Now it can be seen in “Anri Sala: Answer Me,” the artist’s austere yet impassioned survey at the New Museum. The video is an apt introduction to his roiling explorations, mostly in video, of sound, time, color, architecture and the politics of modern life.
This exhibition is brilliantly installed and is as much for music as for art folk. Organized by Massimilano Gioni, the New Museum’s artistic director; Margot Norton, its associate curator; and Natalie Bell, an assistant curator, it spreads a dozen videos and video installations through three floors, encompasses some 16 years of artistic growth and includes a smattering of fairly inconsequential sculpture and drawings. (Example: a snare drum stacked with four real human skulls and dedicated to Cézanne.)
Black-box viewing rooms have all but been eliminated, and the sound quality is extraordinary. The music flows through the museum’s spaces, defining them floor by floor. In a work collectively titled “The Present Moment” on the second floor, Arnold Schoenberg’s tumultuous late Romantic “Verklärte Nacht,” a string sextet from 1899, starts out whole and its notes are fragmented across the entire space and 20 separate ceiling speakers. It re-emerges, performed by musicians on two video screens, having been subjected to the modernist 12-tone technique that Schoenberg developed in the 1920s. It sounds a lot like the Minimalist Philip Glass.
Several videos play in wide open spaces, especially on the third floor, where a large screen hangs from the ceiling to accommodate projections on both sides, their sounds mixing and conversing. And the fourth floor presents Mr. Sala’s masterpiece, “Ravel Ravel,” a dual-screen, 16-speaker symphonic installation, accompanied by its aural doppelgänger, “Unravel.” Both works were seen at the 2013 Venice Biennale and did not stick in my brain. They will now.
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But for a minute, back to “Dammi i Colori,” whose title — “Give Me the Colors” in Italian — is from “Tosca.” It was made in Tirana, Albania’s capital, where Mr. Sala was born in 1974 and lived until 1996, when he left for Paris, studied film and video for four years and subsequently settled in Berlin. At the time of the filming, 2002, Tirana resembled a war zone in recovery, rising precariously from decades of Communist neglect and corruption; basic services were intermittent, the roads were barely paved.
With his camera giving us a passenger-seat view, Mr. Sala drives along these byways, past scaffoldings and piles of dirt. Shooting mostly at night with a spotlight, he focuses on rows of modest Eastern-bloc concrete buildings, which Tirana’s mayor is having painted an array of bright, booming colors.
In newer works, Mr. Sala has done with music what he does with color, which is to convey its nurturing power in the face of disruption, a theme undoubtedly influenced by growing up in Albania during its rough transition from communism to democracy.
He usually achieves this with disorienting combinations of spatial, visual and aural elements that are rarely devoid of politics. On screen, modern architecture figures prominently, as a symbol of government incompetence and control and as a measure of change, but also as a container that modulates sound. Other political points about history, progress, age, language and displacement are frequently woven into the fabric of his pieces, to be extrapolated by the viewer.
In “Tlatelolco Clash,” shot in Mexico City, several elderly street musicians take turns playing different fragments of “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” — a hit by the Clash — on a mechanical barrel organ while a beautiful young woman hovers about. Around them rise Mayan ruins and, just beyond, a modern skyscraper. At one point a worker starts cleaning the ancient stones.
In “Long Sorrow,” the free-jazz musician Jemeel Moondoc improvises on the saxophone, from what seems to be the balcony of a stark apartment in an unloved mile-long Berlin building known as the Long Complaint, or Sorrow. Only gradually do we realize that there’s no balcony: He’s hanging in midair. As he floats away, and other massive buildings come into view, the piece conjures both Magic Realism and an artistic refusal of architecture’s numbing anonymity. At approximately the top of every hour throughout the show, the saxophonist André Vida improvises alongside Mr. Moondoc’s video performance (13 minutes), their sounds blending and separating as Mr. Vida moves around the space, an option for the viewer as well.
Mr. Sala has arranged the show as something of a sound installation in itself. Sounds from different pieces bleed together. The light rhythmic voices of the video “Lak-kat,” in which two young Senegalese boys practice Wolof — one of their country’s indigenous languages — impinge on the pounding noise and abrupt silences in the video “Answer Me.”
Here a slightly crazed-looking young man drums wildly, the sound reverberating inside an abandoned geodesic dome built by Americans to eavesdrop on East Germany. He sometimes pauses but always ignores the woman anxiously lurking behind him, who is occasionally heard to say “Answer me.” The children of “Lak-kat” seem to respond, although it turns out that they are actually learning the many words that distinguish skin tones.
Throughout this show music is taken apart and reassembled, but is never the same. This is most apparent and complex in “Ravel, Ravel” on the fourth floor. In a darkened space, everything is magnified: the sounds of orchestra and piano buffet you, while the two videos — one above the other — each presents a close-up of a giant left hand playing the piano. Even the walls and ceiling seem exaggerated: They’re covered with two-foot high wedges of foam that mute echoes.
The music is Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D (1929-30), which was commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist (and the philosopher’s brother) who lost his right hand in World War I. The hands on the screens belong to the pianists Louis Lortie and Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, who each performed the concerto with an orchestra, using scores with tempos altered by Mr. Sala slowing or accelerating different parts. Their hands play tag up and down the keys, moving in and out of sync, finishing each other’s passages. The music is at once luxuriant and turbulent; if you know the back story, it can be traumatic. It swirls around, filling and then abandoning the crenelated space, whose protrusions add their own suggestion of violence.
The video “Unravel” is an attempt to straighten out the ravel, or tangle, created by “Ravel Ravel.” Installed in a smaller, lighter room next door, “Unravel” shows the disc jockey Chloé Thévenin with a record of each performance on her turntables, trying to sync them up. In contrast to the pianists’ sparring hands she gently taps or pushes the discs, stops them completely or sets them spinning, sometimes with slurring sounds that can evoke sappy movie music.
Synchronization is fleeting and impossible to sustain, but it is invigorating to follow her fierce concentration. The two versions of Ravel’s music cannot be reunited, but as with this singular show, we experience Mr. Sala building art upon art, as well as life, in inspiring ways.
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