Sound Artists Changing Your Perception of Art

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Art World

12 Sound Artists Changing Your Perception of Art

These artists appeal to the ears, not the eyes.

Alyssa Buffenstein, August 4, 2016

Samson Young performing Pastoral Music at Team Gallery, New York in 2015. Image courtesy of Team Gallery.

For some, abstraction might mean non-figurative painting, but today’s hottest emotive medium is so abstract it can’t be seen, touched, or felt. There’s no arguing that sound art is having a moment. Some artists explore sound in its pure state, simultaneously bridging and muddling barriers between sound, noise, and music in the contemporary or historical sense. Others investigate the political and cultural implications of certain sounds, using their work to bring human rights to the fore. 
Sound art is the most direct way of engaging with art—you can literally do it with your eyes closed—and if music is any indication, sound can affect your emotions immediately, without any thought or explanation.
We have compiled a list of 12 sound artists, in no particular order, expanding the way that viewers engage with art, whether through performance, installation, analogue machines, custom instruments, field recordings, or something in between.

1. Samson Young
The Hong Kong-born and based Samson Young is currently drowning the world in sound with his politically-charged performances and installations. For his first New York show in 2015, he watched six hours of compiled footage of US bombs dropping in the Middle East on mute, and then recreated the sounds of the carnage on a custom-made setup of instruments and non-instruments, like a can of compressed air, or a shaving razor. Last year, he was also added to the roster of Galerie Gisela Capitain in Cologne.
In 2016 alone, the artist is having a number of solo shows (besides his performance with sonic police weapon at Art Basel), like in Hong Kong or Kolkata, and in December, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf will host his first European solo exhibition. Young will also represent Hong Kong at the 2017 Venice Biennale, so there’s no sign that his world takeover is stopping anytime soon.
Related: Shooting Star Samson Young to Represent Hong Kong at the 2017 Venice Biennale

2. Cevdet Erek
Cevdet Erek studied architecture and is a founding member of an experimental outfit called Nekropsi, but his art world forays are where he truly thrives. In 2012, he won the Nam June Paik award for Shore Scene Soundtrack, an interactive, ongoing project where viewers are invited to recreate the sound of the ocean by rubbing their hands on a piece of carpet. This year, he installed a site-specific intervention at the Syndey Biennal, and he will represent Turkey at next year’s Venice Biennale.

3. Carsten Nicolai
Interested in the intersection of art, music, and science, the Berlin and Chemnitz-based Carsten Nicolai has been altering audiovisual perception since the late 1980s. A co-founder of Raster-Noton, the music label for “sound and not sound,” Nicolai recently brought an installation to the Halle am Berghain.
But the artist is no stranger to more traditional art galleries: in 2016, he showed Reflektor Distortion at Galerie Eigen+Art Berlin. A basin of water reflecting a row of neon white lights was hit with low sound frequencies, altering the reflection and making sound visible.
Related: Berlin Gallery Weekend Kicks Off, Unofficially, with Raster Noton’s Berghain Installation

4. Florian Hecker
Florian Hecker creates sculptural sound installations, like his sound objects installed at Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in 2010. Speakers hung from the ceiling with curved mirrors not only reflected the look of the sounds’ source, but altered the atmospheric sounds’ waves as well. The artist is also interested in a concept he calls “chimerization,” like his projects at Documenta 13 or his collaboration with Mark Leckey, where he manipulates voice recordings to create glitchy compositions.
In November, the MMK will welcome Hecker back for “Formulations.” The same month, Vienna’s Kunsthalle will open an exhibition of synthetic sound compositions: “Halluzination, Perspective, Synthese.“

5. Susan Philipsz
The first sound artist to win a Turner Prize, Susan Philipsz creates audio collages using recordings of her own voice and samples from an eclectic range of musical inspirations, from Irish folk music to David Bowie. The Glaswegian artist’s somber work is site-specific, interacting with public architectural spaces. Interested in the psychological effects of sound, her work prompts viewers to introspect.
Related: Women Dominate Turner Prize 2016 Shortlist

6. Haroon Mirza
The Londoner Haroon Mirza challenges the barriers between sound, noise, and music by crossing wires and thinking about his work as a process of manipulating electricity. All the while, his practice is imbued with cultural and scientific research. In 2015, he won the Calder Prize, one year after receiving the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize.
This summer, his work is being exhibited at Pivô in São Paulo, a site-specific installation that synchronizes four video and eight audio channels ruminating on the subjects of music culture, psychedelic plants, and research in physics and cosmology; and at Matadero in Madrid, with an immersive installation of found footage.
Related: British artist Haroon Mirza Wins $50,000 Calder Prize

7. Tarek Atoui
The Lebanese Tarek Atoui studied contemporary and electronic music in Paris. His current practice finds the artist building custom instruments, like for his Reverse Sessions series, an ongoing project currently staging performances at the Tate Modern. Atoui built 10 unconventional instruments—including blowing horns and teacups—and invited a series of fellow instrument makers and composers to improvise with them. The sessions are then layered on top of each other to create a final sound piece, a multilayered synthesis of the summer’s work.
Related: The New Tate Modern Building Opens with a Radical Rehang

8. Christine Sun Kim
Deaf since birth, Christine Sun Kim explores her unique subjective experiences with sound in her work. MoMA PS1 included her piece Game of Skill 2.0 in its recent “Greater New York” exhibition, an interactive piece where viewers were invited to touch a staff-like device attached to a velcro strip hung above their heads. As they walked, dragging the device along the strip, a radio played sound at levels and speeds depending on the direction and speed of the participant.
Her oeuvre also includes abstract musical notation drawings, and performances like Face Opera, with an ensemble of deaf performers. Later this year, Sun Kim will be featured in the SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2016.

9. Camille Norment
The Oslo-based artist Camille Norment uses large-scale installations with sound to activate psychological responses from the viewer. At Art Basel Miami Beach in 2015, her work Toll was featured as part of the Artists Surround Sound Project, a 160-speaker installation in what the fair called SoundScape Park.
She represented Norway at the 2015 Venice Biennale with an installation called Rapture, a project based on the idea of vibration, using sound to shake glass window installations and explore the relationship between fear, excitement, and “getting shaken up.” Earlier this year, the city of Oslo installed her piece Rhythm Wars, a giant drum hung on the newly-constructed train station.

10. Janet Cardiff
Interested in more traditional sounds than many of the artists on this list, the Canadian Janet Cardiff often works collaboratively with her artist husband George Bures Miller. Cardiff alone, however, has developed an ongoing project called The 40 Part Motet, a work which the artist has called a “virtual choir.” The installation consists of 40 speakers, each playing a recording of a different voice singing a part of Spem in Alium, a composition by the 16th-century British composer Thomas Tallis. In 2015, the couple created Conversation with Antonello, a sonic response to Antonello da Massina’s 1475 painting Saint Jerome in his Study.

11. Lawrence Abu Hamdan
The Beirut-based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan uses sound as a tool for counter-surveillance, and appropriates methods of sonic investigation in order to draw attention to larger political issues. A PhD candidate at Goldsmith’s in London, Hamdan dedicates his research to Forensic Listening: ways in which the voice can affect legal testimonies, specifically in the realm of border control.
His artistic endeavors also explore ideas of urban surveillance, like his project Hummingbird Clock, which appropriates a government technique of recording the humming sound of the electrical grid to trace the time and place of CCTV recordings. His video Rubber Coated Steel, currently on view at the Liverpool Biennial, is an audio-ballistic investigation into the killing of two teenagers by Israeli forces on the West Bank. The project visualizes this investigation, questioning the sound and sonic visibility of human rights violations.
Related: Liverpool Biennial 2016 Hits the Spot Between Eccentric and Politically Engaged

12. Thessia Machado
Working in analogue and interested in sound’s physicality, Thessia Machado creates kinetic, sculptural, music-making machines for installations and performances. She once made an absolutely terrifying composition using a found Little Tikes toy, but her invented instruments also make use of more mature materials, like customized turntables, LCD screens, and cassette decks.
In 2017, the artist will have a residency at the American Academy in Berlin, and presumably continue her Jean Tinguely-esque foray into machine building.
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Contemporary Top Lists

Alyssa Buffenstein

 

Photography

Afro futurist digital art by Manzel Bowman

Published on 01 August 2016

images Manzel Bowman

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The past, present and future come together in Manzel Bowman’s mixed media collages. Drawing inspiration from ancient Egyptian symbolism, sci-fi and the iconic album covers of Sun Ra, and Jimi Hendrix, the artist from Long Island, New York creates beautifully symmetrical dreamscapes.
Deities dripped in gold, warriors floating in intergalactic spaces – it’s a decadent vision of afro futurism, perfect for the post-internet generation.
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Books

After Caravaggio: Michael Fried on the painter's enormous influence

The art historian examines the long legacy of the Baroque painter

by Michael Fried  |  26 July 2016

Valentin de Boulogne, Concert with Bas-Relief (around 1624).

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The art historian Michael Fried's new book, After Caravaggio, which has just been published by Yale University Press, looks at the painter's followers and the long shadow he cast over the 17th century.

It follows Fried's 2010 publication The Moment of Caravaggio, where he focused on how the Italian Baroque artist propelled the emergence of the "gallery picture" as a distinct genre that moved away from traditional altarpieces and religious commissions.

"Part of the larger argument of both After Caravaggio and The Moment of Caravaggio is that in the first decades of the 1600s, Rome saw the rise of marvellous private galleries owned by nobles and cardinals, who bought and commissioned works by artists like Caravaggio," Fried says. "Artists became aware of the natural competition that took place in those galleries, because if you hang pictures alongside one another, they will fight among themselves to find out which is strongest. Caravaggio was the big winner here."

The new book elaborates on many of the themes that have animated Fried's work since his spirited attack on Minimalism in his 1967 essay Art and Objecthood. But this new work, he says, is not an attempt to lay an absolute bedrock for this history of Modernism. "The direction I always want to go is not, here is something happening for the first time—there's nothing that ever begins like that, there is always something before. But instead, if you think about these pictures this way, this is how you can make sense of them."

The below excerpt is taken from the book.

Valentin de Boulogne, Fortune Teller (1620s).

Let me begin by looking briefly at Valentin de Boulogne’s Fortune Teller (1620s) in the Louvre, a representative work by the artist and also, equally to the point, a representative example of a certain sort of Caravaggesque painting. In what follows I want to use Valentin’s canvas as point of reference for a series of remarks about what I take to be a distinctive Caravaggesque pictorial “system” or, perhaps more accurately, pictorial poetics, one which I want to suggest possesses an internal consistency and rationale such as have never, to my mind, been fully acknowledged.

To launch right in: Valentin’s canvas, slightly under five feet high by slightly over five and a half feet wide, depicts in a naturalistic manner derived from post-1600 Caravaggio, which is to say in a style based at once on strong local color and powerful chiaroscuro, six figures (four men, two women) in a shadowy but otherwise unspecified interior space. The central figures are a standing young woman – by her red and blue dress and dark coloring, as well as by her actions, a gypsy – who is engaged in telling the fortune – reading the palm – of a seated young man in expensive clothes and a feathered hat. At the right, a young woman plays a guitar while a seated older man with an unruly gray beard and piercing eyes plays a smallish harp. The harpist appears to be singing and the young woman may be doing so as well.

Neither looks at the two principal figures or toward the viewer standing before the painting. Instead the young woman gazes off into space toward her right (our left), and the bearded man gazes abstractly albeit intensely before him, as if lost in the music. Between the two principal figures and a few feet beyond them a boy sits at a table covered with an oriental carpet, his left elbow resting on the table as he supports his head with the back of his left hand; he seems to be looking at the gypsy but it is possible that he too is lost in thought or even that he is gazing off somewhat indeterminately. At the left, behind the gypsy a character in a dark cloak and hat, almost wholly in shadow – a bit of light touches the crown of his hat – carefully extracts (that is to say steals) a chicken from the pocket or sack at her side. The depicted space is shallow and all the figures appear to be situated in close proximity to the picture-plane, including the boy: the table under its rug has almost no depth.

So much seems plain. What is not so plain is whether or not art historians, with a few rare exceptions, have yet taken Valentin’s Fortune Teller and other paintings like it with full critical and intellectual seriousness. What I mean is this. It is true that Valentin is today widely recognized as a painter of impressive achievement, a superb colorist and wielder of the brush, one of the key figures in Roman Caravaggism. At the same time, there has been a widespread tendency to misconstrue, and in effect somewhat to caricature, the specific aims and ambitions of paintings such as this one. The subject is inevitably regarded as hackneyed (not just the theme of fortunetelling but also the related themes of card playing, music making, and pocket picking); no strong narrative or dramatic thread binds the various characters together, and each personage conveys the sense of having been drawn from a common repertoire of stock figures of a popular sort.

As Helen Langdon in particular has demonstrated, the great source work for these pictorially speaking was Caravaggio’s Cardsharps, along with a large later 16th- and early 17th-century popular literature featuring card players, bravi, prostitutes, and similar types. She writes: “The spell cast by Caravaggio’s Cardsharps intersected with the growing popularity of the picaresque novel, and art and literature united to produce a genre which, between 1599 and 1620 [a somewhat early closing date, I think], spread, with astonishing uniformity, throughout Europe”. In painting “[t]he first to establish a vogue for this kind of subject matter was Bartolomeo Manfredi. . . . His Cardplayers [1618], with its opening up of the game to the spectator, and the players so close to the frontal plane, is indebted to Caravaggio’s early genre paintings, but it has lost their bright light, and the figures, wrapped in darkness, are lifted from the master’s Calling of Saint Matthew and Martyrdom of Saint Matthew in San Luigi dei Francesi... Manfredi, and a group of painters around him, built up a repertory of figures that they used over and over again in increasingly complex compositions”. As for Valentin, Langdon sees that he characteristically depicted “a darker, more realistic underworld,” evoking, in a painting like Soldiers Playing Cards and Dice (around 1618–20).

The atmosphere of the dark taverns of Rome, where the threat of violence was constant, and where so many bravi and unoccupied soldiers, decked out in odd bits of armor, looked for wine, women, and adventure and played cards and dice. His figures – the dupe in elegant but bedraggled dress; the cheat, his poker face stiffly expressionless; the dice players, grimy, drunkenly flushed, and clad in scanty tatters – are the mournful cast of a gloomy tavern scene, close in spirit to the descriptions in contemporary picaresque novels. Valentin’s later tavern scenes continue to evoke a picaresque habitat . . . and, increasingly melancholy, sugggest the transitoriness of earthly pleasures. In the years around 1620 there developed a craze for such scenes, by such artists as Simon Vouet, Nicolas Régnier, Leonello Spada, and Nicolas Tournier . . . until, in the late 1620s, the motif began to pall.

All this is true as far as it goes – though the notion that tavern scenes began to “pall” in the late 1620s, putting an end to the “craze,” is a bit unnuanced. But nothing is more striking, when one surveys the Caravaggesque corpus, than the recurrence in painting after painting of the same handful of characters, wearing similar costumes (young gypsy women invariably in red, blue, and white), engaged in the same limited range of activities. In fact the same models can be recognized from one painting to another. But what such an emphasis turns out to ignore is another range of typical features and characteristics, one that has an altogether different sort of significance – an essentially pictorial significance, if I may so put it.

Valentin de Boulogne, Solders Playing Cards and Dice (around 1618-20).

Returning now to Valentin’s Fortune Teller, one previously unremarked factor reinforcing an effect of “presence” on the gallery wall concerns the tables, or rather the central placement in Valentin- or Manfredi-type painting after painting of tables or, especially, marble blocks serving as tables, invariably massive, frequently carved, usually centered, and more often than not set at an angle to the picture-plane. This last point is important. In Valentin’s Louvre Fortune Teller the crucial such element is the bench (stone or wood?) on which the gypsy’s client sits (one’s attention is drawn to the bench by the fact that the central figure grasps its top with his left hand). More characteristic, though, is the tremendous Concert with Bas-Relief (around 1624), one of Valentin’s masterpieces, with its music makers and drinkers gathered around a massive angled antique marble block bearing a classical bas-relief on its nearest oblique face. The illumination of the block – the top face most strongly lit, the left-hand face in a raking light that brings out the bas-relief, the right-hand face in darkness – together with its central placement in effect thrust the block toward the viewer, giving it a salience that cannot be ignored. (The longer one stands before the painting, the more the conviction grows that the block is at least as vital a “character” as any of the figures.)

Nor is the device confined to works by Valentin; on the contrary, it was clearly a common property, in effect a convention, within the group. Thus in Manfredi’s destroyed Cardplayers (1618), the central table is skewed, a fact underscored by the way in which the bravo with the red sleeve grips its nearmost corner. Other such works include Manfredi’s Reunion of Drinkers (around 1619–20), with seven figures seated and standing around another angled carved stone table; Tournier’s Dice Players (around 1622–4) – the central young man’s right hand gripping the nearmost corner, the bearded, downward gazing older man casting the dice also gripping the table-edge – and even more emphatically his Drinking Party with a Lute Player (around 1623).

But probably the most revealing use of the angled table motif is found in a “single-figure” work, Cecco’s Flute Player with its broad wooden table-top skewed relative to the pictureplane, the nearest corner touching the bottom edge of the painting. As one encounters it here, the angling cannot be missed, in fact it is positively disturbing in that it seems so at odds with the viewer’s expectations, the oddness being further emphasized by the proliferation of pieces of fruit in the corner area. In other words, there is in Cecco’s use of the device a deliberate flaunting, an exaggeration, and possibly a parody of the Caravaggesque convention, which he plainly recognized as such. (Significantly, Cecco’s Musician takes quite another attitude to its foreground table.)

In other genre paintings by artists in the group – Valentin’s Fortune Teller, for example, in which the angle of the stone table relative to the picture-plane is unusually slight – it is easier to overlook such elements, or, if they are noticed, to minimize their importance. But they matter profoundly to the works we have just surveyed, and by virtue of their angledness they also stand in implicit contrast to the classical system of composition based on parallel planes, as in the later, Roman Annibale Carracci and his followers and, still in the future, post-1630 Poussin. (If one were seeking in Caravaggio a precedent for such angled elements, it would surely be the great stone slab toward the bottom of his Deposition [before 1602–4] in the Vatican.) Specifically, I want to suggest that marble blocks and tables of this sort function in the paintings in which they appear as a kind of internal ideal of obtrusive and substantial physicality, as if a truly satisfying density of “presence” – an effect of “presence” as density – on the gallery wall could best be achieved with the aid of a central depiction, amounting almost to an invocation, of massiveness and density as such. The Concert with Bas-Relief has somewhat the force of a manifesto in this regard, owing not only to the impressiveness of its particular angled and carved marble block but also to the strong sense of direct address of the viewer on the part of the central boy and perhaps also the lutenist at the right (the gaze of the young woman guitar player seems, in comparison, just slightly “off”).

Michael Fried is J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and the History of Art, Johns Hopkins University.

In Focus

You Won't Believe Your Eyes: The Dizzying History of Op Art

By Artspace Editors

Aug. 5, 2016

They say seeing is believing—but as Op Art reveals, you can't always believe your eyes. Short for "Optical Art," Op Art is characterized by geometric patterns that seem to vibrate, swirl, or bend as you view them. The style became wildly popular in the swinging '60s, when psycholodelic designs infiltrated fashion, design, and art—but Op Art was more than just a trend.

Perception and Art

Cataract 3 by Bridget Riley, 1967

Artists have always been interested in the nature of perception. But in the 1950s, when advances in psychology and technology offered insights into the relationship between the outside world, our vision, our brain, and our experiences, Op Art solidified as a movement rooted in the viewing experience. Exploring the unexpected psychological and physiological responses to visual stimuli, Op artists played with contrasting lines and geometric patterns that to the viewer, seemed to vibrate or move. In some cases, viewers reported experiencing vertigo and nausea, proving the power of images to illicit physical response. 

Conceptually, Op Art offered a new perspective on the function of painting. During the 1960s, art as a whole began to embrace the notion of participation. Kinetic Art involved moving sculptures that related to the spectator's body; and "happenings" constituted performances enacted during everyday life that required audience participation. Op Art was painting's contribution to participatory art, requiring the presence of a viewer to illicit it's function as an optical illusion.

Significant Op Artists and Exhibitions

Bridget Riley's Fall, 1963

Artists at the forefront of both the Op Art and Kinetic Art movements were featured in "Le Mouvement," a group exhibition in 1955 at Galerie Denise Rene in Paris, though the works wouldn't be called "Op Art" until almost a decade later. The term was coined in 1964 by artist and writer Donald Judd in a Times Magazine review of Julian Stanczak's exhibition, "Optical Paintings," held at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. Within only a year, Op Art went on to become an international hit, most notably featured in a survey at the Museum of Modern Art entitled "The Responsive Eye" that included artists like Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelley, Wen-Ying Tsai, Victor Vasarely, Alexander Liberman, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Getulio Alviani, and Bridget Riley.

The large, dizzying, black and white paintings of London-born Bridget Riley are perhaps the most known works of the Op Art movement. From 1961 to 1964, the artist experimented with contrasting black and white compositions, occasionally including tonal gray gradations. One of her most well-known works is Fall, exhibited at her solo show at Musgrave's Gallery One in 1962. Like all of her paintings since 1961, Fall was executed by studio assistants following extensive studies conducted by the artist.

The Chess Board by Victor Vasarely, 1935

Although Op Art closely aligned with the hallucinogenic aesthetics of the '60s, artists had been experimenting with patterning and perception well before the movement took hold. Considered by many as the grandfather of Op Art, Hungarian-French artist Victor Vasarely produced one of the earliest examples of Op Art in the 1930s. Though he had primarily been making portraits and figurative paintings in the 1920s and early '30s, Vasarely's The Chess Board painted in 1935 marked the beginning of Op Art.

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The Science Behind Op Art

Intrinsic Harmony by Richard Anuszkiewicz, 1965

By using lines and geometric shapes in contrasting colors (mainly black and white), artists were able to make discordant figure-ground relationships. Lines and shapes would seem to flicker back and forth between rising to the foreground and fading into the background. The vibrating result causes the viewer to experience motion, which for some, induced sickness or dizziness.  

In addition, some black-and-white Op Art pieces cause viewers to see after-images—colored shapes created by our brain based on signals the eyes send, but do not in fact perceive. Some artists, like Stanczak, Anuszkiewicz, and Riley used colors from opposite sides of the color wheel to illicit optical illusions. 

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At the height of the Op Art movement, many critics were skeptical, denouncing the so-called gimmick as a fleeting trend. While the graphic patterns that characterized the movement did become commercialized and commodified in the fashion and design industries that loved to appropriate them, Op artists continue to be invaluable by having radically altered the relationship between artwork and perception.