Even though I felt my work was moving beyond sound art, I still sought out accounts of listening from within the discipline. I wanted to remain in dialogue with the field that my work had emerged from. Whilst I felt there was a listening practice beyond sound art, and that sound art’s listenings were partial and problematic, I also felt that sound art had, thus far, been attempting to articulate its listening far more critically and deeply than any other artistic discipline. Moreover, during this period of my research, theorists and practitioners within sound art were beginning to ask similar questions of listening as I was, seeking to address its social, political and non-sounding aspects, for example. This resulted in a more
critical approach to listening more generally within the discipline, one that I welcomed and absorbed into my practice. We will explore some of these ideas below.
3.3.1 Neo-Modernist And Post-Modernist Sound Art
Sound art discourse has mirrored debates within fine art about the differences between modernist and post-modernist perspectives on aesthetics, and this has consequences with regards approaches to listening. Two texts exemplify this discourse and here I reflect on these consequences with regards the trajectory of my own research and development of my listening practice.
Christoph Cox’s short essay ‘Neo-modernist Sound Art’ (2003), originally published in Artforum, both outlines and exemplifies a tendency in sound art practice of the early twenty-first century to reassert principles of modernism first proposed by Clement Greenberg and Theodor Adorno in the middle of the twentieth century. I will summarise and reflect on the essay here and then contrast it with the writing of Seth Kim-Cohen, whose 2010 book In The Blink Of An Ear: Non-Cochlear Sound Art, offers a response to this
‘sound-in-itself’ position.
The canonical works of sound practice occupy relatively unproblematically modernist spaces. Works such Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room (1969), or Bernhard Leitner’s Soundcube (1969), whilst inviting interaction and movement beyond that normally afforded in a seated concert hall, still exist as things to be discovered, operating with or without the audience’s hearing. Cox draws on that tradition with his conception of neo-modernist sound art, and asserts the particular politics of such work:
To the postmodernist, the new sound art might seem to retreat from social and political concerns. But neo-modernism has a politics of its own - a distinctly avant-gardist one that recalls both Greenberg and Theodor Adorno and implicitly criticises postmodernism for its symbiotic relationship with the culture industry. In eschewing mass-media content, the genre proposes a more radical exploration of the formal conditions of the medium itself. Against the anaesthetic assault of daily life, it reclaims a basic function of art: the affirmation and extension of pure sensation. Where postmodernism is about mixture and overload, neo-modernism is about purity and reduction. Where postmodernism is about content and the concrete (the vertiginous string of recognisable samples), neo-modernism is about
form and abstraction (p.67).
Cox describes works by Ryoji Ikeda - ‘patterns of interference with simple sine tones’
(ibid.) - and Carsten Nicolai - ‘spare loops out of crystalline ticks and beeps’ (ibid.). Such works place the listener in the role of receiver: admiring and being transformed by the sounding artwork.
I suggest the politics Cox’s speaks of is not one that aggravates or affects at the level of the social body, nor is it work that proposes alternatives to capitalist sensory modes. Rather it’s a politic that remains individualist and symbolic. And that is fine - my thesis does not discredit the affective power, at the individual level, of modernist or neo-modernist informed practices. Rather I suggest that the existence of what Cox calls ‘neo-modernist’
sound practices allows us to mark out another, separate territory, one that doesn’t engage with just form but with other people. It’s a sonically-informed space that puts listening, and not the construction of sound, at its centre. Its audience is not uninformed or partial without an engagement with the art object, but rather, they are enablers, collaborators and aggravators themselves.
In contrast to this return-to-form explored by Cox19, Seth Kim-Cohen sets out an alternative proposition and offers an indirect response to Cox, one that again rehearses the modernist/post-modernist dialectic. Kim-Cohen argues that much sound art portrays sound as ‘sound-in-itself’; as an object that can, apparently, exist without an audience or context and operate in the grand tradition of the modernist art object (as per Cox’s neo-modernist sound works). Playfully engaging with Duchamp’s proposition of a non-retinal art, an idea that has since been seen as a seminal moment in the development of what in the 1960s became known as conceptual art, Kim-Cohen argues powerfully for a move away from sound-in-itself which he views as a modernist hangover - neo- or otherwise - and instead for an embrace of what he calls the non-cochlear; that is aspects of sound art works that are not audible but operate at the level of the conceptual or the symbolic. The notion of sound having meaning without reference to anything but the sound itself – the vibrations of air molecules, discussed in terms of timbre, pitch, density, spectromorphology is, according to Kim-Cohen, analogous to the attitudes towards paint and colour within Abstract Expressionism and is inherently tied to Greenbergian notions
19 Cox has developed this position further over the past decade. See ‘Beyond Representation and Signification: Towards a Sonic Materialism’ (2011), as an example.
of the art object, notions that the visual arts has been much quicker to move beyond than sound art. According to Kim-Cohen, in the visual arts this reductionism was subsequently challenged by conceptualism and post-modernism, which highlighted the complex network of relationships, ideas and trajectories around an artwork, giving it meaning, or acting as the artwork itself. These notions destabilised the autonomy of the art object and uncovered contingencies and complexities that undermined modernist notions of purity, singularity or authorship. Kim-Cohen argues a similar development has not occurred as explicitly in sound arts, with sound still shying away from analysis and claiming some inherent essence, so hindering a potential conceptualist space within the medium.
Kim-Cohen’s text seemed to take sound art beyond the phenomenology-inspired, neo-modernist sublimity, and it also outlines a notion of an ‘expanded sonic practice’ that includes ‘the spectator, who always carries, as constituent parts of his or her subjectivity, a perspective shaped by social, political, gender, class and racial experience’ (p.107) but it fell short of dealing with listening, especially in the social sense that I was interested in. Kim-Cohen’s listening is not phenomenological, but it is cerebral; it’s listening to sound as conceptual art. For Kim-Cohen non-cochlear sound art is a series of signs and symbols, and listening, if indeed listening is required, consists of a ‘reading’ these symbols and signs.
There is still little space for dialogue or communication.
Much sound art still occupies Cox’s ‘neo-modernist’ space, a position that forecloses any possibility of the socially-engaged, participatory and communicative kind of listening I was becoming interested in. Moreover, Kim-Cohen’s post-modern, non-cochlear sound art renders listening (and even sound) to a secondary role in an approach that mutes the sensuality and intimacy of the listening encounter.
3.4 Recent Listenings Within Sound Art: Finding The Boundaries Of My