THE 'CHAMBERS HUM'
A few weeks ago I was wrapping on a sound-designing gig at The Flea, a black box theater just a couple of blocks away from the Chambers St A/C station. I live off the A/C, and had been commuting to and from Chambers St for almost a week.
It was a week of sonic schizophrenia – a race against the stage manager’s clock to compose, curate, and cull sound to create and program over 100 sound cues. I had an active comms set over one ear, while also trying to follow along with the rehearsal in front of me, while also trying to listen and adjust for the idiosyncracies of the speakers and the theater, while also plugging an airpod in and out of my other ear as I went trawling through a maddening number of free-use shrieks on YouTube or cobbled together different shades of fanfare in Logic or built a wormhole that brought us backward and forward through time and space and other dimensions.
At the end of a long day, and especially at the end of a long day of rehearsal, I relish the solitude of standing on a near-empty subway track, waiting for the late-night train to pick me up and carry me home. It’s a moment of city-silence – a type of quiet that isn’t perfectly quiet, but is perfectly almost-quiet. In city-silence you can feel the underlying thrum of the city, punctuated by small blips of life (perhaps a rustle here, a clang there). City-silence is a koan; it facilitates meditation; it forms a portrait of all the little ways the city stays animated and alive, the reason why living here feels comforting and safe; it reminds me of my place here, singular/unexceptional and familiar/strange. City-silence, when I can get it, feels sacred.
On my first night commuting home from rehearsals, a train screeched out of the station just as I was scurrying down the steps at Chambers Street. I waded through the echo of that screech and took up a spot somewhere near the middle of the platform, looking forward to my moment of city-silence. I was confused and a little concerned when, a couple of minutes later, I realized that the echo hadn’t faded. Had the sonic schizophrenia gotten to me? As the sound persisted, it became clear quickly enough that it wasn’t just in my head, so I walked around to locate the source, and found this:
I scanned the QR code and it took me to a webpage with a description of the project, along with some musings that are conceivably meant to give the project meaning. I say ‘conceivably’ because the further I read, the more nonsensical and meaningless the whole thing felt. From one sentence to the next, it feels like the author of this abstract is just saying things, making weak and hollow attempts at pith, ending with the claim that ‘Chambers Hum restores a connection to the universal order”. Reading this sentence incenses me! How fucking hubristic! Delusionally so!
The project cites the Taos Hum as its grounding inspiration. Well, there is nothing in the research surrounding the Taos Hum that suggests a numinous source or explanation. I was in New Mexico last year – it’s a striking place, where civilization seems like debris at the feet of God. I spot cars everywhere, but only occasionally spot other people; an eerie recipe of occupation and desolation. Outside of the pueblos, life feels contrived and copy-pasted from Somewhere Else. Out in the dunes at White Sands, I am in disbelief that anyone could come here and walk away thinking, of all things, what a perfect place to test bombs. I think of Baudrillard writing about this place, a bastion of (American) primitivism and the disintegration of meaning. Images flicker through my head, of Doctor Manhattan visiting the ruins of the Gila Flats test base, his place of birth, before fucking off to be alone on Mars. In Watchmen, Gila Flats is in Arizona – in real life, it’s in New Mexico. In a place like this, the dynamic between surreality and hyperreality is blurry but distinct, born of the relationship between the vastness of the landscape and the interference of civilization. The Taos Hum isn’t some voice of the universe that can be heard if you just tune in. It’s most likely some combination of tinnitus and industrial artifact.
The Taos Hum and others like it are interesting phenomena because they are suggestive, not because they evoke contemplation about stillness and solitude, which actually have nothing to do with whether or not the hum can be heard. Consider, then, this inane line of questioning that is presented in order to give meaning to this project:
But suppose we cannot remain still and solitary? Suppose we are cast into a state of constant motion? Suppose rather than sitting inert, we wish to take joyful part in the sufferings of the world? How are we to maintain our connection to the universal harmonic order? Suppose we love New York City, and in New York City, the hum is drowned?
“Those who are attuned can perceive the hum,” the description continues, “and attunement comes from a lack of distraction.” They talk about attunement, but the reason the hum was investigated at all was because it was a nuisance, not because someone noticed it and was enamored of it or inspired by it. The Taos Hum, which was much lower in volume and frequency than Chambers Hum, drove its hearers so crazy that they took it up as an issue with Congress, which was the reason that anyone looked into it at all!
I don’t understand the intention behind bringing this nuisance soudn to the forefront and placing it amongst a denser population. I wonder, does anyone involved in installing the sound even frequent the Chambers Street station as a matter of actually getting around the city? Do they come maybe even just to check up on how it’s doing, tuning into the hum and looking around at all the people, who in that view become less so people and more so subjects/objects in this hum project? Do they leave with some feeling of satisfaction, of a job well done, the way I do when I’m wrapping on a sound project? What job do they think they have done well here?
In this palette of attunement and movement and distraction that is being evoked, what is it that the artists mean for us to pay attention to? What connection is being restored? Certainly it is not connection to other people, nor is it to the environment; are we mean to pay attention and connect to… ourselves? That’s exactly what we all need a little less of right now.
One of the measures of good quality art is, are you clear in what you want me to get out of this and is that what I’m getting? It speaks to a degree of care in one’s attention, which feels glaringly absent here. That’s important when we’re talking about art projects in public spaces, because anything place-based is inherently political – it immediately evokes the question of what is the artists’ relationship to this place, and with what Right are they operating; where/who does permission, invitation, occupation come from?
There is one comparable example of public art that I must bring up here – Max Neuhaus’s TIMES SQUARE HUM, a permanent sound art installation at the north end of the pedestrian island in Times Square.
The Times Square Hum project brochure, along with a NYT article covering the project, are rife with information/insights, some of which I’ll reproduce and respond to below:
The work inaugurated what Neuhaus called his Place pieces, whereby the real conditions of a location in part determined the aesthetic experience. In the case of Fan Music, weather invariably controlled the rotation of the fan blades and by extension, the work’s sonic amplification. Neuhaus also engaged specific urban architectures, as in Walkthrough (1973–77), a series of mobile clicks and pings in the arcade of the Jay Street–Borough Hall (now Jay Street–MetroTech) subway station in Brooklyn. As the artist succinctly described such works: “I use sound to change the way we perceive a space.”
Who is “we” referring to re perceiving spaces?
There’s this Western Science Brain (Western reductionism) applied in this approach – sterile, ignorant of the LIFE in these places/spaces, connecting ‘noticing’ to the objective factors in a space, not really considering the personal and social experience that is noticing.
Since the artwork, which is called “Times Square,” was installed in the subway ventilation shaft in 1977, the sound and its source have been discovered by, among others, a subway track worker. He found the phone number that Mr. Neuhaus had left, and called to say that the machine was making quite a racket. “You better come fix it,” he said. // A homeless man moved in after Mr. Neuhaus, who in 1992 was preparing to move to Europe, had disconnected it but had not yet removed it. // Four years ago, several groups and individuals collaborated to bring the sound sculpture back. The collaborators -- a Manhattan gallery owner, Christine Burgin; the Times Square Alliance (the neighborhood Business Improvement District) ; Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The New York Times; the Metropolitan Transportation Authority; the owners of several nearby buildings; and the Dia Art Foundation -- spent about $150,000.
Once again, to the people that actually move through this space (the subway worker, the unhoused man) on a regular basis, the sound is a nuisance…
Get outta there, homeless man! Make way for the art project!
Who gets a say: gallery owner, BID, publisher, building owners. Who doesn’t get a say: subway worker, occupant. Who actually interacts with the space vs who gets to say what’s best?
For Times Square, Neuhaus again adapted New York’s transit infrastructure for aural means. Beginning in 1973, the artist entered into four years of negotiations with the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and the city’s largest energy company, Consolidated Edison (Con Edison), before he received permission to install any equipment. As the MTA would not collaborate with a private individual, Neuhaus founded a nonprofit titled Hybrid Energies for Acoustic Resources (HEAR) to facilitate production. HEAR would go bankrupt around 1982, when Neuhaus financed a piece that sought to replace police and ambulance sirens with better designed and more euphonious sounds.
Can you afford to turn an insurmountable rule into a surmountable technicality?
As Neuhaus’s career shifted to European commissions in the following years, he could no longer adequately supervise the maintenance of Times Square. Powering the piece continued to be a problem, and in 1992 the work was disconnected. A decade later, as American critical attention returned to Neuhaus’s oeuvre, gallerist Christine Burgin endeavored to revive Times Square. In collaboration with Burgin, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit, Times Square Business Improvement District, and other unaffiliated individuals, Neuhaus relaunched the work, eventually amplifying its volume to account for the area’s increased noise. Following the relaunch, he donated Times Square to Dia Art Foundation. Dia later commissioned another work, Time Piece Beacon, which was realized in 2005 at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, New York. Before his death in 2009, the artist instituted technical fail-safe measures and held a daily watch over the work via webcam, even scheming to discourage the presence of Times Square street musicians and their compromising sonance.
So… Neuhaus isn’t even a New Yorker. He gets to pull strings and maintain his power over this public space even though he doesn’t live here and he doesn’t work here. Where does this entitlement to New York come from?
New York City is more parochial than the Art World likes to give it credit for. That’s because they can’t see NYC without seeing themselves at the center of it all.
Discouraging the presence of street musicians is the shit cherry on top of the shit pile. It makes my blood boil. Who then is this being preserved for? Certainly not the public, certainly not New Yorkers. Take your hands off of our street performers!!!
An inquisitiveness unfolds, in which the city dweller instinctually asks what is customary to an urban environment and what is mutable.
Where does this claim come from? Especially when the people who actually dwell (the real city dwellers, not the hypothetical ones) in this space exist in opposition to this piece – whether it’s the subway worker complaining, the homeless man who was again displaced when the piece was fired back up, the street performers that are chased away...
I find both the Times Square Hum and the Chambers Hum utterly pretentious. While they may be situated in public space, they are not really made for the public at all; not public art so much as art placed upon the public.
I can’t help but think of all the ways in which regular people are often made to jump through hoops to justify their ideas and scale mountains to convince gatekeepers (well-meaning or not) to let them move around freely in places they’ve lived for lifetimes and generations. Meanwhile, these artists get to fuck around and fuck off; they don’t even bother sticking around to find out.
Chambers Hum drives me crazy throughout the rest of the week. What connection are they presuming to restore? Their hum hangs heavy over everything. It is more an interference/intrusion than it is an integration (restoration).
There’s a moment of relief each night when the train finally comes and the air fills with the hum of steel and air and human motion. It’s a real hum that swallows this pretentious one whole – a lifeline of true connection.