's defined publicly, has shifted from often very small, within a small location people may never leave, to being national. So broadcasting as a national event is like the bell that is meant to be heard by the whole nation. On the other hand, its experienced in privacy. in the house, or in somebody's walkman, in their ears or whatever. So it kind of inhabits part of both but I think it's certainly an interesting way of thinking about it a bit culturally, that it has had tat role. That too is beginning to fragment. The whole way that a lot of cultural forms are heading at the moment is into a kind of fragmentation and particular, smaller market niches. One of the great tragedies for anyone as old as me, is the breakdown of any meaningful form of hit parade. The phrase isn't even relevant today because there's a complete fragmentation in terms of what pop music, even at its broadest might be, and different forms of music. The idea of something which is cultural that in a sense, does broadcast out, which a lot of forms of culture still in a sense do, they sort of permeate, or resonate, actually, they move, or ring right through a society in various ways.
Interestingly, they now do that nationally or in terms of whatever age group your in, and the thing that they don't nearly so often do it in, to come back to the original mite of the bell, is the local community. The cost to some extent of that larger sense of identity, of belonging to an entire country or an entire generation or whatever it is, is actually that social group is no longer for most people, it's not true for most people, I think also there's a big class difference, but it no longer so much one which is in a place, which is what brings us back to the tower and the idea of a specific place, where if you are relatively near it you can hear it and you are connected into it through that. So broadcasting is a contemporary way of thinking a bit about the ringing of the bell. A thousand years on from that as the sole form of communication, of calling people to work, of calling people back from the fields of calling people to church, to Mass etc.
[20:33 It's quite an interesting way of thinking about art generally, given the title and the motif that I've taken, there are millions of different ways you can look at art and cultural creation but I think the idea of the bell, of ringing, of social space and of privacy along a sort of spectrum is interesting. I suppose you could say that art in public places is something which is shared? It can be part of a community and it's very interesting that an enormous amount of art is in public spaces even in the classical format of galleries, museums and so on and so forth. Those are actually public place. Unlike the bell, where the resonance goes out to people from the centre, it's the other way around, you have to go to, certainly most forms of visual, art. as they're fixed in places, or maybe mobile to some extent, but it's a question of going to it. I think those are issues which are certainly very interesting to consider, looking at art, the extent to which people come to it as a group, people come to it socially, the extent to which it moves out in any way to people socially or privately.
[21:08] I hope that's an interesting set of thoughts to raise, and thinking about society today, you walk out of this place into a very kind of fragmented, mixed, medley of sounds which to some extent reflect the kind of mixed fragmented bundle of individuals that do not have in the same way of being a social entity first and foremost. I was going to use the last little bit of my talk time partly by using this idea, having a set up that I think of as quite a useful little tool thinking about various issues, I was simply going to apply it in practice to the work in the show.
[22:05]Although the work is all different, and is doing different kinds of things, I think that the title has been chosen and the work has been put together in the tower with some thought about these kinds of issues, or it seems like that to me. So I was just going to use them as a kind of lever to get an angle on some of the things in the show, which I'm assuming everybody has seen. Well if they haven't it will just tempt them to go and see it. It will draw themm in. The show does seem to me to be specifically and consciously about some of these issues that I've been rambling about, time and space. And both the resonance in time and in the bell like way, but also very powerfully, fragmentation. as well. I think, like a lot of contemporary art which actually speaks about the break down of social space and the breakdown of community as much as it has the power to build it up. I don't know the extent to which it does even have that power, I think possibly social events are more forceful in terms of that so I was just going to work, I think down the tower.
Sean's cubes, Sean Langton, he may have to correct me about this, but these metal cubes inside which there is a vacuum held inside between two cubes which, unfortunately on the day that I came it wasn't ringing, but as I understand it the idea is that the vacuum itself starts to kind of ring, in some way which I don't fully scientifically understand, it sort of rings. And even tough I didn't actually hear it; it seems to me to be a very interesting idea to have at the very top of a bell tower. in the top of the tower, where the bell is. So when you've climbed up all those stairs and very, very careful, because they're unspeakable dangerous, there's actually the bell there, waiting to ring and so this work felt to me, in terms of this idea of the bell going out, like a reverse, like an implosion bell.
[24:36]It's like there's a ringing inside some little tiny box, which even if you can listen to on an ear piece, it's like a sort of in side out version of ringing. In fact there were quite a few tings I found in the show which seem to me to be like a ringing in reverse, like a kind of imploded? ring if that makes any sense. Not the thing which is spreading out. So you have this kind of ringing in internal, imploded ring inside the box, but actually then in the bell tower which is meant to be the site for the ringing moving out for everyone to hear. And it was surrounded by these poems scattered on the ground, which was also, I don't know what the intention was, but to me felt like something was trying to disseminate something, to scatter something. But they hadn't, they had kind of stuck so it also had a kind of, like a ring that had got jammed or something. There were all these poems all scattered around, sort of drained of water, had sort of stuck to the floor. But is was as if one had tried to scatter, as people often used to and in fact still do, you scatter, disseminate something from the top of a tower, a leaflet or information of whatever. But in fact it had all kind of stuck inside the tower. So both of those things to me had the kind of feeling of a ring that hadn't gone out and had stayed in, in some way, if that makes sense.
[26:19]
Whether or not it was intentional, I'm just giving my impressions of these things so you'll have to get different views from the artists they, but I found that interesting because it was located in the actual bell tower. So there seemed to me quite a clear sense of something which was about ringing but wasn't going out there, it was sort of coming in. Which sort of mirrors what I was trying to say about the social reversal of in terms off how we experience ourselves in time and space. And I'm now going to skip out of order in terms of the tower's verticality because another piece of work that had that same sort of effect I thought was Claire Haddon's photos of locked doors which were filling the windows on one floor, so again, the windows where you should have been able to look out were filled up by all these images of locked doors and that was another kind of inward implosion in terms of the tower. Something that is somehow barring, the same thing as the ring not going out. It was the feeling of being locked in and in fact, in the other photo of the steps winding which is blocking the window on the ground floor as well, I thought all that was interesting as a kind of anti-ringing. Or ringing, counter ringing or something likes that.
The other photos, I thought, Maria Mitzali's photos, the sequence of a pool in a holiday resort, but a sequence that takes you through year where you have the off season, gives you a completely different feeling of a place you can't go to. You can see the physical item of a pool and the steps and so on, but the picture doesn't say 'resort' because it's at the wrong time. And it gives a sequence, something cyclical, which is another way of moving through time, the same place moving through time, which also likes the bell tower itself, has a particular function and yet for most of the year that function isn't happening.It was something that was like seeing something that's been abandoned, it has an echo. I thought of the tower itself.
[28:36]Another kind of implosion, another kind of thing coming inwards was the butterfly work, John Elliott's work, I don't know if he is here or not, but anyway these are butterflies made out of postcards that people have sent him from all over the world. So again it's like a sort of counter ring, an anti ring, all these things sent from all over the world converging in the tower and not going out from it. If you've seem the work you'll know the shape, it's an attractive thing. But in a way, the meaning of it, it's important to know that they've been sent from all around the world. I tell you what it feels like to me, it's like a kind of reverse photography. As if you had photographed the ripples going out, the kind of sonic waves going out, but you ten reverse the film. So the thing is ringing backwards to the tower if you see what I mean so all of that was interesting.
[29:57] I'm just going to finish by talking about Karl's piece, again if you've seen it, the image of the light coming through the window but sort of shifting, pulling focus, which is very experiential. You actually feel as if the building is breathing, you feel as if they're like lungs or something and one fades in and out as the other fades in and out at about, well, supposedly the level of a breath or a heart beat but it seemed quite fast to me, like the building was out of breath. But that was a very simple but very powerful sensation of, almost of the tower expanding and contracting and having something of the feeling of a bell, moving out, something rhythmical.
[30:55]It made I feel as if the building has come and getting a pulse somehow, which is another slightly bell-like concept and then Nick's work on the ground floor? is almost like the reverse, instead of the building taking on this corporeal feeling, and having a kind of heart beat, and pulse, it was like the opposite feeling, the sense of physical fragmentation. Interims of the human body but of the body being like relics. It was very close to me to being like the shrivelled up bits of some person that was meant to have moved something around in the bible in a box in the bottom of a church, and it's something to do wit the relic, something which is very valuable and very precious but something which is also broken up in the way the church was. The feeling of the body of the church breathing in Karl's work, was a bit like a parallel to all these looked like broken bits of leg and banisters and bits of masonry and stuff lying around as part of this installation of Nick's that I'm talking about. But it was like the body had got all mixed up with that and broken down as well. So partly I wanted to say something about the work and how it works in that space, also I wanted to shamelessly show what a useful tool for criticism the idea of the bell and the fragmentation and the kind of inward is.
[32:55] Just to finish I would say that it is very interesting and very powerful in a space where there is meant to be this sound ringing out to have this experience where actually so much of the work is about coming inward or fragmenting and to come back to what I was trying to say at the beginning, which may have seemed a bit obvious or repetitive, but actually that does parallel in many ways, our experience now as people in society - a sense of being pushed inward in many ways, a sense of fragmentation, a sense of things moving not outward to be shared but inward on peoples own shoulders. And to what extent that was all absolutely intentional and to what extent it grew out of the space, I found very interesting and with my own mental image of the bell and the walkman as these opposite extreeems of human auditory social experience, I felt that both of those were coming and going in that show and in the work. I'm going to stop there if people want to raise anything. I hope that's a useful way into the show.
Last updated on 18th February 2007
