Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet: The score and the art of equivocation

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The Forty Part Motet (2001), an audiovisual installation by Canadian artist Janet Cardiff, consists in forty loudspeakers arranged in an oval; they play an audio loop of Spem in Alium, a well-known choral work by Thomas Tallis. The recording was devised so that each individual voice can be heard coming from a single loudspeaker. Cardiff’s approach strikes the visitor as highly paradoxical: the artist states that her work is a reworking of Spem in Alium, although the famous composition appears to have been left entirely unchanged. The medium, rather than the piece itself, appears to be the focus of Cardiff’s attention; unlike Tallis’s original motet, The Forty Part Motet pertains equally to music and to the visual arts due to the towering presence of the forty human-sized loudspeakers. The point of Cardiff’s intervention is to emphasize the equivocal nature of the experience thus offered to the visitor: on the one hand, she suggests, by successfully challenging them, that the accepted distinctions between artistic disciplines are largely arbitrary; on the other hand, she shows that dissociation and distance are essential to art, which requires the dynamic interaction of related, but none the less distinct, dimensions of experience. Understood in the broadest possible sense, the concept of score appears to provide a convenient model of this complex situation: first, because it refers to a wide array of similar, but essentially different practices; and secondly, because the purpose of musical notation, increasingly used as a template by visual artists and art critics, is to link various semiotic systems perceived as different and complementary.