Practitioner
Janet Cardiff
Artist — not interviewed
Works The Telephone Call (2001) · The Missing Voice (Case Study B) · To Touch · The Paradise Institute · Forty-Part Motet · sixteen audio walks since 1991
Experienced for this research The Telephone Call, 27 July 2026, 10:30 AM — private viewing, SFMOMA
Janet Cardiff has not been interviewed for this archive. This page is written from published sources and from the compiler’s own experience of the work, and nothing on it is attributed to Janet Cardiff as testimony.
Why she is the anchor of Part II
Cardiff built a practice on encountering evidence of yourself you cannot place. In To Touch, the narrator finds a photograph on the pavement and does not recognize the woman in it — an image that said it was her, without understanding, knowing or remembering. She describes screaming and dropping a tray in a cafeteria because it took a full second to recognize her own reflection. The Missing Voice has been read as being partly about short-term amnesia and a woman searching for herself. None of this is metaphor I imposed; it is the documented subject of the work.
The surrogate voice
She invented the recorded guiding voice out of her own discomfort. After Intimacies (1992), in which she met strangers face to face to talk about intimacy and found her presence inhibiting, she built a persona whose voice could do the work her body could not. Compare Allen Otto on the protection the phone affords, and Parker Sela on involvement held at a distance.
Agency, openly unresolved
Christov-Bakargiev’s catalog essay states the problem this research kept circling: a participant in Cardiff’s work must surrender all intentionality and agency, and whether that is manipulation or a deeper kind of freedom is left explicitly open. Cardiff herself compares the pleasure of ceding control to an impulse she locates in S&M.
The morning of 27 July
I saw The Telephone Call at SFMOMA at 10:30. Four hours later I interviewed Evan Neiden and learned that a slow dance had already been performed for me and lost. I record the sequence because it happened, not because it means anything.