This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on how the world of art and museums is pushing boundaries.
What would Frankenstein’s monster sound like?
In Jane Benson’s view, you can forget all the Hollywood movies. The creature actually has the voice of an enraged woman. Its arguments contain explicit feminist demands. It even sings mezzo-soprano.
Benson, a conceptual artist, arrived at these provocative conclusions a few years ago while exploring literary depictions of exile and rereading Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein” after first encountering it in high school.
As a woman and an immigrant — the English-born Benson lives in New York City with her husband and twin daughters — she couldn’t help identifying with the outcast monster’s pleas for justice, equality and understanding.
Her latest show, “her her,” a combination of sound and visual art that will open on Oct. 30 and runs through Dec. 5 at the TriBeCa gallery Sargent’s Daughters, draws its raw material from the chapters of Shelley’s novel narrated by Frankenstein’s monster.
“This is the sentence that got me thinking about it being a woman’s voice,” Benson, 53, explained in her airy Chelsea studio, pointing to a huge framed work that will appear in the show. It includes a scrawled statement in a meticulously copied rendering of Shelley’s own handwriting: “I waited with forced patience until the moon had sunk.”
She sighed. “I just love that sentence,” she said. “I just think it speaks to a woman’s ‘deal’ in society so much.” In another passage that inspired her, the monster describes a woman who aspired “to higher powers of intellect and an independence of spirit forbidden to the female.”
Shelley herself speaks through this articulate creature, Benson added, noting that the English author’s parents were Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering women’s rights advocate, and the writer and philosopher William Godwin. The teenage Shelley, known at the time by her maiden name, Mary Godwin, first conceived the “Frankenstein” story in 1816 during a love affair with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley — they married later that year — and was herself living as far removed from genteel society as the monster.
Although the 20-plus works in Benson’s new show, “her her,” have their roots in Shelley’s handwritten manuscript, published in 1818 — as well as in the author’s doodles in the margins, which Benson redrew as portraits of English elms — the artist deliberately removed any narrative context from her works.
Instead, she isolated significant sentences, along with phrases, words and even syllables, that she felt evoked the female experience. This deconstruction, which Benson relates to her dyslexia, fueled her creation of four vocal scores, ranging in length from about three to six and a half minutes. Two will be displayed at Sargent’s Daughters; the other two will appear in a version of “her her” that the gallery will show at Art Basel Miami Beach in December.
“How else can I understand this text if I’m not understanding, because of my dyslexia, through written language?” said Benson, who noted that she often reads in fragments rather than linearly.
“Well,” she added, “I could understand it through sound.”
Benson, who is not a musician, scanned the monster’s chapters, enlarging the text and then cutting out the syllables used in the solfège technique of teaching musical scales: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti. She then hand-wrote these extracted syllables, exactly in the order in which they appear, page by page, on layers of polyester film and mounted the layers on hand-painted matte surfaces covered in iridescent acrylic. The process resulted in monumental, semi-reflective artworks that are also musical scores.
The mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, who lives near Beacon, N.Y., and has previously collaborated with Benson, recorded herself singing the works, which visitors will hear at intervals from small speakers at the base of the artworks in Sargent’s Daughters. But unlike some of Benson’s past book-based musical creations, these involve neither a composer nor instruments. The songs’ character and pace, however, vary.
“I definitely change the tone of how I sing,” Chinn said in an interview in Benson’s studio. As she performs, she said, “I kind of loosely try to think the thoughts that the monster is expressing. Sometimes that means being very full-bodied and kind of operatic, and sometimes it means being very dreamy and thoughtful. Sometimes it involves being a little angry.”
This method, Chinn added, gives “these repetitive syllables each their own color.”
Benson also relied on music to give her art actual color. When Isaac Newton described the visual spectrum, he assigned each hue a musical note. Following Newton’s 17th-century system, Benson created artworks like “Her Sky,” an abstract inkjet print in which she translates each note in the last of the monster’s chapters into a color.
After excising syllables, Benson developed other uses for the chapters’ remaining text, arranging some fragments into what she calls “lyric poems.” Other artworks feature just the spaces within letters — say, the circle defined by an “o” or the empty loop inside a “p” — which Benson filled in with a pencil, writing sentences of Shelley’s over these cryptic, dotted backgrounds. Sometimes Benson made art by redrawing a single page of the novel over and over on a single surface, the overlapping sentences creating a kind of visual echo. Small works contain individual words, also in an imitation of Shelley’s handwriting, like “seek,” “rage pain” and “her her,” the exhibition’s title.
These are “specific words that we could highlight to join us on our battle,” Benson said, referring to the struggle for equal rights.
At both Sargent’s Daughters and at Art Basel, a pamphlet designed to resemble Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” contains an essay on “her her” by Molly Murray, who teaches English and comparative literature at Columbia University. A QR code displayed in both locations will allow visitors to play the scores at home. On Nov. 18, the gallery will host a public program in which Benson and Murray discuss the exhibition.
Allegra LaViola, the founder and owner of Sargent’s Daughters, said she hoped the exhibition would inspire interest not just in Benson’s art but also in Shelley’s, revealing “Frankenstein” to be far more than just a Gothic horror tale.
“I am interested in championing female voices,” she said. This exhibition, she observed, is “literally multilayered female voices.”
For Benson, the show consists of “Frankenstein” and yet, like the monster, has a life of its own.
“I wanted to create a new rhythm to the words that exist within this novel,” she said. They are “so powerful for women, I think, and they really nail on the head the problem, from 1818 to now.”
“That’s why,” she added, “I let them linger.”
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