Bach, Falling Upon Deaf Ears

Video Defies, and Redefines, Notions of Artistic Expression

Getting deaf teens to sing Bach is:

(a) Exploitative and voyeuristic.

(b) Culturally inclusive and respectful.

(c) A celebration of failure and chaos.

(d) A celebration of determination and hope.

(e) Art.

As any good test-taker knows, once you're pretty sure that certain answers can't be right, you simply settle for whatever's left.

Art it is.

An impressive video called "Singing Lesson 2" begs you to take a moral and aesthetic stand on the concert it shows. Its success lies in how it makes that task nearly impossible.

The piece is typical of Polish artist Artur Zmijewski, who has been ruffling feathers in his homeland for about a decade. Recently, the 40-year-old has also been impressing, and discomfiting, art audiences around the world. A film in which he re-created Stanford's famous "prison experiment," a 1971 study of the psychology of human domination that had to be stopped when its participants got violent, was a main attraction at the last Venice Biennale. "Singing Lesson 2" had its U.S. premiere in Boston a little while back, just recently joined the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is now making the rounds of European museums.

The 16-minute work is built around a simple premise, like most of Zmijewski's work. For "Singing Lesson 2," the artist got a group of deaf teenagers in Germany to practice cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach, including the exquisite "Jesu, der du meine Seele," then perform them in St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. It was Bach's own church, and is an almost holy site for Bachophiles -- such as the skilled musicians who accompany the deaf choir.

The video first shows us the deaf students learning to sing, under the guidance of an enthusiastic young music teacher. Not surprisingly, the result comes close to pure cacophony. It's likely to provoke a grimace from music lovers. It's also likely to pain anyone with even a hint of political correctness: Giving deaf kids a task they can't succeed at seems awfully close to setting them up to take a fall. It invokes a whole history of cruel exploitation of the disabled. (But it also invokes a history of music lessons for the hard of hearing that most of us don't know about. In the 1980s, Gallaudet University, the nation's most famous center for deaf culture, had a music program for its students, led by a singer who had lost her hearing later in life.)