NOT I: Throwing Voices (1500 BCE–2020 CE)

“The great encyclopedist, essayist, and music amateur Denis Diderot had a penchant for strong analogies, such as this one… written in 1769:

The sensitive vibrating string oscillates and resonates a long time after one has plucked it. It’s this oscillation, this sort of inevitable resonance that holds the present object, while our understanding is busy with the quality which is appropriate to it. But vibrating strings have yet another property—-to make other strings quiver. And thus the first idea recalls a second, and these two a third, then all three a fourth, and so it goes, without our being able to set a limit to the ideas that are aroused and linked in a philosopher who meditates or who listens to himself in silence and darkness.”
Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality

American ventriloquist Edgar Bergen once described his colleague Valentine Vox as a dishonest ventriloquist because he did not move his lips when he performed. Bergen’s distrust highlighted an obvious but elusive aspect of this art: ventriloquism is about revealing a voice as much as it is about concealing it.

Issues of identity, embodiment, performance, and objecthood are at the core of even the most conventional ventriloquist sketch: Where is the voice coming from? How is that voice split into many bodies? Whose voice is this? Who is speaking on behalf of whom?

Drawn primarily from LACMA’s encyclopedic collection, the exhibition considers ventriloquismas both a theme and a methodology integral to the logic of institutions devoted to the dissemination of knowledge, namely museums and libraries. Using this popular form of entertainment as a structuring device for the exhibition allows for cross-collection discussions of representations of sound and text, and the misalignment of voice and body.

Arranged in ten nonsequential sections, the exhibition features more than two hundred objects spanning more than thirty-five hundred years to offer various degrees of ventriloquized voices, from the literal to the liberal. NOT I includes a special project by Meriç Algün in collaboration with the Los Angeles Public Library, as well as commissions from artists Raven Chacon, Patricia Fernandez, and Puppies Puppies (Jade Olivo Kuriki).

The reanimation of a doll, puppet, or sculpture is a common topic in love and horror stories alike. Ventriloquists produce the illusion of reanimation by throwing the voice (breathing) from one body to another. In Greek mythology, Pygmalion falls irredeemably in love with an ivory sculpture he makes of a woman. Upon kissing it, he feels the warmth of her lips and realizes his creation is alive. In the Bible’s Genesis, God creates human life by breathing into a dust figurine.

Tina Modotti
Italy, 1896–1942, active Mexico and Russia
Rene d’Harnoncourt Puppet, 1929
Gelatin silver print
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by Marion and Joe Mundy in honor of Rachel Mundy
96.563

The Tower of Babel
Germany, c. 1637
Woodcut with hand coloring Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Irene Salinger in memory of her father, Adolph Stern
54.89.72

Patricia Fernández
Spain, b. 1980, active United States
Untitled frames, 2020
Hand carved walnut, pine wood, and one or two prints by Francisco de Goya
Courtesy of the artist, commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Afghanistan, late 15th century
Copper (engraved and originally tinned)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased
with funds provided by the Nasli M. Heeramaneck
Collection, gift of Joan Palevsky
AC1996.38.1

Audio Available
Listen to LACMA Curator Linda Komaroff discuss this object in depth.
 

Giulio Cesare Casseri
Italy, 1552–1616
Tabulae anatomicae LXXIIX, 1627
Book
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

Barbara Bloom
United States, b. 1951
Flaubert Letters III, 1987/2012
Glassware engraved with fragments of letters from Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet with vitrine
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of John Baldessari
M.2014.294.1–.6

Dolores Zinny
Argentina, b. 1968
Word for Word: extension for dissolution/ Twain and Borges, 2017
Two colored pencil and graphite drawings on paper
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Judith and Alexander Angerman through @email
M.2018.6.3a–b

Linda Nishio
United States, b. 1952
Kikoemasu ka? (Can you hear me?),1980
Gelatin silver prints, with accompanying text panels and glass sheet
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ralph M. Parsons Fund
M.2001.92a–l

Audio Available
Listen to artist Linda Nishio discuss this object in depth.

“Duchamp’s work was a collaborative one, made with the assistance of his friend and patron, Walter Arensberg. Duchamp invited Arensberg to insert an object (the nature of which was unknown to the artist) inside a ball of string which Duchamp then clamped shut between two screwed metal plates. Duchamp said of it ‘A Readymade with a secret noise. Listen to it. I will never know whether it is a diamond or a coin.’ The conceit is a powerful one. The inner voice (essence, meaning, intention, investment) of the piece has been (ostensibly) supplied not by the artist, but by his patron. It is, (…)Arensberg poses as the ventriloquist of Duchamp’s dummy (or rather, rattle).” Jon Wood, With Hidden Noise: Sculpture, Video and Ventriloquism

“A man plucked a nightingale and, finding but little to eat, said: You are just a voice and nothing more.” Plutarch, Moralia: Sayings of Spartans [Apophthegmata Laconica] 233a

The human ambition to sing like a bird is probably as old as birds and ambition. Whistles make that longing viable as they turn silent human breath into sounds often resembling a bird call. The legend of Saint Francis, a pious man able to speak with birds and understand their language, is one of the many examples of the quest for interspecies dialogues.

Raven Chacon
United States, b. 1977
Mouth Piece (for a collection of objects), 2020
Sound installation Courtesy of the artist, commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

For this commission, Chacon composed a group of songs from sounds and pitches of pre-Columbian whistles and ocarinas from LACMA’s collection (on display in this gallery). Mouth Piece is performed by Alethia Lozano, principal flutist for the National Symphony Orchestra in Mexico. Presented as “beams of directionalised sound,” as Chacon says, the songs tell stories of other non-sounding objects throughout the exhibition, and invite listeners to align their own voices with the cumulative activity in the gallery.

The scene in Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s painting depicts a figure blowing a bubble, a symbol of impermanence and fragility. The painting itself is performing that task, rendering transparency visible. Like singing, whistling, or any other variation of speaking, blowing bubbles requires controlled breathing.

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Soap Bubbles, after 1739, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of The Ahmanson Foundation, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

Bubbles do not produce sound, they encapsulate silence. Bruce Nauman’s bubble is broadcasted to the gallery from a subterranean chamber located in Vienna. Roughly the size of a human body, the chamber is equipped with a lamp, a camera, and a microphone; the images and sounds are transmitted to the monitor displayed in this gallery.

Installation photograph, NOT I Throwing Voices (1500 BCE-2020 CE), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

In Rosa Barba’s installation, a modified projector is suspended from the ceiling by the very film being projected. The projected image is blank, but gets altered by the dust and scratches that accumulate over the course of the exhibition. Barba’s work engages with the image of the invisible and the apparatus to display it: the body and the bubble, the shaky projector, and the pictureless film.

Installation photograph, NOT I Throwing Voices (1500 BCE-2020 CE), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA 

Yee Sookyung
South Korea, b. 1963
Translated Vase, 2013
Ceramic trash, epoxy, 24k gold leaf
Purchased with funds provided by AMOREPACIFIC Corporation
M.2013.205

Audio Available
Listen to LACMA Curator Virginia Moon discuss this object in depth.

“Ventriloquism is mythical, not just in the sense that it is so intimately bound up with fable and fantasy, but also in that it may fairly be said of it, as early mythographers suspected of myth itself, that it is a past without a present. Whether because it is scandalously or mysteriously archaic, or uncannily premonitory, ventriloquism is always anachronistic, never quite on time.”

Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism

Most of the artworks and manuscripts in this gallery showcase ways in which the divine voice becomes a religious text: pages of the Bible inspired by the word of God; a page from the Quran, a text believed to be delivered orally by God to the prophet Muhammad; and a more contemporary textual work by R.B. Kitaj, evocatively entitled Voice from Lovely Nowhere.

Edward Biberman
United States, 1904–1986
Conspiracy, c. 1955
Oil on board
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Judith Rothschild Foundation; Hansen, Jacobson, Teller, Hoberman, Newman, Warren & Sloane, L.L.P.; Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser; the Frederick R. Weisman Philanthropic Foundation; Dr. Judd Marmor; Paul and Suzanne Muchnic; the Reese E. and Linda M. Polesky Family Foundation; and Marvin and Judy Zeidler
M.2002.86

Ventriloquism can function as a methodology. This section is organized around Ventriloquist II by Jasper Johns. The print presents a series of quotes and references dear to the artist, such as a lithograph by Barnett Newman in the top right, an illustration of Moby Dick in the background, and ceramic pieces by George Ohr floating around, along with a work by Johns himself, the iconic double flags. Difficult to see at first, these quotations (Newman, Ohr, and Moby Dick) can be traced and cited. There are, however, references (the bathroom, the incomplete flag, the hinges, etc.) that can be unpacked and conjured by works in the collection (Gober, Petto, Ligon, a Navajo American flag). Johns creates a temporary arrangement, a mini exhibition almost, concerning his voice in a complex spatial relationship with other voices. The print’s title implies all of the voices folded within the work.

A ventriloquist’s performance relies on the misalignment of words, images, and objects. It is a self-reflective act in which both the dummy and the ventriloquist are fictive characters, constantly switching roles: owner-user, subject-object, original-copy. Not Treachery groups a wide array of disparate pipes from the museum’s many collections, starting with Une Pipe (A Pipe) by American artist Sherrie Levine, and evokes the treachery of images, literalizations, and taxonomies. Levine’s pipe talks back and contradicts the famous painting by René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe), which has been defined as a treatise on the impossibility of reconciling words, images, and objects. “Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged,” said Levine in an artist statement. “We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.”

Alexandre Vattemare (Paris, 1796–1864), was a renowned ventriloquist known as Monsieur Alexandre who later in his life pioneered an early international system of interlibrary loans. Monsieur Alexandre didn’t throw his voice through a dummy, but mastered the illusion of creating disparate characters with his voice, as if they were speaking from far away or in adjacent rooms. It should not come as a surprise that a ventriloquist, able to conjure voices from afar to address the audience in front of him, is deeply connected to the history of public libraries and cultural exchange. Vattemare was instrumental in the founding of the Boston Public Library as a sister of the Paris Public Library. He created the Central Agency for International Literary Exchange which, although short-lived, paved the way for more robust systems of collaborations between libraries around the world.

Cindy Bernard
United States, b. 1959
Ask the Dust: Dirty Harry (1971/1990), 1990
Dye coupler print
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of The Annenberg Foundation, acquired from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin
M.2008.40.219

Valeska Soares
Brazil, b. 1957, active United States
Untitled (Sin título), 2005
Platinum-glazed ceramic characters
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Andrew Hauptman
M.2006.125

Images are carried across time and geographies, and through cultures, and peoples. Some take longer than others to land. These echoes and refractions are favored in museums and libraries with a wide and sweeping scope. One can argue that it only took 189 years and a good dose of chance and luck for the distant gesture of a Japanese woman to produce the shadow of a rabbit on the surface of a Ruscha print.