William Furlong at Laure Genillard

William Furlong at Laure Genillard

23 January, 2009
by: SUSIE

Down an unexpected little lane – a welcome historic nook at the otherwise vile corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road – is Laure Genillard, where William Furlong's exhibition Possibility & Impossibility of Fixing Meaning opened last night. The rag propping open the door is unexpected of a gallery that has every possibility of snootiness; whose name I am unsure how to pronounce and whose website is a little – shall we say – impenetrable. But it's a friendly face that greets us and points us in the direction of drinks. Downstairs, the artist is sitting with friends at the kitchen table. There's cheese, wine and an average age of 60.

William Furlong has used sound, particularly the human voice, as his sculptural medium since the early 1970s, when he co-founded an audio magazine, Audio Arts. He is absorbed by the wealth of information (spoken and unspoken) that is invested in recordings of the voice.

This new work includes four sound frames paired with four graphic sound scores, titled 'I Remember Having a Conversation with Liam Gillick', 'Why am I Making It?', 'When you go into an Art Gallery, it's Always Full of Air' and 'It depends on how it is we think the structure of meaning works'. Visually, it's a sparse affair, but not an unappealing one. Each frame is a grid of small black speakers, 3 x 4, that wouldn't look out of place in a trendy minimalist apartment. Bundles of wires run around the perimeter of the gallery, a deliberate indication of the recording process which has consumed and fascinated Furlong for the last forty-or-so years.

The source for these four frames is a series of interviews recorded by the artist as part of Tate's Intelligence: New British Art 2000 and the list of interviewees is a glittering affair: Douglas Gordon, Martin Creed, Yinka Shonibare, Bob & Roberta Smith, Julian Opie, Tacita Dean, Sarah Lucas – the list goes on. The original discussions are thoughtful and in-depth, and yet there is no tiptoeing around their manipulation. Sighs, breaths, ums, silences, words and phrases are layered, repeated and spaced – it's almost orchestral. It alludes to conversation but there is no graspable meaning or narrative. This overlap of the discursive and the creative is a satisfying solution to art being part of life, and not a separate and hallowed entity.

I am reminded of Bruce Naumann's Raw Material at the Turbine Hall in 2004. Naumann is an artist who, similarly, reuses sounds across years of work – retrospectively, if you will. He acknowledges that his work is never finished, that the material always remains available for reuse and reinterpretation. But where Naumann's striking sound installation created a real sense of sculptural form, Furlong's work is smaller scale, quieter, less abstract and more rooted in its original conversations. With such valuable originals, however, this is no bad thing.


Some of the vast audio archive of conversations with artists and produced sound works can be accessed here and more than 70 of the interviews are due to be published in a book later this year.

A second strand of William Furlong's work – concerned with recording everyday folk, evoking the local environment, snippets of conversations, a sense of who people are and where they are going – is presented concurrently at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill On Sea in East Sussex until 15 March.

SUSIE