I hear words, half spoken words, and weeping both melodious and in staccato. Hands clap to the rhythm of music. A young man runs laps around the perimeter of the church’s large nave. There is the sound of voices that approach language albeit an incomplete and partial one. Speakers of this language made up of stutters, cries, laughter, and excess are surrounded by groups of listeners. At once a part of the crowd and removed from it, the dissociated speaker of glossolalia forms the scene. They project ecstatic tremors of the body, the voice, and the face throughout the group. It is a monolingual gesture where the speaker is heard but cannot listen. Only in a moment of exhaustion (or interpretation) does the crowd move toward a point of stasis where the roles of speaker and listener become interchangeable again. During the summer of 2003, I worked on a project investigating glossolalia, better known as “speaking in tongues.” It was a work whose form never came into focus for a variety of reasons ranging from the practical to the ethical. It was also a project that I embarked on shortly after a near death experience and that presented the possibility for reflection on that experience. In early July of 2002, I was hiking with a group of friends in the North Georgia Mountains. After following a trail, we veered off to stand in an area where the water from a waterfall was collecting. Getting to this point required making one’s way up a steep hill about thirty feet in height. This was to the right of a stream of water that flowed from the falls after it pooled. Going up was easy and once at the top, we walked around in the pool and talked for a little while. After some time passed, we moved back down the slope. I was last in the group to descend. As I have a fear of heights in general, I progressed very slowly as I made my way down. But within the first few steps, I slipped, or the ground gave way, and I fell to my right, which took me into the stream of water flowing down the hill. The image of smooth dirt-covered ground rushing past for a brief moment is the last thing that I remember from that day. It was about a week later that I regained consciousness in the intensive care ward of Grady Hospital. Aside from learning of my extensive broken bones and other injuries, I was told that I had been in a coma. I had distinct memories, however, of the time that had elapsed between the accident and consciousness. These memories are as clear and crisp as one would have of an experience in a woken state, yet these memories were also too bizarre and horrific to have happened. In one of these “dreams,” I believed that I had been far away. Upon awakening, I claimed that I had been rescued by the FBI from a group of captors in the Middle East. In this vision, somewhere between dream and hallucination, I was lying restrained against the side of a wall that vacillated between being the inside and outside of a building. It was incredibly hot and the heat was relentless. There was a needle in my arm attached to a hose and that hose was connected to a large rectangular Coke machine, the kind that has the logo printed vertically across its face. Upon later reflection, perhaps the image of Coke machine stood for the local and familiar at a time when I felt very much “away” and in a strange place. As a native of Atlanta, Cocoa-Cola, sometimes referred to locally as “Georgia water,” had thoroughly ingrained itself into my cultural memory, becoming a stand-in for the familiar while in my hallucinatory state. I suspect that the Middle Eastern setting may have been induced by the constant coverage of the Afghanistan war then being played on the television in my hospital room. As a graduate student at the time, much of my work had focused on sound and Auditory Culture. During my studies, I came across one book in particular that motivated what would become the project in question. “Hearing Things,” by Leigh Eric Schmidt, investigates the historical tensions that existed and exist between a particular pre-Enlightenment “Christian” experience of the audible and the countervailing force of Enlightenment science and culture. According to Schmidt it was, in part, under the pressure of “verifiability” that hearing for many Christians began to change. And while most Christian groups eventually gave up “hearing things” such as the voice of god, those experiences held for Pentecostals, Charismatic Catholics, and the early denominations of other groups such as the Methodists. For Pentecostals in particular, there is a longstanding and significant relationship to religious sounds, particularly vocal sounds. This is most evident in the importance that the “Gifts of the Spirit” play in their religious life. These “gifts,” which include speaking in tongues and the interpretation of tongues drew my interest for a variety of reasons. Most compelling for me was the dissociated state of the speakers of glossolalia, their ability to be at once there among other people and far away. I eventually decided that I would attend a Pentecostal church, with the stated intention of eventually making recordings of glossolalia. I was also simply curious and wanted to see in person what I had only read about or reviewed in recordings. I made my way to the largest Pentecostal church in the vicinity to observe one Sunday. During my first visit, I set up a meeting to speak with the Pastor of the church over lunch. During our meeting, I asked if he would allow me to make some recordings of the church sermons. He was very welcoming, friendly, and told me I could make recordings and take some pictures for my project so long as I remained unobtrusive and respectful. We continued our dialog throughout the course of my investigation. During my visits, I made about 14 hours of audio recordings and took several rolls of film. I also spent time speaking with various members of the congregation who from time to time would attempt to convince me to move to front of the church so that they could pray from me to “get the holy ghost.” I had a number of ideas as to how I might present the material in the form of a final work, all of which seem rather trite to me now. I abandoned that project a few months later. Since then, I have had a number of opportunities to begin the project again. For example, some years later, I attended a meeting at a local Esperanto Society. Esperanto is a constructed language developed in the late 19th century with Utopian aspirations. Standardized and “rational”, this language was an attempt to remove misunderstandings between cultures where “natural” language had only compounded them. Similar to many Indo-European languages, Esperanto claims to be easy for “anyone” to learn, but it is as different as English to a Chinese speaker. It assumes, like many humanist projects, to be neutral and free from cultural specificity where it is actually local and specific. During the meeting, one of the members expressed their interest in translating Thomas Payne’s Common Sense into Esperanto. I thought that this group was in some ways an interesting counterpoint to the Pentecostals. Both hold utopian aspirations, it is though their “languages” that understanding can be reached. Glossolalia, emotive, gesticular, and non-rational is the language of a crowd caught up in a stream of affect while Esperanto appears cool and rational. I did not pursue this line of thought any further. Writing this essay gives me the opportunity to re-examine the project and reasons for leaving it incomplete. Beyond the difficulty of knowing exactly what to do with my material there were serious ethical concerns. As much as I tried to interface with the Pentecostal community in a way that couldn’t be reduced to an instrumental relationship, it was a possibility that was always on my mind and troubled me. How does one interface with a community that is not their own community, and is it possible to make work about the Other in a way that is neither condescending nor exploitative? The images that I have chosen to share from this project all picture the subjects with faces obscured in some way. Often with their backs facing the camera, they remind me of paintings by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, who often utilized Rückenfigur, or the Art historical technique of painting a figure with its back turned toward the viewer. Friedrich’s paintings were meant to encourage empathy in the viewer, as the figure in the painting surveyed sublime nature so the viewers felt themselves in the position of the depicted beholder. But I believe there is another possible reading of the Rückenfigur. Back turned, the figure does not offer communion, but rather upholds distance. In Friedrich’s image, we feel the distance between his 19th century Romantic European sensibility and our own way of seeing. In my photos of the Pentacostals , it is for me, something similar: a flow that I never allowed myself to be caught up in. My problem is one of proximity. I feel that we share something but I cannot breach the distance to access it. What is it for you who looks through me and sees a landscape of backs turned?
Joseph Moore 2011
I hear words, half spoken words, and weeping both melodious and in staccato. Hands clap to the rhythm of music. A young man runs laps around the perimeter of the church’s large nave. There is the sound of voices that approach language albeit an incomplete and partial one. Speakers of this language made up of stutters, cries, laughter, and excess are surrounded by groups of listeners. At once a part of the crowd and removed from it, the dissociated speaker of glossolalia forms the scene. They project ecstatic tremors of the body, the voice, and the face throughout the group. It is a monolingual gesture where the speaker is heard but cannot listen. Only in a moment of exhaustion (or interpretation) does the crowd move toward a point of stasis where the roles of speaker and listener become interchangeable again. During the summer of 2003, I worked on a project investigating glossolalia, better known as “speaking in tongues.” It was a work whose form never came into focus for a variety of reasons ranging from the practical to the ethical. It was also a project that I embarked on shortly after a near death experience and that presented the possibility for reflection on that experience. In early July of 2002, I was hiking with a group of friends in the North Georgia Mountains. After following a trail, we veered off to stand in an area where the water from a waterfall was collecting. Getting to this point required making one’s way up a steep hill about thirty feet in height. This was to the right of a stream of water that flowed from the falls after it pooled. Going up was easy and once at the top, we walked around in the pool and talked for a little while. After some time passed, we moved back down the slope. I was last in the group to descend. As I have a fear of heights in general, I progressed very slowly as I made my way down. But within the first few steps, I slipped, or the ground gave way, and I fell to my right, which took me into the stream of water flowing down the hill. The image of smooth dirt-covered ground rushing past for a brief moment is the last thing that I remember from that day. It was about a week later that I regained consciousness in the intensive care ward of Grady Hospital. Aside from learning of my extensive broken bones and other injuries, I was told that I had been in a coma. I had distinct memories, however, of the time that had elapsed between the accident and consciousness. These memories are as clear and crisp as one would have of an experience in a woken state, yet these memories were also too bizarre and horrific to have happened. In one of these “dreams,” I believed that I had been far away. Upon awakening, I claimed that I had been rescued by the FBI from a group of captors in the Middle East. In this vision, somewhere between dream and hallucination, I was lying restrained against the side of a wall that vacillated between being the inside and outside of a building. It was incredibly hot and the heat was relentless. There was a needle in my arm attached to a hose and that hose was connected to a large rectangular Coke machine, the kind that has the logo printed vertically across its face. Upon later reflection, perhaps the image of Coke machine stood for the local and familiar at a time when I felt very much “away” and in a strange place. As a native of Atlanta, Cocoa-Cola, sometimes referred to locally as “Georgia water,” had thoroughly ingrained itself into my cultural memory, becoming a stand-in for the familiar while in my hallucinatory state. I suspect that the Middle Eastern setting may have been induced by the constant coverage of the Afghanistan war then being played on the television in my hospital room. As a graduate student at the time, much of my work had focused on sound and Auditory Culture. During my studies, I came across one book in particular that motivated what would become the project in question. “Hearing Things,” by Leigh Eric Schmidt, investigates the historical tensions that existed and exist between a particular pre-Enlightenment “Christian” experience of the audible and the countervailing force of Enlightenment science and culture. According to Schmidt it was, in part, under the pressure of “verifiability” that hearing for many Christians began to change. And while most Christian groups eventually gave up “hearing things” such as the voice of god, those experiences held for Pentecostals, Charismatic Catholics, and the early denominations of other groups such as the Methodists. For Pentecostals in particular, there is a longstanding and significant relationship to religious sounds, particularly vocal sounds. This is most evident in the importance that the “Gifts of the Spirit” play in their religious life. These “gifts,” which include speaking in tongues and the interpretation of tongues drew my interest for a variety of reasons. Most compelling for me was the dissociated state of the speakers of glossolalia, their ability to be at once there among other people and far away. I eventually decided that I would attend a Pentecostal church, with the stated intention of eventually making recordings of glossolalia. I was also simply curious and wanted to see in person what I had only read about or reviewed in recordings. I made my way to the largest Pentecostal church in the vicinity to observe one Sunday. During my first visit, I set up a meeting to speak with the Pastor of the church over lunch. During our meeting, I asked if he would allow me to make some recordings of the church sermons. He was very welcoming, friendly, and told me I could make recordings and take some pictures for my project so long as I remained unobtrusive and respectful. We continued our dialog throughout the course of my investigation. During my visits, I made about 14 hours of audio recordings and took several rolls of film. I also spent time speaking with various members of the congregation who from time to time would attempt to convince me to move to front of the church so that they could pray from me to “get the holy ghost.” I had a number of ideas as to how I might present the material in the form of a final work, all of which seem rather trite to me now. I abandoned that project a few months later. Since then, I have had a number of opportunities to begin the project again. For example, some years later, I attended a meeting at a local Esperanto Society. Esperanto is a constructed language developed in the late 19th century with Utopian aspirations. Standardized and “rational”, this language was an attempt to remove misunderstandings between cultures where “natural” language had only compounded them. Similar to many Indo-European languages, Esperanto claims to be easy for “anyone” to learn, but it is as different as English to a Chinese speaker. It assumes, like many humanist projects, to be neutral and free from cultural specificity where it is actually local and specific. During the meeting, one of the members expressed their interest in translating Thomas Payne’s Common Sense into Esperanto. I thought that this group was in some ways an interesting counterpoint to the Pentecostals. Both hold utopian aspirations, it is though their “languages” that understanding can be reached. Glossolalia, emotive, gesticular, and non-rational is the language of a crowd caught up in a stream of affect while Esperanto appears cool and rational. I did not pursue this line of thought any further. Writing this essay gives me the opportunity to re-examine the project and reasons for leaving it incomplete. Beyond the difficulty of knowing exactly what to do with my material there were serious ethical concerns. As much as I tried to interface with the Pentecostal community in a way that couldn’t be reduced to an instrumental relationship, it was a possibility that was always on my mind and troubled me. How does one interface with a community that is not their own community, and is it possible to make work about the Other in a way that is neither condescending nor exploitative? The images that I have chosen to share from this project all picture the subjects with faces obscured in some way. Often with their backs facing the camera, they remind me of paintings by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, who often utilized Rückenfigur, or the Art historical technique of painting a figure with its back turned toward the viewer. Friedrich’s paintings were meant to encourage empathy in the viewer, as the figure in the painting surveyed sublime nature so the viewers felt themselves in the position of the depicted beholder. But I believe there is another possible reading of the Rückenfigur. Back turned, the figure does not offer communion, but rather upholds distance. In Friedrich’s image, we feel the distance between his 19th century Romantic European sensibility and our own way of seeing. In my photos of the Pentacostals , it is for me, something similar: a flow that I never allowed myself to be caught up in. My problem is one of proximity. I feel that we share something but I cannot breach the distance to access it. What is it for you who looks through me and sees a landscape of backs turned?
Joseph Moore 2011