To Want

Sound piece, 10 min., 2013/2019

The sound piece To Want consists of an unidentified female voice expressing a long list of desires. Isolating the audio content from any visual representation, To Want shows a manner of constructing identity through a single means of expression: the human voice. The two dates (2013/2019) are testament to the separation between the initial work created in Romanian, and the later point when it was adapted into English, leading to slight content changes that I will address a little later.

I would be able to jump in trees
I would climb very very fast up the tree and
I would eat peaches… and apples
I would and spinach and I
would be strong as Popeye And skinny as Olive
I could lose 10 kilos
I could fit into my highschool jeans again
I could feel attractive again
I could get rid of the belly
I could get rid of the cellulite
I could have skinny legs
I could be taller
I could have luscious long hair
I could have a small nose
I could have perfect lips
I could go to the salon
I could take care of myself
I could spoil myself more

Despite my use of the phrase a single means of expression, what you hear through the headphones, the work’s verbal content, is in fact made up of multiple factors: language (Romanian or English, depending on the version), a voice (recognisably female) and discourse. The word language is derived from the Latin lingua, meaning both the tongue as an organ and the verbal system used by members of a community to communicate. The biological denotation strongly links language to the voice, derived from the Latin vox and vocare (to call, to name, to make heard). In turn, the voice has a double meaning: as sound(s) produced by the vocal cords and as a form of individual expression (e.g., “to make your voice heard” or “the author’s voice”). Last but not least, discourse (from the French discours) refers to the written or spoken articulation of a language. Bearing this in mind, the term voice holds an ambivalent position, encompassing both the specific discourse of the person it belongs to, and the collection of sounds that do not necessarily constitute a discourse but do form the basis of language (as a system of communication).

Logocentrism has dominated Western thought for over 2000 years, with rhetoric being its practical application. As evidence of this, human expression has manifested in areas such as politics, education and theatre mainly through the word and the voice. Even nowadays, public discourse emphasises rhetoric. With the voice understood as an access to truth and authority, rhetorically trained speakers are favoured. Significantly, this form of education and vocal manifestation in the public sphere has traditionally been a male privilege. The only public area where female voices could be heard before the modern period was the depoliticised space of the (opera and theatre) stage, where personal discourse is impossible, and the role of the voice is to delivery another author’s ideas.

This concept suggests that the voice and the discourse it expresses may have a truth value relative to their external context. In this regard, we must consider distinct philosophical stances on the voice in phenomenology, empiricism and poststructuralism. While in phenomenology human consciousness is the fountain of all knowledge (a knowledge that transcends individual experience) and language is the expression of it, empiricism sees language and consciousness as methods of adapting to biological, cognitive and social pressures. For both, then, language is a touchstone of the human mind, a place where sensory perception and thought intersect. Whereas empiricism and phenomenology positively perceive voice and language, poststructuralism offers a negative retort. For the poststructuralist, language is a human construct that can only represent itself. Derrida establishes his theory of deconstruction starting from Edmund Husserl’s understanding of the voice, in order to argue that discourse has no relation to an original, meaningful meaning. As long as words come into existence as the result of a differance, their meaning is assigned to something else, something outside of language. Eventually, this strips human language of significance. Derrida removes the voice from its established place in phonological tradition, believing that it cannot be the source of meaning, nor can it be a form of expressing reality (Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, 1973). Under these circumstances, the voice creates a zone of compromise, which indeed fails to express what the subject truly wants—that is, something outside the subject—and instead expresses something of the subject and their voice: the sonority of an unlocalised feminine identity’s desire. (Griselda Pollock draws a link between language and the pose/image of women in art. She states that the word “woman” is “both an idol and nothing but a word.” Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art, 2003)

The female voice specifically has a long tradition of being suspiciously viewed and heard in history and philosophy. In her book Glass, Irony and God, Anne Carson begins her essay on the gender of sound as follows:

It is in large part according to the sounds people make that we judge them sane or insane, male or female, good, evil, trustworthy, depressive, marriageable, moribund, likely or unlikely to make war on us, little better than animals, inspired by God. These judgements happen fast and can be brutal. Aristotle tells us that the highpitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices. (Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God, 1995)

These three components—the tongue, the voice and the language necessitate a short history of the artwork’s creation and presentation. It was first conceived and made in 2013, when I produced it to accompany a one-night installation at Atelier 35, for the White Night of Art Galleries. The event was titled BwO, referencing Deleuze and Guattari’s famous concept of the body without organs. In the context of the event, the concept functioned as a metaphor for the feeling of constantly engendering a desire caused by an uncontrollable, external factor: consumerism and its material manifestation, the shopping mall. (A deciding factor in broaching this topic was the location of the exhibition space at 13 Șelari Street, in the historical centre of Bucharest—an overwhelmingly gentrified area where everything seems to be up for sale.)

Shopping malls and other consumption hyper-conglomerates have today supplanted public spaces, providing a hybrid experience of buying, leisure, dining, entertainment and childcare, where individuals, despite their proximity to each other, cease to be part of a community because they are individually and constantly interpellated to consume, instigated to desire consumption. In Stiegler’s interpretation, the individual’s relationship with this interpellation is a form of tertiary retention, which—unlike primary and secondary retentions—is simultaneously and continuously oriented towards both past and future. Moreover, it creates a specific relationship with information, in which the being no longer commands, but operates, becoming a consumer-producer, “someone who manipulates concepts emerging from automated understanding but does so devoid of syntheses emerging from dis-automatized reason […] the non-dialectical servant of an information system [who] does not learn anything.”(Bernard Stiegler, Aarhus University Seminar, February 2018, available online)

The large-scale installation at Atelier 35 consisted of a partition that split the exhibition room in two; in the middle, through a small slit, visitors could push through a note with a few default fields that asked for their name, their physical address and a desire they had. The idea of the project was to create, through the mechanism of desire, a communal feeling, not necessarily one of wish fulfilment, but one of wanting to be answered. A simple partition separated the exhibition space from the space where a collection of paper notes held the visitors’ desires, thus introducing the possibility that simple spatial demarcation may be the starting point for a dialogue.

To underline the ambivalent nature of desire as something that individuates but also unites us in collectivity, the soundtrack consisted of the piece To Want in Romanian. The delivery of the text was inspired by the way TV presenters speak on teleshopping channels, where intonation and bodily gestures are not based on logic, but on the constant presence of a stimulus: a product that must be sold. For instance, even a basic question that the presenter asks a guest, such as “How did you end up using the Wonder Grater in your home kitchen?,” draws a reply that opens with laughter: “Ha ha ha ha, I’m so glad you asked.” There is nothing funny about the question, but the constant chatter, amusement and joy around the product, around that which must be bought, creates an ambiance of colloquialism and availability that make the purchase appear trivial, as easily digestible and free of responsibility as a chuckle in a conversation. Through purchasing, the buyer joins the jovial exchange. In the same spirit, but with significantly less pathos, the list of desires heard in the exhibition space was a way of filling the space, of inhibiting silence and potential reflection on the words.

The work was translated into English for the 2019 exhibition Keep Forgetting to Forget Me, curated by Anja Lückenkemper at Spinnerei Leipzig. The translation added another layer of meaning: whereas in Romanian, every desire was expressed in the optative conditional mood (with “aș”), I chose to alternate between “I would” and “I could” in English, thus introducing a sort of distance between the speaking subjectivity and its desire. Some desires are still in the sphere of possibility (I would), while others are still possible but improbable (I could). In a work where an immaterial female voice acts as a spectral presence, I believe that this distancing highlights the way in which, in a patriarchal society, women are educated to doubt even their own desires. In the curatorial statement for the exhibition, Lückenkemper describes the work as “a list of things and experiences, objects of desire […] The words and manner of speaking oscillate between an (if ever so distant) potentiality and the certain unobtainability—the imagining of an identity being already disillusioned before the sentence is finished. The list speaks of desire, a longing to belong somewhere or to be someone, but also of the boredom and inescapability of consumer culture. There are many variations of what (female) identity can be: Some show a cringeworthy self-obsession. Some an idealistic seriousness. An infatuation with consumption. Self-determination. Vapid vanity…”

In addition to these two presentations, in which the sound emerged from speakers and thus filled up the space without a clear origin, I want to mention a third presentation in a very different context. At the end of 2019, the Anca Poterașu gallery invited me to put together a booth for the Artissima art fair in Turin. I decided to go with a large-scale modular installation, titled A Room Full of Hysterical Women, consisting of a series of panels about passionate feminine characters in the history of theatre, literature and cinema. I chose to add another element to this artwork, in a different medium, and since a fair is the art world equivalent of a shopping mall, it was an easy choice. Just as the mall’s spatial setup encourages walking the longest possible routes in order to expose the visitor to as many suggestions for consumption as possible, the art fair is a labyrinth that organises and orientates its audience’s desires for consumption. This labyrinth means that the gaze is always restricted to a few surrounding booths, to create the sense of a variety of options—but not too many, since the art market must also perpetuate the myth of scarcity, the access to one-of-a-kind or limited-edition products.

Since the exhibition space was markedly different in terms of energy, spatial division (a corner booth with two walls) and particularly loudness, it required a different presentation of To Want. I opted for an individual experience, where only one visitor at a time could listen to the piece using headphones. But in order to access the headphones, they had to climb a few steps that appeared to be an integral part of the general furnishings of the artfair. This stagecraft spoke well to the situation it created: since it was unclear what was being played through the headphones at the top of the stairs, a new visitor would queue up virtually every second, keen to listen and satisfy their curiosity. On the other hand, as soon as the visitor reached the top and started listening to the work, they had the opportunity to look over the tops of the surrounding booths and change their visual perspective. They could enjoy a different point of view of the entire fair, a wider angle that emphasised the amplitude of the space, shattering the labyrinthine effect. This simple invitation mechanism, which temporarily withdrew their body from the fair’s architectural set-up, had the role of (modestly) aligning them with their desires in that environment, creating the possibility to recede from its generalised interpellation.