From New York: A Bell For Every Minute

A Bell For Every Minute is contemporary sound art as accessible, site-specific, and multicultural public art. Stephen Vitiello’s multi-channel installation reflects New York’s self-image as a vibrant metropolis of immigrants, and a center of spiritual, civic, economic, and cultural life.

A partnership between the High Line Art program, Creative Time, and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, the piece is installed in the 14th Street Passage on the High Line—a disused elevated train platform converted into a tastefully landscaped park in New York’s Meatpacking District. The multi-channel installation features recordings of fifty-nine bells found in and around the city. Each minute features the sounding, chiming, clapping, or clanging of a different bell. The recordings—which are played at an attention-grabbing volume—are beautifully clear. In the intervals between soundings, bells quietly reverberate in a tone that seems variously acoustic and synthesized. A chorus of the bells announces the top of each hour; it is more like a composed rustle than the cacophony one might expect.

Of the recordings, religious and cultural sites are well represented—synagogues, churches, yoga centers, Shaolin temples. Quotidian sources, like diners, the Transit Museum, and preexisting kinetic sculptures are included as well. The map suggests a possible scavenger hunt—less psychogeography than sonic geocaching, perhaps. However, the plaque could have used some information design finesse; viewers must identify

A Bell for Every Minute, 2010; site-specific multi-channel audio installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Creative Time, New York. Photo by Jason Mandella.

the time on an embedded clock, scan the list of bells and navigate a muddle of crisscrossed lines to map locations.

Formally, I found the aural textures engaging. The bells were allusive; I preferred imagining their locations to the labor of identifying the actual source. The resonance between soundings seemed less necessary the longer I listened. Pragmatically, it indicated the presence of an audio project for New Yorkers bolting through the passageway. Effectively, the arrangement was meditative but cloying when it came into sharp focus, like a score for an outer space film sequence. It seems ironic that an audio composition that draws attention to the bells of the city opted to compete, between intervals, with the sounds of 14th Street below.

A Bell For Every Minute is on view at the High Line in New York City through June 2011.