- Venue
- Aberystwyth Arts Centre
- Location
- Wales
Dawn Chorus
Marcus Coates
21 March ? 12 May 2012
Aberystwyth Arts Centre
Aberystwyth
Ceredigion
SY23 3DE
An eerie, disembodied, echoing of birdsong is emanating from the Arts Centre. It can be heard inside and out. It is encircling the building. Yet, something is not quite right. It is the wrong time of the day for such a heralding and by so many species of bird. Such is the introduction to Marcus Coates? installation, ?Dawn Chorus? (2007), currently on show at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre.
Exerting a strangely seductive primal pull, this incongruous clamouring of song draws you into the gallery. A darkened room onto whose walls are projected seven moving images of people in a variety of interior spaces. There is a half-naked man sitting on the end of a hotel bed, another man is at his kitchen table, a newspaper and mug of tea by his side, another in his car; there is a woman in a staff room, a photocopier standing idle in the distance, there is a dentist in his surgery, an aged man by his gas fire, a young woman in the bath and an elderly one lying beside her husband in bed. Ordinary homes, ordinary rooms – prosaically familiar in their ordinariness. The light in all the films is dull, muted, curtains are closed. It is clearly that time, the time for insomniacs, nursing mothers, shift workers and all-night revellers. Dawn. We watch them as they read, drink, soak, think, sleep, itch, fidget, stretch and stare. Then all of a sudden a strange kind of possession seems to overcome them. Not all together. One will start up and then another. There is a juddering, a twitching, a jerky heaving of the chest, a stretching out of the throat, a quickening of breath, a pounding and then a singing, a singing out of song. The birdsong, the dawn chorus is theirs.
Marcus Coates (born 1968) is a performance and installation artist. Perhaps best known for his work, ?Journey to the Lower World? (2005), Coates? works are passionate, often ridiculous, explorations into the state of humanness. ?Dawn Chorus?, now part of the Arts Council’s permanent collection, took Coates and collaborator, wildlife sound-recordist Geoff Sample, three years to make. From the back of a tiny camper van, parked up in the heathland of Northumberland, recordings of individual bird calls were meticulously captured. A labour of love – more akin to scientific research than artistic creation. By digitally slowing down the bird sounds Coates discovered that they could be mimicked, sung, by a human voice and that when these were speeded up they sounded just like the bird song they had copied. Amateur singers were auditioned and the piece was made.
The films are funny. One laughs at them but one is also discomforted, unsettled. It is a bit like watching someone who has been hypnotised. They appear affronted, unwilling, and resistant; they are being taken over by a force that is stronger than them. An elemental, feral force that is at odds with their ordered, domesticated state. A call of the wild. And the bird calls are demanding. There is aggression, a forcefulness, a stridency of noise that resonates through the gallery. It makes for uncomfortable listening. There is an urgency, a roaring of something potent that one does not usually connect with songbirds, in all their tender smallness. Coates is trying to find connections between us and them, a lost kinship even. He has placed his singers in boxes, closed-off, isolated and trapped within interior worlds of sharply-yellowed light and flabby, too soft, comfort. A tacitly stated contrast to that of the birds, urgently fighting for space, for territory, for the right to reproduce. For all its eccentricity ?Dawn Chorus? is a poignant and beautiful piece of film-making – reflecting back, as it does, our animalistic impotency, our disconnection from instinct, our loss of primal voice.
Ellen Bell
Artist & Writer
March 2012
