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Expanded Aurality: Doing Sonic Feminism in the White Cube

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Expanded Aurality: Doing Sonic Feminism in the White Cube Expanded Aurality: Doing Sonic Feminism in the White Cube Sandra Kazlauskaitė Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Goldsmiths, University of London November 2018 Declaration of Authorship: I, Sandra Kazlauskaitė, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: …………………………………….. Date: ii Acknowledgments A single page is simply not enough to say a proper “thanks” to most of you. If anything, this page could (and should) extend itself into days and into years, and so it will. For now, I must start here: Foremost, I would like to thank my supervisors, Sean Cubitt and Julian Henriques, who have stood beside me from my first day at Goldsmiths and have devoted their time to guide me through this process. Your positivity and encouragement has enabled me to grow and develop in ways and into places I never thought I would end up. I would also like to thank Steve Colburn, Clare Hunt, Rob Witts and the CHASE network – this project would have not been possible without your kind support. If it wasn’t for your backing, Nýló in Iceland and the SPT research collective would not now be my second home. My gratitude also extends to Goldsmiths Media and Communications department as well as Goldsmiths cleaning and security staff for looking after us during hours when most of us are deep asleep. A huge thank you goes to my PhD family – skwod: Annie Goh, Alex Coupe, Jón Ólafsson, Lucy Thornett, Peter Rees, Mihaela Brenebel, Roberto Mozzachiodi, Sasha Litvintseva and Scott Wark – I love you all to the moon and back. I don’t think I would have survived this process if it wasn’t for all the snacks, shared adventures, the mental support, dinners, ‘lols’, viral dog videos and hours of chatting online and offline together. Your acts of kindness and your companionship have kept me full of life and love. I am also sending my love and thanks to my sister and soulmate Gintare Minelgaite who I have been lucky enough to share creative and conceptual visions since day one. Our connection is one of a kind, and I thank her for it. I would also like to thank my parents Vida and Vytautas, my aunt Elvyra, my iii cousin Vaida, my one and only grandmother as well as my brother and his family. Your unconditional love, support and the pick-me-up parcels from home have been feeding me with strength over the course of these last four years. Thank you, Elvira Grob and Frida (the cat), for being such wonderful housemates and close friends – your company, support and friendship has been indispensable and a crucial part of this process. I am also beyond lucky to have met Gracie Tillie, Charlotte Terrell, Benjin Pollock, Katie Kruger, Adam Whitehall and the rest of the Space, Place and Time research collective with whom I have shared academic adventures and created interdisciplinary research projects in the strangest parts of the world. I thank you for being a part of this journey. My gratitude also extends to arts organisations Nida Art Colony in Lithuania, Art Villa Garikula in Georgia, Call & Response and Nýló in Iceland for providing me with the very much needed sanctuary spaces to do thinking, writing and creating. My thanks extend to my colleagues Marie Thompson and David McSherry at Lincoln university. I am grateful for having been offered the opportunity to work together and I look forward to our joint extra sonic practice explorations in the new year. Last, but most certainly not least, thank you, Molly, for being the best companion and helper. In the words of Donna Haraway: ‘If I have a dog, my dog has a human’. I have you, but you have me as equal, and when we are both together, we are complete. iv Abstract This thesis is a practice-led quest to expand aurality in white cube gallery spaces. Using video art installation practice, feminist phenomenology and spatial theory, it explores the soundscape of whitened contemporary exhibition spaces and questions how women-produced sounding video artworks, the experiencing bodies and background noise affect the production of the gallery in perceptual and socio-political terms. This project proposes that the archetypal white cube, as a product of modernism, has served as an architectural and institutional construct since the start of the twentieth century. Built on ocularcentric, patriarchal and capitalist ideology, it has continued to condition our way of displaying and experiencing art. The white cube has primarily accommodated rational, individualised and decontextualised white heteronormative middle-class male subjects, whilst quieting and excluding stereotypically ‘irrational’, ‘subjective’ and ‘feminised’ bodies and their sound from the gallery walls. The white cube, in this sense, has operated as a site of policed silencing and gendered control. This thesis makes an intervention into the field of contemporary art and museum studies by proposing the need to readdress the legacy of the white cube’s gendered and autonomous ideology by bringing video art, sound and gender studies into the white cube debate through theory and practice. This project introduces a methodology of sonic feminism: the acts of speaking the mother tongue and listening to all-sound when exhibiting and experiencing video art inside the gallery walls. Whilst reflecting on my video art projects, I propose that once we allow our bodies to engage in the totality of sound and speak in a language that aims to offer rather than claim when being with art, we might begin to dismantle the white cube’s gendered and spatio-temporal limitations. We might then discover a more expanded white cube – an aesthetic site that exceeds gender binaries, empowers social connectedness and offers a whole-bodied engagement with art, a white cube that is home for all-bodies rather than some. v List of Figures Figure 1, 13.1.91, Exhibition View, Surrey Gallery, 2016 i Figure 2, Exhibition view, We Like Modern Art, MoMa, Dec 27, 1940 - Jan 12, 1941, photo: The Museum of Modern Art Archive, New York 20 Figure 3, Martini, Pietro Antonio, Exposition au Salon du Louvre en 1787, 1787. Wildenstein Institute, Paris 24 Figure 4, J. J Grandville, An Exhibition Gallery, Illustration for the book Un autre monde, Paris, 1844 24 Figure 5, Exhibition view, Robert Irwin, MoMa, Oct 24, 1970 - Feb 16, 1971, photo: MoMa Archive, New York 33 Figure 6, Exhibition view, Christian Marclay, 9 x 9 x 9, South Galleries and North Galleries, White Cube Bermondsey, 2015 41 Figure 7, Exhibition view, Christian Marclay, 9 x 9 x 9, South Galleries and North Galleries, White Cube Bermondsey, 2015 42 Figure 8, 13.1.91, Exhibition View, Surrey Gallery, 2016 124 Figure 9, 13.1.91, Exhibition View, Surrey Gallery, 2016 125 Figure 10, 13.1.91, Exhibition View, Surrey Gallery, 2016 126 Figure 11, 13.1.91 Exhibition Room Layout, Surrey Gallery, 2016 133 Figure 12, Fig. 8, Airport, Installation Detail, St. James Hatcham, 2015 161 Figure 13, Airport, Exhibition View, Sound/Place Exhibition, St. James Hatcham, 2015 161 Figure 14, Airport, Exhibition View, Sound/Place Exhibition, St. James Hatcham, 2015 162 Figure 15, Sound/Place, Exhibition View, St. James Hatcham, 2015 164 Figure 16, Sound/Place, Exhibition View, St. James Hatcham, 2015 165 Figure 17, Sound|Place, Exhibition View, St. James Hatcham, 2015 166 Figure 18, Airport Exhibition Floor Plan, Sound/Place, St. James Hatcham, 2015 175 Figure 19, St. James Hatcham Gallery Floor Map 175 Figure 20, Sound/Place Exhibition Floor Map, St. James Hatcham, 2018 176 Figure 21, A Spatio-temporal Relationality in Airport 195 Figure 22, Newport South Gallery, Exhibition View, Gallery 2, Photo: Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA 206 vi Contents Declaration of Authorship: ...................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments ..................................................................................................................................... iii Abstract ............................................................................................................................................................ v List of Figures .............................................................................................................................................. vi Contents ........................................................................................................................................................ vii Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 1 0.1. Prologue .................................................................................................................................................................. 1 0.2. A Case for Sonic Feminism .............................................................................................................................. 3 0.2. Why the White Cube? ........................................................................................................................................ 7 0.7. Towards an Aurally Expanded White Cube .......................................................................................... 10 1. The White Cube Project ..................................................................................................................... 13 1.1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................
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