“Let’s start with the drum, but gradually move away from it until all that’s left is the feeling of its presence in the room.” This wall text, written by Anthony Huberman, former director and chief curator of the CCA Wattis Institute, opened “Drum Listens to Heart”, an ambitious presentation that spanned six months and three chapters in the space. Featuring the work of twenty-five artists, a pop-up record store, and a series of talks and performances curated by assistant curator Diego Villalobos, the exhibit was the institution’s first major group show since before the pandemic. Three years ago, people around the world came together to blast pots and pans out of their windows in a show of solidarity with healthcare workers. Their improvised drums announced: “We are still alive”. Accompanying healing rituals and battle cries, drumbeats mark major events in the life of cultures around the world. In Huberman’s hands, the percussion instrument also serves to detach visual art from restrictive dichotomies.
Huberman borrowed the exhibit’s title from the late free-jazz drummer, artist, and versatile polymath Milford Graves (1941-2021), who designed a homemade EKG machine with which to compose scores inspired by the irregularity of the human heartbeat. . (“Throw away your metronome and listen to your heart,” he implored fellow musicians.) In his mixed-media sculpture Paths of Infinite Possibilities: Skeleton, 2017, located in the first gallery, a human skeleton shouldered a drum inscribed with the titular phrase. Above his chest, a monitor played video of a beating heart.
Leaving the room bathed in light, one entered an installation resembling a womb, batu knŋ XII-rh/ babhi-brat XII-r [babhi-manyp/ babhi-bawt, (mbaŋ)], 2022, by Cameroonian-born Em’kal Eyongakpa. Walking on wood chips on the floor, bands of mycelium were noticed crawling over several wall panels – the fungus produced a pungent, earthy odor. A speaker amplified the live drip drip of water channeled through the space in transparent tubes, contributing to the damp and cavernous atmosphere of the work. Eyongakpa’s polyrhythmic environment was inspired by the caves where displaced Cameroonian villagers sought refuge during times of political unrest. Visitors were encouraged to sit on one of eight vibrating ammunition boxes, their rhythms both bodily and disturbing.
In the third gallery, seven bronze bell sculptures by Davina Semo hung from the ceiling with long black chains. When activated, one of the bells produced a bellowing gong, a sound that seemed at odds with the shimmering pink surface of the artwork. Its aerodynamic shape evokes a missile or a bullet: one of the many symbols of militaristic violence that permeated the show.
To fully experience “Drum Listens to Heart”, one had to return to it again and again. When I returned to Wattis, the installation had changed, yet the aforementioned works left a ghostly presence. Take the 2014 video from Theaster Gates Gone are the days of refuge and martyrdom, which was presented in the same dark space that Eyongakpa’s soundscape once inhabited. Gates’ video focused on four men in the ruins of a church on Chicago’s South Side. Their elegiac voices and a cello accompanied the thunderous sound of a wooden door that the men repeatedly propped up and which inevitably swung open. Like reverberating ammunition boxes that threatened the sanctity of Eyongakpa’s dark refuge, the world encroached on the once-sacrosanct chapel in Gates’ video.
“Freedom, for anyone,” Huberman writes in the show’s accompanying catalog, invoking poet and theorist Fred Moten, “necessarily occurs in cutting, in breaking, in a state of flight” . In “Drum Listens to Heart”, this rupture takes place both between the different sections of the show and within the gaps in meaning produced by the assembled works. Leaving the exhibition, one becomes more aware of the percussive signals that punctuate the daily rhythms of life: email alerts, text messages, telephone alarms. When I returned to see the latest iteration of the show, one of Rie Nakajima’s motorized objects – a chain hitting a tin can – made me think of a bell and its relationship to Semo’s work. Bells represent freedom, herald death, and once warned of potential attacks in times of war. In Huberman’s swan song at Wattis – he is now executive director of the John Giorno Foundation in New York – all of those meanings rang true.
