Sounds for Wellness: A Monthly Smart Phone Performance

Zachary Cahill presents a series of brief performances in conjunction with his banner project Idyllic—affair of heart, on view in the Smart Museum of Art’s courtyard, which is part of the artist’s ongoing project USSA 2012: Wellness Center. To mark the last Friday of each University of Chicago pay-period, Cahill will play bagpipe music from a portable PA system in the Smart’s courtyard.

At 4:31 p.m. on the last Friday of September, Zachary Cahill, MFA’07, emerges from the Smart Museum with two small speakers and a phone. He sets the speakers on a table in the Smart’s courtyard, which is almost empty. My ten-year-old interns, Kid A and Kid B, are doing their homework at another table; behind them, two students are choreographing some kind of modern-dance duet on the wide sidewalk leading to the Cochrane-Woods Art Center.

“How long does the performance last?” I ask.

“A year,” Cahill says.

I’m taken aback at first. “No—I mean today.”

“Oh.” He laughs. “I dunno. Ten, fifteen minutes.”

At 4:36, “Scotland the Brave” resounds through the courtyard with a piercing drone. The dancers look bemused. The lead choreographer snaps shut her laptop, its small speaker hopelessly outcompeted by the bagpipes, and they leave.

Kid A and Kid B abandon their books. Inspired perhaps by the bagpipe’s proud history as an instrument of war, they chase each other up and down the rolling green hill outside Cochrane-Woods, stabbing at each other with invisible swords.

It’s a perfect autumn day, warm and bright, the sun streaming in from the west end of the courtyard. The music is just as beautiful. “Brown-haired Maiden” comes next, followed by “Old Lang Syne,” then a medley. At 4:45 the performance is over.

“Why bagpipes,” Cahill says, repeating my question. “It’s kind of hard to talk about, actually.”

The main event of his exhibition, he explains, is the painting Wellness Center, reproduced on a vinyl banner on the courtyard wall behind him. “It’s about marking time, watching time go by,” he says. “It’s just a small gesture, five to fifteen minutes of music. It’s semi-celebratory, at the end of the pay period. It’s a ritual of celebration.”

I get that, but I press him about the bagpipes. At UChicago, I say, lapsing into grad school-speak, bagpipes are so freighted with meaning. They’re played not only at graduation, but also at the beginning of O-Week, to let the first-years’ parents know it’s their cue to leave.

“I didn’t know that,” he says, smiling. “It’s very personal. I really can’t talk about it.

“Bagpipes are universal—they mark something important. It’s just a thing,” he continues. “I don’t care that most people don’t have any access to it. There’s no great mystery I want people to understand. It would be nice if people start noticing, but it’s not necessary. I’m not looking to draw an audience.”

At this point, Kid A, exhausted with mock warfare, sits down at the table where we’re talking. “It was nice to have you guys here,” Cahill says to him. “Thanks for making my project better.”

Cahill packs up his stuff; we pack up ours. I still have no idea what the performance was about, what the painting is about, why it’s called Wellness Center.

I also have no idea how aspirin or most other medications work, but they do. You take one, you feel better. That’s all you need to know.

Cahill’s next bagpipe performance will be on October 25.