design / research
serial consign
espaceSONO
[audio.lab listening station / courtesy of saibotuk]
Tobias c. van Veen, one of my favourite artists from the Canadian electronic music community, has just curated an exciting show at the SAT in Montreal. The exhibit, entitled espaceSONO, raises several interesting questions about the archiving, display and performance of sound-based work. The show brings together the work of more than 40 artists to provide a global, diverse range of aesthetics and methodologies. Tobias has a knack for (wonderfully) problematising the curation of sound and music, and this shines through in an excerpt from the statement contextualizing the exhibit:
espaceSONO :: audio.lab is a laboratory for audio environments. We offer a few hypotheses in how to engage sound with your body. Sound that is not music. Thus the vague concept of ‘sound-art' being applied here: sound-art as ‘not-music.'
The exhibit consists of a series of listening sites that range from the familiar (a bed and a tent) to the abstract (a confined black cube), all equipped with high-end headphones and custom listening stations. The show features work by Andra McCartney, Carrie Gates, Fishead, Martin Tétreault & Mike Hansen, Nathan McNinch, Tim Hecker and numerous others, many of whom are affiliated with the Upgrade! network of artists and musicians.
Given the curatorial statement for the show, I was quite curious about Tobias's perspective on the tension between sound and music, display and performance. Tobias was kind enough to provide some thoughts on espaceSONO in an email exchange that occurred this week:
I'm wondering about your thoughts on the challenge of curating audio in a gallery space versus distribution channels usually associated with sound and music, like record labels and established conventions in performance.
When curating espaceSONO I opened with the question "How does one exhibit the unseen?". Inherent to the difference between an exhibition and an event is duration. An exhibition must present works over time, whereas the event stages their one-time happening. This question leads to the next, and the second part of your own question, in terms of moving from, in my case, the underground electroniculture to the gallery space: "Can sound, too, be experienced as an art, or is it always submitted to the sign of music?" This second question is provocative & paradoxical. Depending on one's perspective of music, the question rotates backwards: why isn't music considered an art? Yet, isn't 'music' a kind or set of historic sonic practices whereas sound-art specifies only the stuff of its being? Sound, for itself, an art that would always be on the edges of any kind of music. Even though music might use sound as its stuff, even think of its stuff as a sound-art, it does so to remake itself as 'music'. Sound-art might use music as an object, but it does not do so to re-inscribe itself under music as-such. One might also ask if one can 'exhibit' music; the context of exhibition is such that it recreates the context of its listening as something else, as an object either to be manipulated or contemplated, just as when one performs 'sound-art' in concert, it will invariably be taken as a 'musical' experience.
Tobias just posted a wrap-up of espaceSONO on his blog, and photographer Renaud Kasma has archived his photo-documentation the show. If you are Montreal based, you still have a few more days to get down to the SAT, don some headphones and engage in some deep listening.
full interview text
For the record, here's the exchange in full (will post
shortly at quadrantcrossing.org/blog):
Specifically, I'm wondering your thoughts on the challenge of curating audio art in a gallery space versus distribution channels usually associated with sound and music (i.e. record labels and performance)?
When curating espaceSONO I opened with the question "How does one exhibit the unseen?". Inherent to the difference between an exhibition and an event is duration. An exhibition must present works over time, whereas the event stages their one-time happening. This question leads to the next, and the second part of your own question, in terms of moving from, in my case, the underground electroniculture to the gallery space: "Can sound, too, be experienced as an art, or is it always submitted to the sign of music?" This second question is provocative & paradoxical. Depending on one's perspective of music, the question rotates backwards: why isn't music considered an art? Yet, isn't 'music' a kind or set of historic sonic practices whereas sound-art specifies only the stuff of its being? Sound, for itself, an art that would always be on the edges of any kind of music. Even though music might use sound as its stuff, even think of its stuff as a sound-art, it does so to remake itself as 'music'. Sound-art might use music as an object, but it does not do so to re-inscribe itself under music as-such. One might also ask if one can 'exhibit' music; the context of exhibition is such that it recreates the context of its listening as something else, as an object either to be manipulated or contemplated, just as when one performs 'sound-art' in concert, it will invariably be taken as a 'musical' experience.
The sets of expectations between music and sound-art, or the event and the exhibition, are traversed by a growing trend to consider both as consumer objects that should and must satisfy immediate desires. Rather than contemplation, the user expects manipulation, and manipulation has been associated with an ethical good (interactivity as democracy, etc.). A number of bloggers commenting on espaceSONO couldn't get into the exhibit because they (a) didn't want to spend the time with the work; (b) didn't want to experience the different stations to discover the relation of each set of works with the insinuated body position (tent, couch, bed, cube); (c) didn't want to listen to a work in its totality and thus grew frustrated with the lack, for example, of a fast-forward mechanism on the DVD console. All frustrations gesture toward a set of expectations for immediacy, a child-like desire to have the presence of the thing before oneself without duration. The totality of the thing is the not the stuff of sound. When one attends a film, or a video-art exhibition, one cannot fast-forward through the moving image. Duration is at play. Why should sound be subject to such manipulative whims while we do not expect the same of film or video-art? Such might be a distinction between sound-art and music today when considered as an audio-object 'in exhibition'. The exhibition space most of us are familiar with today is the mobile digital device, which presents a range of options to manipulate the ordering and duration of music. When, in espaceSONO, a DVD console is set-up to playback and select tracks without further options the listener sees it as an attack on the ego, when in fact it offers the chance for contemplation. The very prospect of creating an exhibition space is thus a challenge, for sound requires the most precious non-commodity: time.
Secondly, how does this event tie into your history of artistic and curatorial practice?
Is there a history? Do I even know it? espaceSONO draws from here & there,
it intervenes within the gallery space -- rendering it comfortable or
claustrophobic -- by drawing from many aspects of ambient technoculture, but it also disrupts the expectations of hedonist content sought by the latter.