Art Reviews

Halfway through my second lap of Ess Whiteley's new installation I realized what it reminded me of: standing too close to the subwoofer at a club. Anyone who has done that knows sound is a physical force. You feel the bass in your sternum and your stomach before you hear it. It's body knowledge, and it costs a cover charge. listening materials brings the same fact into a gallery, turns the volume way down, and presents it as a discovery.

The setup: six salvaged woofers, cones up, on white plinths — one large driver in the middle, four around it in a square, a smaller one hanging from a wire. The five on a die, more or less. The wall text (bilingual, heavy on "agency" and "co-arising") insists the piece is tuned to this particular room — its acoustics, its air circulation, its ambient sound. The floor plan says otherwise. A center-and-corners diagram is placeless symmetry, something you could drop into any white cube on earth, and the Athenaeum is not any white cube. It's a former bread factory with a trussed ceiling, oxblood tile, and afternoon light coming through a frosted loading door. All that particularity, answered with the most generic arrangement in the book.

Ping-pong balls, rocks, metal beads and hazelnuts sit in the cones and jitter when a computer cycles sine tones through a seventeen-minute loop. Overhead lamps brighten when the buzzing gets loud, which is the same logic as a sound-reactive party light. Harmonicas hang from the ceiling with small fans taped to them — an aeolian gesture, wind as performer — but for the long stretch I gave them they produced nothing. In a show called listening materials, the only actual instrument in the room was the one material I couldn't hear. The text promises a field of relations. What I saw was an assortment of objects whose only shared property is that they vibrate. So does everything.

Tudor's Rainforest and Lucier's singing rooms hover nearby, but that tradition earned its plotlessness with formal rigor. The deeper failure here is displacement. In the club, you are the vibrating material. Here, hazelnuts have the experience on your behalf while you observe from a respectful distance. Whiteley has built a diorama of an encounter the culture already delivers nightly, at full scale, body-first — then subtracted the pleasure and added footnotes. The amazement on display is the artist's, at a fact the rest of us learned dancing.