Mindblowing Soundscapes show teaches us how to really see again

In a sea of Instagram-ready art, begging for participation and first dates, it’s an utter joy to strip things right back and force our laser-shredded, ball-pond wearied, slide-befuddled eyes to actually just look. And in the case of the National Gallery’s incredible new show, Soundscapes, to listen, too.

The show saw six artists who work with sound either in a sound art context or as composers select a painting from the gallery’s collection for which to create an audio response to. These tracks – created by Nico Muhly, Susan Phillipsz, Gabriel Yared, Jamie xx, Chris Watson, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller – can only be heard in the gallery during the exhibition’s tenure. They’re not online, you can’t stream them, you must take them in live; again, a sublime antidote to a digital culture where the here and now is so often put to one side, downloaded or bookmarked to find later.

The exhibition feels like a brave and brilliant move for a gallery that seemed for a while to be too crushed by the weight of its own history and tradition, shooting itself in the foot with a curatorial fustiness and reluctance to embrace the new, as so poignantly documented in Fred Wiseman’s film, National Gallery. But it doesn’t feel as though it’s multidisciplinary for the sake of being so, or to prove that the institution has a place in the 21st Century: it feels utterly respectful, and very fitting. At the press view Nico Muhly was discussing his work creating sounds for the late 14th Century piece The Wilton Diptych, and made the very adroit point that with a lot of older art, in particular religious art, the connections with the visual and the aural are well-established.

“A lot of the work in the gallery would have originally been seen in churches, so you would have had candles and art and music, so I don’t see it as an act of vandalism,” says Nico. “In a church you have a lot of art meeting – sculpture, music, painting – that’s what creates that reverential atmosphere. I just felt this piece demands to be recontextualised.”

Presented with just six works, each with their very own room, suddenly in hearing their sound counterpart we truly see the work. Lulled into a daydreamy state that opens our eyes and awakens our curiosity, works we might have previously stopped to look at only briefly, or even walked past entirely, become pregnant with meaning and allusion – in part thanks to their marriage with sound, and in part now that we’re afford the time and space to really get to know them. This is also helped by the exhibition design: we move from room to room in corridors bathed in almost total darkness.

Not a single room is a letdown. The sound artists have been chosen superbly, each offering something very different: Chris Watson uses only natural sounds (and chooses a painting that celebrates the Sublime and the natural, in Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Lake Keitele), while Susan Philipsz’s accompaniment to Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors uses three speakers to overlap different, eerie tones and Jamie xx’s utterly gorgeous Ultramarine, created in response to Théo van Rysselberghe’s Coastal Scene shows that 19th Century pointillism and dubstep need not be as separate as we’d assumed.

In the case of each of the sound pieces, but particularly that of Jamie xx, the soundscapes create new rhythms and inferences in the painting that set the pace of it, and guides the way to a new reading of the work. In this way, Soundscapes doesn’t just help us learnt to see again, but to listen again too. If this exhibition isn’t a cure for the hideous, rapacious, modern busyness epidemic then I don’t know what is. In a sense, it’s not really about art or music – it’s about time and seeing and appreciation. When you see the works like this and hear them too, it suddenly makes you realise how apathetically you were seeing things before.