Looking back at debates on the visionary potential of freely structured sounds from the ‘tween-decks of the computer almost evokes a sense of nostalgia. Roughly a decade ago, new polarisations emerged on the map of strands in contemporary music. The routes that various innovations stemming from improvised music, compositional modernism and disparate spheres of pop subculture followed led into a scarcely mapped aesthetic terrain that bore the mark of the digital era. At the same time, the technological quantum leap at the end of the 20th century brought about opportunities to move beyond discourses on sound and contemporary music, for it had become possible to connect these on the hard disc with visual concepts from a fine art context or to construct reference systems with parameters derived from architecture. The log-in button carried listeners into aesthetic interstices without any need to draw on the monstrous mainframes at Paris’ IRCAM or Berlin’s Technical University;. Sound had become one conceptual starting point amongst many.
Production processes based on the digital matrix generated a counterpoint in the realm of the new media culture to classical forms of Sound Art, which, due to its historical development arose from genre-crossover between the fine arts and sound generation. In his recently published book »Sound Art. Beyond Music, Between Categories« (2007), experimental musician and author Alan Licht recalls the role John Cage played in this process. With his practice of performing in public contexts and the way in which he constantly broadened the notion of sound, Cage acquired a status within music paralleling that of Marcel Duchamp in the art world. Cage played a pivotal part in formulating the underpinnings of Sound Art through a broad range of cooperations, for example with Merce Cunningham, through his happenings and by transposing the intellectual construct of notions related to the term »readymade« to noises and sounds.
In the light of the various, often mutually exclusive concepts of artists from the Fluxus context, such as La Monte Young or Jean Tinguely right through to Bill Fontana, Gary Hill, Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, Bernhard Leitner, Laurie Anderson or Christian Marclay, it is not possible to identify a common centre of gravity within this catch-all term where all the echoes of these players would converge. Even categories such as field recording, minimal music, machine art or sound objects would be too reductionist to seize the finely branching discourses, for these discourses are always intermingled with sometimes diverging developments in the world of visual arts. At most a further historical connection to the past could be established through the postulate, formulated by F. W. J. Schelling in the 19th century, that genres in art have collapsed. From the bird’s-eye perspective of the present, the only reliable leitmotif linking the conceptual universes of Sound Art is the common use throughout almost all works of analogue control mechanisms and sound generation apparatus in the form of installations or traditional musical instruments.
At least it is true to say that this connecting element became a distinctive central feature when the cross-references between visually oriented aspects and sound suddenly shifted to the level of binary codes and experienced a heyday under the label »New Electronic Art«. In one fell swoop the old docking sites had begun to crumble. Electronic and Sound Art were separated by a divide as deep as the one that previously lay between fine art photography and painting. Meanwhile, focusing on the intersection of overlapping interferences from the worlds of digital culture, media art and electronic music, exhibitions such as »Sonic Boom« (2000) in London’s Hayward Gallery, »sounds&files« at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna, »Frequenzen« (Hz) in Frankfurt’s Schirn (2002) or »Sonic Process« at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2003) attempted to depict the take-off.
Aeons of successive waves of upgrading of media formats and technology seem to have passed since then. Developments originally acclaimed as a digital revolution became constrained by the straitjacket of the real-time society, still haggling over nanoseconds and terabytes even in the flush of victory. Whilst the way is paved for the move to Web 3.0, in everyday life text-messages take the place of mobile phones, to eliminate the bothersome interruptions to the man-machine connection with the MP3 player. In the process, the digital technocracy leaves little scope for critical practice.
Against this backdrop Sound Art projects are emerging from their period of recession. Artists such as Nikolaus Gansterer and the Institut für transakustische Forschung (Institute for Transacoustic Research) or Matthias Makowsky and Lukas Galehr research the roots of the genesis of sound or explore prospects shaped by Futurists in Luigi Russolo’s circle in 1920s Europe. Away from ideological battles over the hegemony of electronic culture, here and there exhibitions on Klangkunst (the German-language tradition of the art of sound) or Sound Art have made their own idiosyncratic mark. Only last winter Klangkunst curator Georg Weckwerth, presenting 15 Sound Art positions from the last few years in what is known as the open-space slot in Vienna’s Museumsquartier in the show »Tonspur_expanded: Vom Klang der Kunst« (»Tonspur_expanded: The Sound of Art«), succeeded in creating a sense of deceleration whilst casting a tight-meshed net of complex nexuses of meaning.
Weckwerth, who was involved in devising the concept for the Berlin exhibition projekts »Klangkunst« to mark the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Academy of the Arts back in 1996 and curates »Sonambiente«, the festival of vision and sound held there, incorporated a number of Berlin-based projects into the Vienna show. This created an intersection between Berlin’s production environment and »Tonspur«, the series of sound installations also curated by Weckwerth in the Museumsquartier.
The project-based character of the presentation’s setting in quartier 21, which is structured as a kind of experimental forecourt mosaic to the major institutions in the Museumsquartier, makes the exhibition »The Sound of Art« plausible as an acyclical concretion contrasting with the series of highly distinctive individual events in this venue. Part of the show comprised Sound Art classics, such as Achim Wollscheid’s sound box one might think of as a wooden MP3 player for field recordings or Carsten Nicolai’s 1998 »bausatz noto ∞« made up of four Technics turntables and an associated set of discs. The latter piece has been exhibited constantly over the past few years parallel to the process of digitalisation. Like an indicator of the passage of time, Nicolai’s usable object now testifies to former modes of sound activation. It functions similarly to Uwe Bressnik’s DJ deck »Bressniks 1210« with reference to DJ culture; in its use of wood and moss, this piece also focuses attention on the transience of equipment originally imbued with cultic significance.
Both objects bear witness to scenarios of transition and at the same time create an awareness of the haptic character and narrative qualities of Sound Art installations, which can be read in counterpoint to the virtual nature of the electronic realm nowadays. However, he technical transformation of the means of production has however brought about fundamental changes even in Sound Art objects made of apparently trivial materials; in addition to Wollscheid’s »Holz-Soundgenerator« (»Wooden Sound Generator«), this also holds true of Via Lewandowsky’s ironically political souvenir-kitsch cuckoo clock, which plays the voice of a muezzin. Below the ceiling of the exhibition space Jakob Scheid creates a striking piece with five interacting violin machines, evocative of speedy yet improvised cable cars, which play complex polyphonies based on intricate digital control systems, whilst Kris Vleeschouwer’s installation set up in the Freiraum exhibition space as an immersive piece draws attention to the constant smashing of glass bottles.
Structured a kind of selective positioning, the exhibition »The Sound of Art« functions as an experiment in developing a sharper focus on a cross-section encompassing various forms of Sound Art from the last few years created by artists from very different production backgrounds.
Projects such as these are however also part of a sphere which just a few years ago largely ignored euphoric discourses on New Electronic Art. A phase of recession seems to have emerged in the aftermath of the analysis of the machine component in the »Clicks&Cuts« movement, which took digital means of production as its topic, and in the wake of explorations of abstraction and minimalism in the realm of digital culture. What has been missing so far is further examination of potential algorithmic linkages between architecture, sound and image on the map of continuing digitalisation.

»Vom Klang der Kunst« (»The Sound of Art«) could be seen and heard from 11th January to 24th February 2008 at Freiraum, Museumsquartier, Vienna.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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