Article Janet Cardiff - Walking Tours
Type: Art that blurs fiction and reality.
Summary: Canadian installation artist Janet Cardiff has created a new art genre: alternative big city historical walking tours.
Posted by: Elliot Feldman
Janet Cardiff (born March 15, 1957) is a highly acclaimed Canadian multimedia artist. She is best known for creating a new genre of modern art: the alternative audio big city historical walking tour installation. (This is as best as I can describe what she does)
Audio Guided Walking Tours
If you’ve ever been to a major big city art museum in recent years, you have probably seen visitors walking about the galleries sporting headphones and listening to an audio walking tour of the museum. Many major museums offer these audio tours as a paid added service. This has spawned yet another trend: headphone walking tours through historical areas like the Washington Mall and Boston Common.
Janet Cardiff’s unique art genre offers big city historical walking tours that also serve as supremely poetic and totally disorienting audio hallucinations. The big cities where her audio walks have taken place include Florence, Italy; London’s historic East End; Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library; and New York’s Central Park.
How She Created Her Walks
When asked, Cardiff has claimed that she created the genre while walking in a city and “taping in the field.” During this walk, she rewound the audio that she’d taped and then replayed it in her headphones while continuing on her walk. She was taken aback by the physical sensation that she had experienced, trying to mentally correlate the earlier-taped soundtrack with the visual environment passing by in the real-time of her walk.
“I was fascinated by the layering of the past onto the present,” she said in an interview with Hirschhorn Museum curator Kelly Gordon. “It had the strange quality of creating a new world blending together the physical and the virtual.”
More About Cardiff’s Audio Walking Tours
Washington MallIn her Hirshhorn Museum-sponsored Washington Mall audio walking tour, Cardiff blended historical factoids with sound effects created to blur fiction and reality. These effects have included a helicopter hovering overhead, snatches of pre-recorded crowd conversation, and footsteps running behind you. Participants walked with portable CD players as they listened to Janet Cardiff’s virtual tour.
While it would be a strong temptation for some to turn an alternative audio tour through a highly charged political-historical area like the Washington Mall into pieces of Harvard Lampoon-style political satire, Cardiff’s walks have served as carefully-crafted audio soundscapes of art and poetry with serious themes of memories, displacement, and desire.
To give credit where credit is due, many of Janet Cardiff’s installations and walks have been collaborations with her husband, multimedia artist George Beres-Miller.
References
- Cardiff’s Hirshhorn Museum-sponsored Washington Mall Walking Tour
- “Janet Cardiff”, Canadian Encyclopedia
- Janet Cardiff and George Beres-Miller’s web site
