Making the best of a babble: James Webb's 'Prayer'

NVA Editor Andrew Cooper celebrates 'Prayer' at the Lakeside Gallery

The concept

I was first drawn to this project by an email from Neil Walker of Lakeside Gallery asking if I would like to contribute a prayer to represent the small Unitarian congregation in Nottingham.  Neil described the concept in the following terms:

“The idea of making a work incorporating prayers came to Webb in 1999 on hearing a story of a group of scientists who were to include information about human culture in their satellite in the event of an encounter by a higher intelligence. Webb wondered what this material might be and further speculated on what it would be like to listen to all the prayers that were being recited at any given moment, and what impression that would give of our world. This idea took on a political dimension as random domestic terrorist attacks in Cape Town resulted in heightened media speculation fuelling public anxiety concerning the role of religion and religious difference in post-apartheid South Africa.

The first public presentation of 'PRAYER' was in 2002, in which the artist recorded 36 prayers representing a broad cross-section of Cape Town's faiths. The resulting audio-installation presented audiences with an uncharacteristic experience of the city as a culturally rich interdependent landscape.

James Webb considers his works to be open-ended explorations.  In Nottingham, his latest version of the piece comprising a range of prayers recorded from a diverse spectrum of the city's religious faiths is presented as a multi-channel sound installation. The visitor to the gallery sees a large carpet on the gallery floor with a number of speakers resting on top. There is a general ambient sound of people praying but at various points some prayers (selected randomly) rise in volume above the others. To hear the individual prayers more clearly the visitor needs to kneel or lower their head to the speakers and thus assume a position of prayer themselves.

'Prayer' fuses voice, melody and language to envelop the gallery visitor with the resonant texture of each religion's hopes, desires and entreaties.”

I was intrigued and agreed readily.  I met James Webb in the spring and found him a delightful and exceptionally open person, keen to absorb as much of others’ cultures and ideas as possible.  After an interesting conversation I recorded a couple of prayers which I hoped reflected the liberality and diversity of the Unitarian take on life.

The show

I approached the show with two different sets of feelings: first as a participant, slightly nervous about hearing just how uninspiring my own contribution might have been! And second as a member of the audience, ready to wrap myself in the aural blanket that Webb’s installation creates.

The first impression from outside the curtain and on entering the gallery is of a cacophony of sounds.  This is more discordant than the “general ambient sound” prefigured in Neil Walker’s text.  Whilst in one sense the aural elements merge to create an overall layer, nevertheless the essential differences hang in the air and the combined effect is at once both pleasing and grating.

As you approach more closely, the differences become more obvious, as single voices assert themselves against the background.  You may linger by one speaker for as long as you like, focussing the ear on a single voice and absorbing its language and meaning, largely but not entirely to the exclusion of the others.  Or you can flit from one to another, picking up a Jewish lilt here, a Muslim chant there, an earnest Christian monotone in one ear, an elaborate Buddhist meditation in the other. The process becomes almost hypnotic (to pick up an idea from Webb’s accompanying installation, Autohagiography); after a while individual voices lose their individuality and seem to be subsumed within an all-consuming babel of religious devotion.

The show throws up a number of ideas about religion in the modern world.  I found it difficult to remove the notion of the Tower of Babel from my mind.  If you remember, the people in the early world of Genesis chapter 11 (who at that stage all spoke a single language) affronted God by building a city with a tower reaching up to heaven.  God didn’t like that idea and decided to put man firmly back in his place:

 ‘Here they are, one people with a single language, and now they have started to do this; henceforward nothing they have a mind to do will be beyond their reach.  Come, let us go down there and confuse their speech, so that they will not understand what they say to one another.’ 

So the Lord dispersed them from there all over the earth and they left off building the city. That is why it is called Babel, because the Lord there made a babble of the language of all the world; from that place the Lord scattered men all over the face of the earth.

And what have they done now?  They have collected themselves together in a city - many cities - where they continue to attempt to address God in a babble of different voices.

The show highlights those differences, but it also throws up an extraordinary sense of commonality.  It is almost as if Webb’s 'voice city' is an attempt to regain a lost pre-Babel innocence, where men and women speak to each other and each other’s gods in a whole gamut of different languages and cultural forms, but where the celebration of their similarities takes precedence over the assertion of their differences.

A thought struck me: Prayer is marketed as “the voice of a city in prayer”.  But to what extent does it really enunciate the voice of Nottingham as opposed to that of any other city?  Webb first produced the concept in Cape Town in 2002: I wonder, how did the soundscape there differ from the one in Nottingham in 2010? If he did a similar exercise today in, say, Baghdad, Chicago, Buenos Aires or Mumbai, would the overall effect differ hugely from that in Nottingham?  But if he had done it in Nottingham in 1910 or 1860 - or 1410 – how distant would be the otherness from Nottingham now? Surely much greater than that between cities in opposite corners of the world today?

Is that what Webb’s art is seeking to show?  That despite the multiplicity of their voices, languages, accents and traditions, the 36 faith groups in Nottingham today have far more in common than anything which separates them?  That the scattering of men around the world has resulted in a greater commonality around the globe than the closing of boundaries could have preserved in a single place? That the foundations of the Tower of Babel can be located in every city, but that the crude punishment exacted by a jealous old god is no longer deserved?

At a time when religious differences threaten to tear the world apart, this is a brave, sobering and uplifting message for an artist to deliver. 

Prayer continues at Lakeside till 8th August 2010