Sonia Leber and David Chesworth
The Gordon Assumption, 2004

Installation in Subterranean Toilets, Gordon Reserve
Melbourne International Arts Festival - Visual Arts Program
Randomised sound files, scanning light, steel doors

listen to excerpt (6')


About the work
Sonia Leber and David Chesworth's installation 'The Gordon Assumption', was installed in the subterranean toilets at Gordon Reserve in Melbourne for the Visual Arts Program of the 2004 Melbourne International Arts Festival.

An incessant outpouring of female voices lured passersby down the stairwells to the cave-like subterranean toilets. The voices gathered and thickened without respite, in upwards glissandi: an asynchronous chorus of female voices in infinitely rising pitch.

Behind the locked lower gates, the luminous green chamber beckoned as a vertical slit of white light slowly scanned the surfaces of the empty cubicles. The installation recalled the mythologies and mysteries of voices heard in caves, where the voices of spirits, sibyls and oracles are believed to announce predictions and warnings from the mouth of a cave.

Responses
‘Altogether striking and astounding...anything but quiet and understated...
Deftly woven into the fabric of everyday Melbourne, disrupting the easy flow of city routine...startling and fascinating commuters and passersby...’
Jeff Kahn, RealTime No.64, Sydney, December 2004


'A chorus...streams up out of the ground like a legion of mad souls fleeing their opened graves. Is the city disgorging its dead from the sewers? Chesworth and Leber, like necromancers, wind up supernatural effects from the mundane fabric of the city.'
Edward Colless, The Australian, 25 October 2004


'There is no 'music', per se, and no 'text'. There is just the ascending, random glissandi of the soprano voices. But the jouissance of experiencing the high voices is offset by the discomfort in the projected interpretation of the women's predicament and in the spectators' own unsureness of what to do about these screams. This is arguably counter-balanced by the conflicting, seductive, mythologized lure of sirens to depths unknown and potentially dangerous..'
Linda Kouvaras, ‘Toilets, Tears and Transcendence: The Postmodern Place of, and in, two examples of Australian Sound Art’, in Transforming Cultures eJournal Vol 4, No 1, 2009

Acknowledgements
Voices: Women from the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Choir
Michael Hewes, sound system
Bill Buckley, fabrication assistant
Ben Cobham, scanning light fabrication
The artists gratefully acknowledge the support of Arts Victoria and the Melbourne International Arts Festival