BY THOMAS MISSON
Ellen Fullman and Theresa Wong
Mona Foma
Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, 20 January
For the past 30 years, Ellen Fullman has worked on the Long String Instrument project, culminating in a series of fascinating and imaginative installations around the world and this month visiting the Museum of Old and New Art.
Three feet from the ground, around a dozen parallel metallic strings were suspended for almost the entire length of the Nolan Gallery with hanging capo-like points, which re-tensioned and re-tuned the strings. With rosin-coated fingertips on the strings, Fullman walked slowly and patiently, brushing the strings in a smooth moonwalk-like movement to keep footsteps unnoticed, the resultant amplified sound varying mixtures of sitar and the humming of electrical wires. Around five minutes in, cellist Theresa Wong – also amplified – joined in with improvised responses to the slowly shifting sonic backdrop.
Inside MONA’s gallery, noise pollution had been an issue for events in The Void or the Nolan Gallery excluding the earliest morning events of this year’s Mofo. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to see this performance twice and I was more conscious of how detrimental the background noise was. Were it not for this second occasion, this event could have been lost on me. Fullman moved backwards and forwards along the instrument, the aural journey from a one minute harmony change to the next a byproduct of her extremely slow physical journey across the gallery. This was an intimate connection with small and simple changes of musical and physical movement including no bow and little-to-no vibrato.
The effect was comparable to mindfulness meditation, in which your priorities of focus are limited to finite areas, tasks and stimuli in the effort to clear the mind. For much of the performance I had only two priorities: watching the string oscillate as I sat from up to 20 meters away and absorbing the musical changes. Knowing the points at which the pitches would change ahead added to the state of comfort and meditation, the actual pitch being the only surprise and not its dynamic or its length. This set up an interesting liaison between Fullman and Wong of the meditatively predictable and spontaneous.
Wong’s improvised contributions of overtones sometimes felt a little inconsistent with the overall character. Though the combined intensity did climb in the middle of the performance, at times some of the gestures felt a little overzealous. Overall this was a pleasurable experience that proved both a strong proponent for modernist musical experimentation and its extreme breadth as well as a pragmatic and considered inclusion to the overall effect of this year’s Mofo. The urges and desires for the complex, bizarre and sometimes esoteric sounds were well-catered for in other events and Fullman and Wong provided a therapeutic counterbalance.
Image credit: Mona/Rémi Chauvin, courtesy Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
