IN THE SOUND INSTALLATION Still Life No. 3, 2015—one of eleven works included in the Diné artist and composer Raven Chacon’s spare but moving survey at the Swiss Institute in New York, “A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak”—a woman speaking in the Navajo language tells the Diné Banahe’, the Navajo story of creation, her voice emanating from a hanging speaker array forming a curve over the heads of listeners. The narrative tells of the Navajo people’s traversal from lower worlds to the earth through planes that coexist in indistinct spatial registers. Rather than conveying this account in a linear fashion, beginning to end, Chacon composes a sonic palimpsest: The audio is staggered to match the speakers’ arc, so that different parts of the story are communicated simultaneously, collapsing past, present, and future.
Just as the overlaid audio makes this spoken cosmogony difficult to discern, the artist has transcribed the narrative (in both English and Navajo) on engraved glass panels. The score specifies that the space be illuminated by lights that slowly change hue from yellow to blue to red and finally to white, the last of which renders the transparent and reflective glass panes almost invisible when placed directly on the white gallery walls. That is perhaps part of the point. While Still Life No. 3 might be more intelligible to Indigenous listeners, the work’s formal properties impede settler audiences from accessing this Navajo history and language.
Installation view, Swiss Institute, New York, 2024. From Field Recordings,
1999. Photo: Daniel Pérez.
This decolonial politics of refusal manifests throughout the exhibition, primarily in sheet music as well as in graphic and text scores left unperformed, so that their sonic potential must be imagined. (Several of these are reproduced as printouts free for the taking so they can be performed elsewhere.) For Field Recordings, 1999, the earliest work on display, Chacon documented the sounds of three remote sites in the Southwest, all important to Indigenous communities: Window Rock in Arizona, capital of the Navajo Nation; the Sandia Mountains near Albuquerque, a sacred place for the Pueblo; and Canyon de Chelly, which sits on Navajo lands in Arizona. He then amplified each of these quiet recordings to maximum volume in postproduction, effacing their birdsongs and wind flows to create a kind of noise map of the landscape; differences in pitch and static patterns are all that remain to highlight the resonant topography of each place. In this way Chacon inverts the function of the “field recording,” an ethnographic practice intended to truthfully register the ambient sounds of a particular site. Rather than providing accurate sonic portraits, Chacon withholds them. The sounds of Indigenous landscapes are not intended for settler ears.
Among the most successful objects in the exhibition was American Ledger No. 1 (Army Blanket), 2020, which smartly opened the show. This graphic score, emblazoned on an olive-drab army blanket, includes seven lines of symbolic instruction that collectively narrate the founding of the United States, from the moment of colonial contact with Native Americans to forced assimilation. As like many of Chacon’s works, the performance notes, given here in a wall text, call for mostly nontraditional instruments: percussion, but also coins, a police whistle, a match, and the chopping of wood. Yet a recording was not present; the score merely hung on the wall. It functions as both picture and performance, as emblem and absolute, as national flag and national anthem.
However, works that take sound as their primary medium don’t always transpose comfortably to a visual art context, where the conventions of gallery presentation dictate the terms of display, requiring that things be not only shown but seen. Imposing the standard display methods and interpretive strategies of visual art (the frame, the sightline, the wall-based installation, the text label) onto aural compositions can rob them of their visceral power. So it’s somewhat disappointing that what was perhaps the first career survey of a sound-focused artist in a major New York cultural organization—a landmark in institutional recognition—took the form of a rather conventional gallery exhibition.
Chacon is one of our most significant and affecting artists working with sound, with a gift for communicating complex sentiments about history and place through plain language, austere musical scores, and experimental sounds that are often as incisive as they are original. Yet “A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak” privileged installations, videos, and objects in the main exhibition spaces. Scores were relegated largely to the stairwell and, even more ignominiously, to wall labels. The printed score for Report, 2001—Chacon’s haunting composition recasting guns as musical instruments, and the basis for an equally gripping 2015 video—hung in frames lining the wall of a dimly lit gallery leading to the video installation, a seeming pass-through to the main event. This focus on objects rather than sound meant that some of Chacon’s best-known and arguably greatest works were excluded from the show altogether, including the extraordinary series of twelve compositions “For Zitkála-Šá,” 2017–20, each dedicated to a living Indigenous woman composer or performer, and his 2021 Pulitzer Prize–winning composition Voiceless Mass, for church pipe organ and chamber music ensemble. It also meant that the collaborative and communal nature of much of Chacon’s practice, as well as its fluid passage between boundaries separating written, performed, and visual forms, was somewhat erased. (The beautifully designed exhibition catalogue, produced in close collaboration with Chacon, is more daring in this regard. It fluidly interleaves scores, prose, scholarly texts, images, poetry, and conversations, reflecting both Chacon’s layered approach to composition and the open-ended ways that his work can be interpreted and enacted.) This was not just the case at the Swiss Institute; the contemporary art world has not yet established a coherent vocabulary for how to effectively exhibit sound or to accept the ways that it puts pressure on the gallery space, its code, and its politics.
Nevertheless, Chacon’s works—by their very presence, in whom they speak to and how—productively agitate against the conditions of the white cube, disrupting its institutional protocols and subtly “unsettling” a space traditionally intended for white audiences. Take Duet, 2000, a composition (here exhibited as a printed score written in Western musical notation) that contains only intervals of silence, one of many exceptional works by the artist built on sound’s absence. Unlike one famous antecedent, John Cage’s 1952 composition 4’33”, a written expression of Cage’s belief that “there is no such thing as silence,” Duet stresses its lack of sound by notating different intensities of silence, a tool that in the hands of an Indigenous composer powerfully expresses the systematic erasure of Indigenous peoples and histories from colonized Western lands. Or take Vertical Neighbors, 2024, a new score installed as a mural on the roof of the building, which was only visible in full from the street, rather than from within the gallery. As well, there was the very structure of the exhibition itself, with Chacon’s works arranged vertically through the floors of the Swiss Institute to allegorize the Diné worldview, and with others shown concurrently at the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum in Tromsø, Norway (Sápmi), as part of the same monographic survey.
In “Being in a position,” an essay written for the catalogue that serves as a kind of manifesto, Chacon discusses his compositional practice, declaring that melody, rhythm, timbre, and tone are often insignificant. “What is important,” he writes, “is from who or from what the tone originates.” Whose subjectivity is centered, whose story is told, who gets to speak. Chacon’s work asks those questions of itself and of us, proposing a new kind of space—a decolonial one, an Indigenous one—in which it must be seen, heard, and witnessed.
