- Venue
- Greene Naftali Gallery
- Location
- United States
There are some moments in life when I look round for the candid camera. One was in a visual culture lecture, when the lecturer played a recording of the sound of buttons being pressed. One was in a packed train at Waterloo Station, when commuters pressed tight to each other for over an hour, even though the train wasn’t moving and the doors were open.
And one was last night. A darkened gallery in Chelsea, New York. A stud wall with a window set up in the corner. Melodramatic music, on what sounded like vinyl, being played while performers acted and reacted to each other behind the flimsy viewing pane.
What characterises all these almost-candid-camera-moments is the pious attentiveness of the people caught up in them – including me. As I sat cross-legged on the floor of Greene Naftali Gallery, earnestly watching Tony Conrad’s ‘Window Enactment’ amidst the hushed silence of other art-goers, I wondered if someone was going to jump up and pop our collective bubble of concentration. What, after all, were we looking at?
There were some repeated motifs in Conrad’s work. The ominous sounding music that played while performers marched back and forth in front of the window happened on and off with what – in this context – could be said to be regularity. One female performer teased a half-realised, flirtatious character from her whispered words into a mobile phone. And there were pleasingly circular references to the voyeurism of the piece, as performers looked out of the window and into the audience through night-vision goggles.
But were these improvised scenes enough to warrant a room-full of silent veneration? Watching Conrad’s piece felt like spying on the not-quite hidden antics of your neighbours – an illicit pleasure borne out of the knowledge that it’s something you shouldn’t do. Except that here the voyeurism was directed, so all we watched was a series of never-fulfilled relations between people we didn’t know. The naughtiness of that kind of anonymous voyeurism – where the subject is a stranger – was taken away, but its emptiness was left in. It is profoundly dissatisfying to concentrate on some not very interesting strangers half-finish some not very interesting things.
Perhaps this lack of interest is my own fault. Perhaps my own thoughts should have ballooned inside the templates offered by Conrad and his fellow performers, until I constructed the kinds of narratives I pin onto the office workers I can see from my bedroom window. But those office workers seem so interesting because I watch them at a tangent to my life. Here, as the venerated object of this art-crowd’s attention, Conrad’s performers were neither absorbing enough to occupy our thoughts, nor playful enough to encourage flights of the imagination. I left after an hour and a half, realising on my way out that the gallery had quietly begun to empty behind me. Perhaps the others had noticed a candid camera somewhere, trained on our pious and eager faces; waiting for someone to point out that the Emperor had no clothes on.
