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This article considers the relationship between drawing and sound in the work ofAmerican artist Trisha Donnelly (born 1974). Against recent theories of the demiseof individual media, Donnelly’s work is seen to indicate a more complex set ofcross-modal and inter-medial relationships.

The waves keep at it,Arnold’s Aegean Sophocles heard, the swell and ebb,the cresting and the falling under,

each one particular and the same – Each day a reminder, each sun in its world, each face,each word something one hearsor someone once heard.

Robert Creeley, ‘Dover Beach (Again)’, 2005

In Michael Snow’s groundbreaking film Wavelength (1967), the camera zooms slowly across a New York loft,where isolated actions intermittently occur. Furniture is moved, a record is played, and a man collapses deadon the floor, leaving the apartment’s owner wondering what to do about this anonymous corpse. Over thecourse of forty-five minutes, the scene is mediated by coloured filters, shifts into negative, and changes infocus. These visual modulations are accompanied by the electronic wail of a rising sine wave, whichincreases in frequency and in pitch to reach an almost unbearable level of intensity. Finally, the camerafocuses on a black-and-white photograph taped to the wall, a close-up of the ocean, its waves gradually fillingthe frame.

A similar photograph formed the conceptual core of Trisha Donnelly’s first solo show at the Casey KaplanGallery, New York, in 2002. Black Wave 2002 is a black and white image of a cresting wave, seen close-up asif threatening to engulf the spectator. Wilder than the waters captured by Snow, the photograph was said torecord a specific oceanic phenomenon: ‘the unbroken wave in deep water that occurs before and after astorm at sea.’ Related images have appeared sporadically in Donnelly’s exhibitions over the past ten years,often seeming to mark a sea-change in her artistic practice. This article will explore their significance, without

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purporting to explain or decode her determinedly reticent body of work. Taking its cue from Snow’s landmarkfilm, it will propose the waveform as a means of thinking through the oscillatory play of sound, light and matterin Donnelly’s artistic production; her interest in frequencies, vibrations, involuntary reactions, andripple effects.

Since the late 1990s, much of Donnelly’s work has been concerned with the transmission of messages fromdistant times and places, encrypted or distorted like the word-of-mouth accounts of her unrecordedperformances, which she prefers to call ‘demonstrations’. Her diverse artistic production, which encompassesdrawings, photographs, sculptures, films, and audio works, thus conflates the technological and spiritualistconnotations of the term ‘medium’. Responding to this eclectic body of work, curator Hamza Walker haswritten: ‘Although it is tempting to cast her as the consummate post-medium artist, in her case that is alreadyan over-determined category, for Donnelly genuinely has no medium. If anything she is a pre-medium artist,where “medium” could just as soon refer to a psychic.’ Indeed, Donnelly’s practice exposes the roamingpolysemy of the term ‘medium’ – as an intervening substance, a set of artistic conventions, a technology ofcommunication, and a psychic intermediary. The waveform, which spans individual media and transcends thelimits of human consciousness, offers a means of conceptualising this perpetual transgression of modalitiesand boundaries.

Automatisms

Asked about her drawings, Donnelly has said: ‘I think that they relate to objects the way that you listen to theradio, if you have a radio on. I draw when the radio is on. When I’m drawing, I just wait a really long timebecause I have to do the right thing. So I don’t draw all day, but when I have the thing I am supposed to bedrawing, I draw all day and all night.’ This account of waiting, listening, and exhaustively inscribing recallsthe surrealist practice of automatism, in which the artist acts as a ‘modest recording instrument’, the dutifulscrivener of a ‘magic dictation’. Like the courier, the scrivener is a kind of medium, the carrier of a messagethat originates elsewhere. Yet the message is also transformed in the act of transmission – from speech intowriting, or from writing into speech. For the receiver, this entails a displacement across sensory pathways –from audible to readable symbols, or vice versa in the case of the courier reading aloud. The scrivener ofsound is both a mediator and a translator, an agent poised between senses and media.

In Donnelly’s 2002 show, twelve drawings were pinned side-by-side on the wall, traversing one of the gallery’scorners. Each depicted one or two tubular forms, meticulously rendered in green coloured pencil. Like manyof Donnelly’s drawings, they were neither representational nor fully abstract. Drawn in perspective, the formsappeared to occupy three-dimensional space, their curvatures rendered tangible through careful shading. Yetdespite the precision with which they were drawn, the cylinders did not resemble any particular object –unless some crucial detail had been withheld, forestalling their identification. The checklist deferredclarification once more, instructing visitors to ‘see front desk for title’. Upon approaching the gallery assistantto request the missing information, visitors were played a sequence of electronic beats. This substitution ofa sound for a linguistic sign could be seen as another manifestation of Donnelly’s reluctance to verbalise theexperience of her work. Her exhibitions often lack artist’s statements, press releases or catalogue essays, andwhen these do exist, they contain cryptic pronouncements or exhaustive, formal descriptions thatconscientiously eschew interpretation. Donnelly’s engagements with interviewers and critics are similarlyelusive – in one public dialogue she answered ‘pass’ to some questions, and played tracks on her iPod inresponse to others. Her strategic use of sound might thus be indicative of what artist and writer SaloméVoegelin has called a ‘sonic sensibility’, which contests the hegemony of the linguistic sign, seeking tocommunicate differently.

Yet besides functioning as an act of resistance, the use of sound to title a drawing could be seen to extend the

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drawing’s properties, giving an ostensibly silent object an aural dimension. If one were to ask what theserounded, repetitive forms might sound like, the answer could conceivably be a rhythmic series of beats. Toequate visual forms with sonic sensations evokes a kind of synaesthesia, where the stimulation of onesensory pathway leads to an involuntary response in a different pathway. Sound to colour synaesthetesperceive colours triggered by certain noises, while others describe metallic waveforms hovering on animaginary screen a few inches in front of their eyes. These involuntary visualisations are another kind ofautomatism, operating beyond the conscious control of the person experiencing them. Indeed, the languageused to describe synaesthesia is distinctly mechanical, even cybernetic in tone. The condition has been saidto arise from ‘abnormal cross-wiring between brain regions’ or ‘disinhibited feedback’, figuring the brain as akind of machine, whose faulty wiring might trigger unexpected, automatic operations. These abrupt transitionsbetween forms, senses and media are a recurrent theme in Donnelly’s practice, where images are insistently‘permeated’ by sound.

Donnelly’s ‘bulletin board project’ 44 Days to Hanoi, presented at the CCA Wattis Institute of ContemporaryArts, San Francisco, in 2003, centred on a libretto by Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915), the Russian composerwho developed a synaesthetic system whereby colours were assigned to musical notes using a formulabased on Isaac Newton’s Opticks (1704). In Donnelly’s project, the full text of Scriabin’s libretto wasjuxtaposed with letters spelling out the work’s title and two black balloons arranged in an inverted ‘V’formation, these three components encased in adjacent glass cabinets. The libretto was from Scriabin’sunfinished symphony Mysterium, a week-long multi-sensory performance including singers, dancers,musicians, a procession, incense, lighting effects, fire, and water, to be staged in a purpose-built temple at thefoot of the Himalayas and accompanied by the sound of bells suspended from zeppelin-like airships.Throughout the libretto, opposing forces named the ‘Masculine Principle’ and the ‘Feminine Principle’, ‘Wave’and ‘Light’, interact and are unified. Scriabin believed that soul and matter would separate under the highesttension induced by the music’s vibration, engendering a psychotropic state in his audience and bringing aboutthe end of the world. In The Vortex 2003 Donnelly played a recording of the Slavyanka Russian Men’sChorus singing Mikhail Lermontov’s poem Borodino (1837), named after the bloodiest battle of the Napoleonicwars. She instructed her audience to ‘Take the highest male voice. Listen and track it throughout therecording. The sound can compress like a photograph. While listening, flatten it into an object. It’s a comb-likestructure’. This cross-modal interaction, whereby listening becomes watching becomes pressing, facilitatesthe imaginary transformation of the medium of the work, from sound to photograph to sculptural object. InDonnelly’s work, the interaction of the senses prompts a consideration of inter-medial relationships.

During the 1960s, communication theorist Marshall McLuhan famously argued that all media were extensionsof the senses, and that the relationships between media were organised according to patterns of sensoryperception. Depending on the dominant media of the age, some senses would be heightened and othersdiminished, so that ‘new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture’. Despite thiscontinual recalibration, however, McLuhan implied that the individual senses would remain distinct, as wouldthe media that functioned to extend them. More recently, media theorist Friedrich Kittler has claimed that thedigitisation of channels and information erases the differences between individual media, reducing sound andimage, voice and text to mere ‘surface effects, known to consumers as interface’. When information istransmitted as a series of digital numbers, Kittler argues: ‘any medium can be translated into any other …Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, storage, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping – atotal media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium.’ But while Kittler’s account of thiserasure is decidedly dystopian, writer Steven Connor has suggested that with the convergence or aggregationof media ‘new, more dynamic relationships began to become visible, not only in our present, but in ourpast’. Rather than policing the boundaries between media, or fending off processes of digitisation,Donnelly’s work embraces the modulations, transformations and synchronisations that Kittler so

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ominously describes.

Drawing sound (sounding drawing)

Discussing the various strands of her artistic production, Donnelly has said: ‘Some of the objects are sounds;some of the sounds are drawings, but I think that the drawings that I do are more of a physical realisation ofwhat I am thinking than of myself (i.e. an action).’ She has likened the act of drawing to ‘pulling at areceding image’, attempting to grasp something inchoate and drag it into visual form. Drawings aredescribed as ‘triggers’, ‘batteries’ or ‘receivers’, imbuing them with an operative, transformative potential.The Volume 2004 is a pencil drawing of three large, concentric circles, the outer two connected by radiatinglines. Abstract on first impression, the drawing’s title implies that it depicts a volume knob, albeit withoutnumerical markers and massively inflated in size. As art historian Julian Myers succinctly puts it, ‘the pencil isimagined as a noisemaker, another kind of instrument’. Strategically placed in conjunction with other works,The Volume assumes an imaginary modulating function, as if promising to amplify or attenuate their sound.This relates most obviously to the audio-works, while lending a sonic potential to those drawings, sculpturesand films that are ostensibly mute.

If The Volume is an iconographic representation of a mechanical device used to control sound, then HW 2007has a different relationship with the aural. It consists of two cotton panels hung at the entrance to a gallery,each bearing a configuration of lines in black and blue embroidery. On the left, curved lines increasing inlength resemble the sign for noise emitted from a speaker, while straight, parallel lines decrease in length,indicating a vibratory movement that diminishes with distance from its source. The letters ‘W’ and ‘H’ areembroidered underneath the lines, with the entire arrangement repeated in mirror-image on the right-handpanel. Elsewhere, Donnelly has elaborated upon the work’s acronymic title, remarking that it stands for a‘Harvest of Waves’. HW was first exhibited with the drawing R. Creeley + Levitating Wave 2007, which, likeBlack Wave, depicts a mysterious oceanic event.It is dedicated to the poet Robert Creeley, whose poem,‘Dover Beach (Again)’ aligns the rhythmic cycles of the ocean with the mnemonic recurrence of words onceheard. This latent aurality is central to HW which, hung at the entrance of an exhibition, coaxes viewers notjust to look, but to listen to the works on display. In contrast to the gauche mimeticism of The Volume, theselines visualise the invisible, symbolising sound as a vibratory, wavelike movement.

A further, indexical representation of sound occurs in Diagram for Double Gong 2006, a drawing based on anaudio-work Donnelly exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in 2006 called Gong 2005, for which she designed asystem of speakers that related to the specific architectural space of the New York museum. Two separatesurround-sound speaker systems were concealed within the ceiling, to project the same sound in oppositedirections and around the perimeter of the room. Positioned between these dynamic sonic forms, thelistener experienced a metallic whirr, followed by a moment of silence and the sound of a gong being struck.Yet instead of emanating from a single source, like a gong, the sound was both doubled and mobile,consisting of two reverse acoustics describing each side of an invisible U-shaped form. Sound was conceivedspatially as well as temporally, as visualised in the accompanying drawing.

Diagram for Double Gong’s exact method of production remains unclear, and Donnelly has only ever releaseda scan of the original. It includes two waveforms indicative of stereo sound, but instead of moving from leftto right along a horizontal axis marked time, they move upwards along the vertical axis that would usuallyindicate voltage. Donnelly appears to have reoriented the graph so that in addition to signifying time andpower, the area between the waveforms indicates the architectural space between the two surround-soundsystems. This results in an unusual conflation of the flat, abstract space of the graph and the three-dimensional space of the room. At once the visible trace of an invisible phenomenon and the spatial recordof a temporal event, this graphic trace visualises the sound as two striated, wavelike forms, which back away

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from one another to occupy opposite sides of the gallery. Not only does the sound produce an involuntarydrawing then – it exerts an almost sculptural presence within the limits of the architectural container.

Transcribing sound into drawing, Diagram for Double Gong spans senses and media, while visualisingimperceptible oscillations. It constitutes what Kittler, discussing the invention of the phonograph, has called akind of ‘writing without a subject’, a graphic trace generated not by hand, but by the needle of an oscilloscope(or computer software that mimics its effects). This mechanical mode of inscription escapes the binarymodel proposed by art historian Benjamin Buchloh, who has divided twentieth-century drawing into the‘matrix’ and the ‘grapheme’. In Buchloh’s account, the first kind of drawing (epitomised by the systematic gridsof Sol LeWitt) imposes a predetermined structure on the drawn mark, deliberately restricting its expressivity.The second (exemplified by the desultory scrawls of Cy Twombly) uses automatist strategies to disengage themark from technical skill and authorial control. Despite their evident differences, both approachesproblematise the causal relationship between the graphic trace and the authorial hand, bypassing consciousdecision-making in an attempt to generate marks automatically. Yet however strenuously they resist humanagency, both the matrix and the grapheme are fundamentally hand-made, and thus latently anthropocentric.The machine-made mark of Diagram for Double Gong constitutes a genuinely ‘automatic’ mode of drawing,which is nevertheless oddly expressive in its febrile tremors and convulsive waves.

Waveforms

Remarking on the prevalence of waveforms in art, film and music of the 1960s, the composer Alvin Lucier hassuggested that ‘there was something about the purity and neutrality of waves and their motions that attractedartists who wanted to make non-subjective and at the same time expressive works’. He was thinkingspecifically of Lee Lozano’s Wave series (1967–70), a group of eleven paintings based on differentwavelengths of light in the electromagnetic spectrum. Although rendered painstakingly by hand, the paintings’undulating lines evade the autographic, alluding to electromagnetic processes beyond human control.Nevertheless, they harbour an innate sensitivity, appearing to respond to imperceptible changes in theatmosphere. For Lozano and others, the waveform offered a linear model that was both systematic andgestural – both matrix and grapheme – while interrogating the very conditions of perceptibility. In 1998 Luciercomposed Wave Songs, For Female Voice with Pure Wave Oscillators, in which two sine wave oscillatorswere tuned to the size of the waves in Lozano’s paintings. Here the drawn line was used to generate sound,making the graphic trace audible. The composition recalled Lucier’s own landmark work Music for SoloPerformer, For Enormously Amplified Brain Waves and Percussion (1965), in which electrodes were attachedto the performer’s scalp as he entered into a meditative state, aiming to produce alpha brainwaves at eight toten hertz. Amplified, these alpha waves produced an electrical signal that was used to vibrate percussioninstruments such as gongs and snare drums positioned around the performance space. Inaudible, invisiblebrain activity was thus rendered audible and visible, as the various instruments appeared uncannily to playthemselves.

Conversely, the waveform offered a means of contesting the deep-seated ocularcentrism of the visual arts.Following early surrealist experiments with automatic writing, André Breton’s experience of the collaborativegame ‘exquisite corpse’ prompted him to entertainthe idea of ‘a tacit communication – occurring only in waves– between the participants’. This wireless communication surpassed Breton’s earlier conception of thesurrealists as ‘modest recording instruments’ (les modestes appareils enregistreurs), a phrase derived fromtelecommunications practices of the late nineteenth century. As media historian Jeffrey Sconce hasargued, the dawn of telegraphy in the 1840s carried the animating ‘spark’ of consciousness beyond theconfines of the physical body, facilitating speech between spatially distant agents. With the development ofwireless communication at the turn of the century came ‘an increasingly uncertain world, one populated bycitizens cut loose from previous social ties and now suffused with electromagnetic waves set free from

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tributaries of cable and wire’. Such waves spanned senses and media, extending beyond consciousness toan imperceptible yet infinitely dynamic world of radio waves, micro waves, and ultraviolet rays. Whilereconfiguring the relationships between the senses then, the development of electronic media also renderedthe limitations of sensory experience unsettlingly apparent.

Later, in the 1960s, the waveform contributed to conceptual art’s deconstruction of sensory pleasure, since itis a physical phenomenon that could nevertheless be invisible and inaudible. Its implications were mostextensively explored by Robert Barry in a series of works using radio waves, carrier waves and ultrasonicwaves. In pieces such as 88mc Carrier Wave (FM) and 1600kc Carrier Wave (AM) (both 1968), hidden radiotransmitters emitted carrier waves with no modulation. Instead of carrying information, the waves werepresented as objects in themselves – invisible forms occupying space and interacting with its inhabitants. InUltrasonic Wave Piece 1968, forty kilohertz ultrasonic sound waves were bounced off the interior walls of theexhibition space to create invisible patterns and designs. Barry’s Telepathic Piece 1969 built upon theseearlier works, and the artist observed that ‘The nature of carrier waves in a room – especially the FM – isaffected by people. The body itself, as you know, is an electrical device … A person is also a source of somekind of a carrier wave. Let me call that telepathy.’ Like Breton, Barry saw electromagnetic waves as ameans of bypassing verbal or visual communication in the hope of establishing an unmediated relationshipwith one’s audience. His interest in wireless communication technologies was shared by other conceptualartists including Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner, both of whom described the artist as the ‘transmitter’ of anidea and the viewer as its ‘receiver’. By the 1960s such terms were central to the developing field ofinformation theory, which precipitated the onset of digital communication.

This artistic appropriation of the language and technologies of electronic media offers an alternativeperspective on ‘art in the age of the post-medium condition’. Granted, art of the late 1960s and early 1970smoved beyond conventional materials and techniques, heralding ‘the termination of the individual arts asmedium-specific’. But conceptual artists also embraced a more wide-ranging definition of the term‘medium’, which extended beyond artistic conventions to encompass electronic media and, in some cases,parapsychological notions of ‘mediumship’. With her interest in vibrations, wavelengths and coded messages,Donnelly inherits these concerns at a moment when interpersonal communication has once again beendramatically reconfigured by technology. The Receiver 2006 is a suite of eight drawings displayed pinned oneon top of the other, the uppermost drawing placed at the bottom of the pile on a weekly basis. This serialityinstitutes a temporal unfolding that can only be witnessed by repeat visitors to the exhibition. Each sheetbears a blue ink drawing of a robe that appears to clothe an invisible body, uncannily contorted into a series ofanimated gestures. Emblazoned on the robe is a single letter which occupies a different position on eachdrawing. Together, the letters spell out the word ‘RECEIVER’, the radiating lines combining with the word andthe gesturing figure to invoke a ritualistic or technological process of communication. As in other drawingsby Donnelly, these lines resemble the ‘streamers’ seen in Kirlian photography, which make visible theelectromagnetic field surrounding living organisms. Once again, the body is presented as a communicativedevice, capable of transmitting messages verbally, visually, or electromagnetically.

Reverberations

Donnelly’s solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan Gallery in 2010 harboured echoes of her previous shows whileintroducing new, resonant elements. On entering the gallery, the visitor was confronted with a vintage desk,located in front of the functioning kiosk manned by the gallery’s staff. Unoccupied throughout the exhibition,the desk was entitled The Secretary, conjuring an invisible scrivener at the gallery’s portal. Moving into thenext room, one encountered a lustrous chunk of Rose of Portugal marble, roughly hewn except for twosymmetrical, striated scoops taken out of either side. These machine-made marks had neither a decorativenor an illustrative effect, but instead appeared oddly functional, without their purpose ever being clear. One

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reviewer called them ‘comb-like’, recalling the imaginary structure generated by a sound in Donnelly’sdemonstration The Vortex. For another critic, the jagged incisions resembled ‘the crests and troughs ofwaves’.

In the second gallery, a long slab of Black Portoro marble was raised from the floor on wooden props, incisedwith parallel grooves to create a ridged cylindrical form embedded within the larger slab (fig.1). Like all theworks except The Secretary,it was untitled.Propped against a wall was a piece of sand-coloured travertine,into which parallel lines had been cut, this time creating two shallow, oval shapes on either side of a columnarstructure, concealed just below the surface. They resembled some kind of speaker or vent, an illusionheightened by the fractured, percussive sound of sleigh bells emanating from an invisible source. The thirdroom contained a thin, brittle-looking sheet of quartzite propped against a wall, an amorphous shape scrapedinto its surface. Together, the four monolithic sculptures exerted a sombre, weighty presence in the galleryspace. By comparison, the final work in the exhibition was easy to overlook, its impact being of a morecumulative nature. Before exiting the gallery, the viewer passed an unframed, black-and-white photographfixed to the wall, a close-up of a gathering wave, sweeping across a calm but gently undulating sea (fig.2).

Fig.1

Trisha Donnelly

Untitled 2010

Quartzite

Courtesy Trisha Donnelly

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Fig.2

Trisha Donnelly

Untitled 2010

RC print

Courtesy Trisha Donnelly

Anomalous on first impression, the untitled photograph engendered a mnemonic ripple across time thatworked against the synchronic structure of the exhibition. It resonated beyond the 2010 show, retroactivelycharging earlier works such as Black Wave and HW. Yet its vibratory motion also inflected the surroundingsculptures, imbuing their weighty, monolithic forms with a latent fluidity. Inherently transgressive, the waveformtroubled the neat circumscription of the exhibition format, while operating across and between ostensiblydiscrete bodies of work. It reappeared in the untitled film Donnelly presented in a 1950s cinema at Documenta13, Kassel, in 2012 (fig.3). Here, a series of images rich in association yet impossible to pin down wereprojected in an endless loop. Silent and almost static, these transitory images (which Donnelly has likened to‘transmissions’) shared a rippling, oscillatory motion that made tangible the passage of time while resistingany form of narrative or climax. Like the wave photographs, they seemed to stake out a space for the future,indicating that their significance would only be gleaned retrospectively.

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Fig.3

Trisha Donnelly

Installation shot of Untitled 2010–ongoing, at Documenta 13, Kassel

Courtesy Trisha Donnelly, commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13)

Photograph © Nils Klinger

In her book Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound, writer Shelley Trower exploresthe role of vibration in the cultural imagination from the late eighteenth century to the present day. During thenineteenth century, she writes, ‘physicists, philosophers, poets, physiologists, medical writers, patients,inventors, geologists, engineers, mathematicians and novelists developed a preoccupation with those differentspeeds of vibration known as frequencies’. This preoccupation manifested itself in multifarious measuringand recording instruments, designed ‘to bring to light that which lurked just beyond consciousness, or,perhaps more appropriately, to make audible the silent vibrations that were shaping the experience ofmodernity’. Yet however meticulously these oscillatory phenomena were recorded, they remainedamorphous and elusive, escaping formalisation. Sound, which had long been recognised as a wave-likephenomenon, provided a model for conceptualising other forms of vibration. For the philosopher Jean-LucNancy, ‘The sonorous outweighs form. It does not dissolve it but rather enlarges it; it gives it an amplitude, adensity and a vibration or an undulation whose outline never does anything but approach’. Trowersuggests that the inherent dynamism of vibration – its perpetual transgression of modalities and boundaries –might offer a means of rethinking the relations between the senses. Vibrations can be visible, audible, andpalpable, challenging conceptions of the senses as distinct or opposed. The oscillatory movements so centralto Donnelly’s practice might thus function to unsettle our expectations of the senses and the media thataugment them. What results is not necessarily the experiential depletion envisaged by Kittler, in which ‘senseand the senses turn into eyewash’, but a more dynamic range of cross-modal and inter-medial possibilities.

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Robert Creeley, ‘Dover Beach (Again)’ in Robert Creeley, On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay, Berkeley

2006, p.51.

Snow described the title of the film as ‘a pun on the room length zoom to the photo of waves (sea), through

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the light waves and on the sound waves. Electricity. Ontology.’ Simon Hartog, ‘Ten Questions to Michael

Snow,’ in The Collected Writings of Michael Snow, Waterloo, Ontario 1994, p.51.

Casey Kaplan Gallery press release cited in John Miller, ‘Trisha Donnelly – Openings,’ Artforum, vol.40,

no.10, Summer 2002, p.164.

Hamza Walker, ‘As Free as the Squirrels’, The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago 2008,

http://www.renaissancesociety.org/site/Exhibitions/Essay.Trisha-Donnelly.594.html, accessed 7 February

2012.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘Trisha Donnelly: She Said’, Flash Art, March–April 2006, p.60.

André Breton, ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Seaver and

Helen Lane, Ann Arbor 1972, pp.27–8; and Breton, ‘The Mediums Enter’, in The Lost Steps, trans. by Mark

Polizzotti, Lincoln and London 1996, pp.90–1.

I borrow the phrase ‘scrivener of sound’ from Steven Connor, ‘Photophonics,’ lecture presented at the

Audiovisuality conference, University of Aarhus, 27 May 2011, http://www.stevenconnor.com/photophonics/,

accessed 10 April 2012.

Miller 2002, p.164. Donnelly has remarked that she was less interested in the ‘bureaucratic’ aspects of this

process and its reliance upon the gallery system, than in finding a way to make sound and image coincide.

Donnelly in conversation with the author, September 2012.

The Casey Kaplan website provides a comprehensive archive of images but no text, while the press

releases provided for other artists are missing or unavailable in Donnelly’s case. See

http://www.caseykaplangallery.com/artists/trisha_donnelly/01.html, accessed 14 April 2012. The only

catalogue published on Donnelly to date accompanied her solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary

Art, University of Pennsylvania, in 2008. The essay by curator Jennelle Porter meticulously describes the

installation of the exhibition, while an annotated checklist provides a forensic account of the physical

appearance of each work, steadfastly avoiding interpretation. Some of these descriptions are supplemented

with enigmatic statements by the artist. See Trisha Donnelly, exhibition catalogue,Institute of Contemporary

Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 2008, unpaginated.

Marina Cashdan, ‘Trisha Donnelly’, Frieze, no.133, September 2010, p.143.

Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, London and New

York 2010, p.xiv.

Jeffrey Heer, ‘A Review of Synaesthesia’, unpublished paper, Psychology Department, University of

California Berkeley, 2000, unpaginated, http://hci.stanford.edu/jheer/files/2000-Synesthesia-Psych127.pdf,

accessed 16 May 2012.

Donnelly in conversation with the author, September 2012.

44 Days to Hanoi, performed at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, 16

September to 24 October 2003.

‘We will all dissolve in the ethereal whirlwind / We will be born in the whirlwind! / We will awaken in heaven! /

We will merge emotions in a united wave!’ See ‘Appendix: The Libretto of the Preparatory Act’, in Simon

Morrison, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, Berkeley 2002, pp.313–67. See also Faubion

Bowers, Scriabin: A Biography, vol.2,New York 1996, pp.253–4.

Trisha Donnelly, ‘In the Recombination of the Not So Vast Distance (The Vortex)’, Parkett, vol.77, p.94.

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, Toronto 1962, p.41.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

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Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Stanford 1999, p.1.

Ibid., p.1–2.

Steven Connor, ‘Seeing Sound: The Displaying of Marsyas’, lecture presented at the University of

Nottingham, 16 October 2002, http://www.stevenconnor.com/marsyas/, accessed 3 May 2012.

Obrist 2006, p.60.

Trisha Donnelly in conversation with the author, September 2012.

Obrist refers to one drawing as a ‘trigger for a vortex’; see Obrist 2006, p.3. Another drawing was called a

‘battery’ in a statement accompanying Donnelly’s exhibition at Modern Art Oxford in 2007, cited in Jonathan

Griffin, ‘Trisha Donnelly,’ Frieze,no.122, January–February 2008, p.191.

Julian Myers, ‘If It Need Be Termed Surrender, Then Let It Be So, Or: Trisha Donnelly in Parallax’, Afterall,

no.12, November 2005, p.92.

See the annotated checklist in Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia 2008, unpaginated.

Robert Creeley, ‘Dover Beach (Again)’ in Robert Creeley, On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay, Berkeley

2006, p.51.

Email correspondence with Loring Randolph, Director, Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York, 1 February 2012.

For Diagram for Double Gong see http://caseykaplangallery.com/artist-images/.

Donnelly has described Gong as a ‘double paw’, envisaging a giant sphinx smashing two paws through the

seven floors of the Marcel Breuer building in a single, synchronised motion. Donnelly in conversation with

the author, September 2012.

Kittler 1999, p.44.

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Raymond Pettibon: Return to Disorder and Disfiguration’, October, no.92, Spring

2000, p.46.

As Sol LeWitt famously put it: ‘the idea becomes a machine that makes the art’. Sol LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on

Conceptual Art’, Artforum, vol.5, no.10, June 1967, p.80.

For an in-depth discussion of the relationship between surrealist automatism and mechanical technologies

of inscription see David Lomas, ‘Modest Recording Instruments: Science, Surrealism and Visuality’, Art

History,vol.27, no.4, September 2004, pp.627–50, reprinted in this issue of Tate Papers.

Alvin Lucier, ‘Wave Songs for Female Voice with Pure Wave Oscillators’, composer’s notes, 1998,

http://www2.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/mp3/alvinlucierpdfs/wave_song_text.pdf, accessed 9 May 2012.

Ibid.

On Lucier, see Andrea Miller-Keller (ed.), Alvin Lucier: A Celebration,Middletown,Connecticut 2011.

Breton cited in David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, New Haven and

London 2000, p.68.

See Douglas Kahn, ‘Introduction’, Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde, Cambridge,

Massachusetts 1994, p.7.

Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Durham and London

2000, pp.63–4.

Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art, New York 1972, p.37.

Ibid., pp.36–8.

LeWitt spoke about ‘transmitting an idea in different ways through visual means’. See Nicholas Baume (ed.),

Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London 2001, p.27. Weiner proposed

18.

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23.

24.

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29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

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35.

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37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Trisha Donnelly who has given me permission to reproduce a small selection of the worksdiscussed in this article (for further images please see the Casey Kaplan Gallerywebsite: caseykaplangallery.com).

Articles relating to ‘Involuntary Drawing’ have been brought together in Tate Papers no.18 by MargaretIversen, who co-organised with David Lomas the symposium Involuntary Drawing: Time, Motion Capture, theBody that took place at the University of Westminster on 18 February 2012, supported by the Centre for theStudy of Surrealism and its Legacies. The editorial team is grateful to Professor Iversen for her skilful co-ordination of this issue.

Other papers relating to this theme can be found in Tate Papers no.18.

Anna Lovatt is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Manchester.

How to cite

Anna Lovatt, 'Wavelength: On Drawing and Sound in the Work of Trisha Donnelly', Tate Papers, no.18, Autumn

2012, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/18/wavelength-on-drawing-and-sound-in-the-

that ‘Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the

receiver upon the occasion of receivership’. See Lawrence Weiner, ‘Statement of Intent’, 1968, in January

5–31, 1969, exhibition catalogue, Seth Siegelaub, New York 1969, unpaginated.

See Rosalind Krauss, ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London

1999.

Ibid., p.12.

Donnelly’s note on the drawing reads: ‘The receiver. All in all an electric word. The receipt of return is

invited. Radiated out from positions harvested from bodiless bodies. R. E. C. E. I. V. E. R. Spanned over

eight weeks. A blinking guide. Receiver.’ See Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia 2008, unpaginated.

Similar lines appear in a pair of untitled drawings from 2004, displayed on either side of a wall as if their

electric charge were radiating through it. Of these works, the critic Bruce Hainley has written: ‘Do you known

what a drawing is, what it can do? It can become “photographic” or “performative”, by which I mean active,

atomic, atomising through a wall, leaving a blue auratic outline, call it Kirlian or call it the moisture

transferred from the subject to the emulsion surface of the photograph causing an alternation of the electric-

charge pattern on the film.’ Bruce Hainley, ‘Her Artillery’, Afterall, no.12, November 2005, p.102.

Lauren O’Neill-Butler, ‘Trisha Donnelly’, Artforum, vol.49, no.1, September 2010, p.327.

Cashdan 2010, p.143.

Donnelly in conversation with the author, September 2012.

Shelley Trower, Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound, London and New York

2012, p.2.

Ibid., p.3.

Jean-Luc Nancy cited in ibid, p.8.

Ibid., p.5.

Kittler 1999, p.1.

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work-of-trisha-donnelly, accessed 27 September 2016.

Tate Papers (ISSN 1753-9854) is a peer-reviewed research journal that publishes articles on British and

modern international art, and on museum practice today.