Last weekend, Sharon Hayes DJ’ed at the Guggenheim. Thinking of the hipster meet-and-greets that colonize city museums over the summer, I assumed the event would skew more towards the social than intellectual (and possibly include some sort of open bar) but failing better research, I was proven wrong. Instead, the event—which took place during the afternoon—featured Sharon Hayes spinning spoken-word records in the lobby of the museum as tourists pored over maps.

Hayes’ set was part of the Guggenheim’s Haunted show—an examination of how photography and video have responded to new forms of documentation over the past half century. Assuming viewers walk straight up the spiral, the show opens on Warhol and closes on Tacita Dean, with a scattered theoretical survey of post-‘60s art in the middle. Focusing on photography—the imperfect marriage of ghost and machine—the curators posit that in the 21st century media landscape, images negotiate the collective experience of history and memory, and for better or worse, can be remade at the artist or viewer’s volition.

The blank power of the image is elegantly unwound in Sarah Charlesworth’s Herald Tribune: November 1977, a day-by-day breakdown of that month’s front pages with articles whitewashed away. Free of text, the photos invite original interpretations, turning a site of fixed meaning into a new kind of canvas, a space for referents without signifiers. By neutralizing language, Charlesworth displaces the artist, calling attention to art’s natural capacity for deception. In her Small Wars series, photographer An-My Lê takes this as her primary concern, documenting Vietnam War re-enactors in the style of ‘70s photojournalists. These ‘fake’ photos are indistinguishable from wartime ones, and they rely on captions to fill in the punchlines. A Vietnam refugee herself, Lê toys with the sanctity of war images to evoke a scene out of central casting.

In Sharon Hayes’ work, art is less a site of deception than it is one of subjective interpretation. Through audio, film and performance—her projects have been variously described as “re-speakings,” and “re-presentations”—Hayes investigates the reverberations of political speech over time, examining how the process of documentation gives way to perceptual shifts. In Parole, her piece at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Hayes embedded audio of civil rights speeches—James Baldwin; lesbian activist Anna Rüling—over contemporary footage shot in the privacy of homes and public spaces. At the Guggenheim, Hayes’ references were strictly ’60s. Angela Davis, Malcolm X and Spiro Agnew made it into her repertoire, and less explicitly political LPs—the moon landing, Edward Murrow speeches—were stacked up behind her. This “unique sonic event,” as the museum would have it, turned out to be an excellent supplement to “Haunted”—a performance that enacted the show’s central questions while exposing its shortcomings.

Political speech is always at risk of losing its potency when removed from its original context, but sticking it in a lobby during a weekend rush threatens to brush against satire. (Does anybody listen to pianists in malls?) In her previous projects, Hayes broadcast historically charged speeches in parks and homes—spaces where the private and political meet in personal and unanticipated ways. Under these conditions, Hayes suggests, language is able to accrete new meaning while acknowledging the loss of earlier contexts. Performing live at the Guggenheim, however, doesn’t lend itself to subjective experience. Aside from the technical problems associated with projecting sound in the space—a spiral, it turns out, isn’t the most acoustically generous shape—Hayes’ audio intervention lost some of its luster in the sanitized space of the museum.

But while the lobby of the Guggenheim isn’t a great place to start a revolution, it did provide Hayes with a platform for a different kind of critique. As Hayes played her records, visitors tuned in and out, listened ambiently, and occasionally committed their attention to the unlikely DJ. The audio may have been political, but the performance was about the social conditions of politics—a commentary on how we experience media. When read in this way, the intervention seemed to reflect Haunted’s faith in the infinite possibility of media, as well as its depressing underlying condition: it’s always possible to change the channel.

Politics and Other Ghosts: Sharon Hayes spins “Haunted”

Share on Tumblr