A History of Sound in the Art of the 20th Century
A History of Sound in the Art of the 20th Century
In his poem Correspondances, Baudelaire wrote that "scents, colours, and
sounds commune", and the 20th century, often considered the era when the
Arts converged and entered into dialogue, provides countless illustrations
of this notion. After the rise of Abstraction around 1910 and painting's
strivings to commune with music - the abstract Art par excellence - the
new electric media kept up the pursuit of this ancestral myth. Down
through the century the arts of light, cinema and later video, were
fertile ground for experiments in bringing image and sound together, while
at the same time other approaches drew extensively on theories running
counter to the possibility of any match between sight and hearing: using
processes involving notions of chance, random noise and silence, new
performance-art musical gambits challenged the "correspondences" ideal. To
the question raised by the Romantics and then by the Symbolists - "Can
images be translated into sound and vice-versa?" - the century came up
with a host of different replies, some of them utopian and others
emphasising the purest sensory pleasure.In his poem Correspondances, Baudelaire wrote that "scents, colours, and
sounds commune", and the 20th century, often considered the era when the
Arts converged and entered into dialogue, provides countless illustrations
of this notion. After the rise of Abstraction around 1910 and painting's
strivings to commune with music - the abstract Art par excellence - the
new electric media kept up the pursuit of this ancestral myth. Down
through the century the arts of light, cinema and later video, were
fertile ground for experiments in bringing image and sound together, while
at the same time other approaches drew extensively on theories running
counter to the possibility of any match between sight and hearing: using
processes involving notions of chance, random noise and silence, new
performance-art musical gambits challenged the "correspondences" ideal. To
the question raised by the Romantics and then by the Symbolists - "Can
images be translated into sound and vice-versa?" - the century came up
with a host of different replies, some of them utopian and others
emphasising the purest sensory pleasure.
The 2100 square metres of the Sons & Lumieres exhibition are divided into
three areas, with over 400 works - many of them on show for the first time
- providing an enormous range of sensory experiences and highlighting the
crucial moments of the interaction between music/sound and the visual
Arts.
The exhibition is built around three successive themes. The first of these
themes -Correspondences, abstraction, colour music, light in motion - is
the evolution of Baudelaire's notion of "correspondences" within a form of
pictorial abstraction drawn - as in the case of Kandinsky, the
Synchromists and Klee - to the intangibility of music. Painting very early
cut free of the fixed support, becoming temporally inflected colour in
movement via Vladimir Baranoff-Rossine's famous "optophonic piano" (an
idea going back to the Baroque period), Viking Eggeling's "scroll
pictures", Thomas Wilfred's play with light, and other systems culminating
in the early masterpieces of abstract cinema by Hans Richter, Oskar
Fischinger, Len Lye and others.The abstract works presented in this first
segment point up a quest for musical analogies that sometimes involved
instrumental accompaniment. Their musical field of reference extends from
the classical - Bach was an enduring model - to the avant-garde work of
Arnold Schonberg and jazz and boogie-woogie as used by such artists as
Stuart Davis and Piet Mondrian.
The second part of the exhibition - Imprints, conversions, syntheses,
remanence - takes us into a markedly different world, where the notion of
giving visible expression to sound - by transcription, imprint or
conversion via the new technologies - makes sonic vibration one of the
work's raw materials. In the 1920s the cinema, newly endowed with the
sound track, undertook the "photography of sound" to be found in the works
of Rudolf Pfenninger and Norman McLaren. Photoelectric cells and
oscilloscopes were put to work by artists like Raoul Hausmann and Ben
Laposky in experiments with translation of sound into image. The Sixties
and Seventies went deeper into the question: with the coming of the
"environment" the work became a means of global perception that plunged
the viewer into the actual physical experience of sound and light
vibration. Drawing on a dreamlike suspension of consciousness, James and
John Whitney, Brion Gysin, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Paul Sharits
and other artists offered a meditative experience in which waves, whether
of light or sound, shaped the vocabulary of a new audiovisual landscape
open to the full gamut of sensory experience. By contrast other artists,
for instance Bill Viola and Gary Hill pushed the energy and impact of
acoustic pressure to the limits of what the senses could bear. At this
time the idea of writing with sound was taken up - by Nam June Paik,
Steina and Woody Vasulka, and others - in the first video works, which
made bold play with interaction between sound and visual signals and
pointed to the advent of new audiovisual languages.
The third segment of the exhibition - Ruptures, chance, noise, silence -
takes the form of a questioning: via the Futurists "noise", the work of
John Cage, and the Fluxus movement, it focuses on the overall theme's most
iconoclastic aspects. Working from the jumbled, uneven textures of urban
noise, Luigi Russolo offered a musical model that found tangible
equivalents in collage and the tactility of matter, while Marcel Duchamp
set about using the laws of chance to pare down compositional procedures.
This dual vein would triumph in the tutelary figure of John Cage and in
the 1960s with Fluxus, the latter advocating a philosophy of commitment in
which the frontiers between art and life would be totally abolished. The
works in this part of the exhibition bring real irony to their dismantling
of the correspondences myth: chance and accident dictate interaction
between the arts and lead in the final analysis to the experience of
silence in the work of artists like Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman.
The exhibition concludes with two very recent installations, one by Rodney
Graham and one by Pierre Huyghe, that hark back to ideas raised in the
preceding sections. Firmly anchored in the 21st century, this epilogue
leaves the way open to fresh interpretations.
Conception of the exhibition
Sophie Duplaix, curator of the exhibition
Marcella Lista, associate curator
Image: Thomas Wilfred, Untitled. Opus 161, 1965-1966
Composition de lumière évolutive (une phase)
Durée totale: 1 an, 315 jours, 12 heures
Machine lumineuse, 132 x 87 x 66 cm
Coll. Carol and Eugene Epstein, Los Angeles, Etats-Unis
Gallery 1, Level 6
Centre Pompidou Paris Cedex