Opera leaves room for imagination

‘ ‘ ‘ A new installation at the Carnegie Museum of Art provides a view into the imagined world… ‘ ‘ ‘ A new installation at the Carnegie Museum of Art provides a view into the imagined world of a man who lived in a small town in Canada his entire life, collecting hundreds of records. ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘Opera for a Small Room’ is a theatrical narrative that takes place in a ramshackle wooden room filled with records and shadows that shift across the walls. Visitors can peer into the space through windows and spaces cut out from the walls. ‘ ‘ ‘ The artists, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, were inspired to create the work when they found the record collection of the man known only as R. Dennehy in a second-hand store in a small town in British Columbia.’ ‘ ‘ ‘ They didn’t realize that every record cover had the name R. Dennehy written on it until they got home. That’s when they began to wonder what his life was like, explains Karin Campbell, coordinator for the installation. ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘They’re just fascinated with the idea of who is this person who stayed in this one tiny place his entire life, what would his house look like, how would he feel,’ said Campbell. Cardiff and Miller are interested in the tension of desire and a lust for what is absent that can be felt in the juxtaposition between the high culture of R. Dennehy’s opera records with the culturally isolated location of his western Canadian home. ‘ ‘ ‘ Although Cardiff and Miller found R. Dennehy in the telephone book, they made the conscious decision not to phone him, Campbell explains, because they felt that discovering the truth about his life would ruin the fiction they created for him. ‘ ‘ ‘ Cardiff and Miller perform the life they imagined for R. Dennehy in a small room on approximately a 20-minute loop.’ The installation’s performance begins like a theater production as the sound of tuning instruments and an audience plays over the speakers and then the lights go down and the narration begins.’ ‘In the middle of a stage, a man sits alone in a room surrounded by records, turntables,’ said R. Dennehy, as performed by Miller, speaking in a deep, tired man’s voice.’ The narrator’s breath can be heard, opera records play and are shuffled by the hand of an invisible disc jockey, and shadows can be seen moving across the walls as the imagined R. Dennehy lives his life. The isolated feeling of living in the shack is further established with realistic sounds that play during the installation’s night. The sound of rain and the crackle of a lightning bolt during a storm can be heard as well as the whistle of a train and its wheels on tracks, which sound loud enough to pass through the museum walls. Cardiff and Miller also want the isolated shack to look as if it has been lived in, said Campbell. ‘They like that as their technician is installing, he has to step up onto the couches and tables,’ said Campbell. ‘It scuffs them up and they like this aged look on things that, because they’re not being used. Is hard to get.’ The shack brims with dusty records and other objects a man would collect throughout his life that Campbell says she likes to think of as representing the return of the shabby chic.’ Although the installation’s experience begins as a calm and subdued narration, by the end it explodes into a rock opera amid a rainbow of lights that begin to flash inside the shack. The piece then ends with the sound of a clapping audience and a spotlight comes on, reminding visitors that it has been a performance. ‘ ‘ ‘ For the show, the artists wanted to create a dark experience. The gallery had to have its skylights covered, the walls painted dark and gel over its windows, said Campbell. The shack is isolated within this dark cavernous space, a beacon of music, occasional light and life within the darkness. The Carnegie chose to install this piece in Heinz Gallery A to provide its visitors with something to whet their appetite between major exhibitions, explains Campbell. ‘We wanted something that would appeal to a totally broad audience,’ said Campbell, ‘something that really sucks you in. It’s durational so you can sit and watch it like you’d watch a play, but you can also stop in and get the experience. It’s a nice combination of different types of experiences.’