Sound Art Revisited

Alan Licht

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501333149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art

The first edition of Sound Art Revisited (published as Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories ) served as a groundbreaking work toward defining this emerging field, and this fully updated volume significantly expands the story to include current research since the book's initial release. Viewed through a lens of music and art histories rather than philosophical theory, it covers dozens of artists and works not found in any other book on the subject. Locating sound art's roots across the centuries from spatialized church music to the technological developments of radio, sound recording, and the telephone, the book traces the evolution of sound installations and sound sculpture, the rise of sound art exhibitions and galleries, and finally looks at the critical cross-pollination that marks some of the most important and challenging art with and about sound being produced today.

Part One

Introduction

“Sound art” as a term

Sound art holds the distinction of being an art movement that is not tied to a specific time period, geographic location, or group of artists and was not named until decades after its earliest works had appeared. “Sound art” is a term that has been used with increasing frequency since the late 1990s but with precious little in the way of an accompanying, agreed-upon definition. Indeed, the meaning of the term remains elusive. Gallerist Bernd Schulz has written of it as “an art form … in which sound has become material within the context of an expanded concept of sculpture … for the most part works that are space-shaping and space-claiming in nature.”¹ Musician, author, and curator David Toop has called it “sound combined with visual art practices.”² The glossary of the anthology Audio Culture describes it as a “general term for works of art that focus on sound and are often produced for gallery or museum installation.”³ Scholar Caleb Kelly feels that “‘sound art’ describes a medium, much like ‘oil painting’”⁴; artist Max Neuhaus likewise suggested it was as ludicrous as terming metal sculpture to be “steel art.”⁵ As a term, “sound art” is mainly of value in crediting site- or object-specific works that are not intended as music per se but is often a catchall for any kind of piece, be it music or an artwork, that experiments with sound.

As with many art movements, some of sound art’s chief figures, who predate the appellation “sound art,” are mistrustful of the label itself. What follows are considerations of the term by two artists who take sound as their primary medium: Annea Lockwood and Max Neuhaus who made what can now be seen as inaugural sound art works in the 1960s and an assessment of the uneasy fit between sound and art institutions by Christian Marclay, an artist who has moved between the art and experimental music worlds.

That none of them seem to endorse the term is illuminating; while artists frequently resist critical categorization, in this case, it also pinpoints the lack of agreement over what—and whom—“sound art” really refers to:

Sound art. I find it a useful term, but why? I apply it to the pieces I make using electroacoustic resources, and which I intend to be presented in galleries, museums, other places in which sound is, increasingly, conceived of as a medium per se, like video, lasers, but not as performance. For example, I’m currently working on a large audio installation, A Sound Map of the Danube, which I think of as Sound Art. I also recently finished a commission for the All-Stars band, which it wouldn’t cross my mind to call “sound art.” That’s the big difference for me, between music and sound art. There’s some distinction to do with the conceptual, also. I think maybe what’s termed “Sound Art” doesn’t intend connection to the linguistic. Eventually, all styles of performance music become languages, even [John] Cage’s anti-linguistic works, as people become more and more familiar with his intentions and sound worlds. Nevertheless, perhaps the term was pragmatically conjured up for/by museum curators to account for sound’s acceptance into their world.⁶

—Annea Lockwood

When faced with musical conservatism at the beginning of the last century, the composer Edgard Varèse responded by proposing to broaden the definition of music to include all organized sound. John Cage went further and included silence. Now even in the aftermath of the timid “forever Mozart decades” in music, our response surely cannot be to put our heads in the sand and call what is essentially new music something else—“Sound Art” … If there is a valid reason for classifying and naming things in culture, certainly it is for the refinement of distinctions. Aesthetic experience lies in the area of fine distinctions, not the destruction of distinctions for promotion of activities with their least common denominator, in this case, sound. Much of what has been called “Sound Art” has not much to do with either sound or art.⁷

—Max Neuhaus

Well, I think it’s great that there is this interest in sound and music, but the overall art-world structures are not yet ready for that, because sound requires different technology and different architecture to be presented. We still think of museum galleries as nineteenth-century galleries, like “How do we hang this on the wall, how do we light it?” But nobody knows anything about sound—how you hang a speaker, how you EQ it to the room. There isn’t that kind of knowledge and expertise within the museum world. More and more museums have a lounge-type listening room, but there are still a lot of changes that need to happen before the art world is ready to present sound as art. And, you know, it doesn’t matter because there are so many ways for people to enjoy sound these days. Sound is so easily diffused, spread around through the internet, downloaded to portable Mp3 players and Walkmans, you name it. Everything is so portable and so easy to share that you don’t need an art institution to tell people what to listen to. I think it is in sound’s nature to be free and uncontrollable and to go through the cracks and to go places where it’s not supposed to go.⁸

—Christian Marclay

“Sound Art” was first used as the title of a 1979 exhibition at MoMA curated by Barbara London, in which artists Maggie Payne, Connie Beckley, and Julia Heyward each produced a twelve-minute tape piece that was exhibited for two weeks sequentially in “a tiny video gallery.”⁹ In the press release, London notes that “‘sound art’ pieces are more closely allied to art than to music, and are usually presented in the museum, gallery, or alternative space.”¹⁰ A review by Peter Frank of the 1981 show Soundings at the Neuberger Museum refers to it as a survey of “the sound art phenomenon.”¹¹ A longer-lived early example of the nomenclature is William Hellermann’s SoundArt Foundation, founded in 1982, which primarily seemed to work with experimental music or “New Music,” although it did organize an early show of sound sculpture and other exhibitive work at the Sculpture Center in 1984 titled Sound/Art. Hellermann himself was a composer and instrumentalist but also a sculptor, and had exhibited his “eyescores” graphic notations in 1976. In the show’s catalogue, published in 1983, writer Don Goddard refers to “sound art” three times.¹²

The term is already controversial in 1985, as reported by Kevin Concannon in Media Art magazine:

During a panel at the audio art symposium at the Staten Island Children’s Museum earlier this year, Robert Ashley provoked considerable noise from his fellow panelists by referring to them as sound artists. Two of those panelists, Liz Phillips and Doug Hollis, are considered by many to be well-established sound sculptors … Hollis sees himself as a public artist and a poet of sorts. Phillips responded: “I try to avoid describing what I do; I just do it.”¹³

Strangely, Concannon goes on to wrestle with the notion of sound sculpture as something that has less to do with objects than with using sound to show “the interaction between time and place” but makes no further comment on sound art, besides that “the field of sound art in general suffers from a lack of definition and sound sculpture fares no better.”¹⁴ The following year Concannon wrote another article, “Notes on Sound Art,” which mentions an exhibition titled “Sound Art” at the Brattleboro Museum in Vermont as well as a concert series under that name in the Boston area.¹⁵

By 1989 a Miami festival was dubbed “Subtropics: Experimental Music and Sound Art;” a “Sound Art Australia 91” competition was held jointly by Australian & German radio, and in 1995 the term begins to crop up more frequently in the names of festivals and exhibitions (Six Exquisites International Sound Art Festival, held in Seattle in 1995, 1997, and 1999, Sounding Islands Nordic Sound Art Festival (1995), SoundArt ’95 Internationale Klangkunst in Hannover). In 1993 Rene van Peer’s Interviews with Sound Artists was published, including Fluxus artists (Joe Jones, Takehisa Kosugi, Yoshi Wada) alongside Christina Kubisch, Terry Fox, Martin Riches, and Paul Panhuysen, an early reference to these practitioners as sound artists. Only three years earlier, in the biographies section of Dan Lander and Micah Lexier’s 1990 collection Sound by Artists, Kubisch is the sole contributor identified as a sound artist, whereas Neuhaus is an “audio artist” (as are Lander and Douglas Kahn) and Lockwood a “composer/performer.”¹⁶

A rash of high profile exhibitions at the turn of the century brought the term to greater prevalence while causing considerable confusion as to what it actually referred to. Sonic Process: A New Geography of Sounds (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2002) and Bitstreams (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2001) dealt specifically with interfaces between digital art and electronic music and included electronica groups like Coldcut and Matmos and experimental musicians like Elliott Sharp, Andrea Parkins, and David Shea; Sonic Boom (Hayward Gallery, London, 2000) likewise featured 1990s electronic group PanSonic alongside veteran sound sculptors like Max Eastley and Stephan von Huene and ambient composers who have worked with installations (Brian Eno, Paul Schütze, and Thomas Koner). The sound room in the Whitney’s survey of modern American art, American Century, was called I Am Sitting in a Room and mixed sound works by visual artists (Dara Birnbaum, Tony Oursler, Bruce Nauman, Mike Kelley, Fluxus), Minimalist composers (Steve Reich and Philip Glass), classic experimentalists (John Cage, David Tudor, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros), and spoken word recordings (Ken Nordine, William Burroughs), with Bill Fontana being the main example of an artist who creates sound installations exclusively—and he, like the others, was represented with stereo recordings rather than the multichannel system utilized in many sound installations. Volume: Bed of Sound (P.S. 1, New York, 2000) similarly functioned as an overview of experimental music, rather than sound art; unfortunately offering selections to listeners on CD players with headphones or competing with each other in a large space, it managed to include some bona fide sound artists (Neuhaus, Maryanne Amacher, Paul De Marinis) but also threw in experimental pop and rock groups (Cibo Matto, Sonic Youth, the Residents, Yamataka Eye), experimental electronic composers (David Behrman, Joel Chadabe, Tod Dockstader), free-jazz musicians (Butch Morris, Ornette Coleman, Muhal Richard Abrams), and rock star Lou Reed (who deserves some recognition as an experimental musician but should not be labeled a sound artist).

None of these shows purported to be an exhibition of sound art per se, but their curatorial picks reflect and reinforce a tendency to apply the term “sound art” to experimentation within any music genre of the second half of the twentieth century. Other early 2000s large-scale exhibitions like Sons et Lumière (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2004) and Visual Music (organized jointly by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., 2005) and the smaller What Sound Does a Color Make? (Eyebeam, New York, 2005) dealt with synaesthesia, the ongoing dialogue between the visual and music/sound, and the efforts of many to illustrate music or sound, either synchronously or asynchronously, in the age of the moving image. Color organs, animation to music by Oskar Fischinger, the Whitney Brothers, Jordan Belson, and Walt Disney’s Fantasia, Tony Conrad’s flicker films, and late 1960s psychedelic light shows are all well worth experiencing but certainly are not sound art. They are fundamentally related to dance as a scripting of visual movement to music or sound. Music videos have become a mainstream example of the codependency of image and sound and have often been criticized for branding songs with a definitive picturization, limiting the imagination’s ability to come up with its own interpretation of how the music translates into associative visions (or not). In the wake of mixed-media assemblage, video art, and performance, sound has become a medium to be reckoned with in contemporary curatorial perspectives, but sound art and sound in art are not necessarily the same thing.

Proposing a definition: Sound art versus music

For the purposes of this study, we can make a very basic definition of sound art in two (sub) categories:

–An installed sound environment that is defined by the physical and/or acoustic space it occupies rather than time and can be exhibited as a visual artwork would be.

–A visual artwork that also has a sound-producing function, such as sound sculpture.

(Sound or music by visual artists that serves as an extension of the artist’s own aesthetic, usually expressed in other media, is again not nominally sound art but frequently included in early museum shows devoted to sound in the art world; see Part Three.)

Sound art often involves motion—the audient moving through an outdoor environment, a room, or another kind of space to follow the sound; this also differentiates it from records or concerts of music, which are commonly listened to from a fixed position. Sound art tends to heighten a listener’s sense of place, even if it’s filling it, whereas music aims to transcend its setting. Sound art is conceived of in terms of a listener-to-listener relationship between the artist and the audient, unlike music performance, where the relationship is player-to-listener. A sound artist is more likely to be a listener of sounds in the environment than hearing a melody in their head or looking to compose sounds to be put together as in a music piece. Kate Lacey has written, “Sound artists have long been driven by a mission not only to get people to listen to different things, but to listen differently—indeed to make listeners self-reflexively aware of themselves as listeners.”¹⁷ Particularly given the automation of sound installations and some sound sculptures, sound art belongs in an exhibition situation rather than a performance situation—that is, I would maintain, a necessary correlative in defining the term (although one could point to Indian sand paintings, which are erased after a day, as an example of artwork whose rejection of permanence is similar to live music performance; and much of Akio Suzuki’s sound art work is usually done in performance, although it’s as much a demonstration or activation as a show).

Traditionally, music, like drama, sets up a series of conflicts and resolutions, either on a large or small scale (it can be as small as a chord progression resolving to the tonic chord or as large as a symphonic work that adheres to the narrative arc complete with exposition, climax, denouement, and coda). This was drastically reconsidered in twentieth-century composition, which broke down the prevailing orthodoxies of harmony and melody and retained the durations, but not necessarily the forms, of traditional Western classical composition. A friend once commented that avant-garde art is now commercially viable and extremely successful, whereas avant-garde literature, music, and film are usually uncommercial and generally unsuccessful. He’s right, but that is because art (in the modern age, anyway) lacks the inherent entertainment value of a narrative that those other art forms have. It doesn’t have to appeal to the masses to be successful—as long as it catches one collector’s (or curator’s) attention, the person who created it can make a fair amount of money from it. Literature, music, and film, however, are more likely to depend on popular opinion and public demand; there is more distance between their avant-garde and commercial sectors and a different market value between commercial art and avant-garde art. This is because they’re the primary sources of entertainment besides sports. And that is because of the potential to be engrossed by a storyline and characters, dazzled by spectacle, or have a catchy tune stuck in your head all day. If an effort in any of these disciplines fails to live up to this potential, it’s largely considered to be a disappointment; in fact, it’s intrinsically disappointing regardless of its actual aesthetic worth. Part of the reason “sound art” has become such a popular term is because it rescues music from this fate by aligning this kind of sound work with the aims of non-time-based plastic arts, rather than the aims of music (and some have seized on it as a replacement for “experimental music” in order to escape the association with science).

When “sound art” came into parlance, there was no attendant list of artists who would be identified with it, although in Germany Rolf Julius, Christina Kubisch, and Ulrich Eller were often cited as original exponents of Klangkunst, which itself carried a more clear-cut definition: of works, usually sound installations, that catered equally to “...