Sound tracks: Hannah Feldman on the art of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla

AS SOMETHING LIKE THE SPRING BREAK OF THE ART WORLD, Art Basel Miami Beach is the kind of give-'em-all-you-got occasion where one expects to see more than just the occasional over-the-top flourish or media-friendly stunt. Perhaps it was this very context that made Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's installation Clamor, 2006, shown during the fair last December at Miami's Moore Space, seem such an uneasy spectacle: a hulking fiberglass structure--pale gray, topped by domelike convexities, and with a peculiarly terraced facade of jutting rectilinear slabs--embedded in a sculptural outcrop of what looked like splintered, striated rock. At first glance, this intimidating construction seemed steeped in abstract, Minimalist form; but viewers quickly realized that it was, in fact, a bunker. Or rather, many bunkers. The artists had combined design elements of military caissons from around the world to create one particularly obtrusive monolith. Augmenting this sense of surprise was the fact that through the narrow apertures in the walls came not gun barrels but the occasional protruding slide of a trombone. Indeed, the artists had sequestered a five-piece band inside the bunker, all but entirely out of sight, and let its music charge the roughhewn gallery space with a brass-based medley of misbegotten pomp and circumstance. Mostly there were compositions you would expect from such an ensemble--a military march from the Janissary bands of the Ottoman Empire, for example, and a ballad from the October Revolution. But sprinkled among these other tunes were a few, like Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A.," Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It," and even Barney the dinosaur's theme song, that were disarming precisely for their uncanny pop familiarity.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The seemingly incongruous inclusion of these pop-cultural stalwarts brings us, perhaps, to the artists' point in creating this perversely imagined sound chamber. For Allora and Calzadilla consider all these musical compositions to be equivalent in their relationship to war--an estimation that is sustained by recent historical events. The metalhead anthem "We're Not Gonna Take It," for instance, found new life as an inspirational battle cry blasted by American soldiers during the United States' invasion of Panama in 1989. The Barney theme and "Born in the U.S.A."--the latter penned to protest America's treatment of Vietnam vets but later employed, some will recall, in Ronald Reagan's 1984 presidential campaign--hark back to equally dark events: Both, allegedly, were played during the torture of inmates at Guantanamo. Muffled by the heavy walls of the bunker, the artists' clamorous medley suggested that militarism is not as removed from mass culture as we might have assumed; indeed, it has long infiltrated ostensibly "civilian" space, and vice versa.

THE INTERROGATION OF THE WAYS in which sound operates in social space is not new, of course. Nor is the idea that music--its position as the pinnacle of autonomous art in a certain aesthetic tradition notwithstanding--is both a reflection of and a tool employed by the powers that be. In fact, this premise underpins Jacques Attali's now-classic Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977), wherein the author suggests that "the world is not legible, but audible." Critiquing the notion that power is an exclusive correlate of the visible, Attali posits four categories to illustrate music's instrumentalization (as it were) across the ages. Delineating the first three, he explains: "When power wants to make people forget, music is ritual sacrifice, the scapegoat; when it wants them to believe, music is enactment, representation; when it wants to silence them, it is reproduced, normalized, repetition." Most significant, however, is the fourth category, which he says "differs from all preceding it" and has the potential to instigate "a general evolution of social organization": composition. Music that falls under this rubric is produced by individuals in the interest of forging a network of corporeal physical relations beyond the reach of political power and economic exchange. By effecting the removal of war songs from the framework of their customary "social organization," Allora and Calzadilla's band-in-a-bunker makes audible, which is to say perceptible, the centuries-old association of song and coercion that Attali elucidates--turning this association upside down, making strange what has become standard.

Although Clamor might seem a hard act to follow, it is in fact the first in a series of installations in which the artists take up what might be called sonic militarism. These new works are not the first projects in which Allora and Calzadilla have foregrounded sound--one could cite, for example, Hope Hippo, 2005, their "whistle-blowing" performance at the fifty-first Venice Biennale, or the video Sweat Glands, Sweat Lands, 2006, which features reggaeton artist Residente's diatribe against the waste and cultural homogenization wrought by neoliberalism. But the new installation's considerations of the songs of war, taken together, do appear to mark an emphatically "auditory turn" in the conceptual basis of the artists' practice. At the same time, in speaking to the role of music in cultural operations and community formations, and to the particular implications of this role at a moment of global and seemingly permanent war, the new works are recognizably extensions of the pair's long-standing concerns.