- Men at Work, WIRE Magazine, June 2015
Men at Work: a feature on Mikhail Karikis’s audiovisual installation The Endeavour in WIRE Magazine. By A. Hamilton, June 2015.
“Speaking is just a highly coded sound sculpture,” comments Mikhail Karikis, the London-based artist whose immersive audiovisual installations and performances explore the voice as sculptural material and sociopolitical agent. He has often collaborated with communities that offer alternative modes of human existence. But his latest project, The Endeavour, looks at a way of life that until quite recently formed an economic mainstream. The project is hosted by Tyneside Cinema’s Gallery venue, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where Karikis has been artist in residence for a month.
Karikis is articulate and eager to explain the work. Researching the history of the Tyneside Cinema, he discovered that founder Dixon Scott – great-uncle of directors Ridley and Tony Scott – set up the Jarrow Kino 100 years ago. The Kino’s main customers were shipyard workers, and Scott rewrote traditional folksongs, referring to the work of the shipyard. Reading about this history, Karikis was moved to investigate the Tyne soundscape at Jarrow.
There are no shipyards now. But Karikis’s reading led him to the last boatbuilder in the region – Fred Crowell, whose two-man operation makes and repairs wooden boats. Crowell’s boatyard is all that remains of an industrial powerhouse. The shipyards of the Tyne and Wear in North East England were once the biggest in the world; at their peak, Sunderland’s yards produced a quarter of the world’s ships. During the Depression of the 1930s, Jarrow was one of the worst hit communities, with unemployment reaching 74 per cent. The Second World War brought short-lived prosperity, and its end was tragic for the North East. Karikis recognises the poignancy in this, but adds, “I didn’t feel that sense of sadness in the work environment of Fred Crowell’s boatyard – I felt it more outside, in Jarrow, and South Shields.”
“I went and started hanging out in the boatyard, before I took my camera out – just to see what the space is like,” he explains. “Fred Crowell is very friendly and outgoing. That environment is unlike any other I’ve been in – it’s exclusively male.” Crowell has had his own boatyard since the 1970s. “I think Fred is very concerned about the fact that he’s the last one”, Karikis explains. “He was very keen on explaining what he does”. The film focuses on the work itself, the yard’s use of space – and the small community of retired boatbuilders and shipyard workers, who socialise at lunchtime, congregating round the stove. We hear the shipwrights hammering and whistling, and the lapping of the river water. The advance extracts reminded me in some ways of Phill Niblock’s video series, The Movement Of People Working, capturing the value of manual labour.
The Endeavour is a two-screen video installation, organised on vertical and horizontal axes, with a kind of haptic quality. Its three sections capture sounds of manual tools, the drone of a machine tool, and the Geordie vocal rhythms of the men socialising. Also featured are local experimental group Noise Choir, and harmonica player Tom Pattinson. Karikis explains that there was a harmonica band on the iconic Jarrow March of 1936, an early articulation of the right to work. The Noise Choir utter the names of defunct shipwrighting trades, and industrial actions during the 100 years of the Crowell boatyard, making a heterophony of nautical and industrial terms.
One of Karikis’s central concerns is how words that have lost their meaning become “music”. Over the past 15 years he’s been exploring the human voice as malleable sculptural substance – an audible chunk of stuff, textured, stretched and shaped through the body. Our voices produce a much wider variety of sounds than mere language, he writes: “Squeaks, shouts, whistles, sighs, rhymes, gibberish, jargon, acronyms, cries, yells…are heard in different work environments but make no sense to those outside the specific contexts where they occur…these sounds [are] somewhat anarchic”.
Karikis, born in Thessaloniki, moved to London to study with architectural group Archigram, art theorist Norman Bryson and artist Lis Rhodes. A concern with space, central to his architectural training, informs his work. He moved into sound with his PhD “The Acoustics Of The Self”. In 2007 he released an album, Orphica, on Sub Rosa, and has contributed to various compilations and remix albums. More recent projects have involved sound and image: in films such as Sounds From Beneath, in which a colliery choir sing the sounds of coalmining, these elements confront and disrupt each other.
One of Karikis’s most striking recent projects is SeaWomen, about a community of female workers on the volcanic island of Jeju, between South Korea, Japan and China. The haenyeo (literally “sea women”) are aged from 50 to 90 and dive to great depths without oxygen, to catch seafood and find pearls. 40 years ago there were 30,000, but they are now fast disappearing. Their eco-feminist practices reverse gender stereotypes and show a deep sense of community. Karikis’s installation portrays their aural subculture, including traditional breathing technique, work songs, and democratic decision-making. It comprises a multi-speaker sound installation, a 30-minute film, photographs and watercolour paintings. “Each dive lasts up to two minutes and is punctuated by a combination of sounds, including a high-pitched breathy shriek or whistle; an arguably spontaneous vocal firework”, Karikis writes.
He wants to reveal the body – what Barthes called the grain – of the voice as a form of non-linguistic communication. There’s a political subtext here, inspired by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth, their Marxist theory of globalisation. But Karikis isn’t aiming to make documentaries, or trying to “tell the truth”. Above all, he wants to make people look and listen – really look and listen – at the sounds and scenes in their environment.
The Endeavour screens at Newcastle’s Tyneside Cinema The Gallery until 12 July. www.tynesidecinema.co.uk
Andy Hamilton
