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Marisa Espe
Oct 13, 2020
In 2017, I worked on a team of audio producers for a new work by Taryn Simon, for what would become the installation Assembled Audience (2018). For several months, I frequented the three largest event spaces in Columbus, Ohio: the Greater Columbus Convention Center, Nationwide Arena, and Ohio State’s Schottenstein Center. Outside of each venue, I drifted throughout the hordes of attendees on their way to concerts, conferences, basketball and hockey games, trade shows, cheerleading competitions, and more. Approaching, or sometimes sidling up to, individuals whom I randomly selected from the crowd, I ultimately asked hundreds of strangers if they would let me record them clapping their hands for one minute. The listings above, seen as one walks inside the installation at the Wex, share details about the date and place of each recording and the subjects who participated.
The ask itself was deceptively simple, as it was always countered with questions: Clapping? One minute? What is this for? Why? Are you serious? For every willing participant, there were typically a dozen rejections. Understandably so, as I was another obstacle like the salespeople pushing new credit card sign-ups and other indiscernible marketing reps who preyed on these large events, vying for “just a minute of your time.” And truth be told, I never quite perfected my pitch. Sometimes I told people that it was for an art piece, but I learned that was not as persuasive as telling them I was a student working on a project. Whether they were moved to say yes by curiosity, indifference, pity, or perhaps genuine support, I did not leave the venue until I recorded at least three consenting participants.
Upon agreement, I raised the recorder in my outstretched hand and signaled to the participant to begin clapping. The seconds would slowly pass: five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen, twenty. It was usually around the thirty-second mark when participants shot impatient glances at me or at the recorder. For some it was sooner, and I palpably felt their regret for agreeing. A few people even stopped and walked away before the minute elapsed. In the late fall and winter when temperatures dropped, reluctant consenters apprehensively pulled off their gloves to clap for what felt like forever as we huddled close around the recorder.
As I recollect my experiences in the making of this project, now three years later, I cannot help but refract these memories through the lens of current events, especially the social reconfigurations as a consequence of COVID-19. Convention centers and stadium-sized venues have been shuttered for over half a year. Conferences and expos have either postponed or moved exclusively online. The prospect of live, in-person performing arts events becomes increasingly inconceivable. Following a tour to see one’s favorite band perform once signaled commitment as a fan, but now any non-essential travel is considered foolish and irresponsible. Sporting events precariously carry on—notably, the Big Ten Conference plans to recommence later this month—but in bubbles and empty arenas and with increasingly sophisticated audio tracks piped in to reproduce the sounds of crowds, not unlike Simon’s eerily prescient work.
Producing Assembled Audience would be impossible today, but not just because of cancelled events and closed venues. It would be impossible because the piece depended on the proximity between the person clapping and the person recording—between two strangers agreeing to stand mere inches apart from each other for over a minute. This goes against social distancing measures, against the new ways of moving and behaving in public that we’ve rehearsed over eight months. Reflecting on the necessary conditions that made this project possible, I have to pause and ask myself: When was the last time I was in a crowd? The last time I welcomed the approach of a stranger? The last time I stood close to others without any apprehension?
At some point while quarantining and curious, I looked into this now ubiquitous phrase social distance. While its recent application concerns disease transmission, in 1963 cultural anthropologist Edward T. Hall developed a theory of proxemics, studying the extent to which human social relations are spatialized. Hall described four zones, which he categorized by their distances away from an individual: intimate distance, personal distance, social distance, and public distance. To illustrate his ideas, Hall produced diagrams of concentric circles radiating from an individual, each zone a bigger bubble of personal space. Intimate and personal distances, ranging from less than one inch to four feet, is typically reserved for friends and family, whereas social distance is between four to seven feet apart and generally the zone of acquaintances. Beyond approximately seven feet is the zone of strangers, the distance we must now maintain from everyone, including those closest to us.
Throughout the ongoing pandemic we’ve witnessed many different attempts to bridge distances, one being the routine clapping for essential workers organized worldwide. As seen in the viral videos, participants came out and clapped from balconies and open windows and on the street. The ritual has received criticism, namely that this kind of recognition is an inappropriate response when considering essential workers’ pleas for safe working environments and adequate compensation. Still, some have described how joining in on the clapping helps to pacify loneliness and fill a lack of physical, in-person connection.
Being alone within the darkened enclosure that is Assembled Audience, as I did back in 2018 at MASS MoCA, one becomes totally immersed in the rolling waves of applause. For me, the installation incited this strange and unexpected feeling of being put on the spot, singled out, and surrounded by a wall of sound. I can only imagine how differently the work might be experienced today. It could conjure a sense of nostalgia for the so-called before-times. It could act as a melancholic reminder of the extent to which various strategies we’ve tested over the past months are merely simulations of togetherness, not substitutions. Nevertheless, I’d urge visitors to spend real time with the work, especially the list of names. It shows the hundreds of people who said yes to a random ask from a stranger. Though it’s impossible to aurally isolate an individual clap track within the installation, the list makes explicit that every single sound was collected from an actual person. And while I know that fact intimately and it was critical to Simon’s process, Assembled Audience performs this remarkable transformation where every single individual clapping coalesces into a crowd, more than the sum of its audible parts.
Marisa Espe is an art worker currently located in upstate New York. She earned her MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and her BA from The Ohio State University. She has contributed to several exhibition catalogues, including Marieluise Hessel Collection: Catalogue Raisonné, published on the occasion of the Center for Curatorial Studies’ thirtieth anniversary; and FRONT International: An American City, accompanying the inaugural FRONT triennial in Cleveland, OH. In 2019, she edited Say Ever Moves, featuring contributions from the Bard MFA Class of 2020, published on the occasion of the master’s thesis presentation. From 2015-2018, she was an arts contributor for Refigural, a quarterly fashion publication. She has organized independent curatorial projects at Spring Break Art Fair (Brooklyn, NY), Skylab Gallery (Columbus, OH), and Satellite Contemporary (Las Vegas, NV), among others. In 2016, she co-founded MINT Collective (Columbus, OH), an artist-run space dedicated to the practices of emerging artists.
