Exhibit of the week: Silence

The Menil Collection, Houston

Through Oct. 21

John Cage understood the sounds of silence, said Joseph Campana in the Houston Chronicle. For the debut of his 1952 piece 4’33”, the avant-garde composer instructed musician David Tudor to sit at a piano for four minutes and 33 seconds without touching the keys. Inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s “White Paintings” from the year before, 4’33” encouraged listeners to attend to the ambient noises in and outside the concert hall and thus initiated “a veritable sea change in the idea of what music is.” Rauschenberg and Cage were friends, and their work is “the heart” of the Menil’s new exhibit on the art of no noise. The show includes an early printed version of Cage’s score, a documentary about 4’33”, and selections from Rauschenberg’s series.

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More than two legends can play this game, said Rachel Wolff in The Wall Street Journal. The museum’s Rothko Chapel, built in 1971 and home to 14 of Mark Rothko’s iconic monochrome panels, has “long been a site for acts of quiet contemplation.” And silence obviously doesn’t always connote serenity. The oldest work in the show, Giorgio de Chirico’s painting Melancholia (1916), depicts a courtyard where silence seems to abide as a force that isolates the viewer from two figures in the distance. More than a few of the pieces on display do battle with silence. In 1961, Robert Morris decided to cut through the hush of a typical art gallery by building a wooden box outfitted with an internal speaker that plays “a recording of all the bangs and clanks that accompanied its making.” Meanwhile, the spirit of 4’33” lives on in Kurt Mueller’s Cenotaph (2011), a jukebox that plays recordings of ceremonial moments of silence, some famous. True to Cage’s statement that “there’s no such thing as silence,” many of the recordings “aren’t silent at all.”

Since so much of the work on display is visual, the question arises: “What does silence look like?” said Priscilla Frank in HuffingtonPost.com. In René Magritte’s painting The Listening Room (1952), it takes the form of a massive green apple that fills a small room. In the Andy Warhol silk screen Lavender Disaster (1963), a serial image of a 20th-century execution device, “silence is felt in the looming awareness of death.” Yet Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance, from1978–79, might provide the most startling answer. For 12 months, the New York artist locked himself in a wooden cage and cut himself off from all forms of communication. A series of photographs, taken once a day, document the effects of the experiment. As time passes, “Hsieh becomes increasingly ghost-like.” It makes troubling viewing.