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(Museum of Ventriloquial Objects): Reconfiguring Voice Agency in the Liminality of the Verbal and the Vocal

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(Museum of Ventriloquial Objects): Reconfiguring Voice Agency in the Liminality of the Verbal and the Vocal View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by UCL Discovery MUVE (Museum of Ventriloquial Objects) Reconfiguring Voice Agency in the Liminality of the Verbal and the Vocal Laura Malacart UCL PhD in Fine Art I, Laura Malacart confirm that the work presented in the thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Laura Malacart ABSTRACT MUVE (Museum of Ventriloquial Objects) Reconfiguring Voice Agency in the Liminality of the Verbal and the Vocal This project aims at reconfiguring power and agency in voice representation using the metaphor of ventriloquism. The analysis departs from ‘ventriloquial objects’, mostly moving image, housed in a fictional museum, MUVE. The museum’s architecture is metaphoric and reflects a critical approach couched in liminality. A ‘pseudo-fictional’ voice precedes and complements the ‘theoretical’ voice in the main body of work. After the Fiction, an introductory chapter defines the specific role that the trope of ventriloquism is going to fulfill in context. If the voice is already defined by liminality, between inside and outside the body, equally, a liminal trajectory can be found in the functional distinction between the verbal (emphasis on a semantic message) and the vocal (emphasis on sonorous properties) in the utterance. This liminal trajectory is harnessed along three specific moments corresponding to the three main chapters. They also represent the themes that define the museum rooms journeyed by the fictional visitor. Her encounters with the objects provide a context for the analysis and my practice is fully integrated in the analysis with two films (Voicings, Mi Piace). Chapter 1 addresses the chasm between the scripted voice and the utterance using the notion of inner speech, leading into a discussion about the role of the inner voice, not as silent vocalisation but as a fundamental cognitive tool that precedes writing. Chapter 2 discusses hermeneutics in the progressive breakdown of the semantic component in the voice, using translation as the site where politics and economics converge with aesthetics. With performance, the discussion broadens into performativity and the political aspects of agency in speech. With Chapter 3 the analysis shifts towards ventriloquial objects whose vocal component is more prominent than the semantic. Singing is considered from a gender perspective, as well as from the materialistic viewpoint of the recording medium. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 i. MUVE (MUSEUM OF VENTRILOQUIAL OBJECTS) A FICTION 18 ii. VENTRILOQUISMS AND THE VENTRILOQUIAL OBJECT 30 The Voice and its Invisible Apparatus 39 Magic and the Voice beyond the Frame 45 Myth, Past Voices and Present Bodies 52 The Sentient Voice of the Machine 56 Repetition and the Emotional Voice 60 Voice Subtitling and Cultural Ventriloquism 61 Ventriloquial Objects as Audiovisual Objects 63 Chapter I OF LYING FATHERS, AUTISTIC FOOTBALL AND INFANTILISATION: VOICE AS WRITING, INNER VOICE AND THINKING Premise 65 Close Ups 68 Whose Voice Am I? 91 Thought as Artwork, Artwork as Inner Speech 96 Incongruence and Infantilisation as Critique 102 Chapter II TRANSLATED VOICES, THE SENSE THAT CANNOT UTTER ITS NAME Premise 109 Outside One’s Language: Suffering the Language 112 The Music, the Voice, its Accent and the Machine 127 The Disorder of Language and the Music of Thought 137 Vocation and the Body 141 Sightless Seer 145 Body of Evidence 149 Chapter III THE UNBEARABLE PLEASURE OF LISTENING AS THE RECORD OF SIN Premise 155 Historicism Vanguard and Resistance 161 The Problem with Fitzcarraldo 168 Monotone and Difference 181 Live Recording, Repetition and Gender Fetishism 183 Bad Singing and Impossible Love: The Law That Cannot Tell its Name 187 Undisciplined Choir 198 CONCLUSION 206 BIBLIOGRAPHY & FILMOGRAPHY 211 PRACTICE COMPONENT (DVD Submission): Malacart, Laura (dir) Voicings, 2007/10 The News Editor, 2009 Mi Piace, 2008 MUVE (Museum of Ventriloquial Objects) Reconfiguring Voice Agency in the Liminality of the Verbal and the Vocal INTRODUCTION MUVE is a project about the use of the voice in aesthetic practice. My interest in the intersection of language and sound begun with my first video work in which I attempted to illustrate Voyelles, a 1871 poem by Arthur Rimbaud about synaesthesia. The difficulty of this task later made me avoid using sound altogether. Avoidance resulted in an ineffectual strategy, possibly because silence does not exist on earth. The soundless eeriness of my short video Accidents (2001), where planes and birds appear to collide in slow motion, reverberates to this day in the light of the 9/11 events. I remember the shock generated by this innocent 60- second video, displayed on a small monitor, during the exhibition opening in September 2001 – I blame its silence coupled with the inevitable association with 9/11. When I began to tackle the use of the voice I realised the voice carried an excess. As a material it was to hard to control in the sense that ‘it’ always said more than I wanted it to say: I could control the linguistic content but I could not disregard the multiple and complex connotations of a singular, unique utterance. So I abided completely by the ‘material’ and produced some works in which I avoided linguistic communication altogether. Aural Mounds (1999) is a two-screen video installation where a barely decipherable black and white image ‘emits’ a very visceral sound (one produced masticating ten packets of chewing gum). During that same period I was also researching the voice and experienced a frustration in either a general lack of material or its compartmentalisation in specific disciplines. Aside from Michel Chion’s Audiovision (published in English in 1994) most writing about the voice in the moving image tended to deal with the soundtrack separately from the picture. Rick Altman’ s contributions with Sound Theory and Sound Practice (1992) falls into this category, while remaining a significant point of reference in shifting the focus onto the soundtrack. Kaja Silverman’s work on gender and the voice, The Acoustic Mirror (1988) was and still is, influential to practice. 1 In a sense film theory and aesthetic discourses were dominated by post-structuralist theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis that assumed that there is nothing outside the signifying content of language. It was as if the right kind of theoretical material had to be created by harnessing knowledge from a number of disciplines in which the voice had become trapped, and of course through practice. This is why this project is fuelled by an ethos focusing on the ‘voice apparatus’, with the intervention of theoretical contributions from materialist philosophy (T. Adorno, W. Benjamin) and structural linguistics (L. Vygotsky) that become fundamentally integrated with the contributions of the mentioned film theorists. In 2006 I created a performance at the Whitechapel Gallery where I allowed the voice ‘to say more than it should have’ and deliberately based the work on a strong change of register. The live performance was called Promotion and I devised one- to-one encounters with the public where I enticed each participant to join me for a complementary glass of wine so long as they agreed to listen to my marketing message about the event they were participating in. Unbeknownst to the public my voice was pre-recorded, hence the individual attention promoted by marketing was in fact standardised. I mimed my speech into a fake lapel mike that was meant to indicate how my voice was being amplified by the speakers in the room. I initially pretended to read from the publicity sheet I created for the event but then the ‘voice’ went out of character and started to make inappropriate comments on the content read and it progressively become hysterical in a crescendo of rage asking people to leave the room. At this point my miming had stopped and the guest noticed that it had not been me that addressed them, but a pre-recorded voice. This self- fashioned ventriloquial voice is suitable to introduce MUVE because it is situated in a fine art context and it focuses on the potential of the voice as a material traversed by language and imbued with politics. MUVE is conceived from the need to formulate a conceptual framework for a critical and applied use of the voice. The utterance has to be conceived by taking into account its political and ideological potential exemplified by the expression ‘having a voice’. Of course in the domain of representation the perspective on agency has to shift from a direct to an indirect one: as we see and hear speaking subjects we need to question the construction and role of the utterance. The spoken word has a mise en scène. It is constructed, instigated or scripted; the notion of mise en scène 2 in turn is implicated in the diverse discourses connected to the cinematic apparatus and theatrical production. While this project acknowledges the importance of critical debates on moving image and performance practices in connection with the voice, it is also true that the framework in MUVE engages with these practices without aspiring to be situated within the specifics of each discipline. This is due primarily to the fact that often when particular disciplines focus on the role of sound, like cinema and sound art, they do so by considering the aural component autonomously: MUVE instead takes into account the utterance multi-modally, or audiovisually. In addition, as a context for audiovision shapes up from the 1980s within film theory, this research aspires to bring these considerations of the construction and effect of the utterance beyond the domain of the moving image. This is where the notion of ventriloquism comes into play to develop a discussion about voice representation and hermeneutics.
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