Email
Print
FeedA chorus of complaints
"We wanted to tap into this unending source of energy."
The weatherman interrupted my favorite show. The commercials are louder than the programs. The government doesn’t get anything accomplished. I can’t find the peanut butter.
There’s nothing particularly musical or rhythmic about whining. But, hey, that’s what art is supposed to do, right? Alter how we think about the world. In Finland, there’s a word, “valituskuoro,” which, translated to English, means “complaints choir,” and it refers to a whole bunch of people complaining at once. Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, who are married, took the phrase literally, compiling the complaints of real people and organizing choirs to sing them.
“We just realized that people complain a lot, no matter what their life circumstances are,” Kochta-Kalleinen writes in an e-mail. “We wanted to tap into this unending source of energy . . . to transform this complaints energy into something else, something surprising.”
The results can be seen on YouTube (as well as complaintschoir.org), where thousands of people have viewed various complaints choirs performing across the globe. Lisa Dent, associate curator of contemporary art at the Columbus Museum of Art, was one of those viewers and thought Columbus—specifically the Columbus Arts Festival in June—would be the perfect place to try out the idea.
“Many contemporary artists are interested in artwork that engages the community in a way that is participatory, that allows people to contribute to the artwork in a socially engaging way,” she says.
Musician David Holm, who works as an art handler for CMA, was asked to develop and perform the music, which also involved sifting through the several hundred complaints submitted to the museum via e-mail (Holm estimates about 95 percent came from Columbus residents). Lyrics in the CMA complaints choir included: “You got too many items in the Express Lane,” “There’s never enough time in the day,” and, of course, “Come on, LeBron, thought you were large and in charge.”
“It was a really interesting process and quite a challenge from a songwriter’s standpoint,” Holm says.
The finished chorus (as well as the rehearsals), filmed by CMA multimedia producer Jeff Sims, is on exhibit at CMA through Jan. 16, 2011. And an audio version of the roughly 10-minute track, recorded at Central City Recording in Clintonville, is available for download at columbusmuseum.org.
