Remapping the World
Keith Gallasch
Review
of Museum of Rumour
Kirkbride Building SCA, Sydney December 9 -16, 2003
Maria
Miranda’s The Museum of Rumour manifested both online and onsite
in late 2003 at the Sydney College of the Arts. The college was
formerly an institution for the incarceration of the insane, established
in 1886 with 630 patients, peaking with over 3000 patients in 1968
and dropping to 579 in 1988 before being closed. You’d at
least expect to encounter the ghosts of rumour in this work as you
wander about the building where inmates were herded to eat their
meals. But there’s very little
that’s literal about Miranda’s creation. Even so, associations
inevitably spring to mind as you peer into a hole in the floorboards
that cannot be accounted for, or at a kneeling stool, a chest of drawers
or a view of a nearby spire. A headphone set guides you point to point
where a voice gently coaxes your contemplations. Each reverie is followed
by an exquisite if all too brief sound composition (Norie Neumark).
I would have preferred the sound before the words, to let loose more
associations, and then the opportunity to relish the sound again after
the delivery of the text. Even so this is an interesting and unusual
experience thematically reminiscent of Company in Space’s multimedia
performance work The Light Room (2002), also inspired by mediaeval and
renaissance mappings of space by associations, metaphor and memnonics
rather than literal representation.
The
website of the Museum of Rumour offers a very different experience
if on a continuum. It uses the great avant-garde writer Gertrude
Stein as the primary node for a network of association and influence
in six frames, each with a life of its own, aptly titled ‘degrees of separation.’
These include rumours of war, cats (feral, domestic and Tourneur’s
Cat People film), the Gene-Hackman French connection, Our Lady of Coogee
and a set of Steinian cups that fall and clink and spill the writer’s
words. There’s also a Stein page where clicking on scrolling lines
of letters triggers an acrobatic dance of words (lesbian, postmodern,
writer...) and sounds. There’s also a delightful ‘Interferometer’ with
an active grid that responds like an oscilloscope to the speed of rumour
at your choice of drift, walk, wander, meander, lurk or float. This is
a good-humoured, finely made, altogether eccentric museum that suggests
different ways of archiving experience and tracing the lateral paths
of memory and association.
from Keith Gallasch, "Remapping the World" RealTime
59 February - March 2004
