| Matthew Buckingham
by Neha Choksi and Allan Kram
The Voice and the View
I can’t say for sure whose words I hear when I turn
into a room resounding with a sure voice telling me that even these words are "not
really my own." Buckingham’s ‘Definition’ loops a steady-paced
authoritative voice from doubt to doubt as if the borrowed, stolen or perhaps merely hired
words might bring definition to the fuzzy slide of an empty room projected against one far
wall:
"This is the room in one of the houses in London where
Samuel Johnson lived."
"The years spent in this room were dictionary
years."
The gallery floor slopes in the soothing comfort of a
darkened cinema hall as the tourist-guide voice tells us about Johnson and his dictionary.
We are presented neither with an image of Johnson or of the product of his labors; rather
the image constitutes a portable trip to the site of production, projected unvaryingly
against the flow of words, much like the garrett was a constant for Johnson no mater how
portable his product. What we see: an overexposed snapshot fixing the luminescent room in
an immobile exposure. A fragment of a chair marks human presence. A window allows air and
light. The garrett provides those niggardly necessities of space and light adequate to the
production of the dictionary—most of us do much less with much more. Trite as it may
seem, the image of light filling the room captures the light productive of knowledge much
as Johnson captured a moment of the English language.
We occupy a heightened vantage in a perspectivally
projected space whose very compression disrupts any illusionist implication of an
illuminated tromp l’oeil fourth wall. As art audience, we are neither in
Johnson’s room, nor in the artist’s studio, but in the non-productive space of a
gallery. And we know this because we are caught in this dark room, supine. The artist has
eased us into our position as art tourists.
And the artist provides us with such high-brow tourism
indeed. Like most touring locations, this image is merely a mnemonic device to hang
thoughts on. And what thoughts: the fashionably erudite voice--variously reassuring,
pleasing, critical, ironic, and informative--paces his thoughts with pauses. The nuggets
of thought are brief, impressionistic, selectively attentive and direct, synoptic and
syncretic like dictionary entries. As Johnson’s dictionary put forth his
representation of the language, similarly these ramblings build Buckingham’s mellow
version of Johnson for us.
Recalling that Johnson’s representation of the English
language ignored every day speech and that he only rarely addressed matters of
pronunciation in his entries, one wonders just how this toff voice qualifies
Buckingham’s art posing as literary history. Clearly this voice is the elocutionary
performance of an educated Briton whose language has spread in various accents across the
world. This idealized and studied vocal performance presumably is one the American artist
has not mastered. Thus we hear a British voice reading the words of an American artist
whose country, we might recall, gained independence during Johnson’s lifetime. What
does it mean to use the accent of the imperial colonizer par excellence to describe the
life and work of Johnson, the vociferous denouncer of imperial ambitions? The conjunction
of this instructive voice with the image of the illustrious garret at Gough Square reminds
us that this was the same room in which Johnson taught Francis Barber, his young Jamaican
freedman, reading, writing, and penmanship. Why the choice of a masculine voice: it is
often loosely bandied about in scholarly circles how Johnson was a misogynist. I wonder if
Buckingham meant this voice to carry all these valences.
Indeed, I am not sure I like Buckingham’s use of
another’s voice to introduce another layer of doubt: it does belabor the point that
any act of definition is merely a series of approximate fictions altered by context. And
at the same time it provokes questions that the art-project does not seek to address. Is
this piece really just a clever piece or are these mildly disturbed ponderings indicative
of darker undercurrents hidden by the mellow placidity of the presentation?
Yet, Buckingham’s risk is admirable. He uses his
fairly dull slide, and the cinematic darkness of the room to relax the bored eye into an
aural alertness. The ear marks in the well-rounded vowels the posture of certitude and the
poetry of doubt—the emotions of a dictionary. |
