Sound Art (1992)
(Also Audio Art, Aural Art, Sonic or Sound Sculpture, Sound Poetry, Soundworks, Text-Sound Compositions.) Excerpt fr. John A. Walker’s Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design since 1945, 3rd. ed.
artdesigncafé | music + art room | Published 13 May 2011
This text is an excerpt from Walker’s 1992 glossary previously published by Library Association Publishing, London.
Sound Art
Sounds organized into meaningful patterns are crucial to several arts— music, opera, poetry, theatre, film and television— but until the twentieth century sounds played no part in the fine arts of painting and sculpture. This situation began to change in 1913 with the publication of the futurist manifesto "The art of noises" by Luigi Russolo, a painter who also generated "noise music" (also called "bruitism"). As the century progressed and the visual arts became more mixed-media and receptive to all kinds of experimental activities, the distinctions between painting, sculpture, music, video, film, poetry and performance began to blur. Modern technological inventions such as the development of radio, disc and tape recording, multi-track studio facilities and so forth were also vital in encouraging those from a fine art background to experiment with sounds and the dimension of time which, of course, sequences of sounds foreground.
By the 1950s it was possible for an experimental musician such as John Cage to be as well known in fine art circles as in music circles. It was also possible for Robert Rauschenberg to add a collage of sounds to the normally silent artform of painting by incorporating a radio into one of his combines. Since then many visual artists have employed sounds. Some have used them as an adjunct to their main activity, some as one element in a mix of media, and some have specialized in the production of Soundworks. The way in which artists have made use of sound has tended to vary according to the particular art movement they subscribed to; for example, Robert Morris’s Box with the sound of its own making (1961), a wooden box with a three-hour tape recording of its construction, was a clear example of process art. During the 1960s British artschools provided a fertile context for the exploration of sounds and rock music; Brian Eno, an art student himself, later described them as "the cradles of experimental music".
The machines devised by kinetic artists during the ’60s normally produced some noise as a by-product whether desired by the artist or not. The phrase "audio-kinetic sculpture" was coined to describe those works in which sound and movement were deliberately linked.
Sound Sculpture implied a different, more environmental approach, i.e. employing recordings and loudspeakers in a gallery in order to use sounds to "sculpt" the space as the visitor moved within it. The British artist John Anderton engaged in this kind of work. He pointed out that sound could be experienced from within as well as outside the pattern formed by the speakers. This kind of work clearly relied upon the active participation of visitors, especially if their movements influenced the character of the sounds. For the "Magic Theatre" exhibition held at the Nelson Art Gallery, Kansas City in 1969 the American artist Howard Jones devised a "sonic games chamber" in which changes in sound patterns were produced by the movements of the visitors. Tom Marioni, an artist who combined conceptual and performance art, employed amplifiers to pick up the sounds of his actions and by a process of feedback made those sounds persist in the room space for as long as there was any movement.
In 1969 Dennis Oppenheim produced a "sculpture" consisting of a tape recording of the sound of his footsteps as he walked a particular route. A year later at the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco, a show was mounted entitled "Sound sculpture as". It featured the sounds of guns being fired, telephones ringing, and an artist urinating into a bucket.
Sound Art: 1 | 2
ads by artdesigncafe
Facebook comments
