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Blaring Icons: Their Meaning, Our Understanding*

Martin Sturm

We return to the peripheries of language… where it all begins… wheremonosyllabic sounds are all that are needed to say everything that is of meaningand importance. In her Babel Series installation (1999), Candice Breitz composesa stuttering concert of early prattle. Seven television monitors - freely hung atdifferent heights to fill a large hall - display looped fragments of detached speech,each loop derived from a well-known music video. Icons of pop culture. Starsincessantly repeating staccato syllables.We approach the room. Madonna, the media queen, fluttering her lips incessantly.We enter. Noisegate. Cacophony. Reduction. Extreme abstraction. But above all:rhythm, chopped and repeated, over and over again. Language dissolving into aseries of dissonant beats. True pandemonium.We look around. Daylight, filtered. Yellow. Beautiful bow-windows. The blue lightof monitors suspended in space. Primary colours. Where are we? Theatmosphere gravitates between the ambience of a sacred space, a ballroom, a

space disco.

We meander through the room, taking it all in as we move, wandering from icon toicon. Madonna… Sting… and others, hanging before us, enclosed in the mediatedsurfaces of the television monitors, trapped in the repetition of a single moment, inthe utterance of their grinding sounds and syllables. No point of focus, just axes ofvision. We get closer to a monitor in an attempt to make sense of it all.Da-da Sting. Pa-pa Madonna. Is it because of their incomplete sentences that wefail to understand them? Not in the least. The value of a word lies in its use inlanguage, according to Wittgenstein. The same goes for syllables, which acquiremeaning only in the game of language, their emotional charge derived from thecontext of communication. Uttered either individually or in multi-syllabic form, theyare transformed into linguistic signs and signifiers. Appellations. Each of us mustbe spoken into language. In enunciating, I express myself. Speaking, it might besaid, is another form of acting. The question is then; what do we do when wearticulate sound? We might remember the term `interjection’ from our schoolyears. The distinguishing feature of the interjection lies in the fact that it weightsitself like a full sentence… thus achieving the greatest honour possible for a stringof accumulated sounds. OUCH! Pain is expressed not in well-formulatedsentences but in sharp and woeful cries and moans. We make love, and ourbodies stammer strings of abbreviated sounds – perhaps the most intimate and

strongest forms of expression.

It is on this level that the Babel icons iterate themselves. What is it that they shoutat us? What do they mean? What do they stutter and stammer? They wail at us,aggress us, assault us and implore us. They ask us to come closer and yet insiston their distance. They beg for our attention only so that they might fling theirinfantile yammer at us. A choir of cacophonous amputees. Here stripped almostentirely of the attributes that make them what they are, the very expressions that

guarantee them: their songs.

Stripped? Perhaps not entirely. Their songs resonate in our heads. Saved andstored. We understand them as we understand ourselves… in relation to familiarsocial situations, networks of opposing stimuli into which we are inscribed throughmutual knowledge. Our linguistic experience is predetermined. Without the sharedcodes that structure language, understanding would be impossible. We areinterpellated by sound. By the seven pop icons. The visuals. The movements. Allis familiar. We recognize and identify songs that have been reduced to splitsecondbeats. We know them all, these celebrities, their faces and their histories,their words and their narratives. Cultural context. We are children of the

mainstream.

And yet at the same time, our understanding fails us. We are estranged fromthese icons. Our memories of them are nothing more than useless points ofreferences. The facts before us dispute memory. As they perform before us, theseven celebrities violate familiar rules of linguistic convention. Da-da Sting. Pa-paMadonna. Rendered infantile. Their roles reversed with ours. Stars mutated intochildren… immortal pop gods babbling like young babies. And yet, a powerfulchoir nonetheless. A choir devoid of easy repetition and sing-along refrains. Achoir lacking in sweet linearity and smothering narrative surface. Back to the rootsof language. Into the realm of sound. Where potential and meaning are freed fromcontainment in closed narrative form. New raw sounds. Noise-songs.Following Deleuze, one might argue that the rigorous editing and cuttingexperienced here somehow returns us to rhizomatic form. To a realm in whichsounds constitute the basic modules of every utterance and of all linguisticsystems. Units of potential meaning that merge into inventories of signs anddevelop non-hierarchically into instructions that drive actions yet to be performed,yet to take shape. This is a realm in which the meaning of sound is variable andrelative, existing only fleetingly and in relation to the contexts to which it attachesitself. Here sound is still free from inscription into the specificity of a linguisticsystem. Still woven into a web of emotional inflection and intonation. In evershiftingforms, the beats that make up sound simultaneously evoke the possibilityand impossibility of universal communication. Each listener claims their meaningin a different way. The throbbing beats coalesce neither into a lingua franca, norinto an Esperanto that forces us to follow sixteen basic rules towards a globalsyntax. Instead, their shapelessness arouses in us a critical awareness of oursecond skin – language - the skin that surrounds us almost claustrophobically.The skin that is formed as we refashion and punctuate sound into recognizablewords, iterable phrases, repeatable sentences. And ultimately, it is preciselybecause we know the powerful lyrics that are usually communicated by the popicons before us so well, that the syllable songs of the Babel Series embrace us sorefreshingly. The excitement of being subjected to a pandemonious choir thatflings sounds and syllables at us, one might argue, far exceeds the dullexperience of floating along the surface of a song. As stated earlier, it is no easytask to avoid the surface of linguistic signs. With Wittgenstein in mind, we watchand listen to this Babylonian throng of pop as it struggles to free itself from the

spell of reason cast upon us by language.

* The subtitle is taken from Hans Hörmann's noteworthy study on psychologicalsemantics.

This essay was first published in: Sturm, Martin and Plöchl, Renate (editors).Candice Breitz: Cuttings. (Linz: O.K Center for Contemporary Art Upper Austria,2001) exhibition catalogue.