THE COLLECTIVE VOICE
by Leah Ollman
Susan Silton, In everything there is a trace (2013), at the LA Municipal Art Gallery. (Brian Forrest)
I heard whistling as I meandered through Susan Silton's invigorating, wide-ranging show at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. A brief, perky phrase hung in the air, disembodied. It was Silton's "Family Whistle" piped into the galleries, the coded call used among her loved ones to identify their position within a crowd, to signal, Here I am.
The tune is an especially tender component of Silton's ongoing Whistling Project, which began in 2010 with the formation of a women's whistling ensemble, The Crowing Hens. Hens typically don't crow (that's the rooster's job), and women shouldn't whistle, since that's unnatural too, according to a musty proverb. The Crowing Hens reclaim audible space for women's voices with a wry subversiveness that threads through Silton's 40-year survey.
The show, curated by Andy Campbell, includes photographs, videos, installations, drawings, prints, graphic design, sculpture, documentation of performances, audio works and more. It's the first career overview for the L.A. native, whose work has been exhibited widely throughout California and beyond.
Silton studied English literature and creative writing as an undergraduate at UCLA. She wrote for the Daily Bruin and thought she'd become a journalist, or maybe a poet. "Poetry has always been a lifeforce for me," she told me when I visited the show. "No one is telling you what to think when you read a poem. You read it, and feel it. That's how it should be with visual art."
Susan Silton's survey examines themes like identity and grief. (Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery)
The title of the exhibition, Diving Into the Wreck, comes from a poem by Adrienne Rich, which resonates with Silton's own fearless exploration of social wrongs, political messes, personal identity, and collective grief. "From the beginning, my work has been about finding language for the body, at first about being queer," she said. The throughline is voice itself, voice as a multivalent force, a manifestation of engaged witness, a matter of personal agency and collective strength, something to be defended when its free exercise is threatened.
Voice doesn't necessarily take the form of speech in Silton's work (consider the whistlers), but words are ever present. Two lines from Rich's poem — "The words are purposes. / The words are maps." — encircle a huge, sculpted wrecking ball hanging at the exhibition's entrance.
Anchoring the exhibition is the sculptural installation, In everything there is the trace, which also serves as a site of collective performance. Silton conceived of the project in 2013, creating a circle of interlocking desks where 10 volunteers at a time sat and retyped John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath on manual typewriters with inkless ribbons. For this iteration, typists will reinscribe Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. The first shift took place at the show's opening reception, with Silton and nine others generating a glorious, percussive clamor, turning out pages of blind-embossed text. The noise yielded something visually silent. (You can sign up to participate here.)
Such slippage and misalignment abound in Silton's work. Mouths don't always produce the sounds or voices expected of them. Stereoscopic images refuse to align into a coherent whole.
The artist's work straddles performance, audio, and graphic design. (Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery)
In WE (2020), a sequence of 16 photo intaglio prints, Silton gently conjures the friction between one eye and another, one I and another. Each sheet contains a pair of landscape images that are nearly the same, but not quite. Silton made the pictures in the Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve, where she was fascinated by the constantly shifting light. The view changed from moment to moment, but even if seen at the same time, it wouldn't look the same to any two observing souls. Each pair of printed images is captioned with a conjugation of the phrase, “We See it Differently, You and I,” “We Would See it Differently,” “We Will See it Differently,” and so on. Distinct subjectivity is natural and inevitable, the piece suggests, and can coexist with commonality. The work is titled, and the phrase begins, after all, with We.
At the end of my visit to Silton's show, I heard The Crowing Hens live, in the galleries. They wandered individually through the reception, stopping to face one visitor at a time, issuing the Family Whistle and awaiting a reply in kind. When approached, I gladly whistled back, and was graced with a striped fabric armband, marked as a member of the flock. For the evening and perhaps beyond, my I joined the larger We, and in that process lurked hope.
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Sound is crucial to much of Silton's work. For a sonic sample of The Whistling Project, follow this link to a video clip of The Crowing Hens' debut performance at LAXART (now the Brick) in 2010, and this one for a peek at a typing session at USC in 2013.
Leah Ollman is a SoCal-based critic and editor of Ensnaring the Moment: On the intersection of poetry and photography (Saint Lucy Books).
