Against Ambience

Seth Kim-Cohen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781628921366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Teoría y crítica del arte

Against Ambience diagnoses - in order to cure - the art world's recent turn toward ambience. Over the course of three short months - June to September, 2013 - the four most prestigious museums in New York indulged the ambience of sound and light: James Turrell at the Guggenheim, Soundings at MoMA, Robert Irwin at the Whitney, and Janet Cardiff at the Met. In addition, two notable shows at smaller galleries indicate that this is not simply a major-donor movement. Collectively, these shows constitute a proposal about what we want from art in 2013. It's impossible to play possum. While we're in the soft embrace of light, the NSA and Facebook are still collecting our data, the money in our bank accounts is still being used to fund who-knows-what without our knowledge or consent, the government we elected is still imprisoning and targeting people with whom we have no beef. We deserve an art that is the equal of our information age. Not one that parrots the age's self-assertions or modes of dissemination, but an art that is hyper-aware, vigilant, active, engaged, and informed. We are now one hundred years clear of Duchamp's first readymades. So why should we find ourselves so thoroughly in thrall to ambience? Against Ambience argues for an art that acknowledges its own methods and intentions; its own position in the structures of cultural power and persuasion. Rather than the warm glow of light or the soothing wash of sound, Against Ambience proposes an art that cracks the surface of our prevailing patterns of encounter, initiating productive disruptions and deconstructions.

1. Meditations In An Emergency

Consider the summer of 2013 in New York:

June 15, Seth Siegelaub dies;

June 20, The exhibition, ambient, opens at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea (the press release cites Brian Eno’s conception of ambient music as a precedent);

June 21, James Turrell’s monumental show opens at the Guggenheim, one of three Turrell retrospectives nationwide;

June 27, Robert Irwin’s Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light, initially installed at the Whitney in 1977, is reinstalled;

August 1, The conceptual sound show, The String and The Mirror, opens at Lisa Cooley Gallery;

August 9, Turner Prize winner, Susan Philipsz, begins work on her public sound installation, Day Is Done, on Governor’s Island;

August 10, Soundings: A Contemporary Score, MoMA’s first major sound show opens;

September 10, The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet at the Cloisters.

Three short months: inaugurated by what we might think of as the symbolic death of conceptual art; characterized by an unprecedented torrent of sound and light.

Siegelaub’s passing shouldn’t have been so easily allegorized. (While Siegelaub died in Basel, Switzerland, his death must surely be considered a New York event.) But the fact of his demise found itself drowned in rooms full of sound and light. By the end of each tribute to his legacy, the beginning was already dissolving in the flood of the ambient. Back in the late 1960s, as artists launched radical experiments with ideas and language, Siegelaub rushed to their side, acting as champion, explicator, and most importantly, as organizer of many of their important early exhibitions. It is hard to imagine the history of Conceptual Art unfolding without his participation. That unfolding is now in danger of folding back on itself. After 40 years of conceptual expansions of art practice, we may now be witnessing the elastic snapping back. As the dust of relational aesthetics and social practice settles, as the rowdy Rancièrism of the 2000s finds its place in the long view of aesthetic discourse, we are seeing an unexpected retreat to ambience.

I worry that the arguments I made in my 2009 book, In The Blink Of An Ear: Toward A Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, have fallen on deaf ears. Rather than attesting to an expansion of sound practice in the directions of conceptualism, the New York summer of 2013 organizes its exhibitions and its discourse along the simple lines of materials and medium. This commonality implicitly accepts that the appeal of ambient phenomena, like sound and light, is attributable to their evanescence, ineffability, and immersiveness. The flow I’d hoped to see (and to help generate) may, in fact, be flowing in the opposite direction, away from conceptual concerns and back to mute perception. Much of the visual art on offer in this very specific (and admittedly limited) time and place invokes ambience. In the cases of the Turrell and ambient exhibitions, specific appeals are made to sound as a precedent and a metaphor. Implicitly, this work, these shows, and their critical-institutional framing capitalize on (or capitulate to) the reductionist reading of sound as the most ambient of modalities.

Thanks to the redefinitions initiated by conceptualism, we’ve seen the so-called “visual” art world move beyond strictly formal, Kantian-Greenbergian questions; beyond purely visual, perceptual, or phenomenological issues. The art world embraces a widely dispersed set of engagements with the senses and with media, but also with philosophy, economics, gender, identity, and interpersonal relations at the level of individuals, organizations, corporations, and nation-states. Along the way, art is as likely as not to deal with technology, materiality, language, duration, performativity, and cultural critique. These lists are necessarily partial, because art now gives itself permission to address any subject by any strategy that might be productive. In the 1960s, philosophy experienced the apex of what is known as the “linguistic turn,” and around the same time the visual arts experienced the so-called “conceptual turn,” licensing visual art concerned with the complex relations of form, materiality, and image, to language and thought.

The sonic arts, however, have been less expansive. More often than not, works of sound art concern themselves with the material and perceptual properties of sound. There is much talk of “vibrations,” “resonance,” “immersion,” and “affect.” Two rough equivalents in the visual arts are op art and what we might refer to as “immersive installation.” Op art, which makes use of abstract, optical illusions, had a brief moment of notoriety, peaking in 1965 with the exhibition, The Responsive Eye, at MoMA. But op art has never been an approach that demands (or deserves) serious critical response. One might see it as the last gasp of the “purely” visual, coinciding with minimalism’s sly subversions of the paradigmatic acceptances of form and vision. If we no longer consider op art an important contemporary movement, why present sound works which explore similar territory within the sonic realm?

But more to the point of this summer in New York (and more troublingly), immersive installation, like Turrell’s and Irwin’s, leverages the features of sound’s conventional jurisdiction. A broader survey of this approach might include Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2003; Ryoji Ikeda’s The Transfinite, at the Park Avenue Armory in 2011; LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House, which has been installed in Tribeca since 1982; or Random International’s Rain Room, at MoMA, which closed on July 28, 2013, smack dab in the middle of the three months under discussion here. This type of work, which I will deal with as one plank in the platform of the ambient, is more troubling than op art because, knowingly or not, it avails itself of the traits of sound, as sound is typically construed. This construal is multifarious. Some of its assumptions are more stubbornly attached to sound than others. In The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Jonathan Sterne describes these assumptions as “the audiovisual litany,”

- hearing is spherical; vision is directional

- hearing immerses its subject; vision offers a perspective

- sounds come to us, but vision travels to its object

- hearing is concerned with interiors; vision is concerned with surfaces

- hearing involves physical contact with the outside world; vision requires distance from it

- hearing places you inside an event; seeing gives you a perspective on the event

- hearing tends toward subjectivity; vision tends toward objectivity

- hearing brings us into the living world; sight moves us toward atrophy and death

- hearing is about affect; vision is about intellect

- hearing is a primarily temporal sense; vision is a primarily spatial sense

- hearing is a sense that immerses us in the world, while vision removes us from it.¹

Ambience runs down the left-hand column and checks every box of this litany (Sterne also calls it a “balance sheet”): from “spherical,” to “places you inside an event,” to “brings us into the living world,” to affective, temporal, and immersive. Of course, Sterne’s intention in presenting this litany is to dismantle it, or, at the very least, to complicate it. Some have joined him in this project of debinarization. Others have retained the dualism, while hoping to reverse the hierarchical positions of sound and sight. Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong have argued that the left side of Sterne’s balance sheet is the preferable column. Veit Erlmann proposes sound as an alternative to the “mirror” model of human knowledge based on a subject’s ability to reflect on, and see her reflection in, the natural world. His 2010 book, Reason and Resonance: A History Of Modern Aurality, suggests the vibrating string as a substitute metaphor for the mirror. This pairing, of course, provides the title for the exhibition, The String and The Mirror, organized by Lawrence Kumpf and Justin Luke. Later, we’ll return to the metaphors and the exhibition.

The problem with the embrace of the sonic column of the balance sheet is that it happens without complication or critique. When I say I worry that the flow I’d hoped to see is moving in the opposite direction, I mean that instead of sound adopting some of the criticality and self-reflection of the past 45 years of thinking and making in the gallery arts, visual artists and/or visual arts institutions are assuming some of sound’s litanous self-beliefs. Surely, if the gallery arts are now willing to welcome sound, they should do so according to the same criteria of quality and engagement that they demand of other media. The kind of optico-centrality of op art doesn’t cut it anymore. One could argue that this disallowance is precisely what licenses immersive installation, which does indeed move away from pure visuality. But, as Sterne and others would suggest, simply trading in optico-centrality for audio-centrality—even in a metaphorical sense—is not necessarily an improvement.

I engage these examples and the issues they raise from the perspective of an artist. Every work of art is a response to the conditions within which it is produced and received. My own work necessarily engages the assumptions and problems inherent to its time and place. What I’m trying to do here is to understand the moment, to match tendencies with their corresponding pretexts, and to question the sequence of events and inclinations that allow these correspondences to emerge. My hope is that seeming inevitabilities will reveal themselves as highly contingent. We must start by questioning sound’s traditional entitlements. We must be willing to release some of the claims that license many of sound’s most cherished methods, self-beliefs, and meanings. We must be willing to complicate the role and rationale of sound, while at the same time, complicating sound’s relations to, and interactions with, other sensory stimuli. Ultimately, I will argue, artists and audiences need to drop our allegiance to any sense, to any material, to any medium and its history. Media, material, and the senses that perceive them are means to an end. That’s not to suggest they are neutral, transparent, or, in any way, natural. As Sterne, again, has shown, these things are also products and producers of distinct histories, saddled with expectations, limitations, and, as we have seen, misapprehensions. We must interrogate what we’ve previously taken for granted. We deserve an art that is the equal of our information age. Not one that necessarily parrots the age’s self-assertions or modes of dissemination, but an art that is hyper-aware, vigilant, active, engaged, and informed. And it’s not as if there is no such art. As an artist, I’m inspired by a host of practitioners who make sound do difficult, real-world work, people like Johannes Kreidler, Christof Migone, Sharon Hayes, Pussy Riot, Ultra Red, Carey Young, Christopher DeLaurenti, Michelle Rosenberg, Mutlu Çerkez, Nina Katchadourian, James Hoff, Anne Walsh and Chris Kubick, Phil Niblock, G. Douglas Barrett, Marina Rosenfeld. . . . None of these artists have work in the MoMA show (but a few are included in The String and The Mirror.)

2. Percept—Concept—Precept

I want to place on our table—like a fork, spoon, and knife—a set of three terms/methodologies/values.

1. Percepts are objects of perception. I use the term bluntly, but not in an attempt to suggest a lack of sophistication regarding the status of such objects or of perception. For our purposes, this points to artworks concerned primarily with sensory phenomena and their apprehension via the organs of perception.
2. Concepts are abstract ideas that create connections between objects or other concepts. I use the term as an allusion to capital-C conceptualism in visual art, without mapping, 1:1, to that category. I will insist on small c conceptualisms, plural.
3. Precepts are general rules that regulate behavior or thought. I take it for granted that all behaviors ascribe to precepts.

Percept

Douglas Kahn’s essay, “Let Me Hear My Body Talk, My Body Talk,”² reminds us that James Turrell’s pivotal works, the ones which led him down the path he’s still on, occurred under the sway of John Cage’s example. In fact, Kahn points out, Turrell and Robert Irwin worked in an anechoic chamber as part of the Art and Technology project at LACMA in the late 1960s. In the early 1950s, after visiting an anechoic chamber at Harvard, Cage reached the now-famous conclusion that “there is no such thing as silence.”³ Turrell arrived at a parallel conclusion:

There never is no light—the same way you can go into an anechoic chamber that takes away all sound and you find that there never really is silence because you hear yourself. With light it is much the same—we have that contact to the light within, a contact that we often forget about until we have a lucid dream.⁴

Kahn’s essay focuses on the body in the work of Cage, Turrell, Irwin, and William Burroughs: what the body means; the body’s role as a producer and/or receiver of signals; the body’s status as a component of the subject, as a discrete object, or as an entity that complicates this divide. Following from this, I want to think about how Cage, Turrell, and so many contemporary artists working with sound direct attention toward percepts, toward the sensory conditions of a given time and space. I want to think about how this turn toward a situation’s ambience downplays other situational relations: issues of interiority and exteriority, real versus mediated experience, and how these relations instantiate power in one location, one actor, or another.

Perhaps the embrace of sound as a viable medium in the art world is not simply patronizing. Perhaps the problem is not a dearth of curators well versed in the practitioners and problematics of the field. Perhaps what’s happening is that the art world is turning away from what I will call, “linguistic conceptualism,” engaged with language and terminological sites, and turning toward an “ambient conceptualism,” that discards “hard” materiality, in favor of the “soft” materiality of a-signifying phenomena such as light, space, and time. If this is the case (and I think it is too early to tell, but I’m vigilant), then the embrace of sound may be evidence of a broader turn toward the ineffability to which sound has always claimed privileged access. To my mind, this would signal the “immaterialization,” of the art object, rather than the “dematerialization.” The former indicates a passive, immersive, ambient experience, while the latter (Lippard’s term) has always meant, for me, a critical response to commodity objects and their attendant fetishisms; a resistance to the prevalent (and often unquestioned) social and political uses of things. I have held out hope that the positive movements of the last 45 years of art history: linguistic conceptualism, institutional critique, feminism, postcolonialism, relational aesthetics, social practice, et al., would infect sound practice and bring it into phase with the important art of our times. It would pain me (but not surprise me) if, instead, sound is coaxing the art world into a state of nebulous, naive, navel-gazing.

Perhaps, confronted with avalanching evidence of state and corporate corruption, of the theft and cooptation of private communications and online behavior, of base manipulation of societal values for the gain of a select few, perhaps the art world would prefer to escape to soothing environments of diffuse light and sound. Turrell’s inchoate spaces of wombessence seem safe from such encroachments. But it’s impossible to play possum. While you’re in the soft space of light, the NSA and Facebook are still collecting your data. The money in your bank account is still being used to fund who-knows-what without your knowledge or consent. The government you elected is still imprisoning and targeting people with whom you have no beef.

Turrell’s spaces and the experiences they are designed to engender implicitly claim privileged access to a condition of being that is purported to live beyond the reach of language. And when I use the blanket term “language” here, I’m indicating an extended matrix of practices that are both the products and producers of signification, including systemizations, structuralisms, images, traditions, processes, narratives, analyses, diagrams, thinking, and so on. I can only think of two reasons why such a condition of being might be valorized. The first is mystical, appealing (or offloading responsibility) to an authority beyond the influence of flesh and blood. There is some comfort to be found in the notion that somewhere, somehow, there is an agency to the universe; that there are reasons for seemingly unreasonable events, that all the trivia and travail of life is not random. The second reason is political, constructing, and then protecting, a position of authority. Those who avow an understanding of the machinations of the cosmos simultaneously grant themselves authority. And so, these two reasons often collapse into one. There are those who possess the key, the ladder, the code, the hot line, the exegetic cipher. And there are those who don’t. Negotiating access is the basis of politics. But the mystical force to which the anointed, alone, have access, invariably turns out to “move in mysterious ways.” The essence and function of the mystical always exceeds signification. If such a force were transparent in its methods and motivations, then...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• 1. Meditations In An Emergency
• 2. Percept—Concept—Precept
• 3. Against Ambience
• 4. Sight—Site—Zeit
• 5. Errata Is Data
• 6. Sine—Sign—Sein
• 7. No Tone Stands Alone
• 8. Information—Politics—Transcendence
• Notes
• Copyright Page