Walk on by

To get a basic sense of what it's like to experience Janet

Cardiff's 'walks', try putting your fingers in your ears.
Whisper to yourself: 'I found your voice recorder in my
suitcase ... This machine has become you now ... I want you
to walk with me. I need to show you something.' These lines
are from the opening of Cardiff's Villa Medici Walk (1998), in
which Walkman-clad participants were led, in audio-guide
style, over the grounds of the famous 16th-cent-ury Roman
palace, now the home of the French Academy.
Simultaneously unnerving and pacifying, the walk's
narrative weaves in and out of addressing you (the listener)
and someone else, a lost friend or lover whose own voice
occasionally enters, as if from far away. The sound of birds
chirping and pebbles crunching can be heard. Shreds of
plot tug at you; characters address you, flee or morph
together. The intimacy of the voices, one of which is
presumably Cardiff's own, has the effect of making the
listener feel complicit. You are in this together: 'turn left at
the bench ... enter the bosco ...' You are drifting through an
institution.

Cardiff has been producing these walks since 1991, but has
worked with experiential aspects of sound and video
installation since the mid-1980s, often in collaboration with
the artist George Bures Miller. In a general sense, Cardiff's
practice can be divided between 'perambulatory' works -
her walks - and more traditionally 'fixed' installations such
as To Touch (1993), The Dark Pool (1995), and, more
recently, The Paradise Institute (2001), for which she and
Miller received two major prizes at the 2001 Venice
Biennale. These latter works typically take the form of
sensory environments involving ambiguous, though
elaborately staged uses of video, theatrical props, and
audio narrative. In To Touch, for instance, audience
members are parried with fragments of sound when their
hands brush over a wooden table rigged with motion
sensors. While many of these installations are more directly
interactive than the walks, by fate or ingenuity it is the
audio-tours which have developed into Cardiff's signature
productions.

Thus far, however, the focus of attention has tended to be

on the effects of intimacy, dread, wonder, or vertigo that
audiences feel while listening and walking. Far less attention
has been devoted to understanding these works formally
and rhetorically, or to situating their production of effect
within the actual political and social contexts against which
feelings of intimacy and wonder take on meaning.

If Cardiff's walks provide audiences with a fictional or

psychological supplement to the collections, libraries, back
halls, gardens and side streets of sites often thought to be
over-burdened by history and discourse, they do so by
superimposing an essentially imaginary (private) space on
top of the assumed (public) space of the institution. Not
dissimilar to the diegetic unfoldings of a novel or a video
game - absorbing, insinuating, a recipe of cues - this
superimposition locates Cardiff's walks within a tradition of
epideictic rhetoric in contemporary art. In classical accounts
the epideictic is the rhetoric of display, exhibition and
demonstration. Used in toasts, odes, love poetry and
political declamations, it is resolutely present-tense,
appealing to its audience in the moment, about the moment,
and seeks to persuade through eloquence of presentation.
A typical use of the epideictic would be Robert Smithson's
magazine piece A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New
Jersey (1967), a conceptual, quasi-imaginative invitation to
the readers of Artforum to tour a real place rendered in
words and photographs. A similar rhetorical mode can be
found in works by Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Fred
Wilson - artists associated with institutional critique and
critical site-specificity.
Cardiff's walks need to be distinguished from this more
analytical or disputational mode of art practice, however.
You don't 'do' them to be instructed or to participate in a
critical legislation of institutional politics. What you are
seeking is the experience itself, to be transported in the old-
fashioned manner, by make-believe. To use Thomas de
Quincey's famous distinction, the walks are an art of 'power'
rather than 'knowledge'. They seek to persuade and
conflate, to scramble perception - one curator has even
likened them to making love. 1 It's not surprising that people
get carried away when talking about them. They owe their
power to a complex, if recognizably Postmodern, pastiching
of style and method. Confabulations of context, mood and
tone, they draw on motifs from a long range of ersatz
aestheticism - Pre-Raphaelitism, Surrealism, noir and
cyberpunk (all of which are themselves already pastiches).
In Walk Münster (1997), for example, a city's streets
become the host-site for a disjointed, inconclusive narrative
of leaving, returning, and remembering love. The audio tour
commences with the sound of water burbling in the
foreground and cathedral bells peeling in the distance.
Marking our descent into reverie, a little girl sings a jump-
rope song 'made a mistake, kissed a snake, how many
doctors did it take, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ...' Time flies into the past
with the clapping of a horse and carriage. An old man's
gruff Germanic baritone pulls us in further, giving clues
which may lead nowhere. With the whirring of bicycles and
the daylight tweeting of sparrows, we are back in the
present. We keep walking towards the Dom. We are
directed towards tunnels, there is someone we should meet.
History is all around us, enfolded in suggestion. The voice of
a younger man whispers that we have been in his dreams, a
cliché that triggers signifiers of memory. It is not a shock
when Cardiff's murmurs that she is 'now' in Canada, back
with her dog. Prepared for anything, we almost expect the
last line when it comes: 'Please take the Walkman back to
the museum. Press "stop" now.'

If Cardiff's audience negotiates its relationship to the

'institutional-real' through the scripted virtual space of the
imagination, such an experience is, of course, technological
as well. Nothing is felt or known in her walks except through
the apparatuses and mediated stimuli of machines: stereo
sound recording, digital sound-manipulation software,
personal delivery systems such as the Walkman or the
Handycam. Cardiff's technology is 'newer' as an art media
than video and far more discreet than the Internet or
graphics software. Especially in the case of the Walkman,
Cardiff's technology is made for private, portable and
individual consumer experience. The museum precedent for
this technology is also consumerist. Invented in the late
1950s but first successfully used for the Met's King Tut
exhibition in 1976, the audio guide has recently become a
staple of exhibition design and education programming in
most large museums. For a small charge audiences can now
listen to Max Andersen unpack his O'Keeffes or hear George
Plimpton explain the meaning of George Bellows' boxers. As
a technology of display, audio guides are only one aspect of
the box-office-driven transformation of museums away
from their long-held role as civic and scholarly trusts. If
museum-going in today's spectacle-friendly, audience-
hungry institutions now parallels activities such as shopping
or surfing the web - where experience alone is a stand-in
for value - it has also become more technologically
sophisticated, a programmed navigation of symbolic and
architectural code. There is more art in more places
(especially more video, more 'site-specific' installation and
more large-scale sculpture), but also more bookshops,
more cafés, more retail tie-ins to exhibitions, more celebrity
speakers, more didactic enticements such as audio tours
and video displays, more DJs and concerts, more cinema
nights and more big-ticket architecture. To keep up with
culture, museums have adopted culture's strategies.

Modernism, however, has taught us to expect more from

artists than just keeping up with culture. Against this newly
diversified field of the institution, Cardiff's converging of
media, display rhetoric and fictional craftsmanship makes
her walks exceedingly paradoxical works of art. Do her
imaginary narratives disrupt the steady reconception of
museums as subjective, adaptable spaces, or do they
participate in, even benefit, such a reconception? Are they
technologically progressive or simply optimistic? Are they
best judged by the conventions of art or the innovations of
mass culture? If the latter, are they as immersive as Times
Square, as absorbing as Quake? Cardiff's walks may not
really be responsible for - or interested in - addressing such
questions, but they do force the issue of how we experience
art.

Cardiff has produced walks for Biennales such as Venice

(2001) and Istanbul (1999); for large curated exhibitions -
San Francisco MoMA's '010101: Art in Technological Times'
(2001) and NY MoMA's 'The Museum as Muse' (1999), for
example; and for smaller, more intimate institutional settings
such as the Villa Medici in Rome. This variety of locations
would seem to offer the artist an occasion for building into
her walks distinctions between different constructions of art
experience. Wandering through a tight, thematized, and
historically coherent exhibition is not the same as wandering
through the caverns of a multi-national state sponsored
two-year round up. The former is a 'monologic' experience,
necessarily incorporating different kinds of work, but doing
so with an already present rhetoric of display, comparison,
and reflection. The latter is a 'heterologic' experience, not
necessarily incorporating or promoting anything besides the
diverse but mechanistic heterotopia of the art world itself.
It's not immediately clear that such distinctions are of
interest to Cardiff. In terms of narrative and acoustic
strategy, the Walk Münster, which took audiences 'out of
the museum' and into surrounding streets, is not dissimilar
to the walk produced for 'The Museum as Muse', which led
participants on a quasi-ecstatic tour of MoMA's renowned
collections. Given their highly subjective rendering of
institutional spaces - Cardiff has called her locations
'Rorschach tests' - the walks position the audience as the
ultimate arbiter of their site-specifity. But who does this
benefit? This may be the hardest, but most crucial aspect of
the work to judge. The meaning of anything built into a
museum - a bookstore, a café, a sculpture - will reveal itself
and change as the conditions and subtleties of experience
change. On this fundamental level, all aspects of museums
are 'relational' and 'interactive,' meaning only that they are
available to be absorbed together. Rhetorics massaging
rhetorics, Cardiff's walks function most successfully in an
ambient, atmospheric field of open-ended consumption.