Every era has to reinvent the project of 'spirituality' for itself. (Spirituality = plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at resolving the painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.) 

In the modern era, one of the most active metaphors for the spiritual project is 'art.' The activities of the painter, the musician, the poet, the dancer, once they were grouped together under that generic name (a relatively recent move), have proved a particularly adaptable site on which to stage the formal dramas besetting consciousness, each individual work of art being a more or less astute paradigm for regulating or reconciling these contradictions. Of course, the site needs continual refurbishing. Whatever goal is set for art eventually proves restrictive, matched against the widest goals of consciousness. Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outworn maps of consciousness are redrawn. But what supplies all these crises with their energy—an energy held in common, so to speak—is the very unification of numerous, quite disparate activities into a single genus. At the moment when 'art' comes into being, the modern period of art begins. From then on, any of the activities therein subsumed becomes a profoundly problematic activity, all of whose procedures and, ultimately, whose very right to exist can be called into question.

From the promotion of the arts into 'art' comes the leading myth about art, that of the absoluteness of the artist's activity. In its first, more unreflective version, the myth treated art as an expression of human consciousness, consciousness seeking to know itself. (The evaluative standards generated by this version of the myth were fairly easily arrived at: some expressions were more complete, more ennobling, more informative, richer than others.) The later version of the myth posits a more complex, tragic relation of art to consciousness. Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind's need or capacity for self-estrangement. Art is no longer understood as consciousness expressing and therefore, implicitly, affirming itself. Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote—evolved from within consciousness itself. (The evaluative standards generated by this version of the myth proved much harder to get at.)

The newer myth, derived from a post-psychological conception of consciousness, installs within the activity of art many of the paradoxes involved in attaining an absolute state of being described by the great religious mystics. As the activity of the mystic must end in a via negativa, a theology of God's absence, a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, so art must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the 'subject' (the 'object,' the 'image'), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence.

In the early, linear version of art's relation to consciousness, a struggle was discerned between the 'spiritual' integrity of the creative impulses and the distracting 'materiality' of ordinary life, which throws up so many obstacles in the path of authentic sublimation. But the newer version, in which art is part of a dialectical transaction with consciousness, poses a deeper, more frustrating conflict. The 'spirit' seeking embodiment in art clashes with the 'material' character of art itself. Art is unmasked as gratuitous, and the very concreteness of the artist's tools (and, particularly in the case of language, their historicity) appears as a trap. Practiced in a world furnished with second-hand perceptions, and specifically confounded by the treachery of words, the artist's activity is cursed with mediacy. Art becomes the enemy of the artist, for it denies him the realization—the transcendence—he desires.

Therefore, art comes to be considered something to be overthrown. A new element enters the individual artwork and becomes constitutive of it: the appeal (tacit or overt) for its own abolition—and, ultimately, for the abolition of art itself.

– Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will, The Aesthetics of Silence

PROJECT DESCRIPTION: Sixteen steel plates with sandblasted text. Three steel columns with clear acrylic inserts. Sixteen 9-inch video monitors, three video projectors, and custom sound installation.

The sixteen 6 X 10 foot plates will be etched with quotes from sixteen sources on the subject of "Art/Silence." The etched text areas will rust rapidly on exposure to the elements while the remaining non-etched surfaces of the plates will weather at a slower rate. Each plate will include a 9-inch video monitor running blurred black and white video images of everyday activities. The plates will be erected to form a rectangular area approximately 45 feet by 28 feet (five plates on each of the long sides and three plates on each end with 30-inch gaps between them to allow entry into the space.) The columns will be centered within the rectangle and evenly spaced along an axis perpendicular to the end plates. Each column will contain a video projector that will throw video images onto an angled acrylic sheet visible within the column’s acrylic insert. At night, the installation will be illuminated solely by the video screens and the reflected light from the three video projectors.

The audio component will consist of sixteen voices reading the text of the sixteen steel "pages." The voices will whisper from speakers mounted within the columns and plates. Sometimes a single voice may be heard. At other times, multiple voices or even all of the voices may emanate from multiple point sources within the space. These sound events, triggered by motion detectors embedded in the plates and columns, will occur in response to the movement of bodies through the space. The sound level will always be kept to a low murmur. For best effect, the project should be situated on a flat field, preferably the area of Freedom Park on the south side of Euclid between Poplar and Hurt. An interactive, virtual replica of the project is under construction that will allow audiences to explore the space remotely via the Internet (www.pd.org/~chea/17th_voice_VRML/sv_layout_012005.wrl -- *requires Cortona VRML plugin available at http://www.parallelgraphics.com ).

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You might wish to learn more about Audio Spectres, a second Public Domain project proposal for Freedom Park (Atlanta, Georgia).