The Other. James Webb’s Prayer & Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet

By Jon Seals

There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in
the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village that is without light
and companionless. And the
thought comes
of that other being who is
awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.

The Other, by Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913-2000)

The poet R.S. Thomas suggests a vision more expansive than the Atlantic Ocean of how the sound of our pain and suffering, our hopes and dreams, might travel across water, time, and space, across physical and meta-physical boundaries, and be received by an “Other.” Some call this transaction prayer, perhaps worship; others prefer terms like meditation or chant, maybe just wishful thinking. The names we give often depend on our posture toward faith. If by now you are beginning to question the relevance here within the context of an international, glossy, contemporary art magazine, I’m sure you are not alone. Many years ago, while in graduate school I proposed research on the intersection of contemporary art and Christian faith traditions to my art professor’s dismay. The response was, “Jon, please be serious, this kind of thing isn’t functioning in contemporary art, at least where it matters.” I took the suggestion to get serious and organized my writing, curating, and art practice over the last ten years around similar or adjacent investigations. In 2015 I flew to Dusseldorf, Germany to take a closer look at “The Problem of God,” an expansive exhibition organized by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen at the historic K21 Ständehaus. The exhibition included thirty-three contemporary artists from around the world, including James Turrell, Berlinde de Bruyckere, and Kris Martin, roughly one-hundred and twenty works of art, installed across multiple levels of the museum, all taking up, working with, collaging, deconstructing, dramatizing, and on occasion even reverencing, Christian iconography and themes. It seems religion and the Christian lexicon in contemporary art are having a revival.1 I still puzzle over what professor x meant by “where it matters.” I mean no offense and harbor no ill feelings. The world’s religions have often done well at both offending and casting judgment, continue to be engines of war, conflict, persecution, oppression, and manifest horrific acts of hate. But what of the fruits of faith? Love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control? The call to care for the oppressed, the hungry, the thirsty, the marginalized? The dichotomous nature of what many of the world’s faith traditions hope for and in, versus how it all actually plays out, make fertile ground for contemporary artistic exploration. World history, geography, and economics reveal in no uncertain terms that religion is the driver of culture. Faith in some shape or form is intrinsic to art and always has been.

I tend to focus on projects that attempt to do the difficult, nuanced, and more time-consuming work of mending as opposed to dividing, poking holes, tearing, or ripping apart. There are certainly merits in deconstruction, and it is needed. However, artwork that trades in a unifying currency grows in proportion to its openness to others and likewise begins to move from the personal to the local, and perhaps touches something of a universal. Art created and mobilized through interconnectedness has generative energy. Few would argue against such notions; the challenge is in the breaking of barriers. Works of art that expand the horizons of the possible are made possible, as Reinhold Niebuhr put it, by entering creatively into the lives of others.2 The barrier to this move outward is located first inward-self-infatuation and self-preservation which manifests in the form of isolation. A posture that sees all forms of the other as a potential threat, and then, sadly, isolation itself becomes its own form of cancer of the human spirit.

Here I bring attention to two projects that collect together both the familiar and the foreign through sounds of worship and prayer, across various world religious traditions and languages, that ask participants to consider co-creating, to look into the eyes of the other, and to listen with a hope for understanding; James Webb’s Prayer, and Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet. These two sound installations were created just a year apart, on different continents, each circling the globe now for over a decade, and in each city they inhabit, adapt, respond, and morph in bespoken ways to textures, architecture, history, and to the people who engage the work and one another, revealing that museum space, like any other, has the capacity to be sacred.

Along these lines, two philosophers come to mind, Howard Thurman and Emmanuel Levinas. Both have helped me put things into perspective over the years. In his landmark text The Search For Common Ground, Howard Thurman writes, “Here is a paradox. A man is always threatened in his very ground by a sense of isolation, by feeling himself cut off from his fellows. Yet he can never separate himself from his fellows, for mutual interdependence is characteristic of all of life.” He continues, “Therefore, whenever the individual is cut off from the private and personal nourishment from other individuals or from particular individuals, the result is a wasting away, a starvation, a failure of his life to be sustained and nourished.”3 Furthermore, “The human spirit cannot abide the enforced loneliness of isolation.”4 Our lives depend on our relationship to our neighbor, and by neighbor I mean all people, everywhere.

Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet (A reworking of “Spem in Alium” by Thomas Tallis 1556/1573), 2001, 40 loud speakers mounted on stands, placed in an oval, amplifiers, playback computer. Duration: 14 min. loop with 11 min. of music and 3 min. of intermission, dimensions variable. Johanniterkirche, Feldkirch, 2005. Sung by Salisbury Cathedral Choir. Recording and Postproduction by SoundMoves. Edited by George Bures Miller. Produced by Field Art Projects. The Forty Part Motet by Janet Cardiff was originally produced by Field Art Projects with the Arts Council of England, Canada House, the Salisbury Festival and Salisbury Cathedral Choir, BALTIC Gateshead, The New Art Gallery Walsall, and the NOW Festival Nottingham. © Janet Cardiff. Photo: Markus Tretter. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Emmanuel Levinas addresses these themes in ways that both convict and comfort. For Levinas, one must consider the relationship, dialogue, and discourse of the self, the other, and in the infinite, through the finite face of the other. For Levinas, these are realities revealed (or undisclosed) in the face of others. The face of another awakens the reality that they are separate from our own being, we can never apprehend another’s face, only glimpses of their exterior (never knowing the interior fully) thus revealing our separateness, our limitations, and this calls us to honor the other by virtue of its vulnerable nakedness. This creates an ethic that comes before moral training; it is a first philosophy in the sense that the transactions of face-to-face moments begin before language. Language is born out of the face-to-face confrontation. The encounter with the other’s face is a call to action, a never-ending responsibility to respond, “The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation, which no interiority permits avoiding.”⁵ The face-to-face encounter necessitates discourse, “It is that discourse that obliges the entering into discourse, the commencement of discourse rationalism prays for, a ‘force’ that convinces even ‘the people who do not wish to listen’ and thus founds the true universality of reason.”6 The potential for an ethical dialectic the face makes possible is precisely the very thing that makes so many look down when they walk in public, avoiding the eyes of the homeless, the widow, the orphan, the person of a different skin color or religious tradition. This then reveals a compelling relationship dynamic between the “I” and “other”, and the “Other” as in a divine being. This relationship dynamic is brought into curious focus through Webb’s and Cardiff’s installations.

This past September, the Art Institute of Chicago gave James Webb’s project, Prayer, its North American debut. Prayer was first exhibited in Webb’s home city of Cape Town in 2000 and has since traveled internationally. This latest installment is the tenth. Willing residents of each host city contribute to the project by letting Webb record their prayers, which represent a variety of faith traditions. Past installations have included Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and Hinduism, among others.7 For the Chicago project, Webb recorded and collected two hundred and fifty unique prayers.8 Webb then arranges these into one consecutive recording and loops the prayers which are played through twelve modest speakers, each set at different intervals, so it becomes unpredictable from what speaker will come which prayer. All of this unfolds on a long red carpet set on the museum floor. Guests are invited to walk around, sit down, kneel, and engage the work on their own terms. This allows guests to make unique sonic compositions of the soundscape based on their path and duration throughout the space.

Webb created Prayer as a move toward reconciliation five years after the practice of apartheid ended in his country.9 His piece at the Art Institute makes use of the museum, for its so called ‘neutrality’ and wide-reaching audience, to physically bring different kinds of people together into, in this case, a relatively modest-sized room, but also brings voices and traditions together into the same airspace by playing the recorded prayers at the same time, through egalitarian means, overlapping into a cacophony of sound. In the room, the names of the participants are listed in typical discreet, grey, museum wall vinyl. I’m assuming the faith traditions represented in each host city project are intentionally not posted. I do wonder why, exactly.

My experience of the piece was a bit jarring. I expected to feel a calming sensation, a unified wave of sacred sounds. Instead, the first thing I heard was the museum attendee, speaking forcefully to instruct everyone coming through the sound reduction doors to take their shoes off if they wanted to step onto the carpet, followed quickly by a surprisingly loud sonic experience more akin to listening to hundreds of people talk on the phone at the same time, in the same room. Only hearing one side of the conversation is frustrating. Additionally, to be told to take one’s shoes off because of logistical issues related to the cleanliness and proper care of an art installation in a museum is one thing, but now, because of Webb’s intervention, everything is different in the room. I became more aware of things unseen, because of things heard. The biblical scripture from Exodus came to mind and anxiety ensued, “‘Do not come any closer,’ God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.’ Then he said, ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.’ At this, Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God.”10 However, after sitting down and isolating my hearing to just one speaker at a time, I began to step into the work. As I listened and attempted to relate and engage the piece it became more compelling. I began to consider how I gravitated toward, perhaps felt relieved by, things I understood or had a reference for. This is the kind of revelation I believe Webb is after, if one is willing to push past the familiar and listen carefully. Listening has become a lost art. It’s really hard to do. There are language barriers at play here as well, but rhythm, cadence, tone, grovel, and pitch all help to indicate mood, emotion, pain, and joy. With time and uncomfortable patience, the project moved from loud noise towards a collection of sounds. This was all done in the company of others from many walks of life. I sometimes locked eyes with someone in the room for a brief moment, other times I watched others with closed eyes in prayerful solidarity. Perhaps they were praying too. I witnessed others sway in rhythm, still others nervously paced. Some folks walked in and turned around quickly to walk out, as if sensing they stumbled into a private conversation. A prayer, or hundreds of prayers, that are overheard can provoke a slight feeling of transgression, perhaps eavesdropping, even if we know the one praying has provided consent for the project.

Webb aims to join together diverse people groups from each host city with his piece, Prayer achieves this, but with complicated results. In some ways difference comes into sharper relief. Also, are these simply recorded prayers, bits of sound, artifacts? Might these prayers continue to have agency or do they lay dormant until a listener, human or divine, take them up and listens? When does one cross the threshold of listener to become participant? Does it matter if you do not?

To a degree I think it is Webb’s hope that some kind of co-creation does take place between guests and his recordings. He is quoted in the Chicago Tribune saying as much. “I’m a believer in Duchamp’s idea that the audience completes the work.”11 This refers to Duchamp’s position that both viewer and artist have a symbiotic relationship necessary for a work of art to exist. “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act,” he once wrote.12

If Duchamp is correct, the “inner qualifications” of works we decipher and interpret are given shape and form as they interact with our external world before interlacing with our own sensual interpretations and renderings. Thereafter we begin the co-creating process, and lend our human sensory, and perhaps, spiritual capacities.

Consider a second traveling, immersive sonic installation focused on sacred sound. Created just a year after Prayer, Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet, adapts, shifts, and responds to its host sight, not by collecting disparate voiced prayers to create a composite, but by employing recorded voices in worship, unified by a singular score, and yielding them unto the surfaces, textures, and guests to do with it what they may. It’s an invitation I have accepted on one occasion and its presence remains with me as I write. A work like Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet makes it difficult to stay at a critical distance. Attempting to balance a Dionysian and Apollonian response is nearly impossible by my account. I came to the piece as an artist, a fellow co-creator, curious about this new work I had heard billed as “the first contemporary art installation hosted by The Cloisters.” One of the many qualities that have made this work of art so durable across large swatches of people throughout the globe for more than thirteen years and running is that it generates so many to become aware of their own senses and agency as both receiver and giver. I’m confident Cardiff wouldn’t want guests to remain critically distant from her piece. She has written about the piece, “While listening to a concert you are normally seated in front of the choir, in traditional audience position. With this piece I want the audience to be able to experience a piece of music from the viewpoint of the singers.”13

By investigating the variety of places The Forty Part Motet has traveled one can gain insight into its evolutionary existence. Two agents of change are at play that form the ever-changing life of this exhibition as it travels from place to place: memory and materiality.

I made the trek to the peculiar extension of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in December of 2013. The Cloisters provided a unique space for the traveling installation created in 2001. The installation was described in part by The Cloisters as “…consisting of forty high-fidelity speakers positioned on stands in a large oval configuration throughout the Fuentidueña Chapel, the fourteen-minute work, with a three-minute spoken interlude, continuously plays an eleven-minute reworking of the forty-part motet Spem in alium numquam habui (In No Other Is My Hope) …”14 The Cloisters, a museum space intentionally filled with sacred objects and composed from a collage of ecclesiastic architectural plans and materials, is a compelling host for a disembodied collection of voices. Through open doors, I, along with fifty or so strangers, gathered in Fuentidueña Chapel, walked into the center of the oval-shaped arrangement of speakers and waited. Slowly, and then quickly and powerfully, we all became enveloped in human sound recorded and played back through high definition speakers. In this exhibit guests were not given directions to take their shoes off, but it’s likely some did without such prompting.

All in attendance struck me with their reverence. Within the space of sound, without instruction, most instinctively bowed their heads and closed their eyes, and children were shushed by their caretakers. Some folks quietly began to cry. I looked around and took in the bricolage of sacred materials and architecture, reflecting on the disparate, transposed and collected history present while listening. I considered each feature while slowly walking throughout the space and encountering each voice. It was dark outside and soft spotted gallery lighting directed my attention out of the shadows of the space and onto the Catalan fresco depicting the Virgin and Child in Majesty and the Adoration of the Magi. Of course, one could not miss the prominent feature in the chapel, Christ on the cross hanging from the ceiling hovering above. When I moved to the center, the individual voices surged together and hit me with force. Back along the edges of the oval again I could focus my ears on one voice/speaker, maybe two or three at a time. The interplay between interior and exterior was astounding. Immediately I shifted from my previous role of viewer outside the chapel to participant inside The Forty Part Motet. This kind of paradigm shift so many experience is the brilliance of the piece carried by the materials in the space, activating memories or associations with objects and architecture, revealed with the special characteristics of light. The installation hovers in the in-between: between speakers, architecture, visitors and light, ineffable, and intangible, but certainly present. Perhaps this is what leads so many to describe the piece as sacred or spiritual, including those outside any particular faith tradition. I began to think of the piece as an invitation to the sacred, which implies that one must navigate and participate in the work to activate the depths of the project. This is done in the company of others, both present and recorded, and through others, perhaps a divine Other.

The construction of the Motet itself acknowledges the individual and the collective. The English composer of the 16^th century, Thomas Tallis, wrote Spem in alium nun quam habui, a choral work for eight choirs of five voices, roughly in the latter half of the 16^th century.15 It is famous for being an incredibly complex piece of polyphony. An important feature of this piece by Tallis is the way in which it was composed. Tallis not only wrote for the traditional roles of bass, tenor, alto, and soprano. He wrote forty lines or parts for each singer as well.16 The piece is made up of four harmonies, individual singers with individual roles, all in the service of producing an incredibly rich whole. That layering of complexity creates the necessary support for the experience of Cardiff’s installation to move in and out of one voice or more at any given time. Cardiff has recorded with individual microphones each singer of the choir of Salisbury Cathedral’s performance of the piece and then plays each voice with an individual audio speaker. This allows the visitor to listen to different voices and experience different combinations and harmonies as they progress through the work. But there are more than voices at play here. These displaced voices are made present within the context of a space, one that has transformative effects of its own.

Like Webb’s Prayer, The Forty Part Motet often travels to event spaces, galleries, and museums. It holds a peculiar relationship with the phrase “site-specific art.” It is not built for or fixed to a place, but it is always in connection to or in conversation with each place it is exhibited. In each of the thirty-plus times it’s been presented, its new environment adds and subtracts layers to the experience. When the National Gallery of Canada presented the work in the Rideau Chapel, the sound carried to the cathedral’s ceiling, working in harmony with the wood architectural elements that also lift the gaze upward. Rideau Chapel and The Cloisters are similar in their new and re-imagined architectural forms. Both have ecclesiastic histories, both uprooted and transported to a different location in combination with other sites’ materials, and both now function as an art museum.

Both of these sites have traditions of the sacred that are carried over from their previous lives as ecclesiastical spaces. They are loaded with meaning and the constructed content visitors bring with them in their understanding and expectations of both church and museum spaces, here a curious blending of the two.

The Cleveland Museum of Art presented the Motet in its Renaissance painting galleries. Once again, the work in dialogue with memory of art and faith, in this case borrowing and adapting religious and artistic imagery from paintings roughly created when the Motet was originally composed by Tallis. Here, the voices of the Motet were given warmth by the parquet wood floors, faint violet walls, and soft natural light.

At the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre in the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Motet was in dialogue not only with white walls, and cold ceramic floors, but chiefly in a compelling conversation with the sculptures of Henry Moore. It is interesting how the Motet never appears to be in competition with the context or space. It seems to adapt and take on qualities, to expand in interesting ways. If anything, the space may limit the function of the Motet, as opposed to the reverse. Nonetheless, in the case of the Moore pieces, the sounds flow in and out of the carved negative holes of his sculptures. It provides the sculptures voice. The words and the melody appear to be both about and from the figures. Here not only do the visitors of Cardiff’s installation become co-creators, but likewise art itself gets the chance.

James Webb, Prayer, 2018. © James Webb. Courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago.

In each location, the piece morphs and shifts in meaning, in dialogue with wherever it finds itself; in a previous sacred space, a museum, a contemporary art space, with wood, concrete, or ceramic tile floors, surrounded by stone blocks, drywall, marble, on painted or naturally colored walls, or in natural or artificial lighting. The voices take what they are given and work with it, in conversation with the memories the visitor brings to each place.

Cardiff’s work made a believer and co-creator out of me. She and her partner have made exploring the relationships between space and sound their life’s work, while humbly offering their audio works to be activated by materiality and memory. They do so in compelling ways that both question and affirm human interaction with space. The Forty Part Motet is an ever-growing project. Even though it was created some thirteen years ago, it is never finished. With each new venue the project invites others into its soundscape to work in harmony with the space in which it lives. Perhaps for these reasons so many have and continue to accept the invitation.

James Webb’s Prayer invites guests to participate in the neglected, difficult, and radical act of listening. Webb challenges guests to not simply accept a wave of noise as background, but to isolate prayers of the individual and allow them to be heard as sounds, voices, intimate, each with a hope to be heard, understood, helped. Prayer evolves and shifts from city to city, yes, by the architecture and textures that frame it, but mostly by the myriad people and traditions that form it. Prayer provokes one to move beyond the self and the familiar, and to hear one another in all our difference, to listen, to make peace. To remind us that we are united by our great need. Webb invites us to allow the mystery of our prayers to break on one another with love, respect, and grace.¹⁷

NOTES

1. Seals, Jon C. “A Grey Dawn: On ‘The Problem of God’.” ARTPULSE. Accessed December 28, 2018. http://artpulsemagazine.com/a-grey-dawn-on-‘the-problem-of-god’.

2. Niebuhr, Reinhold. “The Christian Witness in a Secular Age.” Christian Century Magazine 22 July 1953: 840-42.

3. Thurman, Howard. “Concerning The Search.” The Search for Common Ground; an Inquiry into the Basis of Man’s Experience of Community. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. 2.

4. Ibid. 3.

5. Levinas, Emmanuel. “B. Ethics And The Face.” Totality and Infinity; an Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969. 201.

6. Ibid

7. “James Webb: Prayer.” The Art Institute of Chicago. Accessed December 28, 2018. https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9015/james-webb-prayer.

8. Johnson, Steve. “Artist’s ‘Prayer’ at Art Institute Is Chicago Voices Singing, Praying, Reciting - and Completing the Work.” Chicago Tribune. September 11, 2018. Accessed December 28, 2018. https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/museums/ct-ent-james-webb-chicago-religions-art-institute-0912-story.html.

9. Ibid

10. “BibleGateway.” Acts 3:9-10 NIV - - Bible Gateway. Accessed December 28, 2018. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus 3:5-6&version=NIV.

11. Johnson, Steve. “Artist’s ‘Prayer’ at Art Institute Is Chicago Voices Singing, Praying, Reciting - and Completing the Work.” Chicago Tribune. September 11, 2018. Accessed December 28, 2018. https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/museums/ct-ent-james-webb-chicago-religions-art-institute-0912-story.html.

12. Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” in Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du Sel), ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, 140.

13. “Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller | The Forty Part Motet | 2001.” Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller | The Forty Part Motet | 2001. Web. 17 Dec. 2014. <http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/inst/motet_video.html>.

14. “JanetCardiff.”JanetCardiff.Web.11Jan.2019.

<http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2013/janet-cardiff>.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Selected recordings of James Webb’s Prayer can be heard at the following link:

https://m.soundcloud.com/theotherjameswebb/sets/prayer

Jon Seals is a conceptual artist, teacher, and curator. He holds a M.A.R. from Yale Divinity School and Yale Institute of Sacred Music and a M.F.A. in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design. His artistic practice is organized around exploring the ways in which identity relates to memory, loss, and redemption in visual culture. He is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Digital Media at Olivet Nazarene University.