“Think of all the nudes through art history, like Manet’s Olympia or Ingres’s Odalisque, who have lain down on couches to be painted,” says James Webb, talking about his haunting installation Autohagiography (2007). “I’m the nude on the couch.”
The couch in Webb’s case is a chaise upholstered in classic black leather. Two speakers are embedded at ear level within the backrest. The gallerygoer who reclines on the couch, eyes closed, listens to the soft, disembodied voice of Webb emanating from the speakers, recollecting fanciful scenes (as a small boy in feudal Japan, Webb loses his pet pig; as a woman pottering about her garden in post-World War II Europe, the Webb character trips and hits her head on a boulder) from his past lives while under hypnosis. “The piece came out of my wanting to generate content when not in full control of my faculties . . . the Dadaist idea of automated drawing,” says Webb.
Early in his career Webb was primarily a sound artist. One of his best-known works is Prayer (2002), for which he recorded prayers from a variety of places of worship in Cape Town, from churches to mosques to synagogues. These prayers were played back in a gallery simultaneously on twelve small floor-mounted car speakers, merging into a droning hum of sound. One needed to kneel down and place an ear next to a speaker to identify the language, religion, and words.
Now Webb describes himself “as an artist whose concepts are often articulated with sound [or video, photography, or text] in certain contextual situations.” His work embraces “themes of alienation, exoticism, and impossible environmental phenomena explored through the languages of espionage, magical ritual, and benevolent trickery,” he says.
During a six-month residency at the Center for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu, Japan (2004–05), Webb began work on his poetic outdoor installation There’s No Place Called Home. In this piece Webb transposes the summer songs of South African birds to Japanese trees in winter and the winter songs of Japanese birds to South African trees in summer. He does so by wiring speakers into trees to emit the recorded bird calls.
“I like the idea that birdcalls are territorial. They either say, ‘Fuck me’ or ‘Fuck off,’ ” says Webb candidly. “There is an almost invisible avian language all around us, expressing issues of power, place, and sex.” Whether passersby at the time would become aware of the strangeness of the foreign birdcalls was unimportant to the artist. What the birds thought or how they reacted is not on record.
In a world where travel has become increasingly endemic, one of the most reassuring sounds on returning home is familiar birdsong at the bedroom window. Webb’s small intervention serves to remind us that in a rapidly changing world, even the dawn chorus is at risk.
Autohagiography 2007
Installation: chaise lounge, speakers, CD player, cables, audio Sound material: recordings of the artist under hypnosis
Duration: 72 minutes
73 x 180 x 65 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
© James Webb
There’s No Place Called Home 2005
Japanese winter bird calls broadcast from speakers concealed in South
African trees during midsummer.
© James Webb