Eavesdropping, Surveillance, and Sound

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Cabin Fever, an exhibition at Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York, February 10–March 20, 2004.

I pick up the pair of headphones and put them on. A wooden rectangular structure, the size of a refrigerator, sits atop four legs in the center of an otherwise empty room. One of the faces is open: not wood, but velvety curtains. Gingerly, I part the curtains and put my head inside the enormous box. Inside, there is a diorama, with a sense of perspective that feels somehow falsely deep. The diorama is a miniature representation of a familiar rural scene: a trailer home, leaves on the ground, trees, a gravel driveway. It is night. Someone is home. The lights are on inside and there is the unmistakable blue flicker of a television screen. As I watch intently, the sound score begins to intrude, interrupting my looking. The sounds of a quiet summer night: crickets, leaves rustling, the murmur of activity in the house. The sound of car wheels on gravel draws my eye into the diorama, to the driveway. A car door slams, followed by footsteps, followed by a screen door opening and closing. I hear murmurs, conversation. A man and a woman. The volume rises. They are shouting now, but I can't make out what they are saying. And then, horrible sounds: things being thrown, objects hitting walls—are those bodies hitting walls, hitting each other? The violence is viscerally unbearable, I want to take the headphones off, when, suddenly, a shot. A gunshot that makes me jump. And then, chilling silence. The screen door opens, slams, feet running on gravel, falling, getting up, running toward the car door, which slams shut, louder and more urgently than before. The car wheels dig into the gravel, throwing it into the air, speeding away. And then, crickets, and the blue flicker of the tube. A car pulls up in the gravel driveway. Is it the police? Another family member? The car door shuts and footsteps on gravel stride toward the house. It takes me several minutes to realize that we are back where we started, the tape has looped. There: someone is getting shot again. It's hard to stay and it's hard to leave. Am I supposed to just hang my headphones on the hook and walk away, in the middle of this? There is space for two people at this diorama/theatre; for a while I wondered if the woman next to me was hearing the same score I was. But I know she was. She jumped when the gun went off too. We both decide to leave around the same time. We make eye contact but do not speak, a pair of guilty witnesses assuring mutual silence with a glance. But, we can say, quite honestly: I didn't see anything .

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's Cabin Fever was one of three of their pieces exhibited at the Luhring Augustine show. The other works included The Berlin Files, a thirteen-minute single-channel video and Feedback, an installation featuring a Marshall amplifier. Cardiff, who often creates pieces with Miller, is best known for her "audio walks," in which participants receive headphones and follow the instructions of Cardiff herself, who speaks through the headphones as part of a layered, non-linear soundscape. Many of these projects are financially supported by museums or, in the case of Her Long Black Hair (Summer 2004 and 2005), the Public Art Fund. Cardiff's work generates an interactive soundscape, prompting questions regarding the relationship between landscape, sound, and narrative. As sound has become a growing point of investigation in the fine and performing arts in recent years, Cardiff's audio walks have emerged as representative. Cabin Fever, while not an audio tour, takes up similar questions about the role of sound in performance.

Cabin Fever was not well-reviewed. Critics either ignored it or denounced it...