I really enjoy the text Realising Voices, reclaiming Power, The personal and collective potential of voice, as an example of a collective medium that include the experience of the personal and collective body through sound and voices as a powerful tools of exchange. After reading the text immediately came to my mind an experience a had in 2005 with an art piece or collaborative performance Murphy Canyon Choir in a military-housing complex in San Diego, when the Canadian artist Althea Thauberger work with eight military spouse to compose and perform a choral event.
“Her project Murphy Canyon Choir (2005) is especially revealing in this respect. Commissioned by in Site, a binational network that features works set in the region of San Diego and Tijuana, its impoverished, cross-border counterpart, Thauberger proposed to collaborate with families from San Diego’s huge military community. Her proposal initially met with, she says, an “ambivalent reaction”: inSite didn’t know how to position the project ideologically. In her statement, Thauberger writes that Murphy Canyon is the largest military-housing complex in the world, but the city’s military population “remains quite invisible…especially to the educated and affluent.”
“Over a period of five months, Thauberger and a local choir director and choral composer worked with eight military spouses to compose an original repertoire of songs they then performed in a school auditorium in Murphy Canyon. While the work was in production, many of the women, all of whom were in their 20s, confided in Thauberger about the difficulty of being left to raise children alone while their husbands were deployed overseas, often to an uncertain fate. In spite of this, the women authored songs that were sentimental and patriotic. Titles such as Wife of a Hero, Waiting and The Story of Love give some indication of the group’s collective view of their circumstances, as well as their ideas about how their feelings should be properly expressed. When an art audience from central San Diego was bused in for the performance, two largely ideologically opposed worlds were brought together, creating a dynamic, emotionally charged situation. The idea that artworks can push boundaries is a commonplace— if not a cliché—of the business, but Thauberger breached tangible divisions by insisting on re-examining assumptions about which communities are worthy of the art world’s attention. As a result, the project helped to expand the two communities’ awareness of each other.”
“…Thauberger has said that she sees her work as creating “a situation of witness.” It is a curious hope to have for art that implicates the viewer morally in terms of a responsibility for what one is looking at. This is true even as Thauberger’s chosen mode of working, community collaboration, is on the leading edge of contemporary art practice. This trend’s best-known exponents are the British artists Phil Collins, Jeremy Deller and Gillian Wearing and the Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez, although their respective practices are all quite different from one another.”
“…To dismiss her work on these terms, however, is to perpetuate the idea that when it comes to self-representation, distinctions between professional and amateur—and indeed between high and low art—should be maintained. But look beyond the surface of these works and the narratives informing the popular imagination become apparent. These include not only aspirations to stardom, but also assumptions about which occasions permit the expression of true emotion, and what kind of sentiments are appropriate, expected even, at those times. Viewers of Thauberger’s works who balk at the stereotypical content of their performances expose another set of stereotypes: the expectation that performers should conform to mass media–fostered norms of what singers should look and sound like. In this way, critics of Thauberger’s work reveal themselves to be, like the girls in Songstress, utterly conventional in their desires.”