EXHIBITION APRIL 29 - MAY 12, 2008 @ SAC ART GALLERY
HOURS: TUESDAY TO FRIDAY 11-5
RECEPTION MONDAY MAY 12, 5 - 7 PM
John Cage’s 4’33” premiered on August 29, 1952 at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, NY. It was performed by David Tudor as a “silent composition.” Nevertheless, a clearly marked entrance and exit makes audible, not silence, but the sounds of everyday life—all the things that ordinarily slide by unnoticed, “all the sounds we don’t intend.” 4’33” brings to bear on everyday life the practice of listening usually applied to compositional music.
The audience was livid—a response that indicates that 4’33” destabilized the situation and discipline of music, even that of the experimental composition that attendees might have expected from David Tudor. To take this as an origin for the practice of sound art, as is often done, allows us to see this contemporary artistic practice as it straddles music, the art world, and everyday life.
Sound is both difficult and problematic, in its persistent, immersive presence, which we cannot ever quite get away from. Auditory mediation pervades life in the digital age — from soundtracks to mobile telephones and mp3 players. Sound indexes past times and distant places. It is texture, the unseen fabric of our environment, often lying just beyond our conscious perception.
Sonic Residues creates spaces to reflect on the relationships shaped by sonic production and reproduction. Here sound streams across networks, interrupts spaces, and shapes private dreamscapes. It is produced by transcoding and translation. It is generated from bodies both artificial and natural, transmuted into images and objects. It is stretched and compressed, imagined and heard. It invites us to consider the habits and processes of listening, and to develop a critical understanding of the sites and locations of sound.
There are a number of themes that run through the exhibition: the first is that of mapping. Annea Lockwood’s piece from 1981, A Sound Map of the Hudson takes its title from the river whose sounds it traces. A noted composer, she calls to our attention the aural features of this natural body of constantly moving and changing water. The river itself produces a unique set of sonic textures. As the clock moves from 1 PM to 3 PM, the listener is taken on a journey down the river, which can be traced on the image on the wall—an image that works as both map and score. 26 years later, artist Grady Gerbracht’s 62931-62943 takes its title from the identification markers on the utility poles that network rural Brazil, whose sounds he traces. Gerbracht’s installation is a meditation on place, space, and materiality. We both see and listen to the wires that crisscross the landscape in an insistent mapping of one of the defining technologies of modernity. The landscape Gerbracht is interested in collides the technological with the natural—staging an encounter of different temporalities. The slow time of the rural agrarian landscape is brought into sharp contrast with the hyperkinetic imaginary of the power lines, and the lifestyle they enable.
Ordinarily invisible sounds are pushed into visual, material form in Takafumi Ide’s Reverberations. Thin metal poles support shallow plexiglas trays, filled with water. Overhead, speakers produce sounds outside the human hearing range; these sounds are indexed by ripples in the water, which are each in turn traced on the walls with pools of light. While Gerbracht’s work maps a landscape, and a certain temporal conundrum ensconced in it, so Ide’s work is an attempt to map the thread of a particular memory—a remembered voice, the sound of a ghost.
Nobuho Nagasawa’s Bodywaves treats the body as landscape, mapping private memory, and indexing both past and present. The light spilling from the rocking chair visualizes her heartbeat; the optical fiber was woven in Kyoto, the artists’ official home on her birth certificate. Her umbilical cord is placed in a petri dish on a small table, next to a medicine jar holding strands of her grey hair. She invites us to sit and participate in this memory by rocking and rewards us with a cacophony of sonic waves. Invited to sit in the chair, to rock, the viewer’s motion brings her into an uneasy proximity with these strangely intimate bodily sounds and cast-off fragments—the heartbeat, the cord, the hair.
Luke Dubois’ Academy maps the collective dreamscape of cinema through a sonic and visual condensation of Best Picture Oscar-winning films. Each year, since 1927, is one minute. One minute of speeding visuals, and jittery amplification, one minute of costume, cutting, blurred soundtrack, close-ups and distance shots. Dubois’s Hindsight is Always 20/20 maps an even stranger collective dreamscape—the political speech. The State of the Union speeches of 41 presidents are transformed into eye charts, highlighting key terms for each president. George Washington’s chart is headed by Gentlemen—the word most oft repeated in his speeches. George Bush 43’s chart is headed by Terror. Past collides with present; aural culture is translated into presidential vision, and placed on pause, for an extended analysis. These works perform the data mining that is possible with digital computation, and bring this together with the stringently formalist algorithms of a John Cage or a LaMonte Young. The result moves in between the worlds of electronic composition, found sound art, and cultural critique.
Timothy Nohe’s work is titled Indicium, a Latin word that means, data, information, evidence, indication, or pointer. He presents an index of the evolution of the mobile telephone, casting phones from the mid-1980s to the present in beeswax. A form of sonic production—and a technology calculated for obsolescence—is repositioned on a velvet display table, an object to be fetishized. The act of casting causes us to pay attention to the form that moves between disappearance and appearance—intended to be easy to use, it falls away from our attention. As a status symbol, it appears, insistently, tricked out and flashing with color and light. In beeswax, it becomes subtly tactile, glowing with patina.
Microclimate by Nick Fox Gieg and Christina McPhee offers a sonic and visual translation of a particular aspect of the landscape, one that it is generally impossible for us to see directly: carbon absorption and release on the tall grass prairie in eastern Kansas. Transcoded, it becomes an energetic and building abstraction of visuals and sound. Like Dubois’s Academy, it attempts to make “large data,” of the sort that is processed and handled by computers, somehow legible—visually and sonically, on a human scale. Nevertheless, in its fading into the illegible and the inaudible, it acknowledges, as do the flickering images of Dubois, the impossibility of that task.
The scores by Stephen Lee and Jxel Rachenberg are maps of a different sort. They are transcriptions of music, intended to translate an idea into sonic form, and allow for its reproduction. Highly graphical for this traditional notation device, these scores provide performance instructions. They are unusual, however, in the degree of autonomy they allow—each functions in a branching structure that allows the musician to select how the piece will be played. Regardless of the sound of the eventual performance, this particular structure is necessarily involved in a complex dialogue with the algorithmic structure of computational culture.
With a set of sound and video works from France, curated by Valerie Vivancos, we enter into the private space articulated by the mp3 player, a computational device that, alongside the cellular telephone, has increasingly begun to shape contemporary spatial experience. Her selections interrogate the transformations of place and identity that have been brought about by the increasing pace of technology and today's globalized culture.
John Cage, in 4’33” and other works, instituted a mode of auditory thinking and critical practice that allowed listeners to enter into a more complex and nuanced relationship to the sonic landscape that surrounded them. Sound irrevocably directs us towards location—and as such, it invites us to pay attention to context. The works in Sonic Residues show that sound must be philosophically and culturally situated, and understood as intimately intertwined with senses of vision, and touch. These sonic practices invite a more open relationship to the world around us—one that takes into account the constantly changing auditory landscape of contemporary experience as we shape it, and it shapes us.
Zabet Patterson |