“The fire runs, and hollers on the blank page”
Liu Wai Tong, “Mysticism, a Song of Failure”

Telling stories with the body itself, narrative cannot avoid a trajectory from one door (material or imaginary) to another, walking or rushing between being and becoming, presence and absence. The window, which constitutes one of the primary moments of imagery in the visual language of Nadim Abbas, acts to interpret the door, demonstrating its dialectics of inside/outside without calling it into ontological existence. For Abbas, the window is sometimes a gasp voiced in the midst of a confrontation between mirror images and sometimes a fountain of voyeuristic bliss. One portion of the installation “I Would Prefer Not To” (2009) consists of a line of windows formed by dark glass mounted with window grates. In “Untitled” (2000), the viewer is seduced to look through a window into a boxlike white room without doors. “Perspective Studies” (2001) places wheelchairs, light, and windows in a set intended to test the viability of optical illusions, the black-and-white checkered floor twisted nauseatingly out of space.

This interest in windows also extends to the grates and frames so ubiquitous throughout the cityscapes of of Hong Kong and South China. “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Again” (2007) represents yet another attempt to interact with the possibilities of the window, here in the form of a sound installation making explicit reference to Marcel Duchamp. The work develops strata of signification, juxtaposing a pornographic magazine clipping resembling Duchamp’s “Étant donnés,” window grates framing images of waterfalls, and a chair covered with cacti.

Liu Chuang, 'Split Landscape,' 2005

Within the household, the installation of window grates is typically intended to either prevent robbery or keep children from falling out–two different aims that are actually one: the prohibition of traversal (with respect to the window). Abbas further consolidates this interdiction by hanging his window frames on solid walls, a limit in contact with the rejection of continuity. Abbas is not, of course, the first person to transform observations of these grates into art. Mainland Chinese artist Liu Chuang’s “Split Landscape” (2005) marks a similar interrogation of the spatial functions of such extensions to the window, extracting the visual elements of a three-dimensional cage-like grate form once popular in Shenzhen and turning it into a stainless steel sculpture with a highly formalized and flattened visual presentation. This same object clearly serves different purposes in the practices of these two artists: Liu is concerned with researching a geometric aesthetic of the grate as an image by peeling it off from the functionality of the defensive structure, while Abbas displaces the windows in order to dissolve the dialectics of inside/outside through a discontinuity in visual perception raised by a physical aluminum veil. The window, here, is like a ship–Foucault’s heterotopia par excellence–a “placeless place … closed in on itself and at the same time … given over to the infinity of the sea.” It goes nowhere and everywhere.

Nadim Abbas, 'I Would Prefer Not To,' 2009

Besides the window, the figure of the Rorschach test image makes a significant appearance in Nadim Abbas’ working practice. The window grate patterns from “I Would Prefer Not To” actually correspond to ten strictly symmetrical inkblots from the Rorschach tables, while “Untitled (14-03)” (2010) consists of a set of drawings mingling the outlines of such inkblots with the floor plans of thee apartments in Hong Kong in which there has been recorded an instance of either homicide or suicide occurring on 14 March over the course of the past 15 years. This project creates an imaginary non-space defined only by absence. Less obviously, “Ornament and Crime” (2008) involves an installation constructed out of white pipes through which observers roll ceramic fengshui balls that ultimately smash against the floor. The symmetrical design of the pipes here certainly resonates with the Rorschach test images, if remotely. Abbas makes reference to clinical psychology again in “I Would Prefer Not To,” another component of which is a specimen box containing manga action figures intended to correspond with the disorders listed in the MCMI-III (Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III). Diverging from the hyped version of psychoanalysis adopted as cultural theory in the art world, Abbas is more concerned with psychopathology. The body, which Schilling calls an “unfinished biological and social project,” is manipulated and fragmented by the clinical gaze, while psychology expands and limits the possible dimensions of the subject through language. Here, art cuts into the human body without the presence of the latter.

Nadim Abbas’s latest project, “Cataract” (2010), continues this distinct obsession with windows and grates in two distinct spaces on a small street in the Sheung Wan district of Hong Kong. In one, two light-boxes show (subtly) moving images of waterfalls, while the other contains an installation with all the qualities of the theatrical set: glossy white bathroom tiles cover a low platform and a square indentation in its center, creeping all the way up a vertical wall punctuated by a protruding shower head from which water pours down ceaselessly into a recycling drain. The shower system, constantly running within this environment, makes reference to a certain filmic anxiety, mirroring the imagery of the waterfall in a different register. At the same time, the soundtracks of a roaring waterfall is juxtaposed against the crisp, white structure, colluding with the monumentality of the shower stand to endorse the cycling of water in a ritual sense. On an adjacent wall are hung two metal frames that cage white square tiles, their gleam muffled under the reflective surface that stands in for that of the glass panes. A metal bar in a matte silver tint extending between the bathroom set and the audience constructs a peculiar sense of viewing distance with its fleshy, disconsolate curve. The sound of the waterfall spirals through the space, trembling beyond it along lines of metaphor. Through the tonal undulation of the audio track one may even be able to visualize the bubbles and foam that, infuriated by the force of gravity against mass of water, burst in reasonless bliss, visualizing the transient glint of light on each bubble that recalls the eyes of aquatic animals.

Still from Wong Kar Wai, 'Happy Together'

The continuous artificial waterfalls may resemble the cylindrical lamp depicting the Iguazu Falls that features prominently in the Wong Kar-wai film Happy Together, or perhaps the digital fengshui calenders mass-produced in mainland China, typically consisting of a large light box occupied by a lush landscape or other Buddhist imagery on one side and a digital clock on the other. It would be overly hasty, however, to cloak this work in the narrative fabric of social criticism related to the extremes of Fordist modes of production or clichéd cinematic reference. The piece may instead shed some light on the politics of artistic production: the monochrome installation not only demonstrates a minimalist aesthetics revealing a process of abstraction, but also reminds the viewer of the white cube space–often considered the most convenient, if not ideal, space for the exhibition of art for its supposed neutrality and lack of presupposition. Nevertheless, this white cube space never embraces the actual work of art with open arms and a neutral context. The white cube arises historically with modernism, as argued by Brian O’ Doherty, who writes: “The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space.” This spatial ideology is heavy-handed, putting its own image before the art work. The bathroom mise-en-scène of “Cataract” may function as an attempt to deal with the gallery as an object rather than an empty structure waiting to be filled with events and other objects that take up portions of the space like actors moving around props on a stage, or even, for that matter, the laughing philosopher’s notion of the atom moving around the void. “Cataract,” on the other hand, interprets space as an object by changing this space into a place through the psychological mapping of daily experience (in this case, the act of showering). We have many curators and artists who treat space as an object: the exhibition Voids: A Retrospective at the Centre Pompidou makes for a strong example. Described as an “exhibition of nothing,” the display consisted of nine empty rooms created by artists from Yves Klein to Maria Eichhorn and Art and Language. Instead of pondering the ontological fable of verticality and horizontality in the spatial perception of art, “Cataract” investigates the possibilities of the cubic space as an object with precise dimensions that function as the limitations and fringes of semiotic implosion.

The title of the project relates to the imagery of the waterfall with a pun, a linguistic forking path. Semiotically and physically, as translucent water is beat into a milky color by virtue of its own velocity, the project speaks in opacity. Opacity, from the window grates that cut short the fabricated continuity of an imagined landscape to pieces of dark glass, deformed floor plans, and inkblot images, far from acting to block vision, can actually open up space for new interpretations of the phenomenology of space. This space, however, is never as simple as a large void or volume to be filled with whatever might appear. Opacity in some ways wipes out the visual markers of certain objects while producing new schematics of signification and metaphors, but, on the other hand, it also provides for the viewer what Zizek calls a “universalized process of recognition,” quite similar, in fact, to the function of the Rorschach test. For Abbas, the production of the space of possible symbolic engineering is a fire that simultaneously burns down and illuminates its object; the singularity of space is always followed by a vanishing, remaining in an unavoidable moment of becoming or morphing into a new and ephemeral likeness. Opacity, sometimes, is a void choked by symbols and language.

Nadim Abbas, 'Untitled (Trinity Buoy Wharf),' 2001

Upon closer examination, the void is ubiquitous in Abbas’ work. Some of these voids are physical , as with the white tubes through which ceramic spheres slide to their self-destructive fates in “Ornament and Crime” or the empty cage of “The Fasting Artist.” Others are basically abstract, or otherwise diverge from the classical Western concept, as with the linear grates that teeter on the edge of metaphor in “I Would Prefer Not To,” creating a dimensional contrast between inside and out; or the mirror reflection of “False Mirror Tests;” or elsewhere, in the dysfunctional shower scene in which the physical bar and mental distance between audience and work prove that no transgression is possible (for it is not discernible in the work).

These manifestations of the void are linked with other elements of the artist’s work. Taking “I Would Prefer Not To” as an example, Abbas adopts explicit cultural references, including the genealogies of different Japanese manga heroes and the psychological paradigms of the MCMI-III. Such discursive systems are sutured together to form a net of connotations, as with the abstract insect-like Rorschach images paired with Hong Kong floor plans. The intangible void, including the heterotopia formed amongst the mirrors reflecting different aspects of his Duchampian peep-show, retains an impossible distance in order to protect a certain utopian narrative; this wall of imagination then creates an illusion of completeness that allows the imagery of the spotlight to emerge, inviting the void to glide across the discursive plane formed by these various paradigms as a trace of the inability to be subordinated to any other system of signification. The void becomes a surface across which additive or reductive traces roll in the form of allegory, metaphor, and random mental association. As a permanent transition between presence and absence in “I Would Prefer Not To,” it etches an extra semiotic layer into the scales of the MCMI-III. But this trace never wants to remain static, instead inherently dynamic and always resulting in a crack–something totally out of the hands of the artist and his practice–when exposed to the interpretations of the viewer. These cracks may interrupt traces just as, in the words of Tim Ingold, “a path of travel may be interrupted by a precipitous gorge in an otherwise level plateau.” This dynamic sense of mutation in and around the void actually creates and erases the traces of the discourses from which the artist borrows and reshapes; the void can not be reduced for any teleological ends, leaving us only to gaze upon its emptiness until we are passively blinded by the “beams of darkness,” to borrow the language of Agamben, that define the presence of the work.

Yves Klein, 'The specialization of sensibility in the raw material state into stabilized pictorial sensibility,' 1958

For Nadim Abbas, contrary to the Orientalist and anti-visual functions to which Yves Klein motivated this key figure of the void, the generic notion of emptiness calls for the void as a specific poetic machine to latch onto existing semiotic systems: opacity becomes adornment, a wildly blank fire of dazzling folds.

Introduction

The exhibition Resonance was initiated in early 2010 as an experiment in the conceptual underpinnings and practical manifestations of sound art as a genre and form in contemporary greater China. Growing out of a series of readings and conversations in Hong Kong with artists as varied as Yan Jun, Feng Jiangzhou, and Zhou Risheng, the final exhibition program included two installations by artists Samson Young, an artist and composer based in Hong Kong, and Yao Chung-Han, a sound artist based in Taipei. This selection of artists allows the experiment to step beyond the mainland sound art and experimental music scene, which is largely incoherent in its current free-for-all exploration of new sonic forms–a site of artistic freedom indeed, but also a difficult territory in which to reflect on the modes of sound already in use in the contemporary art community. Samson Young contributed a piece entitled “Beethoven Piano Sonata, nr. 1 – nr. 14 (Senza Misura)” (2010), a series of open circuit boards hung in rows on the gallery wall. Each board houses two LEDs and a speaker, each marking the tempo of a single movement of fourteen of Beethoven’s early piano sonatas. In the second gallery room, Yao Chung-Han installed an audiovisual piece entitled “I Will Be Broken” (2010), a suspended column of circular fluorescent lamps tied together with power cords that illuminates in a semi-random fashion and emits a prerecorded sequence of sounds. The two pieces engage in a dialogue of light and sound that confronts the tension between sound as aesthetic spectacle and sound as conceptual material, opening a productive conversation between styles and historical developments in the trajectory of sound in art.

Conversation

Robin Peckham (RP): I’d like to start with our initial thoughts when we set out to put this exhibition together. We were interested in how different cultural labels, specifically including music, experimental music, sound, and sound art, are distinguished in the Chinese context. During curatorial projects in Beijing and Shanghai, we found that artists and musicians working under these different labels all share the same live performance events and even exhibition contexts. I want to ask how the two of you see yourselves fitting into this system personally, and how you have experienced these distinctions in Hong Kong and Taipei respectively.

Samson Young (SY): In Hong Kong there is a circle of people working with, writing, and playing contemporary music, and that’s a very specific and self-contained scene. Then there’s a set of people outside this scene who also share a series of different and unrelated events, such as William Lane of the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble and myself. We both come from classical music backgrounds originally, but we’re also involved with other things, learning from different kinds of artists and musicians. The scenes are defined but the content of the work produced in each of these circles is not. As for defining my identity in all of this, I don’t have any strong feelings in terms of being a certain kind of artist working within the territory of sound art. I come out of the classical music world, but I make work that might function as contemporary music in the concert hall or something else entirely within the gallery context. No matter what the work is it should be evident that my interest lies in a certain set of ideas of music to some degree or another. I tend to resist being labeled as a sound artist because this term is so ideologically and politically loaded. There are so many problems with it that have yet to be resolved. Its aesthetics are still being defined, particularly the question of how to judge a work of art within this territory. The question is very much still under discussion. That’s one problem. The question of how to judge or test a work of art is often mixed up with this other question of “what is sound art,” where these should be very separate questions. A work might emit sound of some sort in a gallery setting, but the strategy of judging it through the criteria of sound rather than as conceptual or visual art is a very political process. It is a value judgment. It is very dangerous to judge the work within or using these unresolved debates over the nature of sound art, because it introduces all kinds of ideological questions. The discussion of aesthetics and the discussion of the identity of sound art should be separated. But now they exist within the same conversation, mixing the idea of a value judgment from the idea of a judgment of quality. We have a conversation and a discourse over these questions, but no sense of definition. If we introduce the question of “what is art,” then the entire project becomes compartmentalized and limited to its own territory without any further possibility of the expansion of the genre. As for how I define my own work, I will do some things within the gallery setting with the materials of sound and music, and people can label it as they please. But I don’t think I’ve answered the question.

RP: Yao, I have a more specific inquiry for you. My understanding of the Taipei sound art scene is derived from this narrative of Lin Chi-wei and his collaborators, particularly the Zero and Sound Liberation Organization of the 1990s, which was very much influenced by DIY and punk ethics and aesthetics in music and later art, while on the other hand today we have artists working in a vernacular influenced more by international new media, like Wu Chi-tsung, Wang Chung Kun, and Tseng Wei-Hao. In practice, how do these scenes overlap? Which of these artists do you commonly work or exhibit with?

Yao Chung-Han (YC): In Taiwan sound art has actually already been very clearly defined, or at least categorized, starting from Lin Chi-wei and on towards Wang Fujui, and then to us. Because we all come out of similar art academy backgrounds it appears as a very clear lineage from the outside, a certain school of sound art. The other major school emerges from the academies of music, working with more musical styles of production. Those are the two major directions. Both schools work with new technologies. Younger artists in both have become accustomed to using computers in their work, and both occasionally use musical instruments. Despite this clear demarcation of sound art from an art background and sound art from a music background, activities like our Lacking Sound Festival do try to blue these boundaries to some degree.

RP: You work in a collective called i/O Lab (no relationship to I/O Gallery). Who is involved in that group?

YC: Me, Wang Chung Kun, Chan Ming-Fang, Chang Yung-Ta, Huang Chung-Ying, and Yeh Ting-Hao.

RP: Do you all work in this more conceptual tradition of sound art, or do you also move into the areas in which Samson works, like composition or performance?

YC: More conceptual. It’s production. Our material is conceptual and the result should be thinking, with other relational and spatial concepts as well. In terms of composition, I think some of us make attempts occasionally, but our backgrounds are all in technology and art. Wang Chung Kun’s background is in sculpture, and mine is in architecture, but the other members are all working in some type of art or design. No one is trained in music.

RP: If we look specifically at the two pieces of work included in this exhibition, would you say that sound functions as a medium or a material here, or something else, some other concept?

SY: In my work, the concept is a musical one, but it emerges with a different function, as something closer to sound. The project contains 14 devices, each of which is playing the tempo of a single movement of Beethoven’s early piano sonatas, just as would a metronome. I am interested in this because self-proclaimed sound artists often have at least one shared point, which is that they understand that the definition of sound art is currently being determined. They understand that this is a fluid process, so the term sound art functions more as a signal of a certain territory. But on the other hand, they understand exactly what music is and what it does. From our academic training we’ve learned that music is not a fluid space, but oddly sound art uses music in its own process of self-definition, as an antithesis of sorts. There is a reactive method that is used to understand sound. So here I’m using something from music that could not possibly be more canonical, and then reducing it to something that could possibly be accepted within the territory of sound art. I want to see what happens through this gesture. It’s an experiment.

RP: Yao, what do you think in terms of your work?

YC: My work employs the relationship between sound and light as a catalyst for conceptual work, so I would say both of these elements function as materials. In the process of production I’m trying to tease out something more obscure through this relationship.

RP: So what role does sound play there? What is it doing?

YC: It is a point of origin for the concept of the work. Ultimately it is only a portion of the final piece, but it plays a very important role.

RP: Both of your works involve light in addition to the sound component. Why did you make the decision to include lighting elements for this kind of work that explores the nature of sound? Is there a necessary relationship between light and sound? Is light included for primarily conceptual or aesthetic reasons?

SY: After I had determined the concept, I thought of how to make something like but unlike a metronome, based on György Ligeti’s work, with all of the metronomes swinging back and forth. A piece of music traditionally has a beginning and ending, a structure, and isolating the tempo collapses this composition. Ligeti’s piece depends on both sound and movement. Putting together all those metronomes might not necessarily be mesmerizing per se, so what I wanted to do was to make something very visually mesmerizing. So I added these LED lights that blink with the tempo. It brings together the visual piece as a unified whole. The sound and the light both have the same function here. Without beginning and ending it becomes a mesmerizing loop. I wanted to preserve that collapse, but make it even more obvious.

RP: Yao, the relationship between light and sound in your work comes from a very different place. Without light you simply wouldn’t have sound. Is there a conceptual difference there as well?

YC: At the beginning I was experimenting with lights in my studio process. We’re so inundated now with audiovisual work, from performance to media, and I wanted to experiment in a way that was related to that. I was interested in the role sound played in the audiovisual, especially in the kind of musical performance that Alva Noto and that whole genre is working with. Why, in the information environment we live in, are we interested in that style of work? I think there’s actually a very artificial relationship between sound and light in many cases, so I became interested in more natural, more determined relationships, as with the physical properties of sound and light, and especially cases where the two are inextricable. That scenario is very different from our normal process of audiovisual design.

RP: In the early stages of discussing this exhibition concept, one of our theoretical points of departure was the recent work of Seth Kim-Cohen, who has been advocating a “non-cochlear sound art” in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s “non-retinal art” and in a sort of opposition to John Cage’s “sound-in-itself.” That is to say, he calls for a cognitive rather than aestheticized sound art, the kind of thing you might not even hear at all, or that might involve more conceptual elements. I think this is an interesting but somewhat unfashionable position to take now, after the visual or experiential turn of the last decade, though perhaps this applies to a lesser degree in new media circles further from the art world proper. But there is room for fascinating relationships between sound, the visual, and the conceptual that emerge in this new space. What do you think of these developments? Can sound art be pure sound, or does its status as art imply a necessary conceptual content?

SY: According to my understand of John Cage’s sound-in-itself, I think he had his own agenda, related to the heyday of European musical modernism, and his advocacy of pure sound has to be seen within that context, even though that context no longer exists. Musical modernism has passed. Sure, Cage was a pioneer of sorts, but we also have to put him in his historical place. He was not just a bombshell dropping out of nowhere as he is often treated when we cite him today. That’s the important part of this question. Music has never even been about pure sound, much less sound art. When I go to hear classical music I never spend much effort listening, but rather spend most of my time watching the conductor. Music was once live theater. The concept of music for music’s sake started with the romantic aesthetics of the late 19th century, when music was though of as the ideal way to attain bodily transcendence. But until the recording, there was no such thing as disembodied sound, no such thing as sound without the visual. I think if we reframe the question of “non-cochlear sound art” keeping this in mind, the answer becomes simple. When I write concert music I’m always taking into account different factors, including vision, light, interactivity, and so on. That’s a specific position towards the creation music. Within the gallery, we’re working in a different economy of circulation, but the position towards sound and the visual can be similar.

RP: For those of us with less of an understanding of the historical development of the contemporary music world, would you elaborate a bit on the passage of musical modernism?

SY: John Cage’s reaction against musical modernism was indeed a form of liberation, in terms of defining sound-in-itself outside of music, separating sound from the concept of music. He also liberated notation, assuring that without notation there could still be a sonic context. Finally, he assured that music need not happen only within the concert hall. It no longer needs to rely on the economy of the concert hall–and musical modernism was very much about the privileged position of the concert hall as an institution for sound-making. But the concert hall tradition is very much in crisis today, and the social context of the dominant European (specifically, Germanic) musical tradition out of which all this emerged no longer exists. For sound art to continue to fight the battle under the sound-in-itself bandwagon is to direct energy at a evil that no longer exist, it is ludicrous and toe-curling. People are doing very cool things in the concert hall these days, and no one really believes in the supremacy of Music with a capital M anymore. What it boils down to at the end is that some people choose to operate within the economy of the concert hall, while others flourish in the gallery space. This is, rather, a question of function. To mix the question of the function of production up with one of an aesthetic judgement would only lead to compartmentalization of sonic practices, not liberation.

YC: Studying with Yao Dajuin, we learned to work with sound and nothing else. But the question of the audiovisual within and in relationship to sound is important for me, so I work more with modes of perception in order to analyze forms of communication between these different elements, especially communication with the audience. This communication, as reflected in my work here, is not simply audio plus visual, but rather explores a very different set of reactions that take place when these two things combine. The object in the exhibition space plays a very specific role, based partially on its physical properties. I’m working with the spaces in which these different forms of communication adapt to each other.

RP: I feel that much of your work, and this piece in particular, is more about a visceral relationship with the body, not simply audiovisual but also physically present in terms of tension or even fear produced by the combination of sound and light. Is there a difference between this kind of relationship and more cognitive approaches to sound?

YC: It’s arousal, or excitement. This is a simulation of the sphere of mediation in which we live, populated with familiar objects and abstractions of the light and sound that inundate us. This is more direct, based on minimal and installation art rather than musical sound. It does not require too much contemplation, but rather enacts a different form of bodily communication within this sphere of media and information. Those pieces of information in the real world carry specific meanings, whereas when they are deprived of meaning we are pushed into a state of anxiety, a new model of communication. I’m interested in the reactions to this uncanny form of communication that does not respond to cognitive interpretation, but rather to direct experience.

RP: Your work contains a sensor such that when someone walks into the space there is a very specific order in which lighting elements become illuminated in relationship with the recorded sound of the piece. How is this order defined?

YC: The sound is intended to complement the “motion” of the lighting system, and the order of illumination is randomized according to the physical properties of the hardware. I’m interested in the moment of uncertainty in which even I don’t know if a given light will illuminate. It depends on temperature, voltage, and so on, and these factors inform the soundtrack. It’s like looking at the ocean. You can see the light moving over a given surface area of water and it appears as a random or abstract motion, but in reality it’s all determined by the physics of light, water, and reflection. It’s a partially intentional and partially incidental composition. A performative process.

RP: Have you ever worked with generative or algorithmic processing in your past projects?

YC: No. I don’t see any point to Max/MSP style processing. It’s an abdication of the responsibility or control of the artist, and doesn’t add any of the interesting elements of the physically randomized processes I described in relation this piece.

RP: This is something of a problem in the Chinese sound art scene now, and one of the things that made the exhibition concept so interesting for us. The ideas some of these artists start out with are often very interesting, but randomized processing without any aesthetic control is no substitute for turning a given observation into art via more proactive methods. The results often look awful in the exhibition space. There is always this question: why do you want to randomize this particular subject matter? What does generative processing do for this particular field recording? And that leads back to the question of non-cochlear sound art, because there’s certainly little of aesthetic interest there, only conceptual, but does it make for interesting art? What kind of conceptual standards are we applying to the aesthetics of sound?

SY: I am not sure if I agree that this is a prevalent problem in sound art in China, or just in sonic practices in general. My view is that randomization is a technique, and of course ultimately the artist is still responsible for the visual and sonic outcome of this process. To reveal this process and to put a spotlight on the process is to locate the work at the conceptual level, and the aesthetic judgment that the work demands will then be different as a result. But again I use the concert hall as an example to demonstrate how this discussion should be entirely out of vogue: it is very out of fashion to detail the random system or tone matrix or what have you with which a composer has arrived at the choices of pitches in a piece of composition. This hasn’t been stylish for well over two decades now, I would say. So why are we still asking these questions in sound art? And this is precisely what happens when you decontextualize sound art and to historicize it independent of the contemporary concert hall. Discussions that have already been carried out are repeated in a different space and time.

Participants

Yao Chung-Han: Born in Taipei and a 2008 graduate of the School of Art and Technology, Taipei National University of the Art, Yao Chung-Han is an active member of the new generation of sound artists in Taiwan, which includes the group i/O Lab of which he is a core member. His works are mostly concerned with sound, while at the same time searching for the inherent connections between video, installation, space, and various media. Recent exhibitions include Non-Places: Architecture of Pheromonal Presence, SCU, Taipei (2010); Emergencies!014, NTT ICC, Tokyo (2010); Tokyo Story, Wonder Site, Tokyo (2010); SuperGeneration@Taiwan, Today Art Museum, Beijing (2010), and Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai (2009).

Samson Young: With formal training in classical music and a keen eye for visuals, spatial installations and new technologies, Samson Young has been known to combine his diverse interests into uniquely intermedia concert experiences. Beyond the classical concert stage, his creative output spans composition for symphony orchestra and live electronics to amusement ride-turned-interactive installation and multi-channel performance video. Recent exhibitions include: 18 Degrees of Acclimation, White Box Gallery, New York (2010); Beyond the Colony of Kitsch, Crossing Art Gallery, New York (2010); Hong Kong Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, Hong Kong (2010); Prospectives International Festival of Media Art, University of Nevada (2009); and Last Intervention, Osage Gallery, Hong Kong (2009).

Marcel Duchamp inaugurated one of the manifold lineages of experimental art in the twentieth century with a push towards what he termed “non-retinal art,” launching a plea for the conceptual and the contextual; clearly, these were fertile seeds indeed. Duchamp’s thesis called for a break with art that functioned primarily on a visual level, if such a thing existed at all, but it was not long before a counterpoint emerged in the parallel narratives of minimalism and, ultimately, op art. But the non-retinal for Duchamp was more than this guarded dualism; in fact, this phrase was coined with particular reference to art that took as its primary concern the making and definition of art, a history that, in some models, reached its apex between the 1913 Armory Show and Malevich’s 1921 monochromes. Although this latter painter may have been working at the notion from the opposite direction, Duchamp insisted on the primacy of the mind, if not concept itself, over the visual plane.

It would be absurd, of course, to suggest that the visual plane was categorically dominant throughout Western art history prior to Duchamp’s intervention. Likewise, the field of music, from classical through to the avant-garde, rarely ever entailed a purely aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, it found its iconoclast in the person of John Cage, even if his revolution proved to enact a different situation entirely. This revolution was later wrapped up in the phrase “sound-in-itself,” although Cage himself rarely if ever employed the term, and it offered a wholly transcendental proposition: that “pure sound,” distinct from both music and noise, could mobilize a universalizing function. (This may be one of the root concepts behind Boris Groys’s oft-cited “weak universalism,” which, appropriately enough, discusses the monochromatic Malevich works as a major influence.) Cage also wished to dethrone the privileged status of the visual, resisting the popular model of sensation in which most auditory composition must invoke or emerge from some corresponding visual phenomenon.

This restitution of the aural found an unlikely second wave in Derek Jarman, the cult film director known within the art world as much for his garden as for his collaborations with sound artists and pop musicians on projects that could only loosely be termed music videos. Most pertinently, his haunting last film, Blue, consists of seventy-nine minutes of saturated blue and poetic audio narration; composed as the artist himself was going blind due to AIDS-related complications, the piece represents a struggle with the hegemonic terms of visuality, seemingly closing off the painterly films of Jarman’s earlier career. Derived from the monochromes of Yves Klein, themselves a lush if psuedo-spiritual rejoinder to the non-retinal Malevich, this continuous frame of blue has come to occupy an iconic position in the trajectory of queer theory. One critic has even set the soundtrack-oriented film in opposition to the opening lines of the Metaphysics: from Aristotle’s “above all others the sense of sight” to Jarman’s “pray to be released from the image.”

This last critical attempt may come across as hyperbolic, but there is no denying these ruptures in the narratives of genre and style. Potentially equaling these incidents in terms of gravity and import is Seth Kim-Cohen’s 2009 publication of the tome In the Blink of an Ear. Therein, the artist and scholar argues for a rereading of sound art history, looking towards a “non-cochlear” approach to sound art that would owe more to Duchamp than to the currently dominant justifications of sound-in-itself. Kim-Cohen cites the militant medium-specificity of high modernism as a key culprit in the transformation of sound art into a form of music culturally acceptable independent of context, and in response gestures towards the intertextuality of virtually all sonic artifacts produced today: the friction between sight and sound is collapsed, instead productively giving way to a biologically but not conceptually phenomenological model of perception.

The thesis may seem overwrought to observers of contemporary art, who will be familiar with the use of sound as a component of any number of artists otherwise working in the rhetoric of the conceptual. Indeed, sonic moving parts and, increasingly, speaker cones have become an often requisite element of such installations in the expanded field: one need only recall Bruce Nauman’s “Days,” which premiered in the 2009 Venice Biennale with several rows of whispering speakers, or, closer to home, Adrian Wong’s talking ducks and mumbling stuffed figures, or even the collaborative project recently installed by Vito Acconci and Ai Weiwei. But, like video art that happens to include an audio track, these projects do not consciously or rigorously engage with the notion of sound as medium, nor do they operate within the history of the last half-decade of what has become known as sound art.

Unfortunately, any use of sonic properties within contemporary art practice is often handed the mantle of successful sound art, even if the work in question more properly belongs to another genre entirely. In mainland China, for example, experimental musicians, noise performers, and sound artists are quite often all included in the same festival programs, live shows, and exhibitions: excluded by the art establishment on the one hand and the institutions of classical music and the performing arts on the other, this motley crew has successfully created a scene, but all at the expense of serious engagement with the material itself. In the midst of a deluge of field recordings and patches for the absurdly pervasive (and almost always pirated) Max/MSP/Jitter software package, critics have begun to wonder: Why are all of these artists using sound in the first place? How do they differentiate their practices from music or sculpture? What are they discovering about sound and how this material fits into the narrative arcs of the conceptual and the retinal?

At the limit case of “non-cochlear sound” or conceptual sound art, we approach the asymptotic value of sound without sound. Sound, removed from sound art, does not necessarily lead to the purely conceptual; indeed, it could be an intensely sensory experience in its own right, as with Stephen Vitiello’s “Fear of High Places and Natural Things” (2004). In this installation, a set of speaker cones hang from the gallery ceiling, emitting no tones audible to the human ear but nevertheless vibrating constantly. There is a sense of the uncanny at work here, imparting a feeling of nervous terror that functions physically through sound waves but aesthetically through both the visual and the tactile. Clearly borrowing the vocabulary of sound art in the form of the speaker cones, the piece nevertheless moves beyond sound proper–or perhaps defines the territory at stake in this distinction.

Similarly, former rock musician turned multimedia dramatist Feng Jiangzhou transforms sound into pressure with his installation “The Discipline in Four Parts” (2008). In a darkened cylindrical space, the visitor sits passively on a short stool surrounded by a steel cage on which some twenty speakers are positioned, emitting vast multi-channel compositions designed to disorient and construct an alternative sensation of space. Sound remains very much present in this project, but moves from a one-dimensional sonic experience to a hacking of auditory sensation for the purpose of building an invisible architecture defined by a medium rarely called upon to play such a role. Confidence in a knowable conceptual origin is disoriented in tandem with the simultaneous displacement of sonic origin. Visual deprivation may be a simplistic maneuver, but here the psuedo-musical compositions that recreate the space can be analogous to the psueo-poetic narration that recreates the visual for Derek Jarman.

Although critic-cum-musician-cum-curator-cum-artist Yan Jun launched his artistic practice with the a series of field recordings transferred directly from released on his experimental record label to the exhibition space in a darkened room, he has since moved on to an increasingly interesting series of ventures into the space of sound within contemporary art, aided by the curators of Vitamin Creative Space. In one sculpture formally resembling the Stephen Vitiello installation noted above, a lone speaker cone sits perched on top of speaker case housing; the cone vibrates and even jumps to the low rumbling sound of a heartbeat of some kind, but it is visually unclear whether this sound is actually emitted by the housing below or the cone above. This sense of ambiguity frees the piece as a whole from becoming too closely tied to the auditory experience, drawing forth an almost physical compulsion to touch the vibrating elements personally.

Approaching the sound barrier from the other direction, Hong Kong composer and artist Samson Young strips down music to some of its most basic elements, ultimately transforming it into sound. For the installation “Beethoven Piano Sonata, nr.1 – nr.14 (Senza Misura)” (2010), the artist has programmed forty-seven exposed circuit boards, each one simultaneously ticking and blinking to the tempo of a single movement of all of Beethoven’s early fourteen piano sonatas. The effect is mesmerizing both visually and sonically, recalling the aesthetics of György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes more than anything else, but simultaneously stripping down such musical experiments in timing and composition to a naked framework of pure temporality, creating a totalizing experiment that verges on pure sound without reducing itself to the exercises in taste typical of sound-in-itself.

The goal of this curatorial program, writ large, is to reexamine the underpinnings of the characteristic styles, concepts, and devices that have come to represent the genre of sound within the field of contemporary art. In this vision, sound moves from medium or material to a more historically and contextually loaded territory, an object that can no more reject the lineages of both Cage and Duchamp than it can avoid participation in the carnival of post-conceptualism altogether. The hope shared by the artists and writers described above, however, is that this notion of sound can find a possibility for expression and consideration in an anti-essentialist space defined as much by the cognitive as by the aural, and as much by critical reflection as by enthusiastic volunteerism. It is a goal that should resonate with other once-struggling genres, and it will no doubt continue to resonate through the gallery spaces that propose to contain it.

“Resonance: Exhibition, Performance, Talks”
Published as publicity materials by Input/Output Gallery. This text describes the specific exhibition program that emerged from the critical discussions mentioned above.
Text by Robin Peckham and Rachel Connelly.

Resonance is an exhibition about the word sound. It is about the sound of the word, the meaning of the word, and the usage of the word; that is to say, it asks what sound is, how sound is used, and what sound can do. One may wonder why an artist would choose to work with sound, as opposed to music or visual art, but would find that answers are rarely forthcoming.

Resonance attempts to present an abstracted territory for this dialogue, stripping sound down to its most basic elements; the same elements that contribute to the other creative modes and methods in question. Just as Seth Kim-Cohen, working in the Duchampian conceptual tradition in his book In the Blink of an Ear, has called for an art of “non-cochlear sound” opposed to the “sound-in-itself” associated with John Cage, this project wonders what happens when the sound is removed from sound art. As an exhibition, it engages in the transformation of music into sound, of sound into pressure, and of the sonic into an anti-essentialist conceptual program.

The goal of this curatorial program, writ large, is to re-examine the underpinnings of the characteristic styles, concepts, and devices that have come to represent the genre of sound within the field of contemporary art. In this vision, sound moves from medium or material to a more historically and contextually loaded territory, an object that can no more reject the lineages of both Cage and Duchamp than it can avoid participation in the carnival of post-conceptualism altogether. Input/Output Gallery presents the works of two artists currently working through this problem: Samson Young, the Hong Kong composer, scholar, and artist known for his contributions to everything from game art to new classical performance, and Yao Chung-Han, the Taipei-based sound artist widely recognized for his research into the breakdown points of the technological matrix that surrounds us. Both are representatives of the new wave of emerging sound cultures across greater China and into the international sphere, offering new points of entry into these questions.

Yao Chung-Han here includes the installation, “I Will Be Broken” (2010), a floor-to-ceiling suspended column of circular fluorescent lamps tied together in a mesmerizing totem with its own power cords. As the piece slowly strangles itself into forced obsolescence with the surges of electricity through both body and frame, its lighting sources fluctuate along with a soft, uncanny buzzing. Although the visual spectacle and conceptual nervousness are at first domineering, the work functions primarily on the level of and through the medium of sound, emitting an atonal and unpredictable sound that requires attention by virtue of its low volume and commands consideration based on its ever-evolving almost organic state. Here, sound is a by-product that comes to both lead and stand in for an abstract choreography of relevance and terror that plays out on the stages of perception, ultimately creating an un-composed cacophony through physical experience.

Approaching the sound barrier from the other direction, Samson Young strips down music to some of its most basic elements, ultimately transforming it into sound. For the installation “Beethoven Piano Sonata, nr.1 – nr.14 (Senza Misura)” (2010), the artist has programmed forty-seven exposed circuit boards, each one simultaneously ticking and blinking to the tempo of a single movement of all of Beethoven’s early fourteen piano sonatas. The effect is mesmerizing both visually and sonically, recalling the aesthetics of György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes more than anything else, but simultaneously stripping down such musical experiments in timing and composition to a naked framework of pure temporality, creating a totalizing experiment that verges on pure sound without reducing itself to the exercises in taste typical of sound-in-itself.

I/O Gallery is proud to offer a stage for these explorations of physical sensation, cognition, composition, temporality, and destruction. Conceived in collaboration with the Society for Experimental Cultural Production, this exhibition–along with an associated series of performances and talks featuring Yang Yeung, Cedric Maridet, and Yao Dajuin among others–hopes to throw into relief the problems that mark discourses of sound, art, music, and new media today, contributing to an ongoing conversation.