In semester #1 the final paper assignment for this class was to write about your own work in the third person. Want to know a secret? After weeks of false starts and diddling around I actually had to type in bold 26 point letters at the top of my paper draft "YOU ARE DEAD, WHY DID ALL THE WORK YOU DID MATTER?". Macabre, but I recommend it to any artist as a jump start if they are feeling kind of dumbed down. After reading about the history of sound in art, and once again I was feeling pretty dumb, I analyzed just one of my own works in this piece in a affort to challenge myself-to make two years of work matter. Forcing yourself to matter, even if it's just on paper-it's a good exercise. You should try it.
Art of the Rallying Cry
Like a crack of light creeping into a pitch black room, sound defines the shapes, tones and objects in the three dimensional world, but do we pay close enough attention to realize it? Unlike a prism that scatters white light into component colors right in front of the eyes, the human physiology experiences and processes sound in a very intimate and magical way. According to Marcel Duchamp “One can look at seeing; one can’t hear hearing” (qtd. in Kahn, 9). The philosophical, psychological, and physiological nature of looking that allows visual things to perceptually register at a distance contrasts starkly to the internalized nature of the perception of sound.
The use of sound in art is scattered into forms as numerous and varied as painting, sculpture or photography. Artists have been extolling the use of sound in art for almost a century alongside these inaudible, static practices. Now, more than a hundred years after sound was first recorded surround sound technology is in more homes than art galleries, promising unrivaled realistic experience. It would seem we know no fear of being in the midst of recorded sound; letting it be inside our head, letting it represent all manners of loves and horrors. Or are we just adapting ourselves, learning with the help of technology to keep sound at a distance too? Representational focus on perception and medium in art appreciation and criticism cannot do justice to the use of sound and technology in art. These technologies are still struggling to lead art back into the realms of the experience of communication rather than the appreciation of objectification.
It is within the interstices between distance and nearness or immediacy in all media that communication occurs. Given the complex nature of perception and how we understand and interpret it relative to communication, it is hardly surprising that objectifying experience has been the overwhelming concern of many humanistic disciplines for thousands of years now. In the essay “Hermeneutical Experience”, Hans-Georg Gadamer posits that:
The understanding of a text and the understanding that occurs in conversation-is that both are concerned with an object that is placed before them…. In the successful conversation they both come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community. To reach an understanding with one’s partner in dialogue is not merely a matter of total self-expression and the successful assertion of one’s own point of view, but a transformation into a communion, in which we do not remain what we were. (515)
The artist that employs sound, of both spoken word and non-linguistic ambient nature, is relentlessly pushing the boundaries of the traditional “conversation” with the viewer, to attain a similar communion that we look for in text. Objectification may serve as a means to an end, but is not the goal.
Early on in his book Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts Douglas Kahn notes that modern recording technology, like the ancient human inventions of language and writing, removed the nature of speech from the person, place and time that it was spoken; as well as every other sound that was available for the taking (9). Sound in an art environment creates an unavoidable perceptual appreciation of the dimensions of time and space through judging simultaneity, reverberation or echo, loudness and softness of a sounds place in space. Because of this, sound can attain an exceptional sense of virtual realism, if such a presentation is desired. Recorded sound maintains great swaths of its original dimensional quality: the time it takes to play, inflection in spoken language, even effects of the space the recording was made in depending on the quality of the equipment used and the amount of effort put into the arrangement of recording devices. Of course, like two-dimensional media, sound can also be manipulated to suit other purposes than those just described.
Reflecting on the appreciation and understanding of the place of sound as part of a video or stand alone amplified sound in an installation environment, sound is an integral contemporary tool used to confront the subjective perspectives and objective stances taken in the dialogue that is forming contemporary understanding of culture. When asked about the role of sound in their art installation projects, artist Emilia Kabakov, Ilya Kabakov’s installation collaborator, thinks we find it easy to appreciate paintings because we have thousands of years of cultural experience looking at them. In order to be good art, an installation must be complex and viewers have to learn to spend time with an installation to appreciate it. Sound lends an integral dimension of complexity to any art installation, and installation art is integral to understanding culture (“Kabakov”). Given individual desire to fit into a context greater than themselves while still remaining unique and ‘whole’, innate confusion regarding the objectivity of perception is often brought to bear in all communicative pursuits as the transmission of narrative information becomes imperative no matter how disjointed the presentation.
Our desire that the resulting contexture of the experience of hearing be culturally objectified is of overwhelming concern in any listening situation. William S. Burroughs’s reframing of the internalized subjective nature of hearing through the prism of language and the human propensity to invest language into noise of all sorts is a frightening visualization of one aspect of the experience of listening. Even in the ‘signature’ contextual jumble of his essay “It Belongs to the Cucumbers”, this conflict is simply and poignantly expressed in the lines: “Some time ago a young man came to see me and said he was going mad. Street signs, overheard conversations, radio broadcasts, seemed to refer to him in some way. I told him ‘Of course they refer to you. You see and hear them’” (53). In the type of complex art installation experience that is called to mind by Kabakov, both the artist and the audience create parallel, poetic space and time when sound and spoken word is used. Instead of being a harbinger of mental illness, the representation of ‘hearing things in your head’ establishes an existential proving ground, a subjective necessity for finding ones place and relationship with objective experiences of the world.
This attitude of a space or place for magical poetics was ascribed to shamans, religious rite and artists for millennia before our Modernist antecedents, who more recently enjoyed the analytical mantle of “self expression” which afforded a culturally appropriate place for the cognoscenti to work out their existential anxiety. Instead of becoming a powerful, accessible, mnemonic device that records and represents the present for use in the future, the ability to record and transmit sound and image to a popular audience enforces our confusion about perception and objectivity in these spaces and places. According to artist Bill Viola’s musings on “idea spaces and memory systems”:
“We view video and film in the present tense-we ‘see’ one frame at a time passing before us in this moment. We don’t see what is before it and what is after it-we only see the narrow slit of ‘now’. Later, when the lights come on, it’s gone. The pattern does exist, of course, but only in our memory” (318-319).
The sounds and pictures that come out of our televisions, computers, cell phones and some artists are like a medieval morality play or Victorian hymn. The modern equivalent is still selling you a now that is part of a contiguous life everlasting, achievable through obedience to an earthly church. As long as you approach it all with a healthy dose of naïve fear and don’t ask yourself too many questions the sounds and images of the media can be blithely perceived and appreciated as an active parallel reality; another now that will also pass on into the gaping past of memory.
Karen Joan Topping’s installation Build It Up, Knock It Down (Figure 1) is a work that combines a somewhat theatrical experience with the technology of recorded sound, resulting in a surprisingly complex experience of psychological and philosophical overtones. Walking into a room with muted lighting that has had the walls painted the same color as the floor in an effort to create a horizon-less environment we see an unremarkable tableau of a pile of sand, a child’s sand pail and a single sand castle in a spotlight. The objects remind of childhood memories, the spotlight resembles a cinematic flashback and the starkness of the interlocking trapezoidal forms of the castle and bucket strongly evoke a minimalist art aesthetic.
Figure 1. Build It Up; Knock It Down. Karen Joan Topping.
While the very real pile of sand unassumingly references visual and literary images of sands of time and unfathomable vastness, and the child’s pail refers to play and building as well as psychological metaphors of vessels and carrying or spilling, in the end all they are is terminology that the viewer is familiar with, the ‘hook’ that they feel easy and comfortable with. Real sand, real pail, real words and the sounds of real surf, yet the sum parts add up to a complex nexus thinking and language and hopefully communication.
Appended to this simplistic, referential sculptural installation is a roughly seventeen minute performative recitation of repeated phrases layered and alternated with the recorded sound of the lapping of ocean surf. The repeated phrases “Build it up; knock it down; go ahead; you know you want to; you’ve done it before” coupled with the babbling of the relentless waves of the ocean brings to mind an interior monologue as well as the inexorable exhortation of outside voices. The addition of this recording to this installation creates an environment that transcends the aesthetic and perceptual qualities and clearly attempts to investigate issues of control and creativity on the part of the individual. The constant repetition that is so apparent in the craft of the artist, making and remaking objects and ideas in an effort to communicate them more effectively is the real ‘text’ of Topping’s tableau.
The struggle and violence inherent in grasping to communicate our hearts desire is what is experienced in the presence of Build It Up; Knock It Down. While his focus is textual analysis, the words of Gadamer suits the experience of understanding this work of art; he describes the nature of language as “So uncannily near our thinking [that] when it functions it is so little an object that it seems to conceal its own being from us” (514). Part art and literary reference, part theatrical performance, part sandbox, Build It Up; Knock It Down uses the media of sound to shift the appreciative focus to philosophy rather than technique, by displaying objects that require no ‘technique.”
Nowhere is the traditional artist-viewer conversation that has centered on formal and representational concerns in the modern, western idiom, torn apart more directly or effectively than in the words of artist Martha Rosler. In the appreciation and analysis of contemporary art that employs recorded media there could be no worse sin than to confuse questions of aesthetics and perception with questions of influence and philosophy. In her essay “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment” artist Martha Rosler succinctly lays out that she sees a warmed-over art historical paradigm of “distinctly modernist concern with the “essentials of the medium”” applied to “video artists” (463). She concludes that this “formalized approach… portray[s] artists in the act of objectifying their element, as though tinkering could provide a way out of the power relations structured into the apparatus [of media]” (Rosler 471). Rosler, prophetically, warns against this mystical approach to video art:
Formalist rearrangements of what are uncritically called the ‘capabilities’ of the medium, as though it were God-given, a technocratic scientism that replaces considerations of human use and social reception with highly abstracted discussions of time, space, cybernetic circuitry and physiology; that is a vocabulary straight out of old-fashioned discredited formalist modernism. (472)
The argument rings true in regards to technologies of sound as much as its application to video art. The battleground of new cognoscenti looks beyond magical “idea spaces” and the scientific objectification of psychology and the senses to, in Rosler’s words, “who controls the means of communication in the modern world” (473). As technology blends more and more seamlessly with human product and principle, we can no longer afford to monopolize the discussion of art with our perception of technology.
Rosler thinks that artists must do better than the museums, better than the media; saying that “surely [artists] can offer an array of more socially invested, socially productive counterpractices [sic], ones making a virtue of their person-centeredness, originations with persons-rather than from industries or institutions” (473). In Bill Viola’s even simpler terms, the tool of technology cannot be allowed to infringe on “development of self” (325). This investigation and investiture of oneself in communication, context and culture is a far more urgent rallying cry than perception and appreciation for artists working in all mediums, not just sound and technology.
Karen Joan Topping
12/5/07
University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Works Cited
Burroughs, William S. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. New York: First Arcade. 1993.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Hermeneutical Experience.” Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics. 3rd ed. Ed. Joseph Margolis. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1987. 499-517.
Kabakov, Emilia. “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Conversations with Artists 2007-2008, Artistic Partnerships.” The Phillips Collection, Washington. 14, Nov 2007.
Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History Of Sound In The Arts. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
Rosler, Martha. “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment”. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Stiles, Kristine and Peter Selz, eds. Berkley: University of California Press. 1996. 461-473.
Topping, Karen Joan. Build It Up; Knock It Down. Collection of the Artist. Washington, DC.
Viola, Bill. “Will There Be Condominiums In Data Space?” Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. Packer, Randall and Ken Jordan, eds. New York: Norton. 2001. 316-326.
No comments:
Post a Comment