A Weird Art Piece That Made Different Sounds When Struck
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Over the past twoscore years "sound art" has been hailed as a new artistic category in numerous writings, yet one of its start significant exhibitions is mentioned only in passing, if at all. The start example of the hybrid term audio art used as the title of an exhibition at a major museum was Sound Art at the Museum of Mod Fine art in New York (MoMA), shown from 25 June to 5 August 1979. Although this was not marketed as a feminist exhibition, curator Barbara London selected three women to exemplify the new grade. Maggi Payne created multi-speaker works that utilized infinite in a sculptural fashion; Connie Beckley combined language and sounding sculptural objects, showing sound in both a conceptual and physical manifestation; and Julia Heyward'southward piece of work used aspects of feminist performance art including music, narrative, and the vocalism in social club to buck abstract aesthetics of the time. This paper uses archival research, interviews, and analysis of work presented to reconstruct the exhibition and describe the obstacles both the artists and the curator encountered. The paper further provides context in the lives of the artists and the curator equally well equally the surrounding artistic scene, and ultimately exposes the discriminatory reasons this of import exhibition has been marginalized in the electric current discourse.
When did the "sound fine art" movement commencement? Numerous theorists and historians have addressed this question through the years, creating histories and definitions, or carefully avoiding both while at the same time positing various examples of the course. But if we simply look at the employ of the term itself (as used to define a blazon of artwork of the 20th century), information technology was non, every bit several writers take stated, invented by Canadian Dan Landers in the 1980s, nor did information technology begin with William Hellerman's Sound/Fine art exhibition at New York'due south Sculpture Center in 1983, as has been stated on Wikipedia for a few years. 1,2 In reference to the Landers merits, Christof Migone has said "naming does non necessarily coincide with the incipience of the activity existence named." 3 Maybe not always, but in the instance of "sound art," the timeline of the name corresponds to the solidification of this broad category, every bit long as you discover the existent offset.
Co-ordinate to mutual lore the term sound art began to be used loosely in the avant-garde scene in the 1970s to depict sound-based work that wasn't typical music. At that time, the term sound fine art was used interchangeably with other terms such as sonic art, audio art, audio verse, sound sculpture, and experimental music (to name a few). iv
In 1974, Something Else Press, which had been publishing texts and artworks by Fluxus-related artists throughout the 1960s, issued i of their final editions called Something Else Yearbook 1974. It contains a vast number of texts and artworks by numerous artists from various realms of experimental arts ranging from obscure to more well-known names (either then or after), such equally Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, John Giorno, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, and Wolf Vostell. It includes sound poet Bernhard Heidsick's THE Week (passe-partout) No. five (1971) (created from a transcription of brusque tape recordings of people reading the time on the radio), Fluxus creative person Eric Andersen'due south SINE NOMINE (1961/63) audition participation piece of work that incorporates musical terms and a metronome, and the text scores of groundbreaking works I am sitting in a room (1969) by Alvin Lucier and Sonic Meditations (1971) by Pauline Oliveros. The front cover of the book gives a list of terms describing the contents, such every bit "poetry," "prose," and "notations" in addition to more fanciful ideas including "things seen," "unspeakables," and "laughter." At the very height of the list a new category is described in one of the earliest published instances of the term: "sound art." v,six
One of the first artists who is documented as having used the term sound art to describe his genre was Max Neuhaus, virtually well known for his 1977 piece Times Square in which a sound drones and resonates 24/7 underneath a grate in Times Square. vii In a 1979 typhoon document in the Neuhaus archives at Columbia University he uses the term audio fine art as an umbrella term nether which he uses audio installation equally a subcategory. 8 In an interview past Lynne Cooke in 1977 apropos his piece Times Foursquare, Neuhaus categorizes himself equally a audio artist when he states, "I am an artist and I deal with sound. Traditionally sound artists have been called composers, but that has a tremendous amount of restrictions effectually it, not just in the kinds of audio materials, but (besides in) the sequence of sounds. It's a very limited term considering music is really very much involved with its past." 9 Merely testify of his utilise of the term goes back even earlier. In a 9 December 1973 interview with reporter Ernest Leogrande in the New York Sunday News (later on to get absorbed by the New York Daily News) in reference to Neuhaus'south piece Walk Through, Leogrand says Neuhaus is using the term sound sculpture and refers to him maxim he has other "sound-fine art sitting in one place" when he talks about Bulldoze-In Music. Leogrande also calls Neuhaus a "sound creative person" in the captions underneath photos of Neuhaus installing Walk Through. It is highly unlikely that Ernest Leogrande, a generic arts reporter roofing everything from movies to disco clubs for a tabloid paper, would have been so aware to have been familiar with esoteric terms used in advanced circles such as audio sculpture or sound art; instead it seems obvious Leogrande was transcribing terms used past Neuhaus. 10 By 2000 Neuhaus had disavowed the term sound art, but throughout the 1970s he seemed quite comfy with information technology. eleven
The first case of the hybrid term sound art used as the title of an exhibition at a major museum was 1979's Audio Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA). The young curator, Barbara London (b. 1946), made a signal of providing a concise definition of the new form in the press release for the exhibition:
"Sound art" pieces are more than closely centrolineal to fine art than to music, and are usually presented in the museum, gallery, or culling space. 12
Her definition thus narrows the scope of what tin can be called "audio art" based on the situation of the work both physically and categorically.
In early 1970s London was curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at MoMA, and she "became absorbed in how artists stretched and manipulated time." 13 She was an abet of video fine art at the museum, leading to its starting time acquisition of artists' videos in 1975. 14 Notably, the artists she cites equally early influences such as Nam June Paik and Steina Vasulka saw video art every bit an outgrowth and holistic form of music rather than coming from moving-picture show. 15 In March 1978, afterwards she had get a curator in the Department of Film, London started a serial of talks that featured even more than video artists with connections to the reexamination of sound in a visual arts context, including Vito Acconci, Bill Viola, and Robert Ashley. 16
In tardily 1978, London curated an exhibition of Laurie Anderson's Handphone Table (1978) installation. 17 In this piece, the visitor sits at a simple wooden table with their elbows on the tabular array to support their head (every bit i would do when tired). A transducer is vibrating the tabular array with sound, and when the elbows are rested on the table the sound vibrates the human arm bones and travels to the visitor's ears. eighteen London notes in her essay "From Video to Intermedia: A Personal History" that in the 1970s she saw the new affordability of technology as a vehicle that allowed women to circumvent the organisation. She saw this breakdown of traditional fine art do (including reception and circulation) as an opportunity for the rise of female artists. xix Thus she saw sound in a gallery context, such equally with Anderson's Handphone Table, as expanding the minds of audiences while also challenging the limits of institutions. 20 In this context she curated her Audio Art exhibition in Baronial and September of 1979. 21
The exhibition was held in a minor gallery (the Auditorium Gallery, thus named because it was adjacent to the auditorium) in the basement of MoMA. 22,23 As it would not work to show three sound works concurrently, each piece was featured for two weeks of the six-week run of the exhibition. 24 While the exhibition was never promoted every bit featuring "women artists," London chose simply women artists for the bear witness. Considering that for decades information technology had been common to exhibit only male artists, one could come across this curatorial conclusion equally a feminist statement in itself. The iii artists chosen to be featured were Maggi Payne, Connie Beckley, and Julia Heyward. All were under 35 years quondam at the time. 25 Following is some background of each artist upwardly to the point of the 1979 exhibition, and descriptions of the works they presented.
Maggi Payne
Every bit an adolescent, Maggi Payne (b. 1945) was a precocious flautist with an interest in sound technology, inspired by an expensive Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder purchased for her when she was 11 by her engineering science hobbyist father. 26,27 As a higher undergraduate in music at Northwestern Academy, her talent as a flautist landed her session gigs at professional person recording studios in nearby Chicago. Afterwards the recording sessions the audio engineers generously answered her many questions concerning the equipment. 28,29 She attended graduate schoolhouse at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she began her formal studies of electronic music. After this she pursued a second master'south in the newly established Electronic Music and Recording Media program at Mills College in Oakland, California. 30
Payne had been fascinated with sound and space since growing up in the High Plains of Texas. 31 She had always felt express by mono and stereo recordings and thought they lacked "the richness of the acoustical complexity that the natural world presents." 32 She became aware of spatial composition and multispeaker work while an undergraduate at Northwestern University. 33 Spatialized electronic music was nonetheless a relatively new form at the time, the most well-known bookish pieces up to that point being Karlheinz Stockhausen's quadraphonic version of Kontakte from 1958 and Edgard Varese'southward 400-speaker Poeme Electronique from the 1959 Earth's Off-white.
Shortly afterward Payne arrived at Mills Higher in 1970, the electronic music studio was updated to feature a iv-aqueduct tape machine and iv speakers, which allowed her to begin working with spatialized audio. By 1973 she premiered her kickoff quadraphonic compositions at Mills. 34 Later graduation she remained at Mills as their studio engineer for several years, 35 and information technology was during this flow that she was invited to participate in the MoMA Audio Fine art exhibition, via her instructor and colleague Robert Ashley'south associations with Barbara London at MoMA. 36 Maggi Payne proposed two quadraphonic works to be presented at MoMA, an 8-minute piece called Lunar Dusk (1979) and a nearly 13-minute piece called Lunar Earthrise (1978). They were created and presented in concert at Mills College prior to London's request, thus not specifically created for MoMA. 37,38
Payne used Moog and Aries synthesizers for the source material, which allowed careful command of every nuance of the audio. She carefully recorded ane rails at a time (with the tracks later translated to channel/speaker), eventually building upwardly every bit many as 20 tracks in some sections. She utilized pitch matching, pitch angle, and phase shifting betwixt the tracks to heighten the feeling of sound movement. She employed complex variation in sound spectrum over fourth dimension to highlight motility of sound through space. 39 In reference to her quadraphonic work Payne said (in an interview past composer Emma Lou Deimer):
…many of my ideas are visually oriented. I visualized the audio equally coming from, say, a signal source below where one is standing and might try to make it swirl out and up into an ever-expanding spiral until information technology disappears over the listener'south head… 40
Despite Barbara London'south requesting four speakers for the installation, the museum purchased a Technics cassette deck for the exhibition that could just play stereo recordings. 41,42 Payne thinks one reason for the alter to stereo was considering the Technics cassette deck had the ability to automatically rewind the tape upon completion, allowing a "looping" of the recordings (and thus not requiring manual monitoring of the exhibition by staff). 43 Luckily, Payne already had made both quadraphonic and stereo versions of the piece when she created information technology (as quadraphonic setups are unusual), and thus she was able to immediately provide the stereo version. 44,45
Both Lunar Sunset and Lunar Earthrise had a visual component. In concert performances of Lunar Dusk Payne presented slides of oscilloscope images that she had created, and for Lunar Earthrise she presented abstruse slides. 46 Payne says:
Using my Minolta SRT 102 camera I took 35mm slides of the Tektronix 502A dual trace oscilloscope that displayed images that I created using the Moog IIIP. The images that were displayed were, however, not direct related to the sounds I created for Lunar Dusk since the images required very stable audio signals rather than the constantly changing audio signals needed for the sounds. I besides shot abstract images for Lunar Earthrise using my Minolta SRT 102 35mm photographic camera. I placed dissimilar colored gels on the face up of the oscilloscope to change the color from its green cast to a variety of dissimilar colors. 47
Figure ane.
Maggi Payne with sound and video equipment, 1981. Photograph was taken when Payne was editing her work Circular Motions (1981) which was created using Ed Tannenbaum'southward self-designed and -built digital video processor and his Fairlight CVI (reckoner video musical instrument), a further evolution of her ideas first used in Lunar Dusk (1979) and Lunar Earthrise (1978). Photo credit: Nick Bertoni (1981).
Figure 1.
Maggi Payne with sound and video equipment, 1981. Photograph was taken when Payne was editing her work Circular Motions (1981) which was created using Ed Tannenbaum'southward cocky-designed and -built digital video processor and his Fairlight CVI (figurer video musical instrument), a further development of her ideas outset used in Lunar Sunset (1979) and Lunar Earthrise (1978). Photo credit: Nick Bertoni (1981).
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However, these visual components were non included in the MoMA exhibition. Payne says she never proposed the visual components to Barbara London considering London had asked just for audio, and she speculates that the fact that slides would have required additional oversight may have deterred her from mentioning them. 48 It is worth noting that these works did indeed have a secondary visual component that could have supported the sound textile, literally a visual image of the sound itself.
Figure 2.
Connie Beckley, Balancing Scale (1978), exhibited at PS1, Brooklyn, NY, February 1978. Copyright Connie Beckley, 1978.
Figure 2.
Connie Beckley, Balancing Scale (1978), exhibited at PS1, Brooklyn, NY, February 1978. Copyright Connie Beckley, 1978.
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Connie Beckley
Connie Beckley's (b. 1951) work also had an interest in spatialization of sound, but information technology was more related to physical materials. Beckley had equal interest in both music and art from a young historic period. 49 She received a bachelor of science in music educational activity with a major in voice from Due west Chester University in Pennsylvania in 1973. l She moved to New York City later that same year. 51 Her older brother, conceptual artist Bill Beckley, had come to New York Metropolis iii years before and was 1 of the founding artists (along with Gordon Matta-Clark, Dennis Oppenheim, and others) of SoHo's 112 Greene Street. 52 Beckley says at the fourth dimension she was somewhat influenced past this scene but more significantly by the work of the experimental painter Lucio Pozzi. She was a vocalist in the Philip Glass Ensemble, and she appeared in the 1976 production of Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, which she says had the biggest bear upon on her artistically. 53
By the late seventies Beckley was gaining notoriety for her own work, but writers and reviewers struggled to categorize it. She presented sound supported by visual media in a gallery context, sometimes as installation, other times equally performance that examined sonic concepts, and often with the 2 in tandem. By June of 1979, in a New York Times review of her sound installation The Pendulum shown jointly with her performance Walking Through, John Rockwell called her "i of our finest sound artists." 54
Her sound installation works of that period were concerned with spatialization of sound and other acoustics concepts as office of an expression of visual space. 55,56 Beckley'southward sound installation Triad Triangle, presented at PS1 in 1977, was a 2-channel work created with sound and calorie-free, utilizing the shadows of the speakers themselves as part of the work, with dissimilar material coming out of the two speakers set widely autonomously. 57,58 In her work Balancing Calibration, shown at PS1 in 1978, she hung ii electric organs from the ceiling with Grand major and Yard minor chords on the respective organs permanently depressed, hooking them upward to a circuit breaker that switched every 5 seconds and then but one would play at a time, constantly modulating from major to minor and at the aforementioned fourth dimension shifting audio location. 59 The Notation, the slice she presented at London'south Audio Art exhibition, was office of that same series of works. 60 The Notation was the only one of the iii pieces presented at the Sound Art exhibition that had a visual component. 61
On a plinth on one side of a dimly lit room, a large translucent glass bottle with a wide torso and small opening was turned on its side. An oblong sound commuter—that is, a speaker without its housing—was inside the canteen. The driver was far larger than the opening of the bottle, and then it's mysterious how it could have been placed inside. A wire attached to the driver came out of the opening of the bottle to attach to the playback device, which was discreetly hidden. There was sand both inside the bottle beneath the driver and covering the meridian of the plinth underneath the canteen. 62
A single conventional speaker was mounted on the other side of the room. There were two different tracks of sound fabric, panned hard right and difficult left. Showtime one would hear a woman reading a alphabetic character in the room speaker, while the driver within the bottle played a recording of the song "Ebb Tide." To hear "Ebb Tide" in this circumstance one must put 1'due south ear to the opening of the bottle. When the woman finishes reading the letter of the alphabet, the song, at present at its lyrical climax, slowly transitions over to only the wall-mounted speaker to complete the vocal. In the meantime, the woman reads the same alphabetic character again, but now simply projected through the driver inside the canteen. When the song finishes, one only hears the very placidity muffled sound of the adult female reading the letter inside the bottle. When she completes the letter there is a brusque pause, and so the process begins again, with the adult female reading in the wall-mounted speaker and the music in the canteen. This continues through six cycles, each with a different letter and a different version of the song "Ebb Tide" garnered from diverse vocal and instrumental releases of the tune from the 1950s and '60s. 63,64 Music is a textile in this artwork rather than the artwork itself, a notable characteristic of works designated as "sound art" even to this day.
All the letters are read by the same impassive monotone female person vocalisation; all the same, the nature of the text doesn't point the gender of either the reader or the supposed recipient. Though it is evident the alphabetic character writer has had some previous encounter with the person being written to, the letters all point that whomever is being written to is unresponsive. In the sequence they appear on the recording, equally the letter writer continues to receive no response, the messages become more and more desperate, beginning to border on the obsessively frightening in the 5th letter when the letter writer says:
Figure 3.
Connie Beckley, The Note (1979) (side view), Museum of Modern Art Sound Art exhibition, July/Baronial 1979. Photo credit: Shigeo Anzai (1979).
Figure 3.
Connie Beckley, The Annotation (1979) (side view), Museum of Modernistic Fine art Sound Art exhibition, July/August 1979. Photo credit: Shigeo Anzai (1979).
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Figure 4.
Connie Beckley, The Note (1979) (front view), Museum of Modern Art Sound Art exhibition, July/August 1979. Photo credit: Shigeo Anzai (1979).
Figure 4.
Connie Beckley, The Note (1979) (front view), Museum of Modern Art Sound Art exhibition, July/August 1979. Photo credit: Shigeo Anzai (1979).
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Sometimes, I must acknowledge, I have doubts that you are receiving my messages and and then I become anguished, for how could you know how much you lot still hateful to me? Mayhap you lot are fifty-fifty wondering why you aren't hearing from me and you doubt nigh my dear for y'all. Oh that is the most painful thought of all, for I would rather destroy myself than bring an ounce of hurt to you. I suppose that is why I must insist to myself that information technology will just be a affair of days or perhaps hours until I volition receive give-and-take from you that yous dearest me, that you're on your way habitation, and that I should prepare to be together with you for a long fourth dimension. 65
The letter of the alphabet is read twice, in one case projected from the wall speaker and once played within the bottle. 66 In between the duplicate readings, the vocal "Ebb Tide" climaxes out of the wall speaker into the room with the lovers connecting and the lyrics:
At last nosotros're face to face
And equally nosotros kiss through an embrace
I can tell, I can feel
You are love, you are real. 67
In the final alphabetic character, the letter author speculates about giving up hope that the recipient will respond, but convinces her- or himself to go on hoping. 68 At that point the tape would rewind and the slice would begin once more. 69
Connie Beckley explains the symbolism in her installation notes to Barbara London for the piece. The speaker in the canteen represents a message in a bottle. The message is being sent, but non received. Also, a message in a bottle is thrown into the sea and taken out with the tide, which connects to the song "Ebb Tide" likewise equally the sand on the plinth. The ellipsoidal commuter is ship-like, resembling a transport in a bottle. seventy
Sound is the cornerstone of this work, both physically and conceptually, with the visual image just providing a supporting part. The naked driver literally exposes the disembodied sound, which parallels many aspects of the text, including that the players are literally disembodied in that nosotros merely hear the letters read, presumably by a second political party, and we have no response from the other. We don't fifty-fifty know the gender of the players.
Julia Heyward
Sound becomes physical in the work of Julia Heyward (b. 1949). 71 She was built-in in Due north Carolina, the child of a Protestant minister. 72,73 She graduated with a BFA in painting from Washington University in St. Louis in 1972. The post-obit year she moved to New York City to nourish the Whitney Contained Study Program and became involved in the blossoming downtown performance art scene. 74 Simultaneous with her performance career in New York City she was pursuing an MFA in electronic arts at Rennselaer Polytechnic, a degree she finished in 1979, the same yr equally the Audio Art exhibition. 75
Heyward's functioning work from the seventies migrates freely between spoken word, music, and theater, after melding this work into video art, nigh always revolving around deeper examinations of sound and music. Notwithstanding, her work from this period has a highly mystical and emblematic quality, and so while texts are used, literal meanings are difficult or even impossible to untangle.
Figure 5.
Julia Heyward, Franklin Furnace, April 26, 1977. Jay Sanders describes her use of the pulsate as follows: "The primary prop was a white "north drum," a curved plastic marching drum, that, depending on Heyward's date with it, became a periscope for an unseen submarine, male person and/or female genitals, or just a percussion instrument." 76 Photo credit: From a performance by Julia Heyward and Paula Longendyke, (Pocket-sized Eyes, Frogman Story) at Franklin Furnace on April 26, 1977. Photo by Franklin Furnace; courtesy of Franklin Furnace.
Figure v.
Julia Heyward, Franklin Furnace, April 26, 1977. Jay Sanders describes her employ of the drum as follows: "The primary prop was a white "north pulsate," a curved plastic marching drum, that, depending on Heyward's engagement with it, became a periscope for an unseen submarine, male and/or female genitals, or just a percussion instrument." 76 Photograph credit: From a functioning past Julia Heyward and Paula Longendyke, (Small Eyes, Frogman Story) at Franklin Furnace on April 26, 1977. Photograph by Franklin Furnace; courtesy of Franklin Furnace.
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Information technology is unclear exactly what Julia Heyward presented at the Audio Art exhibition. The program lists a piece called Organ Grinder, merely sound documentation of the exhibition in the MoMA athenaeum contains four other works. 77,78 Heyward says she has no recollection of what was exhibited. 79,80 Barbara London believes Organ Grinder was played. 81 A music video of a slice entitled Organ Grinder was part of Heyward'southward 360 "video album" from 1981 in which she performs a monologue near a car crash, calling it a "human organ grinder," interspersed with video and audio of a male person musician dressed in classic organ grinder attire and playing a barrel organ. Only London's description of Organ Grinder in the programme for Sound Art in 1979 doesn't mention a butt organ or the content of the text: "In Organ Grinder, Julia Heyward combines a monologue with notes from a toy music box to create an eerie surround." 82 (This author does not hear the sound of a music box in the Organ Grinder department of the 360 video.) Nor does London'due south description of Organ Grinder in the program match any of the fabric in the MoMA archive. Further disruptive matters, Heyward's titles were oft repurposed in various iterations of a work, or even applied after to seemingly disparate material. In the plan for the exhibition, the length of Organ Grinder is listed at 12 minutes, which interestingly is the aforementioned length of the combined four pieces in the MoMA archive. At that place exists the possibility that Heyward could have referred to the four pieces as Organ Grinder in that context, although they still don't match the description in the program and printing release. 83,84
What is absolutely articulate is that the recording was played into the empty gallery room at MoMA via stereo speakers with no visual textile. 85
The first recording on the MoMA documentation is extracted from a live consequence during which Heyward performed her slice Keep Moving Buddy, in which she uses a harmonizer to procedure her vocalism during an unaccompanied monologue. 86,87,88 (A harmonizer is a type of pitch shifter that combines the "shifted" pitch with the original pitch. It was intended to create harmonies, but whatever interval could be called, and intervals could be varied and manipulated in real time.)
In Go along Moving Buddy Heyward uses the harmonizer to give her voice a loftier-pitched, childlike quality; she tells a story virtually an imaginary time to come where in that location are no animals, and various groups ally themselves with extinct animate being species and fight each other. In addition to her sound processing, references to sound include vocally elaborating on homonyms with the words coup (equally in seizure of regime power) and coo (as in the sound of a dove), demonstrating a type of futuristic birdcall and talking about a rabbit-affiliated group that possesses a skill she mysteriously calls "aggressive hearing." 89
Keep Moving Buddy is approximately six minutes long. This is followed by three other pieces that segue into each other, in which Heyward both speaks and sings, accompanied by percussion and instruments. These pieces besides involve some extended vocalizing and onomatopoeia. These last three pieces altogether comprise another half dozen minutes of textile. xc
In the plan for the Audio Art exhibition Barbara London states:
While aural and visual elements are combined in videotapes, performances, and installations, the nowadays exhibition is representative of works in which recorded sound is the major component. 91
Withal, particularly with Julia Heyward'due south work, the visual image is typically a necessary means for the examination of audio. Heyward's God Talks from 1976 demonstrates this perfectly, using ventriloquism as both a critique of religious mandates and our ain inner voices. With an audio-only recording you would not see Heyward's frozen face as she throws her vocalisation. 92,93
Heyward'south 360 from 1981 (containing the only existing recording of a work of hers entitled Organ Grinder) was a 46 minute video featuring ten songs/performance works created in collaboration with well-known rock musicians, including Jody Harris of The Contortions and Don Christensen of Bush Tetras. It features Heyward throughout, singing and monologuing, melded with surreal imagery, electronic processing, and word play characteristic of her performance work. The intent was that the "album" would be distributed exclusively on the new video disc format that ostensibly was going to replace sound-only formats. As the medium was a failure, the album was never released. 94 All the same, this situation again underlines Heyward'southward need to take a visual component to her sound-focused creations in order to fully convey her creative ideas.
Figure 6.
Video still from the Keep Moving Buddy segment of Julia Heyard'southward 360 (1981) "video anthology." Used courtesy of Experimental Arts Intermix.
Figure 6.
Video withal from the Go along Moving Buddy segment of Julia Heyard's 360 (1981) "video album." Used courtesy of Experimental Arts Intermix.
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In the Audio Fine art exhibition, Barbara London stakes out iii main tributaries of the large and murky flow of what was then and has since then been called "audio art": (one) audio sculpture/installation via the visual art tradition, oft with music used only as a component in a larger examination of sound, (2) multispeaker audio installation via the academic music tradition, as a fashion to create an immersive audio feel outside the concert hall, (3) operation presented in a visual arts context with a focus on sound, such as sound verse, sound performance, and various multimedia forms. While London pops these into a fiddling gallery space in the basement of ane of the almost influential museums in the world, it's credible that the theory reaches beyond merely "sound in a gallery." Fifty-fifty the exhibition itself chafed at the limitations, i.e. MoMA's failure to provide four speakers for Maggi Payne'southward piece and London's choice not to show video or performance by Julia Heyward, perhaps to avoid its being misunderstood every bit something other than "sound fine art" by viewers and/or colleagues. 95
London says that she was interested in featuring female artists at the exhibition, simply both Beckley and Payne say they have no recollection of the exhibition beingness pitched equally "women's fine art" or any kind of feminist exhibition, and there is zip written in the promotional materials framing this equally "art past women." 96,97,98 London saw a form in which women were finally finding equal representation. At that place was no need to marginalize the exhibition by ad it every bit representative of gender. These were simply three strong young artists spearheading a new direction in art. London states this most eloquently herself when reflecting on the 1979 Sound Art exhibition in 2013:
The impetus for the exhibition came from the artists, who, with their countercultural convictions, were committed to working in a medium that went confronting the grain. Sonic work then had a candor, a do-information technology-yourself sense of experimentation. It bankrupt new ground, pushing the capabilities of institutions willing to exhibit it and the sensory thresholds and understanding of audiences who were curious to experience information technology. 99
In the past 20 years, numerous books have been published about the background and development of the "audio art" movement and in some cases, what is and is not "audio art." In 2013 Barbara London curated the big Soundings exhibition at MoMA, touted as "MoMA'south first major exhibition of sound art" featuring "work by 16 of the most innovative contemporary artists working with sound". 100 London notes the connectedness between the exhibition discussed in this paper and the Soundings exhibition when she says Soundings is "…the realization of a longstanding commitment to bring sound works past artists into the Museum. It began in 1979 with Sound Fine art.…" 101 (Later on she goes on to briefly describe the Sound Art exhibition.) But to date, with the exception of Barbara London'southward catalogue, all published books discussing the history and groundwork of "sound art" either don't mention the Sound Fine art exhibition at MoMA in 1979 or mention information technology only in passing. 102 Why?
It can't exist because the artists faded to obscurity. All of the artists remained active, exhibiting, performing, and winning awards for decades that followed. Both Beckley and Heyward won Guggenheim Fellowships in the 1990s. Maggi Payne figures prominently in most feminist literature on electronic music. Julia Heyward is a fixture in the history of performance art and was part of the Rituals of Rented Island retrospective at the Whitney in 2013. Connie Beckley was featured in most major exhibitions of the form nosotros now call "sound fine art" from the late 1970s through the 1980s, and she has continued to be exhibited internationally ever since. Through the years all have continued to examine sound concepts in their work in much the same fashion they did in 1979's Sound Fine art exhibition.
In the catalog for Soundings in 2013, an essay by Anne Hilde Neset ruminates over the historical events leading upward to the "sound art" movement and briefly brings up Michael Nyman'southward 1975 book Experimental Music, a definitive text for word of composers such as John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Christian Wolff, Steve Reich, Alvin Lucier, LaMonte Young, and fifty-fifty Fluxus artists such equally George Brecht. Neset notes that the book does not discuss a single woman composer. 103 She then states, "Histories of sound art and the theories that are developing from them are helping to spread awareness…of pioneering women artists and composers who have been written out of music histories." 104 But if that is so, where are Connie Beckley, Julia Heyward, and Maggi Payne?
Many books published from the early 2000s to the present about "audio fine art" in the 1960s and 1970s describe a line from the "experimental music" composers in Nyman's book, besides as minimalist and conceptualist visual artists, to the new "sound fine art" form. 105 Robert Morris'south Box with the Audio of Its Own Making (1961), a plain wooden box with a recording of the box existence made playing back inside, has been mentioned in some books as a harbinger of the audio fine art form. Minimalist composer Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room (1969), oft cited equally the beginning of the sound art movement, starts with a recording of a seemingly innocuous text describing the technical sound process that is going to accept place over fourth dimension in the recording (made simply slightly personal by a vague allusion at the end to Lucier'south speech communication irregularity). But with continuous repetitions, the spoken language is slowly abstracted into a mass of undulating tones, obliterating all connections to the personal. The same Max Neuhaus piece Times Square (1977), frequently discussed every bit a pioneering work of sound art, is merely a drone played underneath a grate in Times Square. Bernhard Leitner, ordinarily credited as a founder of the parallel Klangkunst motility in Germany, throughout the seventies created works in which basic sounds and tones are used but as a method of making vibrations to affect actual sensations of the participant. For example, Leitner's Sound Chair (1975) uses a low tone panning betwixt two speakers to make a stationary chair transmit the feeling of rocking. I of the few women brought upwardly equally representative of sound fine art in the 1970s, Maryanne Amacher used abstracted electronic sound or ecology sound to define spaces in various innovative means. An case is her City-Links #6 (Hearing the Space Twenty-four hour period by Day "Live") (1974) in which she broadcast the sound of Boston Harbor into MIT's Hayden Gallery. 106 In all these works, there is detachment from personal narrative, no human relationship to emotional fabric, and an avoidance of annihilation that could exist construed every bit typical "music." 107
In 1979's Sound Fine art exhibition at MoMA, Connie Beckley used the romantic song "Ebb Tide" in her installation, Julia Heyward'south collaborations with Don Christensen used bass and drums (or, if you get with the programme and press release version, a music box), and Maggi Payne's works grew directly out of the academic electronic music tradition. In the case of Beckley and Heyward, they used emotions, personal intimate narratives, and the body, all important aspects of feminist performance in the 1970s. Women had been adequate every bit song performers in Western art music since the rising of opera at the end of the 1600s. Likewise, women were allowed careers as dancers and actors. Operation, the voice, and music were means women had subtly overcome their oppressors for centuries, and then why are they being marginalized for utilizing information technology in their "sound art"? 108 Composer and theorist George East. Lewis says that John Muzzle's idea that audio is an art grade unto itself, detached from all significant, is a method of stripping away history and context:
In his important 1961 manifesto, Silence, composer John Cage, intending to distance our experience of sound from "taste" and "psychology," described audio—all sound—as having iv attributes: loudness, elapsing, pitch, and timbre. Still useful this view of sound might have been at the time as a fashion of orienting composers towards new vistas, it appears to founder on the shoals of our complex everyday feel. For those who maintain that sounds tin be autonomously, "in themselves," lacking relationships to culture, history or memory, everyday life routinely provides powerful evidence to the contrary. Certainly in whatever major U.S. urban center, fifty-fifty very young children are obliged to learn a particular kind of acoustic environmental, one related to the survival value of parsing sonic utterance. In the words of one parishioner in a church building in 1 of Chicago'south poorest communities, "You could even hear the gunfire while we were singing." 109
Figure 7.
Julia Heyward (as Duka Delight) (broom, center), Don Christensen (video camera, left) and Jody Harris (guitar, correct) in 1978. Photo credit: Julia Heyward.
Figure 7.
Julia Heyward (equally Duka Delight) (broom, center), Don Christensen (video camera, left) and Jody Harris (guitar, correct) in 1978. Photograph credit: Julia Heyward.
Shut modal
Based on the old minimalist/conceptualist trajectory, Susan Philipsz's Turner Prize–winning Lowlands (2010), widely touted every bit an example of "audio art," is not audio art considering information technology contains (one) music and (2) emotion. Indeed, Susan Philipsz seemed to sympathize this when in an interview immediately post-obit receipt of the Turner Prize she said that she does not consider herself a sound artist. 110 Nevertheless, she has appeared in multitudes of "sound art" exhibitions and articles since, still doing the same types of work. While it seems the soapbox has opened upward for electric current work, it's non applied to historical works. I would contend that Lowlands reflects elements of each one of the Sound Art exhibition pieces from 1979: (1) it exploits spatialized sound for a time-based feel with a get-go and cease, as with Maggi Payne's piece, (two) information technology borrows a popular tune with romantic meaning, as with Connie Beckley's piece, (3) it features the artist singing, and in its later presentation at Tate Britain in October 2010, information technology was presented only as playback of a song in a white box space with no visual material save ii speakers, as with Julia Heyward'south piece. Philipsz made a strong feminist argument concerning the electric current catechism of audio fine art, even if she may accept done then unintentionally. And she won the Turner Prize for information technology. Sometimes all you need is a gut reaction to hit the nail on the head.
Media theorist Peter Weibel has chosen Laurie Anderson's early performances "an extension of her audio sculpture and sound spaces into the theatrical." 111 Merely 1 could instead look at her performances every bit another mode of sound art. Brandon LaBelle has said, "Sound art as a practice harnesses, describes, analyzes, performs and interrogates the condition of sound and the processes past which it operates." 112 That perfectly describes Anderson's entire body of work from the 1970s, though she never appears in LaBelle's book. Alan Licht categorizes Laurie Anderson as a "crossover signifier" and Yoko Ono as "the prototypical crossover popular artist," excluding them both from the audio fine art category. 113 Is information technology possible that Anderson's and Ono's hijacking of the mainstream system was a type of sound art divers past a situationist intervention with a feminist bent? Women of the 1960s and '70s had nothing to lose by innovating beyond the systems that had historically rejected them.
While at that place are many celebrated reasons for John Muzzle's artistic decisions, too as those of visual artists creating abstract work in the 20th century, it is harmful to continue to enforce this dusty catechism into the 21st century. In the future, scholars studying audio art might consider questions such as: Does the evolution of the genre itself incorporate exclusionary behavior? How did opportunities denied to women and practitioners of diversity touch on the trajectory of the form? How did interpretations of work that seemed "exterior the aesthetic" define the histories? Would broadening the definition of the form allow for a more accurate picture of the history? Hopefully, the new information presented in this paper will encourage more than research into the wider grouping of artists from the 1970s that initiated a move they sometimes called "sound art."
Notes
1
"Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Betwixt Categories (New York: Rizzoli, 2007), 11. Rahma Khazam'southward "A Brief History of Audio Art," Volume—What You Meet Is What You Hear 1 (2010): 6–9 also points to a mid-1980s Lander moment of origin. In Douglas Kahn's "Sound Art, Art, Music" (from 2005 merely recently reprinted in Tacet 3 (2014) (328–47), he traces his own disinclination with the term sound art in connection with his friendship with Dan Lander in the period leading up to his 2001 Noise Water Meat (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)" excerpted from Christof Migone, Sound Art: Sound as a Medium of Art, edited by Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM/Middle for Art and Media; Cambridge, MA; London, United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland: The MIT Press, 2019), 689.
3
Christof Migone, Sound Art: Sound as a Medium of Art, edited by Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM/Center for Fine art and Media; Cambridge, MA; London, UK: MIT Printing, 2019), 688.
four
Email messages to author from writers Jan Herman (12 September 2019) and Peter Frank (25 August 2019), and artists Connie Beckley (19 August 2019), Walter Wright (21 August 2019), Charles Morrow (eleven June 2019), and William Hellerman (25 March 2013). All lived in New York Metropolis in the 1970s and all stated that they recalled the term beingness used in that decade, but report information technology applied to various types of work.
5
Peter Frank, Something Else Press: An Annotated Bibliography (New Paltz, NY: McPherson, 1983), 62.
half dozen
Jan Herman, ed., Something Else Yearbook 1974 (Barton, VT: Something Else Printing, 1974).
vii
Max Neuhaus, interviewed past Lynne Melt in 1977, Max Neuhaus—Times Square, dir. Rory Logsdail (Firefly Pictures production for Rai Sat Art, 2002), short film.
viii
Max Neuhaus, Essay on the development of his work, Max Neuhaus Archives, Columbia Academy, box 7, folder 5, 1979.
9
Max Neuhaus, interviewed by Lynne Melt in 1977, Max Neuhaus—Times Square.
x
Ernest Leogrande, "Walk Through Sounds of Pleasure in Metropolis of Dissonance," Sunday News, New York, 9 December 1973.
11
Max Neuhaus, "Sound Art?" in Volume: Bed of Sound (New York: PS1 Contemporary Art Middle, July 2000).
12
Barbara London quoted in Museum of Modern Art, Museum exhibition features works incorporating audio, press release no. 42 for Audio Fine art exhibition 25 June–5 August 1979, MoMA Archives Exh. 1266.
13
Barbara London, "From Video to Intermedia: A Personal History," in Mod Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modernistic Art, ed. Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz (New York: Museum of Modern Art, Distributed Art Publishers, 2010), 353.
15
Barbara London, "Practice Out on the Cutting Edge" (keynote speech, Exhibiting Sound symposium, Fine art Gallery of Alberta, Alberta, Canada, 31 October 2015), video documentation published on YouTube by the Center for Sound Communities, x Feb 2016, accessed twenty August 2019, https://youtu.be/12UyN5DeN2I (starts at 8:48 on video).
17
This original version of Handphone Tabular array was made in collaboration with Bob Bielecki. Source: Denise Markonish, "Laurie Anderson: Language of the Future," published in gallery guide for exhibition Laurie Anderson (Northward Adams, MA: MASS MoCA, 2017) back encompass.
eighteen
Barbara London, "From Video to Intermedia: A Personal History," in Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Mod Art, 363.
twenty
Barbara London, Soundings: A Contemporary Score (New York: Museum of Modernistic Art, 2013), 8.
21
Barbara London (presumed writer), Museum of Modern Fine art, program for Sound Fine art exhibition, 25 June 1979, MoMA Archives Exh. 1266.2.
22
Museum of Mod Art, Museum exhibition features works incorporating audio, printing release no. 42 for Sound Art exhibition 25 June–5 August 1979, MoMA Archives Exh. 1266.
23
Museum of Modern Art, Guide to Building and Exhibitions (architectural clarification of Museum of Mod Art building at 11 Westward 53rd Street, New York, NY, including location of Auditorium gallery next to the auditorium in basement), Museum of Modern Art Archives, 6 October 1958, 5.
24
Barbara London, Soundings: A Contemporary Score, x.
25
Barbara London (presumed author), program for Sound Art exhibition.
26
Tara Rodgers, Pinkish Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Durham, NC: Knuckles University Printing, 2010), 64–65.
27
Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner, Women Composers and Music Applied science in the United States: Crossing the Line (Aldershot, Britain; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 85.
29
Tara Rodgers, Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound, 64–65.
32
Maggi Payne, email bulletin to writer, 23 May 2019.
35
Maggi Payne, email bulletin to writer, 21 August 2019.
36
Barbara London, electronic mail message to writer, xxx May 2019.
37
Maggi Payne, electronic mail bulletin to author, 21 August 2019.
38
Maggi Payne, Lunar Dusk (1979) and Lunar Earthrise (1978), cassette, Museum of Modernistic Art Archives, 25 June–8 July 1979, Exh.1266. Identified in archival listing as "Sound from Maggi Payne'due south installation Lunar Dusk and Lunar Earthrise."
39
Maggi Payne, program notes for concert versions of Lunar Dusk and Lunar Earthrise, 1979.
xl
Maggi Payne, unpublished interview past Emma Lou Deimer, approximately 1983–84 in response to questions regarding a later work entitled Crystal. Payne says the technique was the same every bit used for Lunar Earthrise and Lunar Dusk.
41
Barbara London, Museum of Modern Art Archives, "Carpentry Asking," with post-obit information: Installation PO# 9191: 7514–2329: Hang 4 speakers; Electrical PO# 9165: 7513-: Connect four speakers; Exhibition: Sound Fine art; Location: Video Gallery (Auditorium); Opening date: June 25, 1979; Closing date: July 5, 1979; Manager: Barbara London; Appointment postage: June nineteen, 1979. MoMA Exh. 1266.2.
42
Barbara London to Maggi Payne, 22 June 1979, letter: "The Museum purchased a Technics cassette deck, which I had modified to automatically rewind and echo the tapes." Note that cassettes are stereo recordings, not capable of quadraphonic (4-rails) playback.
43
Maggi Payne, email bulletin to author, 23 May 2019.
44
Maggi Payne, email message to author, 19 Baronial 2019.
45
Maggi Payne, Lunar Earthrise, notes given to author 12 December 2018: "Note that the stereo mixes are not fold-downs of the four channel mixes, but are mixed from scratch."
46
Maggi Payne, email bulletin to author, 21 Nov 2018.
47
Maggi Payne, electronic mail message to author, 19 August 2019.
48
Maggi Payne, email message to writer, 23 May 2019.
49
Connie Beckley, The Aquarium, liner notes (New York: Composers Recordings, Inc., 1997), CRI CD 756.
50
Connie Beckley, email message to author, 29 May 2019.
51
Connie Beckley, The Aquarium, liner notes.
53
Connie Beckley, email bulletin to writer, 12 September 2019.
54
John Rockwell, "Music: Forms with Sound, Light Modes," New York Times, 9 June 1979.
56
Connie Beckley, email message to author, 28 May 2019.
57
Connie Beckley, email bulletin to author, iii June 2019
58
The audio from Triad Triangle was later released on the LP AIRWAVES: Two Record Anthology of Artists' Aural Work & Music (New York: One Ten Records, 1977), which also featured works by Julia Heyward, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, and many others.
59
Connie Beckley, email bulletin to writer, 3 June 2019.
lx
Connie Beckley, email message to author, 3 June 2019: "These three pieces (The Annotation, Triad Triangle, The Balancing Scale) were influenced by my reading of Hermann Helmholzt'due south book 'On the Sensations of Tone' and…all these works (The Note, Triad Triangle, The Balancing Calibration) have sound and epitome and they are interdependent in getting the idea across. And they only actually brand sense as a whole when all elements are present. Then when my piece of work would be published but as sound, information technology is only incomplete."
61
Barbara London, email message to writer, 30 May 2019: Author: Every bit I understand it from speaking to the artists, only Connie Beckley'southward piece had a visual element (speaker in a glass bottle). Is this correct? BL: Correct.
62
Connie Beckley, email message to writer, 25 November 2018. Photograph provided past Connie Beckley.
64
Connie Beckley: The Note, cassette, Museum of Modern Fine art Athenaeum, 23 July 23–five August 1979, Exhibition: Audio Art, MoMA Exh. 1266. Identified in archival listing as "Connie Beckley's audio performance of 'The Note.'"
66
Connie Beckley, email message to author, 25 November 2018.
67
Connie Beckley: The Annotation, cassette, Museum of Modern Art Archives.
69
Connie Beckley, email message to author, 25 Nov 2018.
lxx
Connie Beckley, The Note, installation instructions submitted to Barbara London at Museum of Modern Art, June 1979, courtesy of Connie Beckley personal archives.
71
RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Fine art Since 1960 (New York: Harry Northward. Abrams, 1998), 219.
73
Julia Heyward, interview by Linda Montano from Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties: Sex, Food, Money/Fame, Ritual/Death, compiled by Linda One thousand. Montano (Berkeley: Academy of California Printing, 2000), 276.
74
RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art Since 1960, 219.
76
Jay Sanders, "Love Is an Object," in Rituals of Rented Isle: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama: Manhattan, 1970–1980 (New Haven: Whitney Museum of American Art; Distributed by Yale Academy Press, 2013), 35.
77
Barbara London (presumed author), Museum of Modern Art, program for Sound Art exhibition.
78
Julia Heyward, Nova Convention and Julia Heyward and D. Christensen, It's Raining Blood, Bury Me in 2001 and Apocalypso, cassette, Museum of Modern Art Archives, Exhibition: Audio Art, ix–22 July 1979, MoMA Exh. 1266. Identified in archival listing as "Soundtrack to their installation."
79
Julia Heyward, email message to author, 23 May 2019.
80
Don Christensen, who collaborated with Heyward on 3 of the four pieces in the MoMA archive, says he does non remember the MoMA exhibition. Don Christensen, email message to author, 27 May 2019.
81
Barbara London, email message to author, 22 May 2019.
82
Barbara London (presumed author), Museum of Modern Fine art, program for Audio Art.
84
Julia Heyward, 360 (New York: Electronic Arts Intermix, 1981), video.
85
Barbara London, email message to author, thirty May 2019.
86
Julia Heyward. email message to writer, 22 May 2019: "'Keep Moving Buddy' is from the Nova Convention of which Laurie Anderson and I were the MC's."
87
Laurie Anderson and Julia Heyward, Song from America on the Move (Track fourteen): The Nova Convention (New York: Giorno Verse Systems, 1979), GPS 014-015. The showtime half of this track is America on the Move by Laurie Anderson, the second one-half is Keep Moving Buddy past Julia Heyward.
88
Jay Sanders, "Dear Is an Object," in Rituals of Rented Isle: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama: Manhattan, 1970–1980 (New Oasis: Whitney Museum of American Art; Distributed by Yale Academy Press, 2013), 37.
89
Julia Heyward, Nova Convention (Keep Moving Buddy), cassette, Museum of Modern Fine art Archives.
90
Julia Heyward and D. Christensen, Information technology's Raining Blood, Coffin Me in 2001 and Apocalypso, cassette, Museum of Modern Art Athenaeum.
91
Barbara London (presumed author), Museum of Modernistic Fine art, program for Audio Art.
92
Whitney Museum of American Art, "Rituals of Rented Island: Julia Heyward," YouTube video, two:36 (0:43 on video), published 5 November 2013, accessed 21 Baronial 2019, https://youtu.be/IEEMPgCd4ek.
95
Barbara London, "Practice Out on the Cutting Border." London states at appx. 11:95 on video: "After [the MoMA exhibition of Laurie Anderson's Handphone Table] I hoped to organize a large audio exhibition. However, I had two strikes confronting the idea. Sound can be a curse. Unchecked it flows like water and annoyingly invades everything around it. Furthermore, more traditionalist colleagues believed that MoMA'due south role was to offer visual experiences to visitors. Audiences go to concert hall or the jazz lodge, to listen to organized sound, i.e. music. But I still continued to organize shows. I did a little audio show that I called "Audio Fine art" in 1979 with Julia Heyward, Maggi Payne and Connie Beckley."
96
Barbara London, email message to author, thirty May 2019.
97
Connie Beckley, email message to author, 29 May 2019.
98
Maggi Payne, electronic mail bulletin to author, 24 May 2019.
99
Barbara London, Soundings: A Contemporary Score, eight.
101
Barbara London, Soundings: A Contemporary Score, 9.
102
To the best of this writer's knowledge at the time of this writing.
103
Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Across, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK / New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
104
Anne Hilde Neset, "Expressway to Yr Cochlea," in Soundings: A Gimmicky Score (New York: Museum of Modernistic Art, 2013), 17.
105
Post-obit is a sampling of titles relating to this statement:
(1) Bernd Schulz, ed., Resonances: Aspects of Sound Art (Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2002). Schulz's introduction says that the fine art class has developed over the ii decades prior to 2002, negating a discussion of the 1970s. Merely Bernhard Leitner notes in his interview that he began developing and showing sound installations and sculptures in New York Metropolis in the 1970s (he moved there in 1968). With the exception of Leitner, the artworks in the volume are all post-1970s and most are from the early on 2000s. In his essay "Musique concrete and its importance to the visual arts," Robin Minard affirms a definition of sound fine art that includes a detached aesthetic when he says, "In many of the works referred to in this book, audio, light and colour are all equal contributors to abstruse environments—on some levels metaphorical just never literal or narrative" (p. 48).
(2) Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum International, 2006). LaBelle starts with a discussion of John Cage and musique concrete and then moves to Fluxus, minimalism in art and music, and the conceptualist minimalist Michael Ascher. While it'southward to LaBelle's credit that he includes the 1970s work of Vito Acconci and Iannis Xenakis, he mostly sticks to the standard experimental music trajectory concerning the 1970s, discussing Alvin Lucier, Max Neuhaus, Maryanne Amacher, Bernhard Leitner, Bill Fontana, and Yasunao Tone.
(3) Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Betwixt Categories (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2007). Licht states that "Sound fine art, similar its godfather experimental music, is indeed betwixt categories, mayhap because of its event on the listener is between categories. It's not emotional nor is it necessarily intellectual" (p. 218). He lists Annea Lockwood, Neb Fontana, La Monte Young, Maryanne Amacher, Bernhard Leitner, and Max Neuhaus every bit "the start generation of audio artists" (p. 124). (He doesn't pursue that Annea Lockwood's 1970s installations involving the destruction of pianos had deep feminist connotations, but Licht instead focuses on her 1980s environmental recordings.) Afterwards in the book he offers a chapter of selected artists' biographies that he says "provides another view of audio art's generational development," but this besides focuses primarily on persons coming out of the conceptualist and minimalist traditions (p. 253). Licht never mentions the 1979 MoMA Audio Art show; even so, he does dismiss Connie Beckley equally not a sound artist but a "vocalist who gives semitheatrical performances surrounded past sculpture or other visual props" (p. 217). (Writer's note: I have not been able to obtain a re-create of Licht'south new 2019 book Sound Fine art Revisited prior to completion of this paper.)
(4) Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-cochlear Sonic Art (New York: Continuum, 2009). Kim-Cohen dismisses sound art of the 1970s altogether by saying, "Sound art, as a discrete category of creative production, did not come up into beingness until the 1980s" (p. xix in introduction). While his sections nearly Muddied Waters and Bob Dylan are thought provoking, they seem to be diversions from the main theme, again outlined past minimalists and conceptualists growing out of the ideas of John Cage and Pierre Schaffer (for instance, Robert Morris, LaMonte Immature, George Brecht, Alvin Lucier, and a functioning of Steve Reich's "Pendulum Music" framed as sculpture). He further underlines this past connecting sound art to Clement Greenberg's ideas concerning abstract expressionism. He states that Für Augen und Ohren at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1980 "is widely held to be the first dedicated sound art exhibition" (p. 100) and never mentions the 1979 MoMA Sound Art exhibition in this book. (Notably, Connie Beckley was included in Für Augen und Ohren.)
(5) Caleb Kelly, Gallery Sound (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). The first chapter of Kelly's book is about the minimalist installations of Michael Ascher, Bruce Naumann, LaMonte Young, and Alvin Lucier. He talks virtually musicians performing in a gallery context in the 1970s era, but focuses on performances past Steve Reich and Phillip Glass at the Whitney's Anti-Illusion exhibition in 1969. Kelly but briefly mentions Barbara London's 1979 Sound Art exhibition toward the terminate of the book on page 144, proverb information technology was "an extremely progressive exhibition for its time," though he doesn't tell u.s.a. why.
(6) Peter Weibel, ed., Audio Art: Sound equally a Medium of Art (Karlsruhe, Deutschland: ZKM/Eye for Art and Media; Cambridge, MA; London, UK: MIT Printing, 2019). This massive 744-folio publication contains an exhaustive number of essays, photographs, and histories concerning the "sound fine art" movement. Nonetheless, at that place is no mention of Barbara London, Connie Beckley, or Maggi Payne in the entire volume, and Julia Heyward just appears in a list of performers on a 1982 cassette compilation. Apropos sound art of the 1970s, the book follows the same well-trodden historical path. Most significant is Christoph Cox's essay "Sound Art in America: Muzzle and Beyond" from the section "Historical Cartography of Sound Fine art." Cox discusses, in this order: John Cage, Max Neuhaus, LaMonte Young, minimalist sculptor Michael Brewster, Alvin Lucier, and Maryanne Amacher, followed by discussion of some post-1970s figures. Linnea Semmerling's "Shhh…! In search of the White Cube'south soundtrack" says that Robert Morris's minimalist conceptualist sculpture Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1969) is "ane of the earliest and nearly canonic sound sculptures" (p. 506).
106
Ludlow 38, Maryanne Amacher: Metropolis-Links (New York: Ludlow 38, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Goethe-Institut New York and Amacher Annal, 2010).
107
To be fair, Robert Morris created other audio-focused works that used narrative and emotion such equally 1972's Hearing, in which visitors listened to a frightening legal cross-examination (John Perrault, "A Sculpted Play on Words," Hamlet Voice, four May 1972, 30.)
108
Barbara London seems to reflect on this curatorially in 2013's Soundings exhibition at MoMA. Susan Phillipsz uses music in the gallery context, and naught else, to set a mood and a context. Camille Norment often includes musical performance and singing as part of her presentations at museums and galleries (though she didn't at Soundings).
109
George E. Lewis, "The Virtual Discourse of Pamela Z," Journal for the Society of American Music ane, no. 1, Feb 2007 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 72.
110
Susan Philipsz wins the 2010 Turner Prize, Aqueduct 4 News, 6 December 2010, YouTube, https://youtu.be/BMsXrKUA0BQ, accessed 15 September 2019, 3:59.
111
Peter Weibel, "Audio as a Medium of Art," in Sound Fine art: Audio as a Medium of Art, edited by Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM/Center for Fine art and Media; Cambridge, MA; London, UK: MIT Press, 2019), 146.
112
Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum International, 2006), nine.
113
Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2007), 153 (Anderson) and 197 (Ono).
Source: https://online.ucpress.edu/res/article/1/1/25/109397/The-Forgotten-1979-MoMA-Sound-Art-Exhibition
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