Ingrid Bachmann: Symphony for 54 Shoes (Distant Echoes)

Neutral Ground
September 9 - October 6, 2006

Ingrid Bachmann’s Symphony for 54 Shoes attempts to delineate where humanity ends and technology begins. The symphony consists of 27 pairs of shoes which move up and down, accompanied by a clacking sound. The movement, which appears totally random, is controlled by a micro-controller and software. By presenting noise that is almost the opposite of music, and movement that could not be mistaken for dance, Bachmann removes evidence of the human hand--or, more specificallly, the human foot--from her work.

It is not simply that human presence is lacking, it has been eradicated. The artist is working with shoes, which, on an extremely superficial level, recall Marilyn Levine’s clay representations of leather shoes. However, the appeal of Levine’s hyper-realist shoes, and other leather articles, is the way that they imply human absence through the physical traces left by the owner of the shoes. Or, perhaps a more fruitful comparison would be to Dominique Blain’s non-kinetic installation of army boots, where every other boot islifted about a foot off the ground by a white box. The piece is eerily effective in its evocation of movement, and, as a result, the absent soldiers.

So, how does Bachmann take shoes, particularly effective in reminding the viewer of their absent occupants, and remove the human element? First, the shoes are presented to the viewer several feet above the ground, on a shelf that runs along the periphery of the gallery. They are not positioned on or near the floor, as Blain’s army boots are, and therefore do not have a direct relationship to either the viewer’s or imaginary occupant’s body. Furthermore, they have been lifted off the base of the shelf by two metal posts and a small box (which I assume contains the mechanical components which control the movements of the individual shoes).

Second, the movement of the shoes is distinctly robotic and mechanical. It is an intentionally and glaringly inaccurate imitation of the motion of the human foot. Third, although each shoe has taps attached to both the sole and the heel, the tap itself serves no purpose. The tapping sound is created by metal bits at the end of the metal posts. The shoe itself is mute. This is a particularly important element, because it renders the tap, the shoe, even the motion, absolutely pointless. There is really no reason for any of it, as none of it actually contributes to the “symphony.”

Lastly, the symphony is completely a-rythmical. I could not pick out any kind of arrangement, pattern or method to the clacking sounds, and the randomness of it is mildly unpleasant (which is perhaps why the gallery staff turn the installation off when no one is viewing it). Like the non-dance-like motion, the noise is almost exactly the opposite of music. This, the piece seems to say, is technology without humanity. It can imitate but it cannot recreate human expression. The artist--who is interested in technology, but also nostalgic, preferring those technologies that are not cutting-edge, that have been relegated to the realm of the obsolete--may not have intended this reading of the work. In her artist statement, Bachmann explains that she “[tries] to bring the complexity of the real world and experience into the digital experience, to complicate the relations between the virtual and material realms, to create works that situate themselves in the world in rich sensory, tactile and sonic ways.” For me, the work does complicate the relations between the virtual and material realms, but in the way that it fails to bring the complexity of the real world into the digital experience.

Angela Beck