News

Jul 31, 2023

The sonic sculpture of Camille Norment

IN THE BEGINNING there was vibration: the originary pulse from which everything in the universe is shaken into being. Sound is one way vibration, that foundational matter-mover, makes sense. For the

IN THE BEGINNING there was vibration: the originary pulse from which everything in the universe is shaken into being. Sound is one way vibration, that foundational matter-mover, makes sense. For the great artist-composer Camille Norment, sound is both a material essential to her practice—which arcs across sculpture, installation, drawing, music, and live performance—and a catalyst for the rearrangement, the reinvigoration, of perception, relation, and the attention we pay to the inner and outer worlds. “I believe in the sonic metaphor,” she said in a public conversation with Axel Wieder, director of the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway and cocurator (with Silja Leifsdóttir) of “Gyre,” Norment’s mesmerizing exhibition there. Per the dictionary, a gyre is “a circular or spiral motion or form;” per the show, it is one possible schema—dynamic, returning—through which to take in how, and what, the nine works on view propose, or loosen, or transmit to the reverberant gray matter of a mind.

For almost three decades, the American-born and Oslo-based Norment has conducted sound via materials such as glass, wood, steel, and paper, often by way of transducers stowed inside her sculptures, which play back the recordings she creates either live in the exhibition space or prior to the exhibition. (Her most recent shows include the 56th Venice Art Biennale in 2015, for which she represented Norway, and a presentation of two monumental works at New York’s Dia Art Foundation in 2022. She was also this year awarded the 2023 Nam June Paik Award.) To think of sculpture as a kind of instrument instantly expands the realm of the visible arts (to borrow from philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy) to include the invisible—the aural and the haptic arts, the hearing and the feeling. (Norment’s call to expand the means of apprehension resists art’s tacit command to all viewers: do not touch!) In the first room of “Gyre” is an installation of ghostly pale pine benches, the lengthy title of which is an invitation from Norment to rest and restore, to connect within and to the environs without:

Her instructions set the stage for a public performance of oneself—albeit silent, and largely for oneself—directed by attention to the unscripted movements and rhythms of one’s own body. As scripted by Norment, “you” are the center of this experience. But one’s interior is not a tidy territory, rather it is formed in part by the inevitable osmotic flow of input (welcome or otherwise) from outside sources and forces, and throughout the exhibition, sound underscores the porosity of self—not without a little cheek. Sitting on the benches of Take a slow deep breath. . ., you may suddenly hear a chorus of voices singing from below your seat, the sound reverberating through the wood and tickling your ass. You feel the work as the work feels you.

One way to “share this resonance” (as Norment prompts) is modeled by Untitled (Bellhorn), 2022, a shining, magisterial brass sculpture installed in the middle of an otherwise empty gallery. About five feet tall, its form is like the horn of an oversized tuba, seamlessly closed off at one end to balance upright, its wide maw open to the ceiling. Suspended just above is a long, thick thread that gathers into a molten, lacrimoid pendant, in which Norment has hidden a speaker. Four microphones point from the four corners of the room toward the sculpture, recording the ambient sounds of the visitors and the room—bits of conversation, footsteps, the rustling of clothing—all fed into the speaker in loops which in turn echo inside Bellhorn’s mouth and beyond. Every sound is a record of the listener; every listener is permeated by their own sounds. As author and sound artist Jace Clayton noted about this work in his review. of “Plexus,” Norment’s exhibition at Dia: “Feedback is machinery saying ‘I Am that I Am.’” Feedback is also architecture declaring the same, or at least rounding out the chorus. Less audible, perhaps, but no less present, are context’s effects and distortions.

Your sonic trails played back at you, who are now disembodied and dislocated from your own noise—you might not recognize the origin of the sounds you hear. Norment isn’t forthcoming about where, preferring you to experience that. You’d have to read the exhibition notes to know how the works work—or don’t, and allow yourself the spaciousness of mind to entertain whatever suspicions arise. These push-pulls between legibility and abstraction—between presence and absence—at times conjure the feeling of phantoms in the room, of spirits that suddenly animate the otherwise still sculptures, moving them and giving them voice. But Norment also infuses Bellhorn with a quality of silence, of nonspeech, playing through it bits of static lifted from radio broadcasts from the 1960s and ’70s reporting on “social and environmental struggles.” Conducting the caesura, the artist offers a way to hear between the lines of history.

On the floor lies the rusting Coil, 2023, comprising pieces of steel railway brackets and building tubes piled together in a shattered circle. From the metal rises the sound of teeth chattering in a near-mechanical staccato. I couldn’t help but first think of the quietude of Minimalism—the stolid machismo Richard Serra projects through hardy Cor-Ten, for example, or the funerary aura exuded by Carl Andre’s cold, floorbound objects. But here Norment’s materials, moving at the speed of erosion, also approach speech, its allusions to machinery and architecture bested by the sonic image of a mouth. Nearby hang three drawings from this year titled Effervescent Gravities 1, 2 and 3, made of iron, rainwater, pencil, ink, and blood that have been moved across acetate or cotton rag paper via vibration, or the use of magnets, or simple gravity. In essence, they map the forces of their own making, as does the pair of Baoding balls in the brass singing bowl at the center of Everyting but Noting, 2023, a sculpture mounted to a drum stand on the wall of the final room of the exhibition. The bowl is perched atop a pair of headphone pads. Without warning, the balls inside of it quiver and roll around—choreographed by sound, one assumes, but of what?—the metal grazing metal, creating a stinging tone. In the corner stands Frisson, 2023, a stunning, stainless-steel sphere that also emanates sounds, but at this point in the show, the cumulative effect of so many works “singing” is that one’s interest in knowing the source is bested by the desire to stand there and simply listen. (A confession: Norment’s The First Conscious Moment, 2023, is described in the show’s pamphlet as a “point of ink,” but I failed to notice it when I visited. Joke’s on me, I suppose.)

Norment is not alone in her belief in the sonic metaphor. Scholar Tina M. Campt’s book Listening to Images (2017) offers sound as a model for the way in which archival images of and by Black people in diaspora are taken in, perceived, and how those images in turn resound of possible Black futurities. Poet-theorist Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003) is a meditation on jazz and improvisation, tracing the many contexts, registers, and effects of Black performance. In his 2010 essay “Music Extensions of Infinite Dimensions,” the late percussionist and healer Milford Graves noted the potential knowledge gained via the physical intake of sound: “Through our given sensory receptors and biological transducers, it is possible and permissible to creatively decipher the concealed and hidden energies within and beyond the universe.”

Distinguishing the sonic from the linguistic, Norment’s work proposes a rethinking of the ekphrastic task, calls for a form that conveys without analogy, which is at best an approximate articulation that shortchanges the precision not only of an experience but as well of its apprehension. “Words are clamor-filled shells,” noted Gaston Bachelard of the measly containers we use and reuse to capture the riotous, cacophonous present. To trap in ink what is otherwise ever shifting in the ether is to betray the feral possibilities, the feedback, of mind and matter. The sonic metaphor, able to express what cannot be spoken, opens the world to fresh forms. All you have to do is listen.

— Jennifer Krasinski

“Camille Norment: Gyre, the Festival Exhibition 2023” at the Bergen Kunsthall, Norway, is on view through August 13.