BEATE GEISSLER + OLIVER SANN: Several Silences; The Renaissance Soceity (Univeristy of Chicago)

Geissler and Sann, Personal Kill #13, 2007 C-print 41"x 53"

Titled after an essay by the late philosopher and literary theoretician Jean-Francois Lyotard, Several Silences is a group exhibition exploring various kinds of silence. As a discourse, the aesthetic of silence has been thoroughly domesticated within the visual arts. Although silence as a discourse in art arose out of conditions calling for the negation of art, it has subsequently become familiar subject matter no longer operating as the avant-garde ideal it once was. This is not to say silence has lost significance. If anything, it has become a more potent antidote to a culture of distraction. Silence, however, is not the absence of communication. It is dialectically opposed to communication, so that one sustains and supports the other. Inextricably bound to communication, which it tacitly evokes, silence itself is a form of communication with many meanings. There are voluntary and involuntary silences--some comfortable, others not. There is Cage's silence, which calls for the distinction between clinical and ambient silences. There is silence as conscious omission or redaction. And then there is memorial silence.

I think this exhibition is great conceptually. Its ideas relate directly to a culture that is overstimulated, bombarded, and busy. The idea of "silence as a form of communication with many meanings" opens up infinite ideas to be expressed and exlpored. Geissler and Sann's image Personal Kill #13 is very 'silent' in that it is an isolated, empty space, void of human life, but its meaning is anything but silent. A lone wooden chair at the end of ta dirty, wet, confined corridor surrounded by heavy bare concrete walls with two small windows giving the smallest glimpse of life outside penetrates the viewer and a strong sense of death and abandonment are experienced.