Trilogy of Sounds: fabulously innovative experience for Mount Stuart

Things are really looking up.  The Mount Stuart Contemporary Visual Arts Programme for 2010 is sounding off with what is arguably – unarguably the most exciting arts experience Argyll has had.

From 9th May to 30th September, there is an exhibition of the artist Lee Mingwei’s Trilogy of Sounds installation.

This is a form of what is called ‘conceptual art’ – or ‘experiential art’. It needs and wants those who visit it to participate with it and with each other.

The sort of art we mostly experience is self-contained, detached, there to be observed and accepted for what it is. It’s nature is largely fixed, whether it is looking at a traditional art exhibition, listening to a concert or watching a play. It doesn’t need us. It would usually still be what it was if we weren’t there. Our presence may be economically necessary and supportive of the artists involved but it is rarely acknowledged and it is mainly inorganic.

There are, though, forms of art which are what they are because of the people who come to experience them. These are fluid, unpredictable, unrepeatable and, in a way, unsafe – in the sense that ‘safe’ is knowing what comes next.

Performance art of this kind is new only because we rarely get the chance to be part of it. It has been around for some time and the brilliantly anarchic Futurists probably accelerated its development in the early part of the 20th century.

Trilogy of Sounds at Mount Stuart

The sound installation designed for Mount Stuart is in three parts, each focused on the artist’s sense of the sounds around specific places in the house and the gardens.

The information we receive through our eyes – of colour, texture, shape, mass, detail – is normally clear and stable. The sounds we receive in the same places are not.

Distant sounds from unseen sources elsewhere are part of a soundscape found in one place – traffic, wind, wave, children, doors are actually present. Some present sounds evoke the past. Soundscapes are much less constant and more mysterious than is a visual parnorama.

Outside at Mont Stuart, in the landscaped gardens, you will find a large bronze and wood wind chime sculpture, using the Taiwanese – Lee Mingwei was born in Taiwan – symbols of circle and square. The circle means enlightenment or access to the ideal. The square is the earth. Then there is a net structure, conjuring the poetic technique of a spider’s web.

You find your own way to enter this installation – through or under its form-  and by doing this, you become part of the relationship between its natural and its man-made elements.

The journey through the house introduces further sensory sound experience and a heightened sense of awareness.The specific acoustics in the magnificent spaces and surfaces of Mount Stuart’s interior cannot but produce an unforgettable soundscape.

Mingwei makes use of an invisible location to provide echoes of once-upon-a-time music lessons, audible from the hall and second floor gallery.

A further installation within the conservatory -  originally conceived as an astrological observatory and subsequently used as an operating theatre during Mount Stuart’s temporary use as a Naval Hospital during the 1914-1919 World War – symbolizes repair, renewal and the ongoing transformation of space.

So what do you ‘do’

You don’t go to an event of this kind to stand back, to be detached, to judge. You go to experience whatever it is that the polygamous marriage of it and you and the others present with you create together.

In a way you just empty yourself, receive everything newly and see what it males you feel and think. There is no ‘right answer’ to this art – in fact, at root, there is no ‘right answer’ to any art. What’s interesting is what it gives you, what it stirs in you – and not all of it does.

And your experience will be different from anyone else’s because you bring to it every aspect of who you have become.

Good artists of this kind know to a very precise level of thought and execution what they intend to enable – and the calibre of their skill makes it possible. Where the artists are not skilled, an event may defeat itself.

This is what happened with the collaboration – in Half Life in Achnabreck Wood in Kilmartin Glen a couple of years ago – between the installation art company, nva and the National Theatre of Scotland.

This was a game of two halves – an installation by nva, itself conceptually confused, handed over to the National Theatre team, who had no concept at all of this sort of event and presented a very traditional and very wordy play in rather unusual circumstances.

The audiences, along with the creators were… conceptually confused – but, as art dreadfully persuades its audiences, they blamed themselves for being unable to ‘understand’. This was the double jeopardy of the event, the final injury.

Here is how Lee Mingwei’s work is described: ‘… he has often “focused on issues of trust and hospitality, particularly between strangers, creating both participatory installations, where strangers can explore trust, intimacy and self awareness on their own and on one-on-one events, where visitors explore such issues with the artist himself through eating, sleeping, waking or conversation’.

His projects are often ‘open-ended scenarios for everyday interaction’ – meaning that people come and go when they please, there is no beginning and no end. You make your own. Your experience starts with your arrival and ends for you when you leave. And your presence, for as long as it lasts, changes the experience of those there before you.

Lee Mingwei’s projects take on different forms depending on the participants. Of course they do – and that’s why each event is unique.  By contributing ourselves to an event like this, we reinvent it.

His work has been all over America, to Australia, to Taiwan, to France and Venice. He seems to have been in the UK only once before – at Tate Liverpool in 2006 – but they’re welcoming him back this year (2010) at the Liverpool Biennial.

Congratulation to the well-informed and creatively opportunist team at Mount Stuart to bring him here and to Scotland.

This sort of event is fun, inclusive, respectful of people, chimerical – it’s there and it isn’t. This exhibition is there for you to encounter at any time during its opening hours over an all-but five month period. You could be there on your own. You could be there when there are a lot of people. You may want to go back several times.

Here is a hugely imaginative event for the Mount Stuart team to bring to the island and to Argyll. There’s plenty of time to connect with it. Just make sure you do. It will be an experience unique to you. Go.

On 9th May, launching the exhibition, at 3.00pm at the Mount Stuart Visitor Centre, Lee Mingwei will be in conversation with Pieranna Cavalchini, Contemporary Curator of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.  Booking for this event is advisable.

Further information is available at the Mount Stuart website.