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Excerpt from the exhibition essay Amplified Attention,
by Lisa Le Feuvre.
The full text is included in the publication Four Exhibitions:
October 2008 - August 2009
(click for larger images)
Paying attention is a difficult task: distractions abound, be they
tangibly present or imagined. Amongst competing sounds speech that can be
understood is hard to ignore: it brings meaning to sound. The process of
paying attention to the ‘what’ of language, though, blocks other qualities
of sound – perhaps the form, rhythm, volume or pitch. Think of listening
to a language that cannot be understood: it opens possibilities of
understanding that extend outside of the meaning of words. 'This process is
addictive and energetic'[i] and is capable of reconfiguring assumptions by
stretching the limits of perception.
Free Speech Bubble
operates across and between three points of reference: a poster, a video
projection and a monitor piece. This latter work rudely places a moving
image work in front of a picture window interrupting an expansive view of
the surrounding landscape of the Scottish Highlands.
Couzins’ works
enter into a disagreeable conversation with the unique surroundings of
HICA – a site that is concurrently a hill farm and a contemporary art
venue, a home and a public space and a remote site of overwhelming (maybe
even sublime) beauty that is interrogated by international contemporary
art, often more associated with urban centres. This is a very particular
blurring of art and life.
Processes and mechanisms
for productivity lie at the base of Free Speech Bubble. In
researching for this commission Couzins came across what he describes as a
“disused earthwork” amongst the HICA buildings, |
just viewable from the large picture window. Couzins’ discovery is of the
remnants of a mill – a manually operated device for grinding grain. Now
unused, it lies muted by overgrown grass. Amongst the unlikely array of
gestures in the Free Speech Bubble moving image works is a
millstone, its circular hole at the centre filled with water. Today
millstones, now of rare functional use, have been co-opted as decoration,
divorced from their purpose. Throughout his artistic practice Couzins
reclaims useless objects while concurrently making objects from words by
squeezing out meaning. This is exemplified here in his use of circular
songs in the soundtrack of the video works. Like pop music or children’s
songs, these take up residence in one’s mind, hooking into memory and
repeating long after the artwork has been walked away from. As the
voiceover at one point suggests: “if you hear something you start
repeating it like chewing gum”
.
This set of slippery
works both use and defy language, placing a set of attitudes into an arena
for thought that slips into the imagination and reformulates modes of
perception. As with the wider programme of HICA, Couzins’ work perversely
operates within its context – naming the beautiful as insufficient and
proposing that the low-grade, be it cheap carpet or chewing-gum, might
become productive freed from association and meaning. In Couzins’ practice
ambiguity is comforting and meaning ungraspable.
[i]John
Cage, ‘Sixty answers to thirty-three questions from Daniel Charles’,
For The Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel
Charles,
D. Charles (ed.), London: Marion Boyars, 1981, p19 |
