I think the best analogy to convey what I experienced when listening to Camille Norment perform is when you are reading something but have too many other thoughts racing through your mind, so your eyes simply end up scanning words on a page without really processing them.
When viewing a work of art – especially as an art student – I feel as if there is always pressure to “understand” it or grasp some underlying meaning (which I believe usually exists, one just either requires more context or more knowledge to comprehend it), and more often than not, when engaging with visual works as I am used to, I find that I am more easily able to gain insight into what this meaning might be, at least to some degree. However, listening to Camille Norment’s performance at the Hamar Kulturhus quite literally stumped me, possibly because I do not have much experience engaging with performances that solely employ sound to generate meaning, hence I did not really have any frame of reference to compare this work to in order to gain better insight into Norment’s intentions. Nevertheless, if I had been asked right after finishing the video what I understood from it, I couldn’t have put into words an adequate answer. Therefore, a large part of my response to her work was highly intuitive and entered around what I “felt” rather than “understood” from it.
I think it would be appropriate to echo her statement in the OCAvideoarchive video wherein she notes that her use of the glass harmonica in her work “represents the sonic space of tension” and state that this is an accurate reflection of my feelings as she performed. There was definitely tension, not just in the sounds that she was creating – which at first sounded like auditory static or some kind of digitised ringing that kept changing in pitch, and then transitioned to sharper sounds once she began using her instruments (evidently I do not have the appropriate vocabulary to describe sound at all) – but also between my own desire to extract some deeper meaning from the performance and being unable to do so. I think this overlap really added to the creation of an atmosphere of uncertainty and anticipation in her performance. Moreover, in the video on “Rapture,” she notes that her use of elements such as social and sonic tension, and the space between poetry and catastrophe that accompany the sound of the glass harmonica, all “prevent the audience from settling into one set of conclusions,” which I feel very precisely capture the ambiguousness of her performance at the Hamar Kulturhus.
Overall, I think Norment’s work to me is reminiscent of a video we watched in my Integrative Seminar class a couple weeks ago, which was a performance of sound poetry by The Four Horsemen. While I definitely feel that Norment’s work is much more pleasant to encounter as compared to the Four Horsemen, and personally feel as if her work contains more symbolic meaning and significance (at least as she puts across in her explanation of her projects), the experience of listening to both videos was quite similar, as the strangeness of the sound and the inaccessibility of the meaning behind it are aspects that are common in both works.
Fig 1 – The Four Horsemen performing sound poetry
Provided References:
Camille Norment
Performance by Camille Norment
Work from:
5th Nov 2020 – Daily Vitamins Assignment
Time with Professor Mike Rader
