Writing about Bass is like talking about love. It is nearly impossible to find words that would convey a true essence of the experience. But then, what would the world be without love songs?
Walking into Schaulager, a hybrid between museum, study centre, and archive in Basel, is already an interesting moment, every time. It’s somehow intimidating – not so much for its scale but for its mass, and for its architectural contrasts: the mirrored glass façade, fragile yet stubborn, holding atop a cube of smooth and rough surfaces. The British filmmaker and video artist Steve McQueen has produced many monumental works tethering the relationship between image, sound, and the body. This time, though, he stripped the moving pictures to arguably its most abstract quality: the effect of light, colour, and sound on our physical perception of space and time. Bass is an immersive installation that invites one to be aware of one’s own body as a resonating entity. Moving through the Schaulager’s brutalist halls – concrete pillars suddenly feel like soft giants in the pink light that has filled the room now, as if consisting of thick ether.
I feel like I am on a quest without destination, a confrontation with my feet standing in the middle of this space, my arms and body dipped in the same colour as everything else around me.
McQueen has created a capsule that is as momentary as your emotional capacity to follow the slow drift of changing hues – from green to blue, over pink to red, yellow and white – or until someone else’s voice interrupts the sonic landscape unfolding. It feels cinematic, yet its not a film and not an image; it is instead a work where sound and light sculpt the space itself, shifting our sense of time, perception, and presence.
In a recent talk with Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, McQueen remembers the work’s roots stretching back to a conversation he had with jazz legend Ornette Coleman in 2003. McQueen began to imagine a piece that could hold both openness and weight – “I wanted to incorporate and encapsulate everything and the way I thought I could do that was, of course light, because that’s what makes things visible in some ways.” And while the colours in Bass dominate the visual field, it is the low-frequency bass sound, played through stacked speakers arranged in three spots throughout the space, that lets you journey.
McQueen invited an intergenerational group of musicians – Marcus Miller, Meshell Ndegeocello, Mamadou Kouyaté, Aston Barrett Jr., and Laura-Simone Martin – to an improvised recording session. Guided by the historical resonance of the Middle Passage, their instruments weaving memory, presence, and Black diasporic history into the soundscape. Minimally edited, the session became a three-hour composition that now reverberates through the exhibition space, shifting bass frequencies from background to foreground and into this visceral experience.
Bass feels complete. And like a good love story, in an abstract environment of light and sound it holds intimacy and monumentality. Within it, there is nothing to watch but everything to feel. And as McQueen insists, what is ultimately on display is not the work itself, but you: your body, your thoughts, your presence in the space. And then I step outside into the scourging summer day, back into reality.