There’s No Such Thing as Silence: Recovering the Stakes of Minimalism’s Refusal in the Work of Nikita Gale

Installed in a gallery at the California African American Museum from March to May of 2021, Private Dancer was the multidisciplinary artist Nikita Gale's first solo museum exhibition. Installed in a dark, windowless gallery, the work consisted of five theatrical lighting trusses perched haphazardly atop each other, while a tangled array of electrical cables suspended from the ceiling ran across and around them. Although the stage appeared to have collapsed, the lighting system remained functional, its spotlights engaged in a continuous and absurd search for an absent performer.

It was not just the lights that searched for a performer, though: the audience did, too. This was a search informed both by the expectations that accompany the architecture of the stage as well as the work's title, a reference to the 1984 album of the same name by the legendary Tina Turner. Instead of the presence of the artist and the sounds of Turner's voice, however, Private Dancer's audience heard only the mechanical whirring and creaking of the lights as they rotated on their axis, lending the work a soundtrack of ambient electricity.

Private Dancer examines music and performance's sprawling and messy relations to race, culture, and technology. The combination of the signaling work performed by the installation's title and wall text, as well as the presence of the performance stage, suggest the audiovisual image of Turner without delivering it, ensuring her virtual presence and broader celebrity are palpable despite her absence.

Gale's spartan (audio)visual aesthetic disrupts the cultural expectations that accompany music, inviting her audience to attend to what they typically take for granted in the space of performance. Through a consideration of the correspondence Private Dancer evokes (and disrupts) between sound and vision, and the themes of labor it indexes in relation to race, gender, and celebrity's imperatives of visibility and performance, Private Dancer demonstrates how minimalism's economy of means, forged here through music, can be a counterhegemonic practice aimed at offering necessary ways of seeing and hearing on different registers.

Gale's work has been described, like the work of minimalist artists from Carl Andre to Michael Heizer, using the language of ruins.1 As a term that conveys destruction or decay, ruins also implies the presence of something that has survived — that history and memory persist in and through an absence. They are, as Susan Stewart has explored, a means of describing the distinction between "appearance and interiority" — we look at them but also beyond them.2

Although the defining qualities of minimalism as a historical movement and aesthetic strategy in the visual arts have been variously characterized as work with low "art-content;" an artistic tendency organized around "the right angle, the square, and the cube;" and a movement born out of the "discovery of theater" in the visual arts,3 minimalism is, at its most basic, a method of artistic production "distinguished by severity of means, clarity of form, and simplicity of structure and texture."4 Minimalism's stripped-down vocabulary was often articulated by early proponents as interested in redirecting audience attention away from content and towards the space of art's encounter. The artist Robert Morris, a central figure in defining the philosophy of minimalism as it was developing in the 1960s, claimed of his work that "once it is established all the information about it [ . . . ] is exhausted, allowing the spectator to focus on their physical relationship to the work, the particularity of its space of encounter in real time."5 Famously disparaged for being too "theatrical" by critic Michael Fried, minimalist art was interpreted to be primarily interested in presence and perception.6 To follow Morris's characterization, its attention to simple shapes and lines was understood to serve as a means of closing off the art object from culture and history in favor of a purified experience of the relationship between bodies and objects in space.

In 2013, the artist and scholar Seth Kim-Cohen diagnosed a mode of contemporary, sonically oriented art (what would come to be called sound art) that, like the minimalism of the 1960s, was interpreted by artists and critics as interested in eliminating the messiness of culture, representation, and allusion. Pointing to a number of events that occurred over the summer of 2013 in New York City — MoMA's first major exhibition dedicated to sound in the visual arts, as well as smaller gallery shows such as ambient at the Tonya Bonakdar Gallery — Kim-Cohen observed that sound seemed to have been adopted by the visual art world in an effort to privilege an object's "material and perceptual properties" and an audience's ambient experience of the space in which it was installed.7 This occurred at the expense of criticality and conceptual art's tendencies toward institutional critique, post-colonialism, and feminism, just to name a few.

It is not surprising that sound would be adopted as a medium of art in the 21st century towards the end of staging an ahistorical, un-critical experience of pure perception. Ephemerality, immersion, resonance, and vibrations were all prominent ways in which sound's medium specificity had begun to be theorized in the plastic arts and humanities after what has been labeled the sonic turn.8 These vague descriptive words shirk the messiness of articulating sound's entanglement with the specificity of culture and society.9

Sound art has often been described as work that provides an opportunity or invitation to focus on the sounds themselves. In the words of the philosopher and sound art theorist Salome Voegelin, "The task," in an encounter with sound art, is to "suspend, as much as possible, ideas of genre, category, purpose [ . . . ] to achieve a hearing that is the material heard, now, contingently, and individually."10 Like Morris' delineation of the experience of minimalist sculpture, sound art has been theorized as interested in a rejection of the discursive in favor of the supposed purity of embodied perception.

Although not often described as sound art,11 Gale's work is all about sound and in particular its hybridity, showing how its relationship with the other senses of perception, as well as history and culture, makes it impossible to isolate. Where minimalism and sound art are both typically described as shirking the level of the symbolic or specific, Gale describes her own stripped-down visual work and its relationship to sound as political. She uses both sound and its suggestion to structure an absence that prompts specific attention to how an absent sound or image might persist in what is present.

The choice to ground a work that plays upon the inextricability of sight, sound, and culture in the figure of Tina Turner has much to do with Turner's complex star text and seemingly conflicted experience of celebrity.  Private Dancer, released in 1984, was Turner's fifth solo album. This album, dramatically announcing her "comeback" in the 1980s, powerfully punctuated her life story up to that point: her "discovery" by Ike Turner, a central figure in the early history of rock 'n' roll; her early career as the titular performer in the Ike & Tina Turner Revue; and the revelation of her abuse at the hands of Ike and their divorce in the late 1970s; and finally, after a five year album hiatus, the release of Private Dancer. Announcing that she would no longer perform live nearly twenty years ago, Turner has also become known for what seems to be a rare, "real" celebrity retirement. Listening to Turner now is to grapple with the awareness of her ambivalent experience of the visuality with which she was so strongly associated during her recording and touring career, even while her visual presence persists in an encounter with her sound.

Private Dancer was not the first time Gale engaged with Turner and her music. In an essay Gale wrote for a 2018 residency she held with Triple Canopy, a publisher and nonprofit arts organization, Gale describes the recording session for Turner's early hit "River Deep - Mountain High." She begins the essay with a lengthy account of how she imagines the recording studio, describing the occupants, their position, the activity, and the mood of the space. Her words convey the overwhelming presence of mega producer Phil Spector, the construction of the song's aural space, and the way in which Turner's voice sounds as though it is fighting to be heard above the record's layering of strings and melodies — Spector's famous "wall of sound."

Although Turner was rarely unseen and unheard in the first phase of her career, she was seen and heard only in certain ways. In Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, the philosopher Theodore Gracyk defines what he refers to as the "recording consciousness," how music's promotional imagery extends its myth and conceals its reality: where are all the images of musicians in studios, he asks?12 The obvious answer is that the studio image is boring — all the machinery, the endless takes, the exhausted performers. Pop music's promotional complex is far more invested in disseminating images of glamor, of pleasure and performance, eliding both the effects of studio manipulations on music's sound as well as the everyday realities of often grueling, demanding studio labor.

More than most, Turner suffered from the omissions and erasures that went into constructing both her performances and her recordings. When she announced in an interview with Carl Arrington in People magazine in 1981 that her relationship with Ike had been abusive, her disappearance from public life in the late 1970s, as well as her early career on stage had to be re-seen and re-heard.13 Just as Gale suggests with her attentive reconstruction of the details of the "River Deep - Mountain High" recording session, the presence of one image and one sound had not eliminated others; it had merely drowned them out. 

Originally trained as an archaeologist, Gale is all too aware of how the unseen is never fully invisible, as traces of the past are always re-surfacing and history is always being re-written. Her artwork is often aimed at bringing to the surface the physical as well as psychological traces of what initially appears to be absent. Through a process of subtraction, her artwork paradoxically multiplies the resonances of her materials, revealing how the background or ambient objects and structures that occupy space, in this case of performance, affect its encounter and convey more than their simple forms initially suggest. She aims to draw attention to something as seemingly insignificant as silent audio cables, for example, and how this attention can communicate the idea that "sound is being transmitted," even if it is in an aural register to which we don't have access.14

Gale's minimalist deconstruction of performance space turns attention to the existence of those other registers. In Private Dancer, the sound of electricity is audible in a way it hardly ever is in an encounter with musical performance or sound art — like Turner's voice in "River Deep," typically the sound of electricity can't quite break past the barrier of constructed sound. Gale also programs Turner's sound into the work in an even less apparent way. The work's stage lights are programmed to respond to the silent soundtrack of Private Dancer (1984) thanks to a system Gale designed in collaboration with lighting designer Josephine Wang. The lights' movement responds to musical elements such as a song's BPM (beats per minute) and volume, their rotations slowing down and speeding up in response to the various registers and qualities of the sonic. Just because we don't hear it doesn't mean it isn't there.

In her writing on art and Black visuality, the critic and scholar Tina Campt has articulated an aesthetics of refusal that, rather than eliminate an artwork's broader resonances, expands them. She defines aesthetic refusal, in part, as "the creation of possibility in the face of negation ie. a refusal to recognize a system that renders you fundamentally illegible and unintelligible."15 Writing on the films of the artist Arthur Jafa, Campt locates a distinctly sonic logic in Jafa's blurring of genre boundaries between still and moving images (what she calls "still-moving images"). Jafa's art, in refusing to comply with genre expectations, engages audiences in both "critical and affective labor." Importantly for Campt, that refusal opens a space for the recognition of the interpenetration of the senses — for the possibility of (hearing) images and of (seeing) sound. In much the same way, Private Dancer's own refusal engages its audience in an act of conceptual labor that opens space not just to see (and hear) in new ways, but to see (and hear) what was always already there.

Gale's work, like Jafa's, exists between media, acknowledging while working against the stranglehold cultural and generic expectations have on how we engage with art. Private Dancer's absences don't equate to invisibility or silence — the lack of Turner's body or voice does not transform the work into a non-specific contemporary performance space. In their absence the audience imagines or, to a certain degree, becomes the performer, laboring to find alternative ways to engage the work. The stage, for example, an object which typically fades into the background, emerges instead as a structuring presence. We start to pay attention to it, its evocation of resignedness — perhaps seeing in its collapse Turner's own refusal to continue performing, an act easily interpreted through a heuristic like Campt's as an act of self-preservation.

The ruins of performance also strike a jarring contrast to the persistence and repetition of the overactive lights in their choreographed dance. In the absence of a performer the performance (labor) of the stage apparatus becomes very apparent — the lights creak and buzz as the fans propelling their motion whir animatedly, working overtime to compensate for the lack of anything else. Turner's presence in Private Dancer, and in culture more broadly, is unavoidable, both psychologically and sonically. This time, however, instead of hearing Turner fighting to be heard above the noise, or failing to see the lived realities undergirding her performance career, the work's absences allow us to see (and hear) her in different ways.

Like John Cage, an artist whose influence on the development of minimalist strategies of all kinds cannot be overstated, Gale's work engages strategies of reduction not to silence but instead to create space for the sounds we don't usually hear — or know how to listen to — to emerge. Far from gestalt, her work opens onto a complex cultural story, one which engages both broader histories of reception as well as the specific histories of Black musicians and popular music in twentieth century America. Across her body of work Gale has developed an aesthetic language that answers Kim-Cohen's call for an art of sound that would be mired in the discursive — an art of sound that explicitly engages the concerns of the present.16

Although the early minimalists refrained from a direct engagement with the specificity of their moment, Gale's minimalist practice recovers the inextricable connections between the senses and their shaping by culture, and between art worlds and the everyday. Her work transforms audience attention into the object of art but rather than evacuating or evading cultural context, hers maintains that less really can be more — a complex, messy more. Private Dancer's refusal reveals the stranglehold of cultural expectations and what their overdetermination obfuscates, such as the power of audiovisual unity, the structuring role of technological mediation, and the invisible labor upon which culture industries rely. It is work that recognizes the pitfalls of over-valuing an objective, universal experience, especially in terms of the people who get left out or left behind. Gale's intentional blurring of the line between abstraction and specificity allows art an opportunity to resonate across broader cultural spheres, and acknowledges the stakes that are at play in visibility (or sonority) and its refusal. 

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Jennifer Smart is a writer and advanced doctoral candidate at Northwestern University. Her interdisciplinary research sits at the intersection between visual art, media studies, and experimental music, and her dissertation project examines the variety of ways in which sound and music have been exhibited in the visual art museum.       

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