Page 6, Evergreen Gazette, March 10, 1981 ART TALK By Michel Segard

SOUNDS FOUL MESSAGE OF WENGER SHOW

One of the current fashions in the visual arts is to produce multi-media installations. They are frequently a collection of visual images accompanied by taped sounds or music. Often the combination can be very effective, and the “sound-track” will sharpen the focus of otherwise weak visual material. Movies have been using this technique for over 40 years. But there can be booby-traps. Just as a sound-track can clarify the meaning of a visual image, it can also totally alter or obliterate the meaning of that image, and if done unintentionally, with disastrous results to the success of the piece.

Just such a disaster has occurred with the Jane Wenger exhibition currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Ms. Wenger is an accomplished photographer who has acquired a reputation for capturing the intensity of human effort through close-ups of the human face and body. Her photographs are both powerful and at the same time sublime. But in this case her exhibition has literally run amuck.

The exhibition consists of about a dozen very large close-up photographs of men’s faces and necks as they strain in labor while lifting weights. The photographs are hung in a small totally blackened room. The only light is from spotlights aimed at the center of each piece. Accompanying this is a tape recorded “sound-track” of the grunts and straining noises made by the men while lifting weights. However, there is no visual or auditory clue as to what the men are doing. So one is confronted with straining flesh in a small dark room accompanied by grunting noises. Frankly, the overall effect is distinctly scatological.

What I found particularly irritating was the alteration of meaning induced by the ambiguous sound-track. The photographs, taken alone; focus on human physical effort as a visual metaphor for the struggle of human-achievement. These works in a darkened room give a religious tone to that message and emphasize man’s struggle to come out of the darkness and achieve some degree of grace or immortality. But the addition of the grunting sounds shifts the focus of the works back to the basest of animal functions.

It is proper within the context of this work to remind the viewer that man is after all really an animal (in the biological sense). But this point is made quite clear in the photographs themselves. Their sharp focus details every wrinkle, pore, and imperfection of the skin. So the inclusion of the grunting sounds is unnecessarily redundant in this respect.
The inclusion of the sounds then seems ..to imply (by their base connotation) that the goals pursued by the men in the photographs are unworthy. By extension, the content of the work is then that man is really an uncivilized beast with delusions of grandeur. But this message is totally inconsistent with the dignity that Wenger imparts to her subjects in the photographs.

The inclusion of the sounds have then only succeeded in obscuring the meaning of the work. It has left the impression that Ms. Wenger did not have enough confidence in the visual power of her work and felt it necessary to try to amplify her images with auditory props. In fact, Ms. Wenger is an excellent artist and photographer, and her work does not deserve to be befouled with the gimmickry of an ill-conceived installation.