Sound artist gives voice to collection

ART REVIEW

Turner Prize winner ties ballad to PEM’s maritime works

June 04, 2011|By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

Susan Philipsz has a sound installation in the East India Marine Hall at… (Photos by WALTER SILVER/PEABODY…)

FREEPORT [NO. 003]: Susan Philipsz: If I with you would go

At: Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square, Salem, through Nov. 6.

866-745-7550, www.pem.org

SALEM — The Turner Prize, Great Britain’s award for the best contemporary British artist under 50, has in the past prompted some head scratching for bestowing its awards to artists who push the bounds of our common conception of what is art. Martin Creed won in 2001 for “Work No. 227: The lights going on and off,’’ which came to the Boston Center for the Arts in 2007. The title aptly describes the piece.

In December, Glasgow artist Susan Philipsz, who has an installation up now at the Peabody Essex Museum, was awarded the Turner Prize for singing. All right, not explicitly for singing — the competition is not “Britain’s Got Talent.’’ Philipsz is a sound artist who uses her own untrained voice to explore space. The Turner Prize show at Tate Britain featured an empty gallery with speakers piping Philipsz singing “Lowlands,’’ a sad old Scottish folk song. Visitors conditioned to look had to instead stand and listen. Like Creed’s piece, Philipsz’s gallery installations thrust her viewers into their own internal experience. And that, indeed, is one of art’s jobs.

In an interview Philipsz gave in 2008 for a show at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, she described singing as “a sculptural experience. [There’s] your inner body space, and what happens when you project sound into a room.’’ Listening, too, awakens the spaces within the body — where do the tones resonate? What emotions do they touch off?

“Lowlands’’ was, in fact, originally a public art piece. The music murmured out from under three Glasgow bridges, as water lapped below and trains rattled above. Philipsz has also recently imbued London back alleys with haunting folk songs. Imagine coming across a mournful, disembodied woman’s voice singing out from under a bridge or in an alley. It would be like seeing a ghost.

At PEM, Philipsz is the focus of “FreePort [No. 003],’’ a program that invites contemporary artists to interact with the museum’s collection. She has set up shop in East India Marine Hall. This is no empty white cube gallery. East India Marine Hall sports a neoclassical design with long, arching windows at one end. It houses some of the museum’s maritime history collection, including several hand-carved figureheads that once rode the prows of ships, portraits of 18th-century ship captains, and exotic artifacts they brought home from distant journeys.

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