If the repertoire of contemporary art could at some point also be enriched by the audiowalk as a form of expression, then this is thanks to the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff.
If you, equipped with an MP3 player and headphones, let her tell you what is right in front of your eyes, you will experience things and time differently.
Sees surroundings like a prosaic memory.
This is also the case in "Ittingen Walk", one of her oldest radio plays from 2002, which was commissioned by the Kartause in the Kunstmuseum Thurgau and is one of the few such explorations that are permanently available in a museum.
Silence, the pounding of footsteps, but also aircraft noise create different echoes of the current and past present and form a separate, fluctuating continuum.
It is as if the now merges with a then, as if one is remembering something that one has never experienced and sees the dictum of a Roland Barthes - the photographic "It was like that" - in the presence before one.
Then you forget the smartphone in your pocket and all the news that just reached you.
Instead, it is the real space that the perception focuses on, accompanied by the imaginary narrator.
According to Cardiff, this wants to “make you think you are a different person”.
Such a walk is therefore an escape room in another reality, an “escape room”, as the artist might call it, who has been collaborating with her compatriot George Bures Miller since 1995.
"Escape Room" is the name of another, the most recent work by Cardiff & Miller, which can be seen in a retrospective of the artist couple in Duisburg's Wilhelm-Lehmbruck-Museum, organized on the occasion of the renowned prize that was awarded to him in 2020 and named after the museum's namesake is.
The dim interior was created during the pandemic as a studio allegory, staged in small parts as bricolage.
A rockin', nerdy homestead of the imagination gives birth to models of a dystopian world - and goes to great lengths for theatricality and mystery.
In contrast, the environment of the "Forty-Part Motet" from 2001 strikes a minimalist pitch, with an oval of forty loudspeakers on stands, which are arranged in a very simple way and all the more convincingly in the large hall for temporary exhibitions.
The renaissance composition "Spem in Alium" (hope for another) by Thomas Tallis is performed with eight choirs, each with five voices, which you can approach as you wander from box to box and thus control the sound individually, so to speak.
To make the concert experience mobile in space, this idea captivates.
One can linger for a long time in the cool Olympus of polyphonic vocal music, this haven of seclusion would have appealed to a Meister Eckhart.
Were chips already crunched in the cinema in the 1940s?
The lavish Duisburg exhibition defines the bandwidth of an oeuvre in which sounds of all stripes, noise and whispering, music, but also literary narration set the tone.
In a 1940s-style cinema, you can hear (again through headphones) how those sitting next to you are enjoying their chips, and you look around in confusion to see if anyone is actually sitting there.
The casual noises get on your fur, they unsettle your own location in this small cinema.
Visitors can take a seat at a mellotron, the forerunner of the sampler from the 1960s, and play the sounds themselves, individually or in wild chords.
The 72 keys of Cardiff & Miller's "Instrument of Troubled Dreams" are punctuated with soundtracks of boots in the attic, drops of water, barking dogs, gunshots, rustling, thunder,
storm occupied.
These are effectively carried into the room via a large number of loudspeakers and let an obscure as well as opulent soundtrack sound.
At the same time, a soundscape of meanings arises in front of the inner eye: everyone is a composer, at least on this keyboard.
Fluxus art ideas live on in such works with their offers of playful participation.
The “Killing Machine” from 2007, which visitors set in motion by pressing a button, was inspired by Franz Kafka's story “In the Penal Colony”.
Cardiff & Miller's torture of an explorer is carried out on a highly virtual victim on a dentist's chair who is not even there.
The apparatus seems quite Kafkaesque, but hard-hitting social criticism is less the thing of the two artists - the art torture remains more of a kinetic sculpture than reflecting horror.
Nevertheless, the escape into art Cardiff & Miller is not one from reality.
It aims straight at those areas of freedom that need to be defended.
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller.
In the Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg;
until August 14;
then in the Museum Tinguely, Basel.
The catalog from Wienand Verlag costs 28 euros.