AN EAR FOR SOUNDS A Collection of Sound Art for The Vault Curated by Valerie Brodar Updated February 3, 2012
Valerie Brodar CURATORIAL STATEMENT AN EAR FOR SOUNDS Sound art has been firmly situated as part of a hybrid visual art practice, which in part focuses on expanding and engaging the non-visual aspects of perception. Like a painting s rich and varied colors, illusionary space, or nonobjective abstraction audio collage heightens the aural perception of a spatial environment, the color of sound or a sonic sensory experience. Investigating the dimensions of sound through silence, noise, ambient textures, appropriation, geographic soundscapes, indeterminacy, narratives/text, and mashups sonic art encompasses intimate listening experiences, live multi-dimensional performances, sound sculptures and installations. Audio artists have captured the tiniest of sounds such as a tree growing to an ear piercing sonic boom to create complex collages that reflect the world we listen to and tune out. Luigi Russolo, in his seminal text The Art of Noises, proclaims that noise didn t exist until the industrial era, before that the world was silent. John Cage took this one step further to state Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations, Rain. Like photography before and film after, recorded sound had profound conceptual implications on how art was defined and experienced. The evolution of reproductive modes from wax cylinders to reel-to-reel analog tape, vinyl albums to compact disks and digital code enabled the previously unrecordable to be recorded. Artists captured the ephemeral and continue to invoke the dead. The audio collage is revealed only through the unfolding of time and is simultaneously located and dislocated temporally and spatially. The original can be duplicated enabling the work to transcend boundaries as it can be experienced at the exact same moment in New Orleans, Nairobi, Beijing, and Beirut. The old adage, often said in jest, you need a (fill in the blank) like you need another hole in your head reflects our innate inability to block sound. We close our eyes to not see the monster in the closet, but we don t have ear lids to not hear it rustling to get out. Valerie Brodar received her B.F.A. in Printmaking & Fiber Arts from Carnegie Mellon University and her M.F.A. in Time Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been shown at the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano, Miraflores, Peru; Zico House, Beirut, Lebanon; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA; SOHO20 Chelsea, New York, NY; Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, WA; Artemisia Gallery, Chicago, IL; Betty Rymer Gallery, Chicago, IL; Gallery 2, Chicago, IL; and The Erie Museum, Erie, PA. She is currently an Associate Professor of Media Arts at the Univeristy of Colorado, Colorado Springs. SOUND ART IN THE VAULT (Pasadena, CA) You Don t Need a Weatherman, 1997 s You Don t Need a Weatherman deals with environmental catastrophes and has approached this by reaching into the distant past, and the unknown future, spanning geological time, while capturing the immediacy of the human present 23:38 A Crack Across the Face of America, 1991 s text/sound/music audio and radio works consist of layered intersecting textual and sonic narratives, and deals with memory, history, and the interface between nature and culture. 5:00 The Culture of Disappearance, 1991 26:54 Free Fire Zone 1980: Idaho (excerpt), 1980 5:28 Lynn Book (Winston-Salem, NC) bird, 2003 An emergent composition derived from improvisatory explorations that converge extended voice and text with electronic looping and acoustic instrument to simultaneously conjure and denature the semiotics of bird. Lynn Book, voice with Kevin Norton, vibraphone. 7:23 Lynn Book blink, 2003 Lynn Book s blink was developed from an automatic writing journal entry on September 10, 2001. The eerie prescience ricocheting in the writing was actually part rant, part rumination on the destructive impact of large scale social forces. Lynn Book, voice and electronics with Kevin Norton, drums and percussion. 6:57 Lynn Book red ramble yodel, 2005 Lynn Book s red ramble yodel is a meditation on traditional yodeling-- with layers, repetitions and building harmonies. 3:27 Paul Bright (Winston-Salem, NC) a-rhythmia Sound collage: discontinuities and connections of varying rhythm in diverse spaces; overlaid, staccato, resonant. 3:58 Paul Bright Porto: Civitavecchia:, 2011 Sound collage: repetitions, dislocations, malfunctions, interrupted silences; travels through a mutable space-time. 4:07 1 2
Paul Bright Voci I: Linea Gialla, 2009 Sound collage: admonitions, directions, truncated conversations, reverberations, a chance to win; quotidian poetry, intentional and otherwise. 2:43 M.W. Burns (Chicago, IL) Observer Observer collapses narrative style into an endless description of surveillance and voyeurism. This audio text attempts to create a kind of verbal vortex. This work was never installed, feeling quite at home over radio or the web. 4:08 M.W. Burns Articulations Articulations explores how glitches, stumbles and slips of the tongue become a source of meaning, regardless. 5:50 M.W. Burns Drift Drift explores how glitches, stumbles and slips of the tongue become a source of meaning, regardless. 5:12 The Cake Dancers (Lafayette, LA) Denikin Slurred Speech, 2011 An improvisation with a loop of Tchaikovsky, flipped, reversed, and inversed on upon itself. Anton Denikin was a White Russian general. 3:30 The Cake Dancers Triadic Prelude, 2011 Composed of three loops taken from a recording of Wagner s prelude to Tristan & Isolde, it focuses on the classic rising and descending, tonal and dissonant chords. It is a juxtaposition of the three major articulations of the tonal/atonal chords. 31:38 Philippe Landry (Lafayette, LA) The Original Jazz Loop, 2011 Various worn out loops, including Benny Goodman, moans, feedback tones, and Khmer Rouge soldiers confessing to acts of torture. It is an improvisational composition made of half random selections of tape, the reverse sides being unknown to me. 4:08 Lou Mallozzi (Chicago, IL) Peers, 2010 The intersection of language, disembodiment, ephemerality, and hermeneutics crystallizes for Mallozzi in an art practice involving mediations of sound: He utilized sounds, many of which are recognizable replications or reiterations of previous sounds. 33:17 Lou Mallozzi Screenplay: one and one, 2010 The intersection of language, disembodiment, ephemerality, and hermeneutics crystallizes for Mallozzi in an art practice involving mediations of sound: He utilized sounds, many of which are recognizable replications or reiterations of previous sounds. 1:46:00 David Moss (Berlin, Germany) 23 Ways to Remember Silence, But Only 1 Way to Break It, 2011 23 ways... is a recollected sound-history of Moss world: a song anyone can sing; amateur singers on Karl-Marx Strasse; tortellini, mustard plants & galaxies; streams with boulders and watercress; a Russian rhumba, & don t forget the paradiddles. 31:12 David Moss, voice/text Hanno Leichtmann, drums/electronics Little Candy Story, 2010 Moss stated, A tone or two, an insistent rhythm, backgrounds bubbling into aural focus all tied together with an ancient personal story I didn t even know I knew until Hanno played this loop into my ears late one afternoon in his 3rd floor studio. 4:28 David Moss, voice, text, perc., electronics Wittgenstein Sings, 2003 A basic contradiction emerges: Wittgenstein singing? Meanings fragment and reassemble; words and music tumble, touch and transform into vapors. It s a process of chaotic incantation (see accompanying text). - David Moss 2:53 Senga Nengudi (Colorado Springs, CO) Conversations on Being: Jill, 1988 In the late 80s & early 90s, Nengudi created radio performance art in the form of interviews with friends on topics ranging from obsessions to utopian societies. In a tiny apartment brimming with books, the alternating smell of incenses and litter box in the air and little of the hot California sun filtering in, poet Jill shares her personal tale of obsession.*explicit 7:06 Senga Nengudi Doublethink Bulemia: Conversations on Being, 1989 Radio performance art in the form of interviews, in order of appearance: Sunra, George Mingo-vocal, Senga Nengudi Fittz-interviewer, Darryl Sevad- Dr.Fuki and high minister of Bulemia, Danny Davis-music (Sunra Arkestra member), and Kenneth Severin. 7:28 Helen Thorington (New York, NY) 09.11.01 scapes_, 2002 Jo-Anne Green began scapes_ the day the World Trade Center was attacked and continued to add new pages in the aftermath. She used the only medium available to her at the time: Photoshop. Her palette consisted of NASA images of earth, and photographs of diatoms and Ground Zero. Each Scape consists of multiple layers: Thorington used the layers titles, and the texts that accompanied the NASA images to weave her multilayered narrative for the Notes; and much as Green used found pigments, Thorington used found sounds to create the rich soundscore for the series. 16:57 3 4
Helen Thorington North Country, 1996 North Country is a hypertext story about an unidentified woman whose bones were found near a lake in North Country. With a sound score by the author with accordionist Guy Klucsevek.32:09 Helen Thorington Aphids and Others, 2000 Helen Thorington s Aphids and Others is about the reproductive behavior of aphids, snails and octopi, composed in response to public radio s stance on what is and is not suitable for radio. 7:45 David Webber (Lafayette, LA) #99q1 2:54 As an artist, David Webber works primarily with time-based media and interactive installations. At the moment he is developing customized audiovisual performance instruments utilizing galvanic skin resistance and capacitance proximity sensors. David Webber #ExRecM 2:55 David Webber #H1 3:22 Hildegard Westerkamp (Burnaby, British Columbia) Cricket Voice, 1987 A musical exploration of a cricket singing in the stillness of the Zone of Silence in Mexico. The percussive sounds were created by playing on various desert plants and by exploring the resonances in the ruins of an old water reservoir. 10:55 Hildegard Westerkamp Gently Penetrating Beneath the Sounding Surfaces of Another Place, 1997 A sonic journey into the opposites in India of shimmering beauty and pollution grunge, of the extraordinary daily life intensity and the inner radiance, focus and stillness that emanate from deep within the culture and its people. 14:04 Hildegard Westerkamp Talking Rain, 1997 Captured in the raincoast of British Columbia, Canada, Talking Rain refocuses the ear on the sonic formations of rain and the habitations on which it showers. 16:00 Lovely Ways to Burn, 1990 Burned fever memories, for three fuguing voices and saxophone. 27:01 How to Pronounce Prosthesis, 1991 The destiny of a disembody, caged by a language lesson. 4:51 Twilight For Idols, 1989 A requiem for shattered voices. 4:24 Michael Winter Leptons Michael Winter is a sound designer and musician living in New Orleans. He is a graduate of The Recording Workshop and has released two full-length albums available on the Magnanimous Records label. 3:52 Michael Winter Bottom of the Ground 3:18 ARTIST BIOS Since 1971 visual, performance, and media artist, audio composer, writer, director, producer, and educator s diverse artistic career has encompassed a wide range of media and forms multimedia installations, interdisciplinary performance, audio, radio, photography, video, film, artist books, drawings, site specific works, public art projects. Her works have been performed, exhibited, and broadcast in art spaces, galleries, museums, theaters, festivals, on radio and cable TV throughout the United States and Canada, and in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. She is a professor at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA where has she been a faculty member since 1983, and currently teaches modernist cultural history, and performance art. Apple has also published over 200 critical essays and reviews on performance, dance, music, media arts and installation. Lynn Book Lynn Book has a 25 year history of interdisciplinary artistic practice that traverses boundaries between performance art, dance, theater, writing and new music forms. Critics from the New York Times, Village Voice and Chicago Tribune have called her work bold, inspired and unlike anything anyone else is doing. Her diverse works have received citations, fellowships, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, Franklin Furnace, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation funding for the production of a radio drama based upon her performance theater piece, Gorgeous Fever. Book s recent large scale work RE:garding Next, is a collaborative culture project launched in spring 2007 at the SouthEastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC and involves numerous collaborators, most notably, Austrian composer and extended pianist Katharina Klement. Lynn Book founded Voicelab, an educational and cultural organization in New York in 1999 through which she produced emerging artists featuring extended voice in original performances and taught and coached individuals in private practice until 2005. Lynn Book relocated to Winston-Salem, NC in 2005 where she is Director of the Program for Creativity and Innovation with the Office of Entrepreneurship and Liberal Arts and Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Wake Forest University. She continues to serve on the faculty of Transart Institute in Europe where she teaches and advises MFA candidates from around the world. 5 6
Paul Bright Artist Paul Bright began using sound for his work only recently, in 2008, as he expanded his approach to collage. Noticing the sounds in the environments where he collected materials for his physical collages, he thought of similarly using the aural elements to create sound collages. With the advent of small, high resolution digital recorders, he was able to collect sound as spontaneously as torn posters or paper, an important quality for an artist who prizes the dialogue he establishes with the found. He forms the sound collages much like he does his material ones, spontaneously structuring them of discrete parts. They are not intended to be narratives or sound-walks ; they are abstract works built from fragments of the familiar. Bright uses our urge to identify specific sounds as a lure into soundobjects that frustrate that desire for definition and narrative completeness. The sounds remain themselves, but they are relocated into the new context the artist has constructed for them. He has exhibited the sound collages in tandem with material collages in recent exhibitions in Italy and Canada. Since the late 80s, he has shown in numerous venues in Switzerland, Canada, Germany, Italy, and the US. He has also received grants and residencies, in the US and Canada. M.W. Burns M.W. Burns is an audio artist using sound to conceptually activate space. Many of his installations rely on tactics of public address, projecting the voice into existing urban conditions. Other projects integrate pre-recorded sound into an environment, instigating the perception of events taking place. Burns has had solo exhibitions at the TBA Exhibition Space, Chicago; Northern Illinois University Art Museum; Tough, Chicago and the Lab, San Francisco. His sound installations have been included in numerous group exhibitions, including the 2000 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Sound/Video/Film, the Donald Young Gallery; Contextual: Art and Text in Chicago, at the Chicago Cultural Center; Time Arts at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Body at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; and Takeover at the Hyde Park Art Center. Other projects include Sound Canopy, a public sound system supporting audio work created to participate in the urban environment. The Cake Dancers / Philippe Landry Born in Saint Martinville, Louisiana, Philippe Landry is a self-taught composer, multiinstrumentalist, and visual, video, and performance artist. Philippe has collaborated twice with choreographer Paige Krause, composing and performing the music for her large-scale dance-installation piece, I ve Stopped Having That Dream I ve Been Having; it premiered as an excerpt in the spring of 2011 at the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, Louisiana, and was then expanded for a second installment in the fall of 2011. He and the dance collective that he composes for and performs with have been chosen to perform in June at Fringe 2012 in Montreal. Landry also releases music under the name the Cake Dancers, his latest albums being Negro Music, Home Of The Ponies, and Triadic Prelude.. In addition, Philippe has collaborated with visual artist Brian Guidry, exhibiting a mixed media installation at Good Children Gallery in New Orleans, and contributed sound design to visual artist Adrien Price s mixed media installation at Madame John s Legacy as part of the Prospect 1.5 biennial in New Orleans. He has also taken part in the Difficult Music series curated by Maggie McKweon at McKeown s Rare Books & Difficult Music in New Orleans. Philippe also exhibits various performance-based installations, which blend video, sound, and visual art. His work has been discussed in Gambit Weekly. He holds a Bachelors in Anthropology from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and has done graduate-level research on right-wing political culture in early-20th century France, including presenting a paper on culture and nationalism at the Western Society for French History 2010 annual conference. Lou Mallozzi Lou Mallozzi (b. 1957) is an audio artist in Chicago who dismembers and reconstitutes sound, language, gesture, and image in various media. He works in live performance, radio art, sound installation, CD recording, soundtrack design, and visual art. He has presented works at numerous festivals, concerts, galleries, and broadcasts since 1986, including the Bludenz Festival for Contemporary Music (Austria), the TUBE Audio Art Series (Munich), Fylkingen (Stockholm), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), The Fort Wayne Museum of Art (Indiana), Podewil (Berlin), The PAC/edge Performance Festival (Chicago), Aetherfest Radio Art Festival (Albuquerque), The Resonance FM Radio Festival (London), Bayerischer Rundfunk (Munich), The Chicago Cultural Center, The Donald Young Gallery, Corbett vs Dempsey, and many others. He has collaborated with numerous artists in these endeavors, including Sandra Binion, Michael Vorfeld, Mats Gustafsson, Jaap Blonk, Michael Zerang, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Carlos Zingaro, Hal Rammel, Terri Kapsalis, ensemble Intégrales, Guillermo Gregorio, and many others. Mallozzi has received a number of grants and awards for his work, including a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation s Bellagio Study Center in Italy, four Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, and grants from the Driehaus Foundation and the Governor s International Arts Exchange Program. He is the Executive Director of Experimental Sound Studio and teaches in the Sound Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. David Moss David Moss is considered one of the most innovative singers and percussionists in contemporary music. He has performed his solo and theater work all over the world, from New York (Lincoln Center) to Venice (Theatro La Fenice) to Brisbane (Festival). In 1991 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship; in 1992, a DAAD Fellowship (Berlin). Moss has sung with the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle, made his Carnegie Hall debut with the American Composers Orchestra, sings regularly with the Ensenble Modern. He was twice a featured soloist at the Salzburg Festival. He sings in Heiner Goebbels orchestra work Surrogate Cities and music-theater work Prometheus. He was a 2008/09 fellow of the International Research Center Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Moss is the co-founder and artistic director of the Institute for Living Voice, which has conducted master classes, workshops and seminars throughout Europe and in South America and Australia. He was recently appointed guest curator of the MADE Festival in Sweden, and is artistic director of the all-volunteer new-music choir, New Babel Sounds, a project of the Neuköllner Oper, Berlin. He performs with the Berlin-based trance-funk trio, Denseland. 6 7
Senga Nengudi Winner of the 2005-2006 Anonymous Was A Woman Award and the 2005-2006 Louis Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award, Senga Nengudi recently completed an artist residency at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. The resulting solo exhibit Warp Trance was hosted by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. There has been renewed interest in her late 70s Panty Hose Pieces. In September 2003, Nengudi exhibited in a solo show at Thomas Erben Gallery, Repondez S il Vous Plait - The Panty Hose Pieces 1975-77. These seminal pieces first exhibited at Linda Goode-Bryant s legendary Just Above Midtown Gallery in the late 70s demonstrate the toll life may take on the body and the psyche. Born in Chicago, bred in Los Angeles and living in the 70s in New York City with a year of foreign study in Tokyo, Japan, Nengudi presently resides in Colorado. Helen Thorington Thorington is a writer, sound composer, and radio producer, whose radio documentary, dramatic work, and sound/music compositions have been aired nationally and internationally for the past eighteen years. She has also created compositions for film and installation that have been premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial, and in the Whitney Museum s annual Performance series. Thorington is the recipient of a 1995 and 1997 Meet the Composer grant, and Music Commissions (1995 and 1998) from the New York State Council on the Arts. She is a published author and a frequently requested speaker on radio and Internet arts. Thorington is also the Executive Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (aka Ether-Ore), the founder and producer of the national weekly radio series, New American Radio (1989-1998), and founder and producer of the turbulence and somewhere websites. Thorington recently initiated an Online Project to enable arts organizations and artists to produce or participate in the production of online performance events. David Webber Originally from the Philadelphia area, Webber received a BFA (2001) from Tufts University in Medford, MA while concurrently studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, MA. His MFA (2007) in Electronic Integrated Arts was received from Alfred University in Alfred, NY. Webber is now an Assistant Professor of Media Art at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where he teaches video, film, sound, installation and performance art. As an artist, Webber works primarily with time-based media and interactive installations. At the moment he is developing customized audiovisual performance instruments utilizing galvanic skin resistance and capacitance proximity sensors. In his spare time he creates analog synthesizers and makes electro-acoustic music. Hildegard Westerkamp Hildegard Westerkamp lectures on topics of listening, environmental sound and acoustic ecology and she conducts soundscape workshops internationally. By focusing the ears attention to details in the acoustic environment, her compositional work draws attention to the act of listening itself and to the inner, hidden spaces of the environment we inhabit. Her music has been commissioned by CBC Radio, Canada Pavilion at Expo 86, Ars Electronica (Linz), Österreichischer Rundfunk, Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Germany... She received Honorable Mentions in competitions such as Prix Ars Electronica in Austria, Prix Italia, and the International Competition for Electroacoustic Music in Bourges, as well as a Recommendation for Broadcast from the International Music Council s 4th International Rostrum of Electroacoustic Music... Her articles have been published in Radio Rethink, Kunstforum, Musicworks, MusikTexte... For an extensive exploration into her compositional work see Andra McCartney s Sounding Places: Situated Conversations through the Soundscape Work of Hildegard Westerkamp, York University, Toronto, 1999. As part of Vancouver New Music s yearly season she has coordinated and led Soundwalks for the last eight years, which in turn has led to the creation of The Vancouver Soundwalk Collective A founding member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE, see: www. wfae.net), and co-editor of its journal Soundscape, Westerkamp was a researcher for R. Murray Schafer s World Soundscape Project, and she has taught acoustic communication at Simon Fraser University with colleague Barry Truax. is an audio artist, sound poet, media philosopher, and the creator of over two hundred radio plays, essays and acoustic adventures. Spanning four decades, his work represents a deep and sustained exploration of the paradoxes and frictions that make analog radiophonic space so beautifully bewildering. The winner of numerous international awards, including two Sony Gold Academy Awards, Mr. Whitehead is also the co-editor of Wireless Imagination: Sound Radio and the Avant-Garde (MIT Press). Michael Winter Michael Winter is a sound designer and musician living in New Orleans. He is a graduate of The Recording Workshop and has released two full-length albums available on the Magnanimous Records label. From 2000-2004 Webber was Co-founder and Media Director of the Berwick Research Institute, a 501(c)(3) arts space where he curated and produced exhibitions and events. His work has been screened in various exhibitions including LOOP 08, LOOP International Festival for Video Art, Barcelona, Spain; ididx, International Digital In Development Expo Lafayette, LA; DÉRAPAGE 8 Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) - Québec, Canada; Delta International Film and Video Festival, Delta State University, Cleveland, MS; and The Crackpot Theorists and Terminal Technology Show MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA. 8 9
THE VAULT: A PRIMER To access Breaking the Sound Barrier, press the menu button until you are at the main menu. Press the next or previous buttons to select Music. All sound art is found there. THANKS SPACES would like to thank Valerie Brodar for her assistance in assembling this great group of artists for The Vault. We would also like to thank the artists for their willingness to participate in our program. The Vault functions as a media flat file a converted walk-in safe where audiences can experience a variety of video and audio art. Work will be added to the The Vault on a rolling basis, remain on view for approximately six months and then rotate out. Viewers have the remote control in their hands to select the work they would like to experience. Major support for SPACES comes from Toby Devan Lewis, the John P. Murphy Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the following: The George Gund Foundation The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Additional support comes from James S. Anderson and David W. Wittkowsky, Dodd Camera and Video, Donna and Stewart Kohl, and Process Creative Studios. Large print available at the front desk. 2012