PLAY IT BY EARRICHARD CARR

PLAY IT BY EARSoma Contemporary Gallery

PLAY IT BY EARSoma Contemporary Gallery

Play it by Ear presents the first solo exhibition of work from Richard Carr, one of Irelands leading

young contemporary artists at Soma Contemporary Gallery, Waterford City, I reland. Beginning in

201 2 as a research trip to Pythagoras' cave, Mt. Kerkis, Samos, Greece, Carr spent time participating

and immersing himself in the sonic material , both from Pythagoras' cave and surrounding

environment to bring back home to Ireland to work with.

As the legend goes, Pythagoras fled to the caves in Mt. Kerkis c.400 B.C to escape the infamous

tyrant Polykratis who was pursuing him. While in exile Pythagoras used these caves as a place of

prayer, teaching and residence, developing many fol lowers. Rooted in both mathematics and

mysticism, his caves became a philosophical school, a rel igious brotherhood, and a political

association. During this time it is widely believed that Pythagoras delivered his teachings from behind

a curtain, in an attempt to activate a l istening sensibi l ity among his pupils. In doing so his pupils

became known as akousmatikoi, with Pythagoras often being accredited as the first acousmatic

practitioner.

Occupying the four gallery spaces at SCG, Play it by Ear showcases four exciting instal lations that

further Carr's ongoing enquiries into and around sound and listening within the histories of

contemporary visual art practice. These works il luminate beautiful combinations of early interventions

into acousmatics with contemporary concerns around notions of sound(in)art within a gallery context.

Through these Play it by Ear brings a valuable contribution to many of the areas currently being

developed by leading international artists, writers and theoreticians such as; Salomé Voegelin, David

Toop, Gemma Fiumara, Brandon LaBelle, among others.

Working on this premise, the title of this exhibition aims to bring to the forefront a l istening sensibi l ity

as a simultaneously intuitive and critical practice. Through the exhibition of the work, it also aims to

examine the curatorial dimensions of working and exhibiting sound within a gallery context, as well as

the resulting modes of encounter or invitation each work offers, as one moves and listens through the

four gallery spaces of SCG. Final ly I would l ike to thank a number of people who came together to

bring this exhibition to fruition; Richard Carr, Salomé Voegelin, Sean Kissane, Declan Long,

Waterford, South Dublin and Wexford County Councils, Gorey Cultural Centre as well as al l the staff

at SCG, without whom it would not have been possible.

Jacqulyn Johnson | Director SCG

ForwardSoma Contemporary Gallery

Richard Carr - Play it by EarSoma Contemporary GalleryAug.27th - Sept. 1 9th 201 5

Declan Long

At the opening of On Photography, Susan Sontag famously declares that “humankind l ingers

unregenerately in Plato’s cave, sti l l reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.” Plato’s

al legory concerns a group of prisoners, chained together and facing the interior wall of a cave, their

only impression of the exterior world being gained from the fl ickering images that play on the wall in

front of them: shadows thrown by a fire burning behind their backs. I t is a story of lasting fascination

for thinkers on art: a recurring reference point in efforts to formulate an understanding of reality’s

fraught relation to representation.

A cave associated with a different Greek philosopher is, however, the primary influence behind the

recent directions taken in the work of Richard Carr. Carr’s fascination is with the cave of Pythagoras

— a place of sanctuary and learning, where this pioneering thinker developed a distinctive teaching

method, based on the paramount importance of l istening. In this secret cave, well away from the

gaze of the world, hidden inside the volcanic Mount of Kerkis on the Greek island of Samos,

Pythagoras chose to teach his students from behind a curtain, prioritising a method of educational

instruction that demanded concentration on the voice alone. Grounding the motivating concepts of

his art in this anti-visual mode of teaching — and on the presumed intensity of this enclosed

environment of careful l istening — Carr seeks to advocate an art less concerned with the ‘age-old

habit’ of creating or studying ‘images of the truth. ’

Carr’s artistic investment is thus primari ly in sound, but also in special ly designed scenarios in which

sound can be newly attended to. There is therefore a commitment to turning the volume down on

visuality, while at the same time retaining a sculptural appreciation of the relation of the body to

objects and to broader spatial situations. Central to Play it by Ear— a title which speaks both of the

Pythagorean mode of instruction and of a more open, improvisatory approach to appreciating sound

— is a compact structure that functions as an in-the-round loudspeaker. Presented in a near-dark

space, the object attains a mysterious, monolithic authority, broadcasting a seamless sequence of

drifting, droning sounds that are persistent and looping, but largely unidentifiable. We might

imagine this as a scenario with chapel-l ike intensity — and our reverent attention is cal led for in

engaging with the sonic transmissions that emanate from the central, amplifying source. The

hypnotic sound is both choral and carnal: massed voices harmonise together with disembodied

weightlessness, while other sounds hint at the physical ity of speech — immersing us in the

material ity of communication.

Within the crepuscular atmosphere of this instal lation-space, Carr is encouraging a heightened

manner of l istening. He is perhaps asking, by employing an obliquely mimicked version of

Pythagoras’s pedagogical approach, for us to develop new levels of patience in relation to sound,

asking us to develop new understandings of its variations, capacities and effects. His experiment

cal ls to mind, in passing, the fascination with ‘microsonics’ that J.G. Ballard plays with in the short

story Track 12 — a story in which a scientist advocates the learning benefits associated with

slowing and amplifying sound. Amplified 1 00,000 times, the process of animal cel l division, we are

informed, “sounds l ike a lot of girders and steel sheets being ripped apart” while “plant cel l division

is an electronic poem, al l soft chords and bubbling tones.” Microsonics, the scientist argues,

reveals unimagined distinctions and detai ls in the world. As the story progresses, nevertheless, the

uses of this experimental micro-l istening become increasingly sinister — and it is worth

considering, in this regard, a correspondence with the way in which the gothic gloom of Richard

Carr’s sound-situation perhaps suggests more disconcerting, unpredictable connotations than his

sources in ancient teaching methods might immediately suggest. What is set up by Carr is,

therefore, an open situation: one in which we might play, and be played with, in manifold, seductive

and unsettl ing ways.

Richard Carr, Play it by Ear, Sound Instal lation, 201 5. Courtesy of the artist

Richard Carr, Play it by Ear, Sound Instal lation, 201 5. Courtesy of the artist

Richard Carr, Residual Error, Sound Instal lation, 201 5. Courtesy of the artist

Richard Carr, Residual Error, Sound Instal lation, 201 5. Courtesy of the artist

Richard Carr, Construct?, Participatory Instal lation, 2009/1 0. Courtesy of the artist

Richard Carr, Construct?, Participatory Instal lation, 2009/1 0. Courtesy of the artist

Making with RainbowsTowards a philosophy of Sound(in)Art

Richard Carr

Within recent times ‘sound’ has gained in importance. This could be due to the ever increasing

acceptance of ‘sound art’ practice and theory, which has inevitably created a discursive network

between the histories of music and the visual arts and ultimately perception, particularly a l istening

sensibi l ity and everyday living. This has come about with the introduction of texts concerned with the

role of sound within the contexts of the arts and the phenomenology of perception, from artists and

writers which are highly respected within their own domains. Some of these texts include Listening to

Noise and Silence, Towards a Philosophy ofSound Art by Salome Voegelin, Background Noise,

Perspectives on Sound Art by Brandon LaBelle and Sounds and Perception, a col lective of texts

edited by Nudds and O’Callaghan.

Everyday living or experience is ful l of cross-modal information from the senses so in one way it may

be pointless in trying to isolate the senses from one another in theory. However, by doing so has led

to interesting observations. One of the main distinctions between the visual and the auditory may well

be notions of the ‘visual gap’. What the visual gap suggests is that vision in its very nature assumes a

distance between the beholder and the object of attenion no matter how close. What this then

suggests is that seeing always takes place within a meta-position encouraging stabil ity,

monumental ity and structural certainty; faci l itating the definition of ourselves in relation to these

structures.

Throughout this paper, I wil l endeavour to examine the physical and emotional traces of sound as 2d

or 3d ‘things’. To do this I wil l firstly discuss aspects of l istening and its relation to contemporary art

practice by speaking general ly about the practice of Michael Brewster and dealing specifical ly with

one of Lars Lundehave Hansen’s pieces; Spiderbytes. I wil l then put forward some of the common

debates around the ontology of sounds stemming from empirical and philosophical research that aid

in the development of a knowledge around notions of l istening and the sonic object.

Michael Brewster, a sound artist based in the USA once said you can't make sound become hard and

solid; but you can make it seem to stand sti l l , as if hovering in place. (Brewster 1 998). This statement

has become central to the practice of Michael Brewster, a practice most commonly associated with

the term acoustic sculpture. Although Brewster has worked using sound with drawing in mind, the

physical ity and material ity of sound within the sculptural experience is central to his practice. For

Brewster sound has physical size, dimensions in feet and meters as well as density, vibrancy,

rhythms, textures, volumes, edges, planes, ful lness, flatness, roundness and hollows, a medium ful ly

equipped to work with within sculptural experience.

For Brewster, by using the sonic instead of the visual he aims to construct the object of attention

around the viewer/l istener in a way that does not restrict their presence and movement, where people

can experience and listen to the very spaces they inhabit, which Brewster says is l ike exploring a

landscape from the inside, with al l of your body and not just from the front with your eyes. This for

Brewster is in relation to the visual where the sculptural object wil l always be experienced as a bunch

of sequenced frontal izations, where the object of desire is always over there no matter how close we

try to bring it; even with touch he suggests there is an away-ness. What this does, which is important

for Brewster is alter the conventional art viewing posture of ‘stand and look’ to an exploratory ‘move

and listen’ (Brewster 1 998).

This physical ity or object-ness of sound that Brewster speaks of is also explored by a more

contemporary artist Lars Lundhave Hansen (Denmark) in his piece Spiderbytes, albeit in a much

more direct and l iteral way. Lars has exhibited Spiderbytes in a variety of different forms but the one I

was fortunate enough to experience consisted of a table-top plinth covered in a large sheet of paper,

with two speakers each mounted on top of four pencils as legs. What Spiderbytes did essential ly was

use sound to move the speakers and pencils around the page leaving a direct visual trace/picture of

the sound/movement on the page (Carr, 201 2). For the purpose of this paper Spiderbytes is

interesting as it does not only use sound to move other visual objects in space but it also shows that

sound can be so physical it can almost exclude other visual objects from its space, creating a tension

between the almost known differences between what is object-l ike or event-l ike.

Pierre Schaeffer (1 91 0 – 1 995) a pioneer in Musique Concrete coined the term ‘Objet Sonore’ or

Sonic Object that for him summarises the main achievements of musique concrete. Objet Sonore was

the conception that recorded sound was something almost independent from its source, its own entity

contained within the tape recorder or phonograph. For Schaeffer the objet sonore created a reduced

listening, an attitude that consists of l istening to the sound for its own sake, as a sound object by

removing its real or supposed source and the meaning it may convey. Another influential practitioner

and writer Michel Chion explains that it is not the separation of sound from its source/environment

that constitutes the object-ness of sound but the developments of electromagnetic instruments and

their means of fixation and reproduction that constitutes its concreteness. (Lopez 1 998).

I bel ieve more contemporary practitioners and writers such as Salomé Voegelin who discusses in

depth notions of a l istening sensibi l ity would believe that the objectness/concreteness of sound would

not rely on the sound being contained within the electromagnetic instrument, or as Chion states its

means of fixity and reproduction, but that the object-ness of sound would be that of l istening, not with

a reduced listening but a generative one.

Thinking of the sonic object as a listening engagement of this type turns the experience of l istening

into a collaborative and generative process and the sonic object into an object that has been created

through intersubjective sensation. This is not only important within the discourse surrounding the

history of the l istener, who has all to often been relegated into a passive role throughout the histories

of music, visual art and speech perception, but also for the future development of dialogue. According

to Gemma Corradi Fiumaro, western foundations of knowlegde and logocentrism are founded on a

half logic, a logic of saying and expressing but forgetting to l isten (Fiumaro, 1 990), and most

importantly for this paper the importance and placement of the sonic object in contemporary art

practice.

Within the ontology of sounds there is one main disagreement between leading philosophers. This

disagreement might be put down to differing views between distal and proximate theories of sound, or

wave based accounts such as those from O’Shaughnessy, Sroenson and Nudds and source based

accounts such as those by O’Callaghan, Casati and Dokic and Pasnau. The main disagreements

between these two views concern the location of sounds, spatial audition and what type of things are

sounds. These differing views encourage debate around the nature of sound but also the experience

of sound, with wave based theories locating sounds within the medium, saying sounds disperse and

occupy various different locations over time. Source based accounts locate sounds at or near their

sources; they argue that sounds only travel if their sources do so therefore sounds do not travel

through a medium (Nudds & O’Callaghan, 2009).

Many of these questions also revolve around the notions of authenticity of perception. Many distal

theorists would imply that if sounds are where they seem to be then they should not travel through a

medium unless systematical ly we mispercieve sound, and maintain that in constructing accounts of

sound we should not so easily appoint wholesale i l lusions to the act of experience. (Nudds &

O’Callaghan, 2009) They would also argue that auditory perception is akin to visual perception in that

sounds are located at a distance and only percieved by reason of a medium. I t is this medium which

is the carrier of information about the distal sounds / objects, l ike l ight bringing information to the eye /

brain about distal objects. In this respect sounds would not be waves and would not travel through /

with the waves, instead the waves would be a mediator between hearers and sounds. However, there

are many differing views on this, and numerous writers and philosophers stemming from the proximal

camp would maintain that auditory perception differs from visual perception in that sound as thing is

located near the perceiver, and it is sound that bears information about distal objects or events. To

put it another way, distal theorists would believe that to hear a sound as located would come about

because that is where the sound is located. Others such as O’Shaughnessy would believe that sound

is aspatial , located near the perceiver at the time of hearing and it is the perceiver who works out the

information about the sounds locatedness. Much debate concerning spatial audition stems from

Strawson (1 959);

A world of sounds would be a no-space world because sounds are not

intrinsically spatial. Spatial concepts have no intrinsically auditory

significance, auditions spatial capabilities depend upon its inheriting spatial

content from other modalities. (Nudds & O'Callaghan, 2009 p.9)

With regards to 'what type of things are sounds', it would be most common to say that sounds are

things we hear, and whatever you hear must be a sound (however Sorenson would argue we hear

si lence which he believes does not involve hearing a sound, which may well be in contrast to the

views of John Cage). More traditional philosophers such as Locke would suggest that sounds are

secondary qualities similar to colours, tastes and smells whose experience of them would be

intrinsical ly l inked to subjects. Pasnau (1 999) would suggest that sounds are properties that would be

identical to the vibration of things, such as a tuning fork. Recently more and more philosophers such

as O’Callaghan believe that sounds are not properties but more particulars or individuals, and would

argue that the property theories do not account for the conditional identities of sounds as they change

through space-time (Nudds & O’Callaghan 2009). What this does now is raise questions around

whether sounds are more object-l ike or event-l ike.

There are many experiments, situations and discussions that are debated on by the proximal, wave

based and distal fol lowers such as the vacuum experiment, the echo and modes of transmission that

are extremely interesting especial ly in attempting to understand the nature of sound. For me,

although I find them fascinating I can't help but think their approach is al l a l ittle to physical ist. I t may

seem a little non-sensical to some, but others have given accounts of 'what sound may be' that does

not neglect the experience of l istening so sorely. One that comes to mind and one in which I find

extremely interesting is Rodger Scrutons theory of sound as secondary object and pure event which

he discusses in his text The Aesthetics ofMusic, 1 997. Scruton makes his case for sounds as

secondary objects by discussing the varying possible differences between sounds and colours.

Firstly Scruton believes that primary qualities possess the possibi l ity of being perceived through

multi-model senses, the shape of a box can be perceived through sight, touch and auditory

experiences. Secondary qualities he proposes can only be perceived through one sense-modality

l ike sound and colour. Sounds being objects of hearing and colours being objects of sight. I t is

obvious that it is possible to recognise sounds through vibrations which Scruton believes would be

similar to tacti le l ip reading, but the important part would be the absence of sound. Through the

detection of vibrations the deaf would learn no more about sound than the blind reading about

colours through the method of brail . However there is one major distinction that Scruton proposes for

the difference between sound and colour and that is that colour is a secondary quality and it depends

on the things that possess it. Sound on the other hand is not a secondary quality as it is not a quality

at al l according to Scruton, things do not have sound in the way they possess colour.

If every sound must have a cause, it does not follow that it must also be

emitted by its cause or that it must be understood as the sound of that

cause. (Scruton, 1997, Nudds & O’Callaghan 2007).

To get a clearer understanding of what Scruton might mean by stating that sounds are secondary

objects and pure events it is necessary to discuss O’Callaghans rainbow in relation to sound. A

rainbow I believe is an excellent example of a secondary object, their existance, qualities and nature

are all determined by the subject. Rainbows are objects of sight, visibi l ia. We are all aware of the

explanations of a rainbow through the refraction of l ight through water droplets in the air but this is not

the interesting part. What is interesting about the rainbow is not only does it have secondary qualities

but it also possesses many primary qualities such as size, shape and duration but it cannot be

touched, smelled, tasted or l istened to. I ts having these qualities depends entirely upon a

counterfactual experience. Rainbows take up space but do not exclude any other objects from that

space, although from our point of view there is a definte difference between where a rainbow is and

where it is not. The explanation regarding the physical ities of the rainbow I believe are similar to the

wave theorists explanations of sound, but what is interesting here is that the explanation of the

rainbow does not describe any particular object that would be identical to the rainbow; so why does

the physical ist insist that sound would be identical to the vibration of its source? As O’Callaghan puts

it the subject is free to locate the rainbow wherever it may appear, within the relationship of water

droplet, sun and the eye of the beholder (Nudds & O,Callaghan 2009).

Within the ontology of sound, the tension between object and event, a l istening sensibi l ity or sounds

and perception relates directly back to the history of a visual art discourse and many of its debates

and concerns from abstract expressionism, action painting, form/content, instal lation, happenings,

performance, new media to the practices of more contemporary painters, whose work could be said

to hover between the terms of abstraction and figuration, concerned with many aspects of provisional

painting and conditional pictures. I t’s also in conversation with and pushes the l imits of what Donald

Judd calls ‘Specific Objects’ in relation to 2d and 3d space or ‘real ’ and ‘i l lusionistic’ space. (Kellein,

2002). Many if not al l of these concerns, interests or problems are asked of the ‘material ity’ of ‘sound’

before the maker has even used it to make stuff with. This may be due to the common notions often

relating a visual sensibi l ity to aspects of knowledge or understanding, it also may be due to the notion

that the ‘material ity’ of ‘sound’ is intrinsical ly characteristic of the contemporary.

However, in contrast to common notions relating to the visual gap and its certainties, hearing is ful l of

phenomenological doubt on the part of the l istener, both in regards to the heard and the hearing it.

This may be due to views that hearing in particular does not real ly offer a meta-position in the sense

that the sonic object may sit in the ear no matter what the distance of its source. This means that to

hear you have to be immersed in the auditory object, not its source but its sound, as sound itself. Due

to this aspect of sound it seems to involve active participation from both parties rather than making

possible a distanced viewing position. In this sense the object / event under contemplation and the

subject become generative collaborators encouraging an aural knowledge and producing subjective

meaning through intersubjective sensation, similar to Merleau-Ponty’s world of ‘being honeyed’

(Voegelin, 201 0).

I t may well be this very nature of sound that has appealed to so many within the arts to uti l ize it as a

medium to make stuff with, this unstabil ising of a percieved certainty that could be said of a visual

aesthetic. Many sonic practitioners suggest unstabil ising without putting forth a dialectical stance

similar to Walter Benjamins Dialectical Image by focussing on sounds potential to bring forth unseen

aspects of visual ity concerned with a sonic sensibi l ity (Voegelin, 201 0). This may also be similar to

what the fi lm theorist Christian Metz discusses in his essay ‘Aural Objects’ (1 975) where he states

that it is in language that sound gets rehabilitated into the visual order, where it takes primary role but

in doing so relinquishes its aural quality (Voegelin, 2006).

The history of Western art has been thought about, read and looked at in much detai l but rarely has it

been heard or l istened to. However sounds and sound making have been infused in the arts not only

in this century, but from the research of Igor Reznikoff we can now believe we were as aural ly

sophisticated as we were visual ly as far back as the Palaeolithic era, (during the time the earl iest

recorded art work was being made) and that a l istening sensibi l ity is quite possibly our most primitive

sense. (Reznikoff, 2002) Sound-making has been enriched but also heavily burdened by a paucity of

extremely short and fragmented documented histories. Short from the point of l istening that we were

unable to record sound-making or sound-work unti l relatively recently in the overal l scheme of things

and therefore we are dealing with imagined traditions, and fragmented from the point of l istening that

the ‘sonic’ has never had a history of its own. One that considers, understands and teaches

accommodating the soundfulness/noisiness that sound is. In other words sound has been articulated

and discussed under the parameters of visual culture by referencing the sonic qualities back to a

visual score, object or event, and its relevance or critical val idity, or more recently by centering

discussion around technological developments and the visual media employed in its production or

presentation, but very rarely by beginning with l istening.

This is understandable or in fact probably unavoidable as Gemma Corradi Fiumara explains

throughout The Other Side ofLanguage; A Philosophy ofListening. Our current methodology of

‘knowledge’, ‘discourse’ or ‘reasoned discourse’ in the western world stems from the early Greek term

and noun ‘logos’ which over time has changed but never has it catered for the processes of l istening.

This for me means that our frameworks of ‘knowledge’ in the western world have been built upon a

half language, one that favours ‘simple’ mechanisms rather than deal with the engaged temporality of

the l istener(s). This notion has also been spoken about recently by Irit Rogoff in her text Turning but

in relation to education and curatorial perspectives when she says;

In a “turn,” we shift away from something or towards or around

something, and it is we who are in movement, rather than it. Something

As notions of the dialogical, participatory, col laborative and multi-discipl inari ly have become common

place it is not unusual I bel ieve for a discourse and history to be emerging more central ly around

notions of the ‘sonic’. As a practitioner with a history in the visual arts I bel ieve it is important to learn

from the developments within visual culture, one that I bel ieve over time has made the ‘visual ’

something that has nothing to do with being able to see. The ‘visual ’ in the studies of ‘visual culture’

have become more concerned with the conceptual relationships between objects and images, and

their interpretations all too often neglect the sensory registering of sight. I am aware that many

students of visual culture and art history discuss the history of seeing; however from my experience

of this the discussion usually places the seeing within the image/object, a type of al legorical eye that

does the seeing for us; rather than organs of observation situated in the body of the person that is

doing the looking. To see has become a process of (re)viewing rather than a generative looking.

Ears are also organs of observation and for me it would be a terrible thing to see those holes in the

side of our heads becoming stuffed up and permanently sealed with a set of earl ids, during the

making, l istening, comprehension and discourse of future sound-making and sound work. I bel ieve it

is important that the phenomenon of sound should be placed at the centre of aural culture and the

future of sound-making.

Listening does not offer a meta-position/time to contemplate oneself in relation to an ‘object of

attention, ’ we are it, producing l istening at the nexus of self-hood, performance and objecthood. This

is l istening as a generative and moti le process, once you commit to the l istening process you are

alone, generating your place of being through your own consent and engaged temporality. For me a

listening sensibi l ity unsettles the monumental ity and dialectical nature of a visual aesthetic, requires

a dissolution of critical distance, invigorates and re-centres the critical ‘I ’ in practice and theory, as

there is no place where I am where my listening is different from the heard or moment of sound. The

listener and the heard are both entangled in place and their sense of the world and of themselves

are embodied in this relationship, wholly and partial ly present at each moment.

As a sound-maker, producing ‘l istening objects’ is quite a problematic practice as notions of

is activated in us, perhaps even actual ized, as we move. And so I

am tempted to turn away from the various emulations of an

aesthetics of pedagogy that have taken place in so many forums

and platforms around us in recent years, and towards the very drive

to turn.

expression and listening often meet at a complex interface. Expression and Listening are often

thought of, or placed at opposite sides of language. Where they intermingle proves difficult to

‘conceptual ise’ without the fluidity of intention and receptivity at where they conjoin, and at this

‘intermediary place’ uncertainty flourishes not as thing but as being. Object and subject as ‘sonic

things thinging’ exist in an entangled fluid weave as participants occupying each-other in situ. They

do not attend to the questions of meaning as a collective, total comprehension but enquire into

interpretation as an individual [not a post-modern shared heterogeneity], contingent and solitary

practice relying on perception in the moment of l istening. This does not make a listening practice

critical ly irrelevant, inexact or irrational. In fact relying on the expectations of a stabil ised a priori

intention, art historical context or critical discourse would not make the perceived more valid, I bel ieve

it would only make it more stable within its own descriptions and because of this ‘producing l istening’

cannot accommodate the notion of intentionality as a stabil ised a priori , presumably this would be an

intentionality too solid to hear.

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Voegelin S. (2007) A Speech for Noise. studentsZINE Publication for Contemporary Visual & SonicArt www.studentszine.com – Original ly published in Earshot, Journal of the UK and IrelandSoundscape Community’ no 5.

Voegelin S. (2005) Noise, Pondering a Paradox. studentsZINE Publication for Contemporary Visual& Sonic Art www.studentszine.com. – Original ly presented at NoiseTheoryNoise2 conferenceorganised by the Centre of Research in Modern European Philosophy, London.

Voegelin S. (2006) I am not a Sound Artist; an exploration of sound as concept and the fear ofvisual

definition. – Original ly presented at Sound as Art conference, 21 -24 November 2006, Aberdeen,www.urbannovember.org/conference/index.php?cf=2. Accessed 20th December 2011http: //www.salomevoegelin.net/salomevoegelin.net/I_am_not_a_sound_artist.html

Richard Carr, Secret, Sound Instal lation, 201 4. Courtesy of the artist

Richard Carr, Secret, Sound Instal lation, 201 4. Courtesy of the artist

Richard Carr, HomeBird, Sound Instal lation, 201 3. Courtesy of the artist

Richard Carr, MOUNTAIN, Sound Instal lation, 201 3. Courtesy of the artist

Richard Carr, Black Box, Sound Instal lation, 2008. Courtesy of the artist

Richard Carr, Black Box, Sound Instal lation, 2008. Courtesy of the artist

Reversed Anechoics

Salomé Voegelin

The works are built of wood and sound, cloth and glass, paper and technology. These are layered in

space and layered in time demanding an unpacking and lingering effort on the part of the audience.

They are not works that can be summed up in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. 1 The

relational ity of their elements do not present a formal ambiguity speedily decoded from a lexicon of

conceptual meanings, and fitting into the expected unexpected. Instead they are awkward, baffl ing

even, an affront to aesthetic and communicative expectancies.

The materials used in their construction are obstacles to their own understanding and placement

within art and within the everyday. Their pretence of functionality at once refusing the expectation of

the work to be as artwork outside the circle of use value, while also not fulfi l l ing the value of that

scheme: not al lowing for the wood, the glass, and the sound to be functional and useful in another

way. They pretend a desire for communicabil ity, and work to create material frameworks to this end,

but obstruct and diffuse what they profess to seek clarity of at the same time and through the very

same processes of production that promise the clarity thus unattained. The apparatus of

communication: l istening booths, directional sound beams, language, display shelves, and so on, are

subverted by the instal lation, the construction and the duration of the works. What we start to hear

are not the words, voices and environmental sounds but their echoes, rushing round the space and

rushing from the space that was built to make them directed, audible, echoless and intel l igible.

In this sense the works produce mirrors and reflections on the crises of echo as identified by Frances

Dyson, when in her book on the Tone of our Time she presents the anechoic, the space without echo,

without resonance with the subject nor the object of l istening, as displaying the current ideology of a

control led and control l ing system that defies incommensurabil ity and cancels out the noise of dissent.

Referring to Michel Serres she discusses the anechoic as the state of our time when the social

sounds of opposition are enclosed in an echoless chamber of media production that purports

communication but in reality obliterates the multiple dimensions of meaning in its monotony.

What is lost in the process, is, according to Serres, “quite precisely- our

common sense” and by this he is referring to both the sensible (as all that

can be sensed) and the idea of a common wisdom formed from the union

between the sensible and the “general ized eardrum of our skin”. (Dyson,

201 5, p1 09)

And thus while the anechoic, the echoless chamber, grants perfect articulation, without the

obstruction of interference, refraction, distraction and resonance, it avoids contingent eardrums

and possible hearings. By contrast, the obstacles to communication engineered by these works

allow different possibi l ities to emerge from the incommensurable and the lack of restrictions.

This possible is generated in the works’ reversed infrastructure. There are turns and twists:

turning inside out boxes, earl ier made by Robert Morris, to be not a box of its own making but the

sound of the making of the l istening booth that impedes my listening therein. And as much as

Morris’ box is turned inside out and upscaled for me to inhabit, as a l istening space whose

making I hear above all else, in another work the acousmatic curtain is reversed and upscaled

too. The cloth stretched over a 7 foot high octagonal frame hides the source of already

disembodied voices. The disembodiment is technological, prearranged, and the real curtain hides

not the body but the loudspeaker, emitting invisible voices layered as in a chorus but without

accord or synchronisation, producing a chorus of plural ities rather than of the monochord. Thus

the acousmatic curtain does not hide the absolute and unassailable seat of knowledge, its

teaching and articulation, but the source of a physical song, whose bodies emerge in my

contingent imagination and invite not meaning but an inhabited experience: producing a common

sense through the eardrum of my skin.

There are fragments and fragmentations, beams of sound that direct diffusion and remain

uncontrol lable, defying physics and leading to errors, l ingering misconstructions of cuts and

cutting paper bouncing off the walls. The physics no doubt is thorough, glass panes precisely

instal led, audio-spotl ight systems rigorously positioned, walls, screws, measuring tapes. But the

sound refuses to turn solid. I ts material ity does not obey the command of its cal l ing. I t is

supposed to sit on a shelf, producing a certain object and performing the impossible, instead it

produces other possibi l ities.

Duly bathed and cooled his mind,

Ardourless, wil l utter

Liquid song, his forming hand

Lend a shape to water.

(Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, The Plastic and the Poetic Form)

The technology of precision, the anechoic separation of unwanted sonic material , seems purposeful ly

at odds with the sound itself: the dripping water, maybe of melting ice, accompanied by a blustering

wind? - precision becomes an il lusion leading to diffuse reverberations rather than a single point of

perception, producing a refracted room of residual errors and an opening of the gallery walls; the

abandonment of the enclosure of meaning and expectations within its monochrome white, towards a

broader resonance, reflecting back to us a sensibi l ity of al l that can be sensed.

To touch the doll people, the length of your arm

Folding right into its hot, red belly. Final ly you slept

Your head in the kitchen window, a doll in your teeth.

(Sarah Jackson, What Daddy Built)

And this is where we rejoin the cigarette, the duration of smoking or whatever time we are wil l ing to

take to reach such thoughts and sensibi l ities. The anechoic, as acoustic fact and as ideology,

produces not only the spatial reduction of sounds to a tone, but creates also the thinness of their

time. I t shrinks sounds to their signification, caught in the sign of articulation and the sign of things

through the error of a timeless spatial ity. By contrast, obstructions, resistances and echoes thicken

time and so expand its space.

Time is one of the most obstinate materials in the whole construction. What makes the wood, glass,

paper, cloth and technology awkward is how time brings them together and takes them apart to make

rickety shapes that defy the functionality of their building blocks and demand a durational

engagement. There is no easy grasping of individual elements to add up meaning and source its

concept in their shape and relationships: the shape is not real ly defined however much wood and

cloth has been used in its built; the relationships are forceful in their apparent functionality, but

dissolve into i l lusions through the contradictions of what they sound. And thus the construct is one of

diffuse time, of temporality itself, producing experiences without an intel l igible certainty.

This reverses the anechoic; it makes noise and refractions the principle element of

communication, producing plural and invisible senses achieved through the bodies of the

l istening viewers performing as extended eardrums. The demand of the “echoic” is the work’s

aesthetic and political radical ity: it remains contradictory and forces on you a re-evaluation of the

communicative infrastructure of language, headphones, shelves and white walls.

Perhaps, nonetheless, it was the imagery of Leibniz’s folds that alerted him

to the way a world devoid of transcendental mysteries is sti l l nonetheless

rippled with hidden recesses, shadows and shade, secrets and anonymity;

with an obstinate resistance to the lumen naturale whose obscurity or veil ing

is inseparable from forming and disclosing but which is confused with

transcendent forces or certainty at our peri l . (Diane Coole, 201 0, p11 3)

Maybe it is best then not even to think of the works as visible material but as sound, to get us to

what they do invisibly and thus to show us what the visual material pretends not to do. Temporal

and spatial echoes resonate objects and subjects. They defy the value of intel l igibi l i ty and

question how we think we can judge and know, without “obstinate resistance”, in a fake bright

l ight. But this l ight creates only the semblance of i l lumination. I t is the preconception of the

material , created by the purpose that precedes its encounter and obscures its refracted

experience.

We expect screw holes, dimer switches, headphones, and glass panes to carry us from the

retina, without obstruction, to an understanding. The visual artwork negotiates this preconception

in ambiguity, but only produces a secondary certainty, that of the work, that of discourse, within

which it is the expected unexpected, spotted within the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. Work

that omits the invisible shelters in the anechoic. The invisible, that which is obscured by the l ight,

by contrast, brings us to that which renders the work visible in the first place, that which sustains

it and lets it appear, over time and in plural shapes; l ingering, diffuse, echoing dissent and

resistant to consistency.

On this rickety park-bench

an old man can be seen

who sometimes tel ls the truth

He did not show up to day.

But the smoke. Do you see the smoke

(Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Sightseeing Tour)

Footnotes

1 . The time it takes to smoke a cigarette is, according to M. H Mil ler writing in the New York

Observer’s Gallerist blog, and quoted in David Balzer’s book Curationism, the time it takes Swiss

über-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist to take in a whole art fair, decide what impresses him and move on to

the next event.

References

Balzer, David, (201 5) Curationsim, London: PlutoPress

Dyson, Frances, (201 5), The Tone of Our Times, Sound, Sense, Economy, Cambridge

Massachusetts: MIT Press

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, (1 994) ‘Sightseeing Tour’ in Selected Poems, trans. Hans Magnus

Enzensberger and Michael Hamburger, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books

Goethe von, Johann Wolfgang (2007) ‘the Plastic and the Poetic Form’, in F.R David the “Stuff &

Nonsense” issue, trans. Anthony Hecht, Amsterdam: de Appel, orig. 1 81 9

Jackson, Sarah, (201 2) ‘What Daddy Built’ in Pelt, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books

Diana Coole, (201 0) ‘The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh’ in New Material isms

Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), London: Duke University

Press

Richard Carr, Work in Progress, 201 5. Courtesy of the artist

Richard Carr, Work in Progress, 201 5. Courtesy of the artist

Work in progress, 201 5. Paul Funge Residency Programme

Published on the occasion of the exhibitionPlay it by Ear

Soma Contemporary Gallery, Waterford City27th August 201 5 - 1 9th September 201 5

Exhibition produced bySoma Contemporary Gallery & Artist

Exhibition TeamJacquelyn Johnson, DirectorSCG & Richard Carr, Producer of ExhibitionAidan Byrne, Technical CrewBrian Carr, Technical Crew

CatalogueEditor: Gorey Cultural CentreAssistant Editor: Richard CarrEditorial Assistant: Roma CarrDesign: Gorey Cultural CentrePrinted by: MagCloudPrepared by: Gorey Cultural Centre, Gorey, Wexford

E-mail : goreyculturalcentre@gmail .comWebsite: www.goreyculturalcentre.com

This Edition © Gorey Cultural Centre & Artist 201 5Texts © 201 5 Gorey Cultural Centre, Wexford and the authorsAll Artwork © the ArtistPhotography by: Áine O'Reil ly

We apologise if, due to reasons wholly beyond our control, any of the sources have not been listed. Every effort has beenmade to acknowledge correct copyright of images and texts where applicable. Any errors or omissions are unintentionaland should be notified to the Publishers, who wil l arrange for corrections to appear in any reprints.

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Principle Funder Also Supported By

PLAY IT BY EARSoma Contemporary Gallery

PLAY IT BY EARSoma Contemporary Gallery

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