A hurry through mud: between peregrines, flocks and raves.
Kate Friedeberg presents her online exhibition
mudroom (A hurry through mud: between peregrines, flocks and raves.) as part of the exhibition series A hurry through which known and strange things pass.
The exhibition can be experienced right here:
Exhibition Video:
Artist Statement:
m u d r o o m is an experimental ambient audio installation, initially intended as a temporary occupation of the Return Gallery at the Goethe-Institut Irland as part of a collaborative project A HURRY THROUGH WHICH KNOWN AND STRANGE THINGS PASS,[1] a season of propositions, performances, experiments and scenarios by the MFA Art in the Contemporary World of NCAD. It was transformed into a one-hour virtual livestream streamed independently on Twitch on 23rd April 2020 during Ireland’s first coronavirus lockdown. Now, due to continued circumstances of contagion, the work is being re-uploaded virtually as a continuation of these previous moments and un-moments.
This re-iteration of the work – the exhibition of a recorded performance which occurred virtually due to prohibitive circumstances for live public art – engages with the loop theory central to the piece and the artist’s wider soundscape practice. Elements will always re-occur; repetition and re-iteration are inescapable and unavoidable. We must work within the paradigms of our given situation, and know that an isolated moment is part of a wider whole that will always complete itself and loop back to the beginning. There is a pathetic futility and ultimate acceptance in understanding that the looped environment will continue to revolve in a state of stasis, moving towards entropy. m u d r o o m is here being re-iterated under similar and unanticipated circumstances of contagion to its first denial of being-in-the-world. The stagnation of the coronavirus purgatory for this and many other artwork’s attempts at public manifestation allows the themes of isolation, repetition, tension between stasis and change, confusion, and discomfort in this piece to work within a richer and more nuanced context in this newest sounding, or unsounding, of itself.
Kate Friedeberg
26 October 2020
Please find below the artist statement for the work upon initial performance:
Welcome to m u d r o o m
m u d r o o m is inspired by Steve Goodman’s text Sonic Warfare in relation to J.A. Baker’s text The Peregrine. Baker writes, on the banks of the estuary ‘man walks in water or mud; there is no dry land. Mud is another element. One comes to love it, to be like a wading bird, happy only at the edges of the world where land and water meet, where there is no shade and nowhere for fear to hide.’[2] This concept of a space of fear is supported by Goodman’s writing on the influence of sonic and subsonic vibration and frequency on space and bodies, especially spaces of culture and congregation like sound or clubbing venues. In his writing on ‘the throbbing crowd’ Goodman references Elias Canetti’s work on ‘Crowds and Power’: ‘the affect of fear, particularly of being touched by the unknown, forms a basic logic of population physics.’[3] This sublime quality of fear is the inspiration for and intention of m u d r o o m . There is a tension between fear linked to silence, confusion and isolation, and fear linked to sound, bonding in community and evolution. Fear can be made manifest as exhilaration or a heightened sense of presence and clarity. Baker writes, ‘Learn to fear. To share fear is the greatest bond of all.’[4]
m u d r o o m questions how we flock together, in the paradox of escape through gathering. This ‘escape room’, while a social game concept, is also central to the purpose of a club room. ‘The club can be as much of a trap or a broken promise as it can be an escape from reality. Or it can be all those things at once.’[5]
m u d r o o m is about the muddiness between spaces virtual and physical; between spaces under and above ground. It is about being stuck in the mud, trying to push through and figure out; the universal feeling of difficulty of articulation, the fear of being lost, unheard, silenced or trampled. It is about discomfort and the fear of being obliterated but also the sublimity of such obliteration. In the virtual m u d r o o m we wade like birds in the mud, at once together and blaringly apart, in a space of unknown.
Kate Friedeberg
23 April 2020
[1] Seamus Heaney, ‘Postscript’, 1998.
[2] J.A. Baker, The Peregrine (London: Harper Collins, 2015), pp. 94-95.
[3] Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Massachusetts: MIT, 2010), p. 110.
[4] Baker, p. 30.
[5] Andrew Ryce, ‘Jasmine Infiniti – BXTCH SLÄP’, Resident Advisor (16 April 2020) <https://www.residentadvisor.net/reviews/24928?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=GlobalNewsletter-2004.4> [accessed 16 April 2020].
Part of Common Denominator, a programme in the Goethe-Institut’s Return Gallery curated by Art in the Contemporary World MA/MFA. ACW is a theory-practice post-graduate Masters in the School of Visual Culture at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.
In cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Irland.
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