Cathy's Art Diary

Annoying exhibition at the Hayward Gallery looking at how sound has been used by six contemporary artists and how it can “conjure and challenge cultural memory”. OK having been to a few shows that use sound in the work I need to get something off my chest! If you have a show with sound in it each piece needs to be heard alone. Either deliver the sound via headphones if space is an issue or if you have room use proper sound proofing or maybe play each piece one at a time! In this case one piece in the first room by Magdi Mostafa called “Wisdom Tower” had 84 speakers in a panel and was very loud so the sound dominated all the other works. I am sure that was part of the desired effect but if felt like aural bullying. Also to be honest I really don’t want to have to give lots of time in a gallery to listening (or watching) long pieces. I want an art work to act like a painting in that you can take a quick look and draw some conclusions or you can choose to spend more time with...

Small exhibition of work by the filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk at the ICA. The work was mainly preliminary studies for his animations and I liked the fact the films were being shown alongside the studies for those of us who didn’t know his work. There were also sculptures describes as sound sculptures. These looked fascinating but somehow the fact they were in glass cases and not making any noise made them seem a bit pointless. Oh dear I seemed to have been in a grumpy mood at the ICA!