2000
"Volume: Bed of Sound", P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, -First published as an introduction to the exhibition Volume, Bed of Sound, P.S. 1 Contemporary Center, New York, July 2002
-Whitechapel Gallery, London to reprint the text in Sound, edited by Caleb Kelly, 2011
Sound Art?
For the past several hundred years the limits of scale and complexity in music have been set by the symphony orchestra. It is still a fantastic entity even today.
It is made up of some of the most skilled artisans in the world, people who begin their specialized training often before the age of ten and, after practicing for hours each day, are then only selected to join it through rigorous competition with others some fifteen to twenty years later. There is nothing else which compares with this in the modern world.
It is also the most tightly coordinated human activity - one hundred people functioning together with a precision of a small fraction of a second - not to mention its other highly developed skills in the aural dimension. Its instruments, refined over hundreds of years, produce an incredible range and quality of timbres. Being in the same space with a performing orchestra is a unique and truly wonderful experience.
On the other hand, the orchestra is not without its problems. Because its members are trained over a long period with music from the past they often resist the new. This, coupled with its organizational ungainliness as a still living form of a very formal old bureaucracy and its dependence for survival on audiences conservative by nature, tends to make it into an historical museum of music rather than an instrument of the present, despite the best efforts of many modernists.
Recently the rules of the game have changed.
Only a relatively short time ago music was made exclusively by specialists blowing, bowing or touching physical objects and it could be heard only where and when it was played. Then for the first time in history we found a way to capture sound, to record it - stop it in time so to speak and even play it backwards if we wanted to. Very recently we have found ways to make sounds that are no longer limited by the physical laws of vibrating objects
- virtual instruments.
But perhaps the biggest change is that the means for controlling scale and complexity in music is no longer in the hands of the orchestra, nor even limited to the hands of its specialists. Anybody with a personal computer and a few extras now has in hand the means to make music with almost unlimited scale and complexity; this does not mean of course that everyone can.
Perhaps it is this greatly expanded access to the manipulation of sound that has been one of the main forces in sparking a new awareness of sound and in spawning what some claim is a new art form called 'Sound Art'.
Over the past twenty years there have been a number of exhibitions at visual arts institutions that have focused on sound. In the last five years their number has increased to the point of almost an art fad. Often they include a subset (sometimes even all) of the following: music, kinetic sculpture, instruments activated by the wind or played by the public, conceptual art, sound effects, recorded readings of prose or poetry, visual artworks which also make sound, paintings of musical instruments, musical automatons, film, video, technological demonstrations, acoustic reenactments, interactive computer programs which produce sound, etc. In short, 'Sound Art' seems to be a category which can include anything which has or makes sound and even, in some cases, things which don't.
Sometimes these 'Sound Art' exhibitions do not make the mistake of including everything under the sun, but then most often what is selected is simply music or a diverse collection of musics with a new name.
This is cowardly.
When faced with musical conservatism at the beginning of the last century, the composer Edgard Varese 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'.
I think we need to question whether or not 'Sound Art' constitutes a new art form. The first question, perhaps, is why we think we need a new name for these things which we already have very good names for. Is it because their collection reveals a previously unremarked commonality?
Let's examine the term. It is made up of two words. The first is sound. If we look at the examples above, although most make or have sound of some sort, it is often not the most important part of what they are - almost
every activity in the world has an aural component.
The second word is art. The implication here is that they are not arts in the sense of crafts, but fine art. Clearly regardless of the individual worth of these various things, a number of them simply have little to do with art.
It's as if perfectly capable curators in the visual arts suddenly lose their equilibrium at the mention of the word sound. These same people who would all ridicule a new art form called, say, 'Steel Art' which was composed of steel sculpture combined with steel guitar music along with anything else with steel in it, somehow have no trouble at all swallowing 'Sound Art'.
In art, however, the medium is rarely the message.
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.
With our now unbounded means to shape sound, there are, of course, an infinite number of possibilities to cultivate the vast potential of this medium in ways which do go beyond the limits of music and, in fact, to develop new art forms. When this becomes a reality, though, we have to invent new words for them. 'Sound Art' has been consumed.
Max Neuhaus, June 2000