Sound has an amorphous quality about it that when coupled with the word ‘art’ presents a very real and immediate problem in terms of presentation in a gallery space. In its pure, unfiltered form sound has no tangible boundaries. It just is. Means used to create, capture, and transmit it often become the unwitting focus in presentations of sound-based works. Installation art approaches can engage audiences in active participation with the listening elements of the work. Yet, often, in the journey from sound to sound art, visual representations become more the focus. How can we take attention away from the vehicles, trappings or visual representations of sound and place it back where it belongs?
Recently I attended a talk by Steven Connor at the Audio Forensics Symposium at IMT in London and it addressed this problematic head-on. His talk, entitled Ear Room, explored language as container and argued for a more forthright approach to sound aesthetics through semantics. Why talk about sound and space? Why not give body and shape to these formless terms and refer to them as ear and room? This focus, this pinning-down, he argues, would provide sound art with a solidity it now seemingly can only find via its vehicles, trappings and visual representations. But this assumes that fitting into a container is what sound art wants to do, and yet, many of the manifestations of sound art avoid receptacles altogether via ambient strategies, radio and Internet transmission being two examples. But this does not solve the problem of the white cube. How to put focus on the sound in sound art within the gallery space?
If the amorphous and ambient elements of sound art are to be featured, any physical representation, be it object-based or installation, can draw attention away from the sound. A way of addressing this problem is to embrace sound’s invisibility and place focus on its more salient qualities, one of which is its existence in a timeframe. Working with time, instead of space, in curation allows for sound’s visual absence of boundaries to be expressed and at the same time provides a means for packaging the work within the gallery. It also places special emphasis on the sound properties of the piece — even with visuals present in the space.
This does not mean that a sound art exhibition would not have object or installation elements. David Toop — speaking at the same symposium at IMT — explored the idea of using objects as a way of focusing on sound. Taking this approach would deal with our gallery-going expectations directly. So, by pinning down the visual language of sound — and getting that expectation out of the way — it frees us up to engage with the sound more purely.
Still the focus needs to come back to sound, and a good vehicle for doing this is time. Considering the gallery in terms of opening hours rather than cubic metres can help bring audiences to the sound element of the work. And through the activity of listening, link up the gallery experience to a process-based approach that has body and form beyond the white cube.
Monica Biagioli
Writer, Curator and Academic: University of the Arts London
