Furniture Music (For KK & WS)

Sound is a fundamental constructional material of both the semantic and the formal aspect of many works in the oeuvre of Daniel Malone. It constitutes a mechanism that triggers the potential of the given work; it imparts context on objects, images and words, and, ultimately, it becomes the focus for the artist’s individual experience. Originally coming from New Zealand, Daniel Malone works in Poland and in his daily life he is immersed in Polish, which is a foreign language to him. Furniture Music is one of his works that tell of his life in a world in which the fundamental tool of communication has not been wholly recognised by him and remains full of traps and ambiguities.

The object consists of a record player mounted in a small wooden table whose two legs (of four) have been shortened and are supported on loudspeakers. The record player is working: the line stół z powyłamywanymi nogami, recorded on a vinyl record, is spoken in the voice of a speech generator installed in an Internet translator. This tongue-twister, which for the speakers of Polish is an elocution game allowing them to exercise their articulation skills, appears here as a phrase that is, essentially, impossible to pronounce correctly. The mechanism grows enmeshed in the loops of its own errors and thus reveals its other face: that of a fundamentally uncommunicative communicator. Importantly, the record player is not an entirely neutral object; quite the opposite, it is personalized and it actually bears the artist’s own name, Daniel.

Furniture Music seems to be a personal statement referring to the artist’s feeling of being lost in the universe of sounds and words which are alien to him. Yet the work can also be viewed as an universal one, as a lens in which focuses the experience of many a migrant. It tells of problems they must overcome every day and of the feeling of uncertainty during communication, which breeds frustration and a sense of incongruity. And there is one more perspective from which Daniel Malone’s work can be read: making use of a record player – and, in addition, a record player integrated into a piece of furniture, clearly emphasises the importance of sound in human life. The sound-generating piece of furniture organises reality in its own way; it introduces an order of the rituals of listening into it, sets the rhythm of work and leisure. Finally, by scattering sounds and immersing the recipient in the universe of sounds, tones and intonations, it brings to recollection the importance of one of the four senses which the sight-oriented European culture has relegated to the background.

Izabela Kopania

translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz