Whisper: Jaume Plensa
The first piece in the show is a white, framed wall sculpture of textured cloth and paper. Scattered throughout are screened images of the artist’s face–straight on, in profile, looking up, down, or around–as if confronting you directly in the hope of making you uncomfortable. Though this self-reflexive work is not representative of the rest of the installation, it still conveys Plensa’s intention–to force the viewer to confront his own existence in the context of a common space. Plensa’s two primary tools are sound–or the absence of it–and light as a means of referring to sound. However, he shied away from discussing the role of sound in his work during a gallery talk (“I prefer to talk about digression rather than sound”). Indeed, Plensa’s sculpture is often allusive, offering simple yet suggestive observations about the space surrounding the art–including the viewer. “When we think we have achieved silence,” he’s quoted as saying in exhibition materials, “we discover that something interrupts, something as close and familiar as our own body. Our noisy body.”
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The final room in the exhibit is a kind of epilogue–a small sitting room containing photographs of several of Plensa’s public sculptures. Though these tiny representations of Plensa’s work come across as something of an afterthought, the awe-inspiring yet tender power of Whisper gives us a new appreciation of what Plensa is trying to accomplish in public. These works are big and bold: The Star of David (1998) in Stockholm and Blake in Gateshead (1996) in Gateshead, England, use fortified steel and beams of light visible for miles; Twins II in Seoul pairs highway lamps to represent the division between the Koreas; Golden House of Bird, currently in progress on the Champs-Elysée in Paris, is a large, filigreed birdhouse on impossibly thin legs. But these huge works are never sterile or impersonal. As the artist put it in his gallery talk, “The world doesn’t need monuments. It’s a beautiful thing just to put art in the middle of the street.”
