The Art Now Room houses four contemporary art exhibitions each year. These exhibitions feature recent work by new and established artists, from this country and abroad.The Art Now Room houses four contemporary art exhibitions each year. These exhibitions feature recent work by new and established artists, from this country and abroad.
Tacita Dean often works within the framework of Cinema. 'Foley Artist', her installation for Art Now 7 focusses on those little-celebrated film professionals who invent sounds to accompany visual footage. Working in large dubbing studios, they use a wide range of props and movements to record individual elements, and these are then painstakingly synchronised.
Tacita Dean's installation also uses sound to tell a story. A large dubbing chart enables visitors to follow the artist's orchestrations and reconstruct the narrative. A video of actual Foley artists performing provides a visual coda.
The above is extracted from the Tate Gallery Calendar of Exhibitions.
What a disappointment. I made a special effort when in London recently to visit the exhibition which I had heard mentioned on radio reviews of what's on in the great metropolis. I thought 'Great, movie sound is getting recognition in the art world at last'.
The Art Now room at the Tate is about 30ft by 15ft, walls all painted white. Tacita Dean's installation comprised of a 6ft long light box containing a giant dubbing chart mounted on one end wall, a 16mm magnetic recorder in a glass case running a loop. Against one of the side walls and on the wall opposite a video monitor sticking out about 9ft above the floor. Unseen speakers spewed out loud sound which, in the reverberant box-like room, made it highly unintelligible and Edison's original cylinders seem hifi by comparison.
What a shame. What a missed opportunity. The video showing on the monitor was shot in the Foley Theatre at Shepperton featuring the renowned Beryl Mortimer (Why must we call footsteps etc Foley? Surely here it should be called Mortimers) and Stan Fiferman was good. It showed Beryl and Stan going through the motions of producing the various sound FX laid out on the dubbing charts exhibited in the previously mentioned light box. Unfortunately the screen in the Foley theatre was always blank whenever it came into view in the video making silliness of the shots of Beryl and Stan gazing intently in its direction. The previously mentioned foul loud sound was supposed to be of various effects being created but to my ears it could have been skeletons making continuous love in a tin bath.
Entrance to the exhibition was free but the booklet explaining artist Tacita Dean's artistic conception of the work of Foley artists cost 1, probably worth it for the four excellent A5 B&W photos of Beryl and Stan at work.
Hopefully during the past 13 weeks some of the visiting public will have come away enlightened about a particular phase of motion picture sound production. However. I rather think that the couple of people who ventured in while I was there were about as put off as I was by the ghastly noise
BOB ALLEN