www.artsy.net: Sound art has always been a tricky proposition, for obvious reasons: Unlike a painting or a sculpture, it doesn’t stay put. This unpredictable medium has provided a wealth of potentials for artists—and challenges for curators—whether it’s being exhibited in the white cube or in the wilds of a German forest.
9 comments:
Sound art is not something that I typically run into in a museum. When I think of a museum, I don't really think of listening to sounds, or recordings, or whatever the piece is. That being said, sound art is a very new medium and is also something that I would be really interested in if I did get to experience it. The article makes a great point when they talk about not being able to shut off sound like you can shut off looking at something, so creating this forced listening idea sounds really intense, but that is part of what can make it so powerful. If you are able to make people listen to your piece and your message, you may be able to push ideas across a lot clearer than in a painting, or through a sculpture, but I think both can still be relevant and can be even more powerful when combined.
The challenges of exhibiting sound art actually remind me of the complex issues and considerations we often run into theater. In a sound exhibition, the entirety of the space must be considered as the way sound is interpreted is extremely fragile and can easily be altered by the conditions and properties of the space. As sound exhibits have no inherent visual, the way the space is set up must be very purposeful in order to properly assist in communicating the sound exhibits' meaning. In theater we also have to take multiple factors into account, sound being one of the many. In theater, no consideration can be left out, as the condition of the space is also often vitally important to the tone and message of the play. Although the challenges of use of space in sound exhibitions is more pronounced, I feel these considerations are actually universally important to any artistic performance or exhibition to ensure a pure and purposeful message.
I had never considered encountering a sound art exhibit before reading this article. It's an incredibly intriguing proposition to facilitate the proper "acoustic creation of [a] space." As sound is such an immersive medium that is constantly battling the sound of the world around it, having a sound exhibit seems to be as much about framing the sound exhibit as well as featuring it in a way that accurately represents the artist's vision. I also didn't know that sound exhibitions (at least ones that weren't musical) had such a lush history. It does make sense though, that as sound permeates our being normally, it could easily be manipulated to evoke intense feeling or inspire institutional critique and that that would make it an attractive medium for the revolutionaries of the last century. I'm really glad this field is becoming more recognized and prevalent as I would love to visit an exhibition to experience how this artistry is crafted.
I would love to see (hear) many more sound exhibits in museums. It is such an amazing art form that I think we don't fully appreciate. Everything, everywhere is sound. Sound builds environments, surrounds our experiences, and often shapes our thinking. So why don't we have it in museums? As the author says, when you go to a picnic, you need to bring your own plates, napkins and cutlery. It is really difficult to design a sound installation for a typical visual museum layout for many reasons the article touches on. As a sound installation designer, you are going to want great acoustics, the ability to zone your sound to one space, and a way of entering and exiting the environment that will immerse you in the correct way. To me, it seems the best time to plan for a sound exhibit is with the architecture team from the beginning. This way, we can create the space to fit the art, as opposed to creating the art to fit the space. That's how it's meant to be anyway, right?
Sound as an artful experience has begun to take on much more of an immersive experience in recent history. I previously worked at a school that had a large sound focus and at the same time had an active art gallery and since the two were in the same department their tended to be a lot of collaboration between the two in creating exhibits that represented both the visual and the heard sounds. The hard part comes when you try to just exhibit sound without any additional visual cues. Most people look with their eyes first and it becomes what first pulls them in and causes them to take everything in. Being in theatre, a lot of the sound designers I work with have an artistic ability to key in enough of the visual elements that some manner of interest is peaked first by the look then once the viewer is in they can be brought deeper into purely an auditory experience.
This article is a very interesting read. I’ve never been to any exhibition that’s solely devoted to sound art. I’ve seen sound taking a secondary role in visual art display where you’d be in a little booth and the sound will surround you and immerse you in another world. When I first saw the title “how do you exhibit sound art” I immediately think of our semester review sessions for some reasons. Students from sound design program often have their laptop set up with a couple headphone for you to listen to their arts. There’s a limited amount of visual representation that they can put on a board for guests to see.
What I’ve found deeply intriguing about the concept of sound art exhibition is that one cannot completely get away of providing visuals for the patrons. Even when the visual objects themselves are sound equipment, one has to think very carefully how to present them. The article mentioned an installation where 18 shoebox-sized speakers were placed among the trees and 4 subwoofers amidst the woodland underbrush of a park, which sounds so fascinating.
It’s funny to me how baffled some people can get by sonic art, and it really says a lot about how humans tend to function as purely visual creatures. Every concern that this article talks about is completely valid, but also not really that unique to sound. In fact, I wish visual artists would also address these concerns in their work. The truth is, the human experience happens with all five senses, and there really isn’t a way to isolate any one of them. As Susan taught us, a good artist will try to address every sense, every angle, every moment of the experience of their piece (which is why scent design came into play during our Arcade projects). Sonic artists simply have more expected of them in this regard because humans use sound as a secondary sense to sight, so it feels more unpredictable. I’ll be interested to see how sonic mediums develop, and in what ways.
As someone that sound design doesn’t click with, this was fascinating. There are a lot of concerns of presentation that I would probably neglect if I was to try and set up an installation of this kind. I would love to see museums experiment more with this medium and see what they can do to present it in a way that represents the artist’s intentions. In addition as humans it is very difficult to separate what we see from what we hear. Because of this, designing an installation could be very hard, because a whitewashed, starkly lit room where a lone echoey piano is playing will evoke very different emotions from a warm, wooden paneled room with the same track playing. I’m very interested to see how these kinds of exhibits grow and adapt in the future.
Acoustics and how sound interacts with a space is a huge element of sonic art. I think it would be really interesting to design a space from the ground up with the listening experience of a specific piece in mind. When an artist places a sonic art piece in a gallery their art may change purely based on the space they are exhibiting in. That is such a fascinating thing about sonic art. You can’t tune it out and yet it is probably experience different by each person. Human hearing varies from person to person. Some people perceive high or low frequencies better than others and some people are effected by hearing loss. All of these factors affect the person perception for the sonic art, I guess this is kind of the same thing as the difference in perception of color form person to person in a visual art piece.
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