Another view: The Changing Room

Janek Schaefer missed out the all-important banter in his meditation on the locker-room experience I felt a bit let down by this. Sound artist Janek Schaefer has made an installation inside Bath University , inspired by his exploration of sports changing rooms: what they look like, what they sound like, what they signify. I was really interested to see what he’d come up with – most changing-rooms I’ve used are pretty disgusting – so I took three of the people I coach: a rugby player, a runner, and my seven-year-old son. The first problem we had was that we couldn’t actually find the exhibition – Schaefer has installed his changing room (just two walls, some pegs and a locker) in an empty space between the foyer and the cafe. We got there and thought, “Is this it?” Two doors in one of the exhibition’s walls lead to the toilets: my girlfriend went to the loo without realising it was meant to be part of the show. Most people were wandering past oblivious, but we stayed and pressed the buttons Schaefer has installed, each of which emits a different sound. Press one, and you hear a woman talking about training on her bike; press another, and you hear a motivational slogan: “Winners finish when they finish; losers finish when they’re tired.” I imagine that is the kind of slogan coaches use with elite stars, though I wouldn’t try it on the young people I coach – they’d find it too off-putting. I like the idea of using sound in art, and the changing room is a really interesting place for an artist to explore – but I think Schaefer could have done much more. I’d have liked to see the show installed in a real changing room: there’d have been more of an atmosphere. He could have compared the way a changing room feels when a team has just won a match, with how it feels when they’ve just lost. Or he could have recorded all the sounds you’d hear over one whole day. Changing rooms are all about the people, the smells, and the banter – all of which are

Posted by on April 27, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.