Toward Listening As a Curatorial Method: Histories, Methodologies, Propositions

Toward Listening as a Curatorial Method: Histories, Methodologies, Propositions

Liora Belford

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Art History Art History University of Toronto

Toward Listening as a Curatorial Method: Histories, Methodologies, Propositions

Liora Belford

Doctor of Philosophy in Art History

Art History University of Toronto

2021 Abstract

From the 1960s through the 1980s, an ever-expanding exploration of sound occurred within the visual arts field, helping give birth to sound art (and its exhibition) as a unique genre. The number of sound art exhibitions has grown exponentially over time, reaching into major art institutions.

Building on information gathered about more than 250 sound art group exhibitions from the 1960s to the present, involving works made by a number of artists/musicians, I recognized three main approaches for curating sound: The sonic image, the exhibition as spatial music, and musical composition for visual objects. This dissertation follows these three sound curating methodologies, their histories, and the propositions and influence they have contributed to the production, positioning, and reception of sound in art today.

I start with a question: Why does the most common method for displaying multiple sound works

(or works with sound) within the same gallery space invariably involve constraining these sounds with acoustic barriers to keep them separate? I maintain that this separation of sounds in museums follows how we see, and not how we hear. I argue that this method, which I have termed the “sonic image,” is made in order to ‘help’ us experience sound works as we do visual objects—to hear a sound only when we see it.

Since the sonic turn of the 1990s a few composers curated sound art group shows demonstrating an auditory approach to sound curation: the “exhibition as spatial music.” Composing exhibitions as spatial music means addressing sound’s materiality and applying listening philosophies into the intricacies of the exhibitionary. In doing so, these composers composed exhibitions which—like music—stimulate an inner subjective space within the listener.

The third methodology—the “musical composition for visual objects”—belongs to John Cage, who composed three compositions for museum later in his life. By relating to objects as musical notes, and curating by using a musical score, Cage’s exhibitions demonstrate that listening should not be limited to the sphere of sound, and thus methodologies informed by auditory perception can stimulate multiple layers of perception in the gallery.

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Acknowledgments

My most sincere gratitude and appreciation go out to my supervisory committee: Professor Elizabeth Legge, Professor Barbara Fischer, and Professor Joseph Clarke. Through their ideas, kindness, and guidance, each in their own special way have been invaluable to my research. My deepest gratitude goes also to the composers and artists I had the privilege to work with throughout this research, specifically Michael Snow and Amnon Wolman, who allowed me to think about sound curating by composing their sounds into exhibitions—thank you for your trust and generosity. I would also like to acknowledge Julie Lazar, Los Angeles MOCA’s adjunct curator— who worked with John Cage on Rolywholyover A Circus—as well as Laura Kuhn, the director of the John Cage Trust, for the ongoing help and support each gave me over the years. Lastly, to my family, near and far, and especially to my parents, who taught me to never give up on a dream: I miss you, this is all due to you.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... iv

Table of Contents ...... v

List of Figures ...... vii

List of Appendices ...... xii

Introduction: Theoretical Background and Chapter Layout ...... 1

Chapter 1 The Sonic Image (or Why Are We All Too Familiar with Headphones Attached to a Wall?) ...... 21

Sound Entering the Gallery: The Musical Score, Art-by-Instructions, and Experimental Music in the Gallery ...... 21

From the 1960s to 1980s: A Brief History of Sound Art Curating ...... 29

2.1 The 1960s: Artists (and Curators) Experimenting with the New Medium, Sound ...... 29

2.2 The 1970s: Reconsidering the Elusiveness of Sound ...... 45

2.3 From the 1980s on: Manifesting Sound Art as Visual Art ...... 53

The Control of the Visual Experience of the World and the Taming of Sound in the Exhibitory ...... 61

The Separation of the Senses and the Museum as a Silent Chamber...... 69

Chapter 2 The Exhibition as Spatial Music (or the Composer as Curator) ...... 74

Spatial Music and the Composer as Designer of Space ...... 75

5.1 The Philips Pavilion (1958) ...... 76

5.2 West German Pavilion (1970) ...... 83

5.3 The Pepsi Pavilion (1970) ...... 88

Spatial Music and the Composer as Curator ...... 97

6.1 The Exhibition as a Musical Installation ...... 98

6.2 The Exhibition as a Musical Performance ...... 112

6.3 The Exhibition as a Sound Walk ...... 121

Listening to Snow ...... 132

Chapter 3 (John Cage’s) Musical Compositions for Visual Objects ...... 147

John Cage in the Gallery – Making the Abstract Tangible ...... 148

Changing Installation, 1991; museumcircle, 1991; Rolywholyover A Circus, 1991–95 .....154

9.1 museumcircle, 1991 ...... 154

9.2 Changing Installation, 1991 ...... 157

9.3 Rolywholyover A Circus 1991–1995 ...... 161

Emptiness/Nothingness/Silence—Cage’s Exhibitions as the Evolution of His Silence ...... 168

10.1 4'33'' (1952) ...... 169

10.2 0'00'' (1962) ...... 175

10.3 Emptiness – Cage’s Compositions for Museum ...... 181

museumcircle: Cage’s Space Adaptation of Duchamp’s music (Erratum Musicale, 1913)...183

Conclusion: Listening as a Curatorial Method ...... 200

References ...... 215

Appendix (A): John Cage, museumcircle (1991), List of Instructions ...... 225

List of Figures

Figure 1: Installation, Volume Bed of Sound (2000), MoMA PS1, New York...... 3

Figure 2: Michael Snow, Diagonale (1988), Listening to Snow, 2020 ...... 15

Figure 3: Steve Reich, Pendulum Music (1968), Four Evenings of Extended Time Pieces and a Lecture—part of the programming for the exhibition Anti Illusion: Procedures/ Materials, Whitney Museum (1968)...... 28

Figure 4: Al Hansen, Happening, performed at 11-18-66 at Sound, Light, and Silence: Art that Performs (1966) ...... 31

Figure 5: 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering (1966) ...... 33

Figure 6: Robert Rauschenberg, Open Score (1966), 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, 196634

Figure 7: John Cage, Variations VII (1966), 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, 1966 ...... 34

Figure 8: Cybernetic Serendipity, ICA, London, 1968 ...... 35

Figure 9: Cybernetic Serendipity, ICA, London, 1968 ...... 36

Figure 10: Cybernetic Serendipity, ICA, London, 1968. Exhibition View ...... 36

Figure 11: Stanley Landsman, Walk-In Infinity Chamber, (1968), The Magic Theatre, Nelson- Atkins Museum of Art, 1968...... 38

Figure 12: Stephen Antonakos, Walk-On Neon (1968), The Magic Theatre, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1968 ...... 39

Figure 13: Boyd Mefferd, Strobe Light Floor (1968), The Magic Theatre, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1968 ...... 39

Figure 14: Boyd Mefferd, Strobe Light Floor (1968), The Magic Theatre, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1968 ...... 40

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Figure 15: James Seawright, Electronic Peristyle (1968), The Magic Theatre, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1968 ...... 40

Figure 16: Terry Riley, Time-Lag Accumulator (1968), The Magic Theatre, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1961. Installation View, Courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art...... 41

Figure 17: Len Lye, Universe (1963), Sound, Light, and Silence: Art that Performs, Nelson- Atkins Museum of Art, 1966 ...... 44

Figure 18: Vito Acconci, Decoy for Birds and People (1979), Sound, MoMA PS1 ...... 47

Figure 19: Installation view of Bruce Fier’s The Sound Spiral (1979), ...... 48

Figure 20: Installation views of Norman Tuck’s Water Wheel, 1979 ...... 49

Figure 21: Bob Bates, Fuser (1978), Installation View ...... 50

Figure 22: Bob Bates, Fuser (1978), Activated ...... 50

Figure 23: Jim Pomeroy, Untitled, 1978, Installation View ...... 51

Figure 24: Jim Pomeroy, Untitled, 1978, Activated ...... 51

Figure 25: Für Augen und Ohren, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1980, Installation View...... 54

Figure 26: Für Augen und Ohren, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1980, Installation View...... 54

Figure 27: Für Augen und Ohren, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1980, Installation View...... 55

Figure 28: Sound/Art, 1984 Sculpture Center, New York. Exhibition View ...... 56

Figure 29: Carolee Schneemann, War Mop, 1983, Sound/Art, 1984, Sculpture Center, New York ...... 56

Figure 30: Vito Acconci Three Columns for America, 1976 ...... 57

Figure 31: The Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair, 1958 (exterior view)...... 78

Figure 32: The Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair, 1958 (exterior view)...... 78

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Figure 33: The Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair, 1958 (Diagram of the Sound Routes)...... 81

Figure 34: Iannis Xenakis, Metastasis (1955) ...... 82

Figure 35: West Germany Pavilion, World Fair Expo 1970, Osaka, Japan (exterior view) ...... 84

Figure 36: West Germany Pavilion, World Fair Expo 1970, Osaka, Japan (interior view) ...... 86

Figure 37: West Germany Pavilion, World Fair Expo 1970, Osaka, Japan (audio layout) ...... 87

Figure 38: David Tudor, Bandoneon! (a combine), [1966], 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, 1966...... 89

Figure 39: Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, World Fair Expo, Osaka, Japan, 1970 (exterior day view) ...... 92

Figure 40: Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, World Fair Expo, Osaka, Japan, 1970 (exterior night view) ..... 93

Figure 41: Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, World Fair Expo, Osaka, Japan, 1970 (interior view)...... 93

Figure 42: Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, World Fair Expo, Osaka, Japan, 1970 (interior view) ...... 94

Figure 43: Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, World Fair Expo, Osaka, Japan, 1970 (operating system) ...... 96

Figure 44: Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, World Fair Expo, Osaka, Japan, 1970 (interior view) ...... 96

Figure 45: Laptopia #5, MOBY, 2009 (first floor) ...... 100

Figure 46: MOBY Architecture Plan (detail) ...... 100

Figure 47: Laptopia #5 exhibition view, MOBY, 2009 ...... 101

Figure 48: SOUND, 2009. Exhibition Map ...... 102

Figure 49: SOUND, 2009. Exhibition View ...... 103

Figure 50: Duane Brant, Sew Organ (2006), at SOUND, 2009 ...... 103

Figure 51: Duane Brant, Sew Organ (2006), at SOUND, 2009 ...... 104

Figure 52: Brenda Hutchinson, Giant Music Box [with pins], (1992), at SOUND, 2009 ...... 104

Figure 53: SOUND, 2009. Exhibition View ...... 105

Figure 54: Amnon Wolman, Towing Zone (2012)...... 113

Figure 55: A Piece for Two Floors and a Corridor by Amnon Wolman, 2015...... 114

Figure 56: Xavier Veilhan, Studio Venezia (2017) ...... 116

Figure 57: Xavier Veilhan, Studio Venezia (2017) ...... 117

Figure 58: Xavier Veilhan, Studio Venezia (2017) ...... 117

Figure 59: Shhh… Sound in Spaces (2004), The Victoria & Albert Museum, Exhibition Map and Sound Kit...... 124

Figure 60: Shhh… Sound in Spaces (2004), The Victoria & Albert Museum...... 125

Figure 61: Michael Snow, Listening to Snow, 2020 ...... 134

Figure 62: Listening to Snow, 2020 (Map) ...... 136

Figure 63: Michael Snow, Waiting Room (2000), Listening to Snow, 2020 ...... 137

Figure 64: Michael Snow, Waiting Room (2000), Listening to Snow, 2020 ...... 138

Figure 65: Michael Snow, Falling Starts (1975), Listening to Snow, 2020 ...... 141

Figure 66: Michael Snow, Listening to Snow, 2020 ...... 143

Figure 67: John Cage, Changing Installation (1991), Mattress factory (Map) ...... 158

Figure 68: John Cage, Changing Installation (1991), Mattress factory (Map) ...... 159

Figure 69: John Cage, Changing Installation (1991), Mattress factory (Map) ...... 159

Figure 70: John Cage, Main Circus Computerized Daily Score, Rolywholyover A Circus (1991- 95) ...... 162

Figure 71: John Cage, Main Circus installation view, Rolywholyover A Circus (1991-95) .... 162

Figure 72: John Cage, museumcircle installation view, Rolywholyover A Circus (1991-95) .. 164

Figure 73: John Cage, Circle ‘storage’ installation view, Rolywholyover A Circus (1991-95) 165

Figure 74: Marcel Duchamp, Erratum Musicale (1913) [score]...... 184

Figure 75: John Cage, museumcircle, (1991), installation view at Image Coming Soon #1, 2015 ...... 188

Figure 76: John Cage, museumcircle (1991) IC list ...... 189

Figure 77: John Cage, museumcircle, (1991), installation view at Image Coming Soon #1, 2015 ...... 191

Figure 78: John Cage, museumcircle, (1991), installation view at Image Coming Soon #1, 2015 ...... 192

Figure 79: John Cage, museumcircle, (1991), installation view at Image Coming Soon #1, 2015 ...... 192

Figure 80: Marcel Duchamp, Erratum Musicale (1913), installation view at Image Coming Soon #1, 2015...... 193

Figure 81: Constantin Luser, Vibrosaurus (2008) (workshop view) Big Orchestra: Music with Sculptures of Contemporary Art (2019), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt,...... 203

Figure 82: Constantin Luser, Vibrosaurus (2008) (installation view), Big Orchestra: Music with Sculptures of Contemporary Art (2019), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt...... 203

List of Appendices

Appendix A – John Cage, museumcircle (1991), List of Instructions

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Introduction: Theoretical Background and Chapter Layout

I am both a sound artist and sound art curator, or, more precisely, a sound artist practicing curation.

I use the gallery space as a studio for experimenting with and researching sound, in the same way

I create sound works. A sound exhibition, I believe, should be composed as a spatial musical composition. Along with a number of other curators (such as Ido Govrin, Gustavo Matamoros,

Christian Marclay), I curate by fashioning an acoustic space. This dissertation is an articulation of

“listening” as a method of curating sound. In this dissertation, I trace the method’s origins, its history in installation practices, in sound art history, and consider the further propositions for exhibition that it opens up. Listening, as I use the term, means a critical attention to what is heard, with a view to shaping an acoustic environment, and/or possibly permitting the excavation of aesthetic properties from sound.

In order to illuminate the ways that curatorial listening challenges the canon of historical sonic exhibitions, I try first to excavate and articulate the curatorial methodologies that helped shape sonic exhibitory practices, in order to establish points of access through which I, and others, can influence the sonic canon. In doing so, the first chapter of this dissertation gathers information from a broad range of group sound art exhibitions, from the 1960s until today, focusing primarily on exhibitions from the United States and Britain, stressing the influence of curatorial decisions on how we experience sound art in exhibitions today.

The term “sound art” was first in use by curator Barbara London in 1979, in her curatorial statement for Sound Art, MOMA. Later in the 1980’s, two major survey exhibitions established sound art as a genre – Für Augen und Ohren (For Eyes and Ears) at the Akademie der Kunst in

Berlin, (1980) organized by gallerist and curator René Block; and Sound/Art at the Sculpture

Center and BACA/DCC Gallery in New York (1983), organized by composer and sculptor

1 2

William Hellermann. But the transformation of performative experimental music into “art” was also received by some as being somewhat problematic. Artist Hank Bull, for example, questioned this transformation in his performance at Audio Scene ’79, Sound: A Medium for Visual Art,1 pointing out that “sound is difficult to present in a museum, teach in a school, or sell in a gallery”

(1979). Caleb Kelly in his introduction to his reader Sound (2011) suggests a simpler explanation of the term, one which can still describe both gallery-based works as well as experimental music practices. For Kelly “sound art” may simply describe the medium the work is created from (2011,

14). In this dissertation I adopt Kelly’s straightforward approach to the term and define sound art exhibitions as exhibitions including works with sound, made by one or more artists/musicians.

Moreover, this research is equally divided between the written history of sonic practices, and an exhibition that materially realizes my own approach. As such, it relies greatly on my own artistic activities as a curator, and on that of predecessors and peers, to address conflicts, assertions, and common assumptions about sound and its inclusion and effects in gallery space. I am thinking about these through the material formats of exhibitions, events, and other artistic curatorial objects, reflecting on projects curated by myself and others to support my arguments. As one example, the exhibition Volume: Bed of Sound (2000) at the MoMA PS1, New York, curated by Elliott Sharp and Alanna Heiss, included sound installations and audio pieces by sixty artists (figure 1). The exhibition comprised two galleries: in one, sound works were presented on an enormous futon bed, through headphones; in the other, there were floor-to-ceiling speakers for individual sound-work presentations. Volume epitomized the predominant manner in which sound had come to be presented in the gallery space: isolated or insulated from the other sound works.

1 Audio Scene was organized by Grita Insam at the Modern Art Galerie, Vienna, in 1979.

Figure 1: Installation, Volume Bed of Sound (2000), MoMA PS1, New York. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/4697?installation_image_index=1

It is not only sound that gets submitted to this isolating approach within museums. Artworks that include movement and/or light, such as unrelated video works, are also often distanced from one another. Even pictures or sculptures, in certain configurations, interfere with adjacent works, and curators quarantine or distance them from one another, in order to create a particular context and message for a given work. And yet the isolation of the sonic has a more significant, altering, and detrimental impact than the isolation of the visual, because the acoustic boundaries used to constrain the sound alter its effects: sound needs space and time for it to be itself — that is, to behave according to its own spatial properties. When it is limited to one spot, its dynamic effect is curtailed as well.

Chapter One

In the first chapter, “The Sonic Image (or Why Are We All Too Familiar with Headphones

Attached to a Wall?),” I discuss the ways the tendency to govern the audience’s experience in exhibitions leads to the isolation of sound. A sound-work, like any other art form, is often moderated and translated—by textual support and by context—for its audience in exhibitions. For the sound-work to fit into the labyrinth of display its volume is often muted or even silenced by curators with the use of acoustic barriers such as baffling dividers, heavily curtained off spaces, and headphones. An exhibition visitor listens on average to only a 15-second fragment of a sound work. That edited attention has become normalized and seems natural, having become the visual symbol for the auditory withing the exhibitory domain. I have termed this curatorial attitude and methodology the “sonic image,” which, in practice, means bordering the sound of the work with acoustic boundaries to avoid sound leakage. The sonic image curatorial methodology, as I argue in the first chapter, forces one to hear the sound only while seeing its source, and in doing so defuses most of the work’s proper sonic properties, limiting its effect to its conceptual and visual, often tangential, components. This layout might support the human multisensory perception of speech, as argued in researches focused on how auditory and visual speech perceptually bound together (Stevenson, Wallace and Altieri, 2014), but I stress that the curatorial binding of our perceptual systems limits the sonic phenomenological implications of the sound work. I further argue that when accompanied with curatorial didactics, sound works are often performed to visitors through language.

I further show how the binding of our senses is used to generate specific narratives, leading to the elimination of some sounds: how the curatorial shapes, defines, and distinguishes between what is understood to be a ‘good’ sound and what is a ‘bad’ one. Referring to Emily Thompson’s argument

5 that technological developments in the control and manipulation of sound behavior resulted in the audience’s critical hearing (2002), or perception that the sound of the work is too loud or inaudible, or disruptive, I consider whether adjustments of sound quality and volume help curators control what is listened-to in the exhibition. Having expectations of what the exhibition should sound like, the audience point their collective ears and listen only in certain areas along the labyrinth of display, such as perhaps, where the sound is loud and clear. How then are curatorial decisions made about which sounds and voices sound “good,” in quality and volume, and are consequently more attentively listened-to by the visitor, and which sounds are potentially received as alienating, or at best, as intriguing. Which works are placed at the heart of the discourse (such as sounds in the works of Pipilotti Rist, Bill Viola, Shirin Neshat, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, to name a few), which are placed in the margins (Jennifer Walshe, Phil Niblock) and which are left out of the institution? These are questions that curators need to consider in their shaping of what Pierre

Bourdieu defines as “cultural capital” (1977, 1984), the cultural knowledge and content that maintain social strata. If by controlling the way audience place themselves in relation to what it is they hear, the curatorial imply social superiority of certain groups and the lowering and exclusion of others?

Having gathered information about more than 250 sound art group exhibitions, I have found that the majority of these group shows are thematic survey exhibitions that explore one or more of the following topics: (1) the relationship between the sonic and the visual, in which musicians make art, or artists make sound works, or sound is visualized, or there is a thematic of the influence of music culture on visual arts; (2) sound as a medium in itself, that is: sound and space, sound and technology, non-cochlear sound, sound and philosophy, soundscapes, the musical score, sound’s ephemeral nature, the architecture of sound; (3) conceptual sounds, that is, sound taken in relationship to political and social ideologies and pressures including gender, feminism, and

6 religion; and (4) examinations of a specific time (the Middle Ages, the 1970s) and/or place

(London, Tokyo, for example). It seems that curating a sound show conceptually is viewed as a necessity, as is composing it as a visual experience. Considering the different sounds created by the sound works and approaching the curation of the exhibition’s acoustic environment as a sonic composition, by contrast, is rare (Laptopia#5, 2009 & Sound 2009).

In response to the observation that sound works are typically exhibited in a way that limits their essential properties, I turn for guidance to the texts of artists and curators who continuously shape the sonic canon. For example, Anna-Catharina Gebbers, a curator at the Hamburger Bahnhof is quoted in a recent essay by Margaret Carrigan, for identifying a curatorial need to “protect the sound piece from other sounds... in order to present a sound work in a way that adequately expresses the artist’s idea while making it accessible to the visitor” (Carrigan, 2017). I question why sound needs to be “protected” from other sounds in the first place? For Carrigan it has to do with the artist’s intention. But could the artist not be persuaded that, as in the day-to-day world we are capable of hearing many sources of sound simultaneously and making sense of it, that permitting sound pieces to mutually interfere presents an intensified experience? Isn’t the ear, unlike the eye, able to perceive in all directions? Or, as Marshall McLuhan puts it, the eye is the only one of our senses that is capable of separating or capturing single aspects to begin with.

I therefore suggest, in the first chapter, that the separation of sounds in museums is modelled on how we see—i.e. by the ocularcentric canon—and not on how we hear. I maintain that this separation is put in place in order to “help” us experience sound works as we do visual objects— to hear a sound only when we see it. This sonic-visual hybrid, which I call a “sonic image”—is what I find to be the most common sonic curatorial method. Simply put, this method forces sound by way of its context to behave as if it were a visual object.

Why do sound artists and musicians embrace acoustic barriers in museums and galleries, even if these barriers limit their work? Scholar and artist Seth Kim-Cohen suggests that “artists who want to exhibit sound in spaces designed for visual art must accede to the realities of such spaces”

(Carrigan, 2017). Challenging Kim-Cohen’s assertion, I ask, what are the realities of those visual art spaces? What are the prejudices activated by such spaces, in terms of visitor expectations and curatorial construction? What are the implications of those realities for the way we experience sound in the exhibitory? And I also ask if—and if so, how—curating sound, in spaces dedicated for visual art, has shaped the sonic canon?

Considering the dual role the curator has played as both organizer and critic since the late 1960s,2

I also explore the relationship between theorizing sound art and its display methodologies. Sound art developed alongside the evolution of recording technology, which right from the start led it to be theorized, articulated, and understood through terminologies and ideas used to conceptualize visual reproduction. In three essays from 1934, Theodor Adorno compares the phonograph to the photograph, going so far as to state that sound recordings are acoustic photography (Levin, 1990).

Friedrich Kittler too, in discussing technology and our perception of the “real,” interlaces sonic and visual technological reproduction: of light in the case of the photograph, of sound waves in the case of the phonograph (Kittler, 1999).3 A later example is Jonathan Sterne who, in confronting the idea of “authenticity” in recorded sound, correlates sound and visual reproduction (2013).

Sound reproduction emerged alongside other mass-cultural practices (magazine reading,

2 When exceptional curators such as Harald Szeemann (and his When Attitudes Become Form: Works-Concepts- Processes-Situations, 1969, Kunsthalle Bern), and Kynaston McShine (Information, 1970, MOMA) conceived the exhibition itself as a medium for developing new ideas about art. 3 But these are both purely indexical—what Kittler calls “symbolic.”

8 photography, motion pictures), Sterne notes, and thus needs to be taken as such: as part of a distinctive field of practices related technologically, practically, and institutionally.

The affiliation of sound art and visual art may be unavoidable. As Don Ihde observes, the use of visual metaphors to describe sonic experience is pervasive, as the vocabulary from the field of the visual underlies many of the most commonly accepted sonic terms (bright, high, low, etc.). This fairly seamless synaesthetic assimilation paved the way for sound art’s comparison to visual art in the latter’s own field, merging the former smoothly into the latter, and understanding sound art as a branch or extension of visual art. For example, in In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear

Sonic Art (2009), Kim-Cohen draws our attention to Pierre Schaeffer's Musique Concrète (1948) and John Cage’s Silent Prayer (1948) as key works, and appoints them as the founders of sound art. Citing Clement Greenberg’s and Michael Fried’s declarations about Minimal art as experimental, meaning “only” focused on the study of materials, Kim-Cohen considers work of

Schaeffer and Cage as studying “sound-in-itself,” stating that by failing to reject Minimalism both composers missed the “conceptual turn” and failed to join Minimalist visual artists like Robert

Morris in claiming phenomenological aspects of their work. While Kim-Cohen makes a valuable contribution, I take his (as well as Adorno’s, Kittler’s and Sterne’s) interweaving of histories and theories of sound art to visual art as somewhat comparable to our experiencing of sound-as-visual in museum setting. This is not to say that the relations between sound art to visual art, historically and thematically, is either unimportant or inevitable, but I do propose that reading sound through its visual qualities causes it to lose the individuation of its materiality, and to forcibly enter a larger contemporary conceptual context of the visual and the textual.

I suggest an additional reading of 1948 as a critical moment in the history of contemporary music

—when Cage and Schaeffer incorporated silence and noise into their music—and one which

9 illuminates significant possibilities for the field of sound curation: When Cage defined silence— or, more accurately, the noise that surrounds us—as music he enabled the process of listening to silence as a compositional element of music. Erwin Schulhoff introduced the concept of silence as part of music in 1919 with his movement “In Futurum” (from his Fünf Pittoresken or Silent Music), when he included a silent rest as a movement in a musical piece, but it was Cage who introduced the idea of listening to silence—the unintentional sounds of the everyday—as a compositional method. Schaeffer made a similar move when he incorporated recordings of the everyday into his

Musique Concrète. Thus, because of the work of Cage and Schaeffer, what had previously been considered “noise,” such as the sound of light bulbs humming in a room or a car passing by a window, became music. Taking this into the exhibitory field, I suggest that this moment in the history of contemporary music allows sound works, works with sound, or even music written as music to become ‘noises,’ or rather ‘sounds,’ for curators to work with.

Chapter Two (and Exhibition Component of the Dissertation)

In the second chapter I focus on exhibitions curated by composers who work with the sounds on display. I call the curatorial methodology that contradicts the impulse to separate sounds in exhibitions “listening.” Putting this differently, the process of listening to the sounds of the works and choosing them accordingly does not necessarily require a curatorial insulation and protection of individual works one from the other. It is a way to “work” with the sounds on display, curating the works in the exhibition as layers of a musical composition. By “musical” I do not refer to

“pure” music, as traditionally defined. The exhibitions I consider do not possess features such as pitch and rhythm; rather, they relate to Cage’s and Schaeffer’s definition of music—being inclusive of noise, of the unintentional. I show how in doing this, by ‘working’ with the sound

10 works in the exhibition, these composers-curators produce an auditory exhibitory structure that better supports the sonic properties of the works displayed.

Much has been written with respect to the phenomenology of listening. Some have focused on the voice (Jacques Derrida),4 following a perspective on writing as a body expressed only when actually spoken. Listening in this sense causes imagining, or, rather, remembering, of the meaning of the spoken word.5 Others have claimed that, on the contrary, the voice is the gate to the prelinguistic (Gilles Deleuze),6 and rhythm is the origin of any language (Roland Barthes).7 In that sense, listening is a form of decoding, and is therefore imbued with the power of speech itself: active attentiveness. In other words, what is listened to is not what is signified, but rather what is

4 For Derrida, speech is a form of writing one’s own thoughts, and therefore, only the spoken language—the voice— is an ideal object because it preserves the presence of the object as it is. If writing brings the constitution of ideal objects to completion, it does so through phonetic writing: “It proceeds to fix, inscribe, record, and incarnate an already prepared utterance. To reactivate writing is always to reawaken an expression in an indication, a word in the body of a letter, which, as a symbol that may always remain empty, bears the threat of crisis in itself. Already, speech was playing the same role by first constituting the identity of sense in thought” (2012, 499). 5 Derrida explains that while every visual signifier separates an inside (phenomenological consciousness) from the outside (the world)—as it involves a spatial reference—the phenomenological value of the voice is the “apparent transcendence,” the fact that the signified is immediately present in the act of expression (speech). This immediate presence results from the fact that the phenomenological “body” of the signifier seems to fade away at the very moment it is produced; when I listen to myself speak, the signifier is in absolute proximity to me. Thus, the process of speech has the originality of presenting itself already as pure phenomenon. Any visual reflection (including my own), unlike my voice, is placed outside of what Derrida calls the field of auto-affection, which is the exercise of the voice, the “sameness as self-relation within self-difference; it produces sameness as the nonidentical” (2012, 500). Anything outside of it—space, the outside world, the body, etc.—divide the self-presence. This is, for Derrida, also the case in the experience of touching and being touched, as both cases must begin by exposing the surface of the body in the world. 6 In Logic of Sense (1969) Gilles Deleuze explains that the primary order of language can be found in the way children, long before they can understand words and sentences, hear the sound of their parents’ voice and grasp it as something that pre-exists themselves. The voice (of their parents or others) is understood as something that is always-present (pre-linguistic). 7 Roland Barthes claims that the sign, any sign, is based on the oscillation of “the marked and the non-marked, which we call paradigm” Listening is therefore, for Barthes, too, linked to hermeneutics, the adoption of an attitude of decoding that which is “obscure, blurred, or muted” in order to understand its meaning. For Barthes, listening is a psychological act (while hearing is physiological) and can be divided into three parts: (1) an alert, (2) a deciphering, (3) and a modern approach which focuses on who speaks and, through this, develops in an inter-subjective space, a listening space of the listener. Barthes claims that if for centuries listening was an auditory act, now it has been granted the power of speech. Listening became active. There is no longer a speaker on one side and a listener on the other. The two traditional modes of listening, the “arrogant” listening of the superior and “servile” listening of the inferior (as he names it) are now liberated. The listening that is free, he adds, is one that circulates, and is mobilized. (1985, 249).

11 engaged in an act of signifying. Listening is thus a form of questioning, doubting, and articulating one’s own thoughts (Nietzsche 1888/89, Derrida 1972/82).

The two parts of my thesis—my curatorial practice, and the written discussion—interact in multiple ways throughout this dissertation, allowing me space to test and expand my research in both formats. Accordingly, one answer to questions raised in the written discussion was Listening to Snow, an exhibition project I composed as part of this dissertation for the Art Museum at the

University of Toronto. Listening to Snow is a significant part of this dissertation, and demonstrates in practice the way I curate sound works as layers of sounds in a spatial musical composition.

Listening to Snow was drawn from sound-related works by Michael Snow, and as such, acted as a

Snow solo show. At the same time, it was an experimental space for me to make a proposal for curatorial process. Would the audience of such an exhibition experience the exhibition as musical?

Would it correspond with the concept of music as a formative of interior listening space? Would it cause the gallery itself to manifest as a musical instrument? What can be done with these effects and insights? And how may listening as a curatorial method introduce different or additional phenomenological considerations to exhibitory approaches?

Michael Snow, as an established artist, musician, and film-maker for more than fifty years, with many major international exhibitions, was an invaluable test case. Snow has always insisted on the equal value of sound within his films and the primacy of sound in his sound works. He has therefore tended to have his works exhibited in contexts with sound baffling, to draw out the inherent properties of their sound composition. One promising sign of his potentially being amenable was that, in a 2009 exhibition at the Toronto Power Plant Gallery, Recent Snow:

Projected Works, he designed the exhibition layout in ways that largely quarantined the sounds of

12 individual works. And yet, a certain swathe of the exhibition bore the strident lingering noise impact of the dinning clashing piano sounds of his four part video work, Piano Sculpture (2009).

In Listening to Snow I explored the implications of active listening as questioning, both in my curatorial process of exhibition production and, to an even greater extent, with respect to the audience’s experience while visiting the show. I refined my sense of the distinction between listening and hearing in the development of this exhibition through the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, who claims that the agency of questioning is inherent to listening, and is what differentiates it from hearing.8 Nancy explains that to hear is to understand the situation immediately; to listen, on the other hand, is to strain toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible. Thus, listening, for Nancy, “is always being on the edge of meaning” (2007, 7).

I curated Listening to Snow as a listening space “on the edge of meaning” by allowing several works to share the gallery’s acoustic space and, in doing so, curating the exhibition as a new sound piece. Snow is known for having full control over his legacy and how it is displayed, especially in relation to his sound works. Being the experimentalist that he is, what piqued his curiosity was to know what would happen as a result of merging the sounds of his works. “I’ve never done this before,” he told me in the early stages of this project, “I’ve never before heard my works in a duet.”

He asked that we adjust the levels of the different sound works together, but trusted me in choosing the sound works to be included in the show – to compose the spatial musical piece—in his terms, the “duet” of more than two works, of course—it came to be. We agreed on the elements selected for the exhibition—the grey walls, dim atmosphere, and absence of didactics. These elements,

8 For Nancy, meaning and sound share the space of referral. Meaning refers to a sign, a thing, a quality, a subject, or to itself––all simultaneously––akin to the way sound spreads and resonates in space, where it resounds while still resounding in the listener. This is why listening, for Nancy, is to be a straining toward or an approach to one’s self. Or, as he puts it, the manifestation of being should listen to the truth ‘itself’’ rather than to look at it (2007, 1-22).

13 along with the effect of sounds surrounding the listeners, supported the sonic and thus created a

‘listening’ environment, stressing the power of sound to re-materialize space. I was hoping it would transform the gallery into a music box, stressing the possibilities of listening to an exhibition as a whole. I hypothesized that the exhibition as spatial music might better stimulate different experiences for each listener, encouraging the audience to bring their own memories and experiences to bear on the exhibition, through what Edmund Husserl called “intentionality.”

As Husserl explains, the way in which I conceptualize or understand any object (including sound) that I engage with defines the meaning of that object in my current experience. What makes an experience a ‘conscious’ one is a certain awareness one has of the experience while living through or performing it. Thus, eliminating curatorial didactics from the gallery space supported the most prominent quality of our familiar types of experience, what Husserl calls intentionality: being consciousness of or about something, or the way things are experienced, presented, or engaged with in a particular way.

Extending Husserl’s account of intentionality, Maurice Merleau-Ponty focused on the body and its significance when engaging with all things perceived. In centering bodily perception in this way Merleau-Ponty reinterprets Husserl’s concept of ‘intentionality,’ claiming that all consciousness is consciousness ‘of’ something, including sounds. Walking inside a music box, I hoped, would allow each visitor to listen to their bodily experience—by listening to what Merleau-

Ponty articulates as their “listening body.” By placing the body at the centre of perception,

Merleau-Ponty suggests that sensing, in contrast to knowing, is a living communication with the world. This means that any singular, general truth about the world is impossible. Instead, there is only bodily perception, through which the individual experiences their truth of the world. There is no objectivity, and thus, my perception of the world is always limited to what I can experience

14 while I listen to my listening body. This is not to say that perception itself is limited but rather that it is dynamic, and that there is always something more to experience. Objects are not simply as- they-are but exist as I perceive them through my body. This idea was beautifully expressed by the arts critic Chris Hampton, who visited the exhibition and wrote about it for the National Gallery of Canada Magazine:

Configured in a spiral like the cochlea of the ear, the exhibition

houses the quietly droning Diagonale in its innermost chamber.

…When you stand still, you hear a pure tone, but as you move

around the room, you perceive variations that sound like a siren or

perhaps musical like an arpeggio. (2020)

Hampton further described his experience in euphoric terms: he ran in small circles around the room, “half-giddy from the invitation to play. It is a profound experience art can sometimes provide, when you get to perceive yourself perceiving” (2020). This was precisely the kind of effect and response I had hoped the exhibition would induce (figure 2).

Figure 2: Michael Snow, Diagonale (1988), Listening to Snow, 2020 Photo: Dominic Chan Courtesy of Art Museum, University of Toronto Audio

Sitting in the gallery for many hours every day, Listening to Snow provided a unique occasion for me to listen to, converse with, and learn from the visiting audience.9 It also contributed a practical space for me to reflect back on the exhibitions that I consider in the second chapter here, that is, works by curators who also dared to pattern their role on that of a composer, and merged the sounds of different sound works into one sonic experience. All of the curators in question are sound artists, composers, or artists who work with sound in their own practice. Further, all of these exhibitions took place during or after what Jim Drobnick has identified as the “sonic turn” of the 1990s.

9 Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Toronto’s lockdown, the Art Museum had to shut down, leading to the exhibition’s early closure, and the cancellation of a scheduled professional audio and video documentation of the show.

Resonating with W.J.T. Mitchell’s concept of the “pictorial turn” from the previous decade,

Drobnick describes “the increasing significance of the acoustic as simultaneously a site for analysis, a medium for aesthetic engagement, and a model for theorization” (2004, 10). This sonic turn led to the emergence of sound studies, which annexed sound art as a type of research, and appointed the composer/sound artist/musician as a researcher.10

Pertinent to this sonic turn, in 2016, curator and critic Arnau Horta curated a radio program for

Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art, MACBA, entitled ON LISTENING: Thinking

(through) the ear. In this show, Horta invited key contemporary thinkers to raise phenomenological questions about listening and to disseminate ideas on sound ontology and the possibilities of the sonic in terms of thinking, interpreting, and perceiving. One participant, the artist and writer Salomé Voegelin, spoke about listening as a tool for “reconsidering philosophical certainties and conventions.” She compared the inclusion of sound in the gallery space to the inclusion of sound and listening in philosophy, and notes that it must, by necessity, “implode the conventions, the paradigm, the ideas of how we can show work or how we can write about work, because it demands in many ways a different language” (Horta, 2016). Voegelin went on to explain that it is not that thinking through sound should diminish and abandon epistemological knowledge

(which is based on language and the visual image, as Michel Foucault taught us), but rather that it can enable us to rethink words and how they are used. Sound can call into question philosophical and aesthetic knowledge, she added. By extension, then, Voegelin hopes that, “including the invisible, the ephemeral, the complexity and mobility of sound…can give us a way of including plurality and diversity and difference in a new way that might really make it count” (Horta, 2016).

10 Artworks can be considered theory “in condensed, experiential form,” (2004, 271) Drobnick adds and explains through a variety of works – Christian Marclay’s Snapshots series (1980- ), Martin Kersels’s Brown Sound Kit (1994), Su-Mei Tse’ Echo (2003), are a few examples he brings.

The projects I consider in the second chapter suggest ways that curatorial listening permits sound to manifest its own properties. Focusing on the practical ways composers-curators include sound and listening sensibilities in their exhibition structure, I have divided these projects into three practical models: 1) the exhibition as a musical installation; 2) the exhibition as musical performance; and 3) the exhibition as a sound walk. My consideration of these projects further demonstrates the ways that, much like artists-curators before them, those composers-curators reconstructed the exhibition space and expanded the boundaries of the art exhibition, turning it into a method and a medium, and broadening the freedom of the curatorial. When sound and listening sensibilities are infused into the structure of the sonic exhibitory space, the exhibition itself can stimulate its audience as spatial music, while not only engulfing the audience with sound, but incorporating audience noise so that it becomes integral to the exhibition

Chapter 3

The last part of this research focuses on the possibilities these insights may hold for the visual regime. I ask, can curatorial practice embrace methodologies of listening when addressing visual objects? If music, as Cage averred, is not limited to sound, can object-based art exhibitions be musical too? How can the intimate, durational experience of listening to music be translated to perceiving installations of objects in space? What does it mean to “listen” to such an exhibition?

What would make it musical? In the third chapter I focus on Cage’s three compositions for museum as test cases for curating visual objects through a musical score.

Cage conceived his compositions for museum later in his life. In 1989, he was commissioned a solo exhibition by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Cage, in turn, composed a chance-derived, four-movement composition for museum entitled Rolywholyover A

Circus. This was a long-term, performative, multicentred event for gallery installers, audiences, artworks, artifacts, scores, plants, stones, books, chess tables, chairs, and pieces of ephemera. As part of his trials and preparations for Rolywholyover.11 Cage composed two other compositions for museum, much smaller in scale: Changing Installation (1991) for the Mattress Factory in

Pittsburgh, and museumcircle (1991) for the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue

Pinakothek in Munich.

By using a score—which included chance operations as well as instructions—to compose objects in a gallery space, Cage applied in each of his exhibitions, the same ideas and methodologies he had used to create his music. In doing so, I suggest he established a spatial adaptation of his sound- composition principles: We can experience Cage’s exhibitions the same way we might listen to his music. Moreover, when he performed a sculptural space through a musical score, Cage showed us how sound could become a structure for conceiving the visual, in exhibition settings.

Throughout this dissertation, while pushing toward a more auditory curatorial approach, I use

Cage’s practice and specifically his compositions for museum as a point of reference. Cage is definitely one of those figures who have influenced and shaped the Western sonic canon I am considering. As Michael Pisaro asserts, by the time of his death Cage was recognized as an important composer, writer, poet, and visual artist, whose “impact on modern poetics sometimes

11 This is according to Julie Lazar, MOCA curator who worked with Cage on this project since 1989. All the information regarding Rolywholyover A Circus, if not noted otherwise, was provided to me by Lazar, whom I interviewed. I would also like to acknowledge the help of Laura Kuhn, director of the John Cage Trust, who gave me access to 12 boxes of archival material related to Rolywholyover A Circus.

19 seems to be nearly as great as the impact he had on music” (2009, 57). In turn, his use of the score as a way of composing many phenomena, including his lectures, visual objects, writings, radio shows, interviews, and more, extended the field of music. I would also add that through his use of the score in his engagement with the exhibition apparatus, he made the unique contribution of formulating an object-based art exhibition constructed through sound sensibilities.

But Cage and his legacy is not the centre of this dissertation. The basis for Cage’s role as a point of departure for my project is embedded in his objection to any form of governing. He consistently defined himself as anarchist and stood against any external regulation or determination of others’ actions or experiences, especially those of his performers and audiences. It is in this sense that his inspiration for my research is clear and important. Through the use of chance-based methods he aimed to eliminate his own ego. But even more so, his decision to open up his scores to any involvement and interpretation allowed the inclusion of any voice, language, or culture.

Throughout his career he deliberately ignored all cultural separations and markers.

Exploring Cage’s anarchistic promise for the curatorial, since 2015 I have composed three exhibitions responding to his concept of a ‘composition for museum,’ while challenging, and at times questioning, his legacy. In A Piece for Two Floors and a Corridor (2015), for example, together with composer Amnon Wolman, I challenged Cage’s and Schaeffer’s idea of uniting music and noise by including performative musical pieces and referring to them as sound installations. This lead to unexpected situations when performances were taking place in front of as many, or as little, visitors who happened to be in the museum – even at times when museum was totally empty. In Image Coming Soon #1 (2015) I examined Cage’s use of objects as musical notes when I juxtaposed his museumcircle (1991) with Marcel Duchamp’s Erratum Musicale

(1913), in order to allow myself, and an audience, to experience Cage’s space (which is effectively

20 sculptural installation, whatever the musical program that underscores it) in the context of

Duchamp’s musical score. In my recent project, Listening to Snow (2020), I reversed the latter premise, now treating music and sound works by Michael Snow as phrases in an exhibition formulated as spatial music composition.

In this dissertation I interlace insights from my curatorial experiments with the work of other composers-curators (among them Amnon Wolman, Xavier Veilhan, Lionel Bovier and Christian

Marclay, Lauren Parker, and Jonny Dawe, Rudolf Frieling, Tanya Zimbardo, Jean-François -

Lyotard, Thierry Chaput) who brought sound forward in their exhibitions, revealing its ability to engage the exhibitory situation in multiple ways. These range from stimulating a virtual acoustic space within the listener, to composing a sonic envelope surrounding the audience, to capturing the gallery itself as a musical instrument, or composing objects as notes. Curated/composed as music, these projects demonstrate how deploying compositional methods with sound can rematerialize the gallery space, rethink and open up the work’s context, and through this, challenge the sonic canon. These projects show how curatorial listening can contribute and expand the phenomenological and epistemological limits of our visual perception, and the ways exhibitions, structured and designed as spatial music, can form an inclusive space for many voices and thoughts, not just one governing narrative (whether that originates with an artist or curator).

Finally, these excavate ways that listening to such spaces can perform listening itself as questioning, contemplating, and thinking—rather than knowing—not as an intellectual skill that requires education, but as a self-revealing immediacy present to our consciousness.

Chapter 1

The Sonic Image (or Why Are We All Too Familiar with

Headphones Attached to a Wall?)

Sound Entering the Gallery: The Musical Score, Art- by-Instructions, and Experimental Music in the Gallery Music and visual art have often been performed or installed together within the same places

(churches, theaters, opera houses, and so on). In this chapter I follow the entrance of sound into the gallery space. Specifically I explore how by visualizing music, composers instigated the emergence of sound-as-art – encouraging artists to use scores, sounds, and noises as plastic material: I suggest that while it is true that sound poetry was practiced by Futurist and Dadaist artists in the late nineteenth century12 and that Marcel Duchamp was working with the musical score from as early as 1913,13 it took almost another forty years, and the work of avant-garde composers such as John Cage, to open up the definition of music and push sound towards visual art.

In 1952, with the performance of 4'33'', Cage manifested silence as unintentional sounds, and in doing so, opened up the definition of music to encompass all sounds, objects, and actions—

12A thorough overview can be found in Steve McCaffery’s “Sound Poetry – A Survey,” Sound Poetry: A Catalogue for the Eleventh International Sound Poetry Festival, Toronto, Canada, October 14 to 21, 1978. Underwhich Editions, Toronto, 1978. 13 In 1913, Duchamp created two musical compositions (Erratum Musicale and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) and one conceptual sound piece (Sculpture Musicale). All three sound works are included in The Green Box (1934), which Duchamp published and considered part of the notes for his installation The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), also known as The Large Glass. Duchamp’s musical scores provided the first exploitation of chance in his practice, and along with other projects from 1913, threw into question the concept of the work of art. In 1919 Duchamp further explored the use of the score, applying it to visual art as a tactic for removing the task of executing an artwork from the hand of the artist. While in Argentina at that time, Duchamp sent instructions to his sister Suzanne on how to make his gift honouring her recent marriage. It was called Unhappy Readymade, and the instruction was to hang a geometry textbook on a balcony so that the wind could go through the book and “choose its own problems.”

21 22 intentional and unintentional—as notes. This methodology turned everything into music. Or, as

Cage puts it in his LECTURE ON NOTHING (1959), the musical score is willing to “accept whatever” (1961, 111). It is therefore no surprise that his compositions often elicited the question—is it really music?14 For example, some have argued that 4'33'' is not music because the unintended sounds of Cage’s silence failed to be organized (Davies, 1997/2003) or hold tonality conditions (Kania, 2010). Others, such as Chris Cutler, a drummer and theorist, argued that, if “all sound is music, then by definition, there can be no such thing as sound that is not music” (Cutler,

1988). Cutler tried to protect music, keeping it autonomous from noise; but in doing so, he aptly, though unwittingly, defined the ideology behind Cage’s music, which aims to liberate all sounds from restrictive categorizations and approaches to all sounds as music. This is why Cage used the musical score to compose everything, including things and actions not strictly musical, such as lectures, visual objects, writings, and interviews. Even daily tasks like watering plants were scored.

Further, in the late 1950s his scores stopped indicating specific sounds or actions, replacing them with a process. This turned even the potentiality of sound, along with the idea and the thought of it, into music too.

In the same year that gave rise to 4'33'', Cage composed the first “happening” (even before Allan

Kaprow coined the term), Theatre Piece No. 1, at Black Mountain College. While Cage was reading from a ladder, Charles Olson read from another ladder, Robert Rauschenberg showed some of his paintings and played wax cylinders of Edith Piaf on an Edison horn recorder, David Tudor performed on a prepared piano, and Merce Cunningham danced. All of these actions took place at

14 And, of course, there is Erwin Schulhoff’s “In Futurum” from his Fünf Pittoresken—“silent music” that predates Cage’s 4’33” by 33 years.

23 the same time, among the audience rather than on a stage, and prefigured happenings and Fluxus events of the late 1950s, when art-by-instruction gained momentum as its own form.

Happenings changed the definition of the art object. It was no longer an object to be viewed hanging on a wall or set on a pedestal; rather, it could now be anything, including movement, scent, and even sound. Kaprow coined the term “happening” in 1959 to describe a performance which had its roots in art and not theatre. More specifically, he often stressed that his happenings were in the same category as the action-painting of Abstract Expressionists, rather than that of scripted scenes involving actors playing parts. But Kaprow rebelled against the prescriptions of

Clement Greenberg, both in his art and in his writings: formal aesthetics, he believed, were no longer relevant once art left the canvas. He was among the many artists and critics who focused on an intellectual and theorized view of art, rejecting the monumental nature of Abstract

Expressionist works and instead focusing on the act of artistic production. In particular, his influential essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1956) called for an end to craftsmanship and permanence in art and instead demanded that artists shift their attention to “non-concrete” or ephemeral modes of production.

Fluxus events expanded the understanding of what music could be. One such example is La Monte

Young’s Compositions 1960 series, where the musical scores consisted only of instructions for actions. One such instruction was to draw a straight line and follow it. Another was to release a butterfly at the venue. Another was to push a piano across a wall (or, until exhaustion). These early musical works by Young were performed at the now legendary Chambers Street series, at Yoko

Ono’s downtown loft in the spring of 1961. Organized by Young and Ono, the Chambers Street series ran from December 1960 to June 1961, presenting numerous events by artists, musicians, dancers, and composers. Most works combined music, visual art, and performance, blurring the

24 distinctions between mediums. On any given evening there were as many as two hundred attendees, including key figures like Duchamp, Peggy Guggenheim, George Maciunas, Jasper

Johns, Rauschenberg, and Cage.

Most of the performers in the Chamber Street series were connected to Cage through a class he gave at the New School for Social Research between 1956 and 1960. Having embraced chance compositional procedures as a means of effacing his own likes and dislikes, Cage encouraged students who were already using chance in their work, such as George Brecht and Jackson Mac

Low, to continue on this path, and prompted others such as Kaprow, Dick Higgins, and Al Hanson to begin using these processes. His classroom assignments led to instructions for events and performances that yielded some of the most important intermedia activity of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Out of the Cage class came the kind of event cards for which Fluxus would become well known—an evocative form whose power is best appreciated in the 1959 to 1966 works of

Brecht, published by Maciunas in a box called Water Yam. While most Fluxus event cards are performance scripts, Water Yam also includes instructions for the creation of objects or tableaux— obscure directions whose realization left almost everything to the realizer. In such works as Six

Exhibits (“ceiling, first wall, second wall, third wall, fourth wall, floor”) and Egg (“at least one egg”), Brecht applied to objects and physical situations the freedom of execution and openness to serendipity that are hallmarks of a Fluxus performance.

Brecht was one of the many experimental artists who took part in Fluxus activities, adapting the idea of the musical score to the creation of objects from instructions. Ono was another artist who was primarily recognized at that time for creating art-by-instructions, and in July 1961, at

Maciunas’s AG Gallery, she displayed a series of works made from instructions to be carried out by visitors. Painting to be Stepped On, for instance, called for viewers to walk on a canvas laid on

25 the gallery floor, and Smoke Painting was to be realized by visitors burning the canvas with cigarettes and watching the smoke rise. Ono took the next logical step in her May 1962 exhibition at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, where, instead of objects created by instructions, she displayed only the instructions on sheets of white paper. In this show, ideas—exhibited as verbal directions— were marked out as central. In 1964, in Japan, she published Grapefruit, a book of art-by- instructions calling for the participation of others in an ongoing artistic process.

The exploration of sound and notation by visual artists, in turn, paved the way for performative experimental music events in gallery spaces. Cage’s Music Walk, for instance, was performed in

1958 at Jean-Pierre Wilhelm’s Galerie 22, in Düsseldorf. The piece was written for Cunningham’s

Music Walk with Dancers, with stage decor and costume design by Rauschenberg. According to the John Cage Trust website work database, the score of Music Walk “consists of a transparent sheet of plastic containing five parallel lines, ten unnumbered pages with different numbers of points, and several transparent squares containing intersecting lines drawn at various angles.”

Performers were to use these materials and follow Cage’s instructions, to create sounds at various points in and around the piano, on radios, or with auxiliary instruments (including voice).

In the following year, at the same venue, Nam June Paik presented Hommage à John Cage, a four- movement piece for two pianos (one of which had no keys), tape recorders, tin cans with stones, a toy car, a plastic train, an egg, a pane of glass, a bottle holding the stump of a candle, and a music box. Paik was also a member of the Fluxus movement, and his passion for combining sound and visual and electronic elements was formed then and there, and led to him eventually becoming regarded as one of the initiators of video art. His first video installation in 1963 was part of his first major exhibition, Exposition of Music – Electronic Television, held in a gallery run by the

26 architect Rolf Jährling. It was a musical piece for four prepared pianos, mechanical sound objects, several record and tape installations, and a room with twelve modified TV sets.

Jonathan Bernard notes that while Fluxus pieces stretched the boundaries of what can be considered music (“Is there anything, really, that categorically distinguishes George Brecht’s

Fluxus pieces from La Monte Young’s of about the same time?” [1993]), on the musical side, the activities of the Fluxus group were probably the most significant in the transition to Minimalism in music. Fluxus compositions, he adds, unlike the spontaneous, simultaneous “author-audience- equality” situation of mixed-media happenings, did not exclude variability from their realization or remove all powers of decision-making from their performers, but rather kept the composer in control of their composition. Bernard adds that several composers whose work could be termed

Minimalist, either in whole or in part, restrict the use of chance, because “the material itself has been drastically simplified, and because the formal constraints to which it is subjected are considerable, the result remains channeled within a relatively narrow range of possibilities”

(1993). He offers Terry Riley’s In C (1968) and Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano (1964) as examples of Minimalistic pieces that not only have a fixed number of players, with restricted instrumentation, but also dictate the exact timing for each player (Riley), or, more extremely, do not have any score and thus can only be performed by the composer (Young).15

Two Minimalist composers who primarily performed their music in galleries at that time were

Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Their most documented gallery performance is probably Four

Evenings of Extended Time Pieces and a Lecture—part of the programming (that included

15 Bernard adds that for the Minimalist composers whose careers began in the early to mid-sixties, there was another, much more firmly entrenched methodology (than that of Cage and his followers) to oppose: serialism. “It is probably true that the minimalists, at least at the outset, regarded Cage et al. more as kindred spirits in some sense, less as an ‘establishment’ to rebel against. Nevertheless, it can be persuasively argued that the music of chance ultimately served the minimalists as a negative ideal, an example of what not to do, in their efforts to create a viable alternative to (what they came to see as) the needless and overly ineffectual complexities of serialism” (1993).

27 concerts, a lecture, and screenings) of Anti Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum

(1968).16 It was there that Reich presented Pendulum Music,17 with Michael Snow, Bruce Nauman,

Richard Serra, and James Tenney as performers (figure 3). In unison, the performers, following

Reich’s cue, dropped four microphones suspended from the ceiling with cables to let them swing on top of a speaker that was placed on the floor, face up. When the microphone passed by the speaker, it created a feedback sound, which got longer and longer as the movement of the swinging microphones came slowly to a stop. Once it stopped—when a long feedback sound accrued—this was the cue for Reich to end the piece by turning off the volume knob. Reich described this piece as the “ultimate process piece.” He stated, “It’s me making my peace with Cage. It’s audible sculpture. If it’s done right, it’s kind of funny” (2000). In his essay “Music as a Gradual Process”

(1968), Reich explains further that by “process” he does not “mean the process of composition, but rather pieces of music that are, literally, processes.... I am interested in perceptible processes;

I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music” (1968, 9). Reich was always determined to note the distinction between his use of process and that of Cage, whose process was definitely compositional, but unnoticeable, unheard, when the piece was performed

(1968, 9).

16 Reich and Glass’s performance at Anti Illusion was one of many from their earlier performances, which took place in art galleries and artists’ lofts. Even some of the earliest commercially available recordings of their music were sponsored by galleries. 17 Another piece by Reich for this evening was Piano Phase (1967).

Philip Glass’s piece for “Four Evenings of Extended Time Pieces and a Lecture” was Two Pages

(1969) for piano or electric organ. It comprises a Minimalist musical phrase, repeated in a “length of sound that is not involved in beginning or ending” (Wurlitzer 1969, 14). David Allen Chapman has noted that the performance at Anti Illusion was not on a proscenium stage, but rather in the middle of a large exhibition space, in which the performers sat in a circle facing one another, with the audience surrounding them, and that this influenced Glass’s ensemble performance mode.

Chapman notes that the performance at Anti Illusion marks the first time this arrangement had been used by Glass’s group, which had been founded only a few months before. He further notes that among some of the audience, both Glass’s and Reich’s work was not received as the most suitable for the show. To address this issue, Chapman quotes one of the curators, Marcia Tucker, who states that “[c]ritics would question why we included the rhythmic, repetitive music of Steve Reich and

Philip Glass in an art exhibition. But who said art had to be visual?” (2013, 88).

Tucker curated Anti Illusion together with James Monte with the intention of highlighting contemporary process-and material-based practices. Stressing not the inclusion of new materials

29 in artistic practices but rather how artists explore them, Anti Illusion reflected on the “changing ideas animating much of twentieth-century art” (Monte 1969, 4). Monte notes that the nature of these new materials encourages a situation where the works could only be available after being installed in the museum, in what seems to be a one-time, site-specific installation that cannot be preserved and might not ever be remade. The curators connected this ephemeral essence to Reich and Glass in this context through their use of time, pointing out that their works

have no beginning, middle, or end, only a sense of an isolated

present. This present exists because of a deliberate and unrelenting

use of repetition which destroys the illusion of musical time and

focuses attention instead on the material of the sounds and on their

performance. (Tucker 1969, 36)

This “repetition” is exactly what kept Reich and Glass out of concert halls in the early stages of their careers, and it is also what drew them into art galleries, which more accommodatingly housed their music, connecting it conceptually to similarly repetitive aesthetics in visual art, in particular as seen in Minimalism.

From the 1960s to 1980s: A Brief History of Sound Art Curating 2.1 The 1960s: Artists (and Curators) Experimenting with the New Medium, Sound

The exploration of sound by artists, as well as performances of experimental music in galleries, eventually led to survey exhibitions of the new medium—sound. This was during the time when

30 exceptional curators adopted the dual role of both organizer and critic and conceived the exhibition itself as a medium for developing new ideas about art.18 One such exhibition, among the first to survey sound in the arts, was Sound, Light, and Silence: Art that Performs, which was held at the

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 1966 (figure4). The show was planned and organized by Ralph

T. Coe, the museum’s assistant director and curator of paintings and sculptures, and featured twenty-four works by twenty-three artists, in order to “probe beneath themes to expose polarities of artistic projection from which the art of the next decade may develop” (1966). Coe used examples of Pop, Op, Kinetic, and Minimal Art, along with electronic and sound devices, in an attempt to define points of mergence between the new styles of art. In the exhibition catalogue, he identified sound, light, and silence as the polarities of the late 1960s in art, and juxtaposed, for instance, works by Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Donald Judd with kinetic sculptures by Len

Lye, a film by Andy Warhol, a light and sound installation by Howard Jones, and a painting by

Mark Rothko.

18 Such as Harald Szeemann and his When Attitudes Become Form: Works-Concepts-Processes-Situations, 1969, Kunsthalle Bern; and Kynaston McShine’s Information, 1970, MOMA.

Figure 4: Al Hansen, Happening, performed at 11-18-66 at Sound, Light, and Silence: Art that Performs (1966) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1966 Courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Coe understood sound as another one of the ephemeral-art experiences of the 1960s—along with light and happenings—that engaged different senses simultaneously and that had to be experienced. Seth Cluett adds that in this sense, Coe is not remarkable for exposing the art world to sound as a medium, but rather for being able to assess and assemble the art of the era:

Coe realized, like Rauschenberg had said, “that, listening happens

in time, and looking happens in time” (Coe, 1966). It is this notion

that art begins to embrace time and must be experienced that draws

artists like Nauman, Morris, and Darboven to investigate the sound.

(2013, 112)

In the same year, Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver19 organized, initiated, and promoted Nine

Evenings: Theatre and Engineering (1966)—a theatre festival held at the Armory Hall, New

York.20 Nine Evenings comprised collaborative performances of thirty engineers and ten artists and musicians and hosted performances by Cage, Cunningham, Lucinda Childs, Rauschenberg,

Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, David Tudor, and Robert Whitman.

Nine Evenings is known primarily for mounting, for the first time, a performance of the live aspect of electronics, and also for raising enormous interest amongst New York artists in using new technology (figures 6-9). In fact, the results of this interest included a decision by Klüver, together with a fellow engineer (Fred Waldhauer) and two artists (Rauschenberg and Whitman), to form

Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T)—a service organization for artists, engineers, and scientists. In late 1968 Pepsi-Cola approached E.A.T about designing and programming a pavilion for the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, Japan. Tudor, Whitman, Robert Breer, and Frosty Myers were the four artists and musician who initiated the collaborative design of the pavilion. Throughout the process, engineers and artists were added, and the team was expanded to sixty-three engineers, artists, and scientists. Klüver explains that the pavilion was designed and planned to be an ever- changing performance space “where each visitor would be encouraged to explore and create an individual experience” (1994, 214). As such, the pavilion was continuously programmed by invited artists throughout the six-month duration of Expo 1970. This pavilion is discussed in terms of its implications for listening as curatorial method in the following chapter.

19 Billy Klüver was an electrical engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories. He began collaborating with artists in the early 1960s: with Jean Tinguely on his Homage to New York (1960), with Rauschenberg on his Oracle (1962-65), with Cage & Cunningham on their Variations V (1965), and with Andy Warhol on his Silver Clouds (1966), to name a few. 20 Nine Evenings was to be presented as part of the Stockholm Festival of Art and Technology in 1966. But when the festival’s American program was cancelled, Klüver moved the event to the Armory Hall, where it ran from October 13 to 23, 1966.

Figure 5: 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering (1966) Page 14 of the catalogue published for 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering. Photo: Peter Moore. Edited by Pontus Hultén and Frank Königsberg. New York: Experiments in Art and Technology, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, 1966. Daniel Langlois Foundation. 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering fonds. Courtesy of E.A.T. and Daniel Langlois Foundation.

Figure 6: Robert Rauschenberg, Open Score (1966), 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, 1966 Robert Rauschenberg, Open Score (1966), performed October 14th and 23rd, as part of 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, 69th Regiment Armory, New York, NY. Still from the factual footage shot in 16 mm film by Alfons Schilling. Daniel Langlois Foundation, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering fonds. Courtesy of E.A.T. and Daniel Langlois Foundation.

Figure 7: John Cage, Variations VII (1966), 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, 1966 John Cage, Variations VII (1966), performed October 15th and 16th, as part of 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, 69th Regiment Armory, New York, NY. Still from the factual footage shot in 16 mm film by Alfons Schilling. Daniel Langlois Foundation, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering fonds. Courtesy of E.A.T. and Daniel Langlois Foundation. Video: https://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/media.php?NumObjet=62820

The global artistic interest in technology of the late 1960s led to more ambitious projects21 as well as to survey exhibitions on artistic-technological experiments. One such exhibition was Cybernetic

Serendipity, at the ICA, London subsequently touring the United States. Curated by Jasia Reichart in 1968, Cybernetic Serendipity was an exhibition of cybernetic art with one part dedicated to machines generating music. Some of the exhibits were detailed algorithms, some showed notations produced by computers, and some made musical effects or played tapes of sounds made by computers. As with Nine Evenings, not all the presenters were artists—some were engineers: and visitors could contribute to the acoustics of the exhibition by singing a song or whistling a tune into a microphone (figures 8-10).

Figure 8: Cybernetic Serendipity, ICA, London, 1968 Exhibition View https://cyberneticserendipity.net/image/7225955737

21 Another major example from the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, Japan was the Spherical Concert Hall, co-designed by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (together with architect Fritz Bornemann, acoustician Fritz Winckel and engineer Max Mengeringhausen) for the German Pavilion. More on this pavilion in the following chapter

Figure 9: Cybernetic Serendipity, ICA, London, 1968 Exhibition View. https://cyberneticserendipity.net/post/7243106163/exhibition-view-ica-london-1968-sam-sound

Figure 10: Cybernetic Serendipity, ICA, London, 1968. Exhibition View https://cyberneticserendipity.net/post/7243330658/exhibition-view-ica-london-1968-sam-sound

Another exhibition from the same year that explored the relationship between technology and art was The Magic Theater. Organized by Ralph T. Coe, as Sound, Light, and Silence had been two years earlier, The Magic Theatre was held at the Nelson-Atkins Museum before traveling later to four additional museums.22 It was a major effort and was commissioned by the Performing Arts

Foundation of Kansas City with a budget of half-a-million dollars. Local industries contributed the equipment, technologists worked long hours to produce what the artists had specified, and the works were constructed on site with the help of a large group of art patrons, students, teachers, and officials working for six weeks to pull the show together. In his review of the show for the Art

Journal, George Ehrlich cited Coe’s description of the process: he had invited eight artists23 to create works of art involving sound, light, and inter-activity, aiming for “an arena of eight highly programmed aesthetic experiences geared to the end of mental catharsis” (1969, 40). Ehrlich defines the exhibition as resembling a happening, and adds that Coe’s first criterion for the selection of contributing artists was that the artists had to have an idea for a project “which was monumental to the point that it could not be accomplished without massive technological collaboration" (1969, 43). This, according to Ehrlich, led to a show of spectacular monuments that resembled prototypes that could later be easily replicated and mass-reproduced (figures 11-16).

22 Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York, N.Y; Montreal Museum, Montreal, Canada; Toledo Museum, Toledo, Ohio; and the City Art Museum of St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri. 23 The artists selected were Stephen Antonakos, Howard Jones, Stanley Landsman, Boyd Mefferd, Terry Riley, Charles Ross, James Seawright, and Robert Whitman.

Figure 11: Stanley Landsman, Walk-In Infinity Chamber, (1968), The Magic Theatre, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1968. Courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Figure 12: Stephen Antonakos, Walk-On Neon (1968), The Magic Theatre, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1968 Courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Figure 13: Boyd Mefferd, Strobe Light Floor (1968), The Magic Theatre, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1968 Courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Figure 14: Boyd Mefferd, Strobe Light Floor (1968), The Magic Theatre, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1968 Courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Figure 15: James Seawright, Electronic Peristyle (1968), The Magic Theatre, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1968 Installation View, Courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Figure 16: Terry Riley, Time-Lag Accumulator (1968), The Magic Theatre, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1961. Installation View, Courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Ehrlich, in his review of The Magic Theater, also describes the artists as “designers,” critically pointing to a gap between the artists and their works. But this gap may well have been initiated as a rebellion against the Abstract Expressionist conception of art as evidence of the artist’s consciousness. Painters such as Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, for example, were two opponents of this notion, stating that nothing is left of the artist in the painting once the painting is done (Newman 1990, 194), and that the laying bare of oneself autobiographically or socially is obscene (Reinhardt in Leymarie and Werner, 1971, 292). Both artists also aimed to push aside any accidents or automatism, arguing that everything should be worked out in the mind of the artist beforehand.

This was during the time of formalism and materialism, or what Donald Judd called “specific objects” (1965). Specificity in Judd’s sense meant something more than mere materiality; instead of being built of natural materials like the wood and marble sculptures of the past had been, the new monuments were made of artificial materials—plastic, chrome, electric light, and sound— aiming to bring the look and tone of tomorrow into the present. This preference for industrial materials and finishes meant that large manufacturers produced those artworks.24 It also, as Ehrlich suggested, placed the artist in the role of a designer. But for Coe, this new role was an important part of a new type of art exhibition, where artists could work beyond formal laws and control new mediums (1970, 13). Accordingly, The Magic Theatre, together with Nine Evenings and

Cybernetic Serendipity, signalled the momentum gathered in the 1960s not only for collaborative

24 This in turn also led to the claim that these artworks were mere objects (Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 1967).

43 histories of technology and art, but also for collaboration among artists and composers themselves.

These creators started embracing new mediums as a way of exploring their own practices.

Further, I maintain that the curators of these early exhibitions that surveyed sound in the arts of the late 1960s—when artists began to embrace time, and musicians, gallery space—were themselves experimenting with the new medium. By enabling experiential simultaneity of sounds, all dissolving freely in the gallery, these curators produced exhibitions which acted as happenings, environments, or theatres. In Sound, Light, Silence, for example, Coe writes that some of the crowds sat down in corners in order to perceive the simultaneous activities of more than one work, while others danced, jumped, and “swayed in empathy” (1970, 44). He adds that this new audience behaviour alarmed the museum guards, who had to be instructed not to interfere “as long as there was no disrespect of safety” (1970, 44). Coe refers specifically to the audience’s reaction to Len

Lye’s Universe (1963)—a 6.7-meter steel band softened and manipulated by electromagnets hidden in the sculpture’s base. In motion, Universe is as much a musical instrument as a sculpture

(figure 17).

At times, as the gong was contacted by the steel, the Lye loop

screamed fitfully like a harpy out of classic mythology. It would

wail like a banshee and sing like a siren. Then [it] sank into silence

as it continued to vibrate like an outsized lyre. Its vibrations cut the

senses. There was shocked silence. Inwardly, we urged the band to

reach the gong. A near miss left us in a state of empathic suspension.

Interior resources within us were tapped. (1970, 46)

Coe’s description of Lye’s Universe further reveals the stimulus of sound diffusing relatively freely among gallery visitors and staff.

Figure 17: Len Lye, Universe (1963), Sound, Light, and Silence: Art that Performs, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1966 Courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

In Cybernetic Serendipity, as in Sound, Light, Silence, one could hear the whole (or nearly the whole) exhibition simultaneously. Jamie Croy Kassler uses the term “commotion” when defining her sonic experience of the exhibition, and Kassler adds that three small domes provided dedicated listening environments for three separate musical experiences: “Each dome housed a loudspeaker situated in the center of its floor, around which the listener could sit on benches or cushions”

(1968). These “listening environments” were dedicated to computer music—some of which was composed by composers, and some by scientists experimenting with acoustic phenomena.25 But as we learn from Kassler description, these domes did not provide absolute acoustic isolation, and thus most likely provided a visual/acoustical differentiation between music (to listen-to) and noise

(to ignore).

2.2 The 1970s: Reconsidering the Elusiveness of Sound

By the 1970s, as the boundaries between music and visual art continued to fade, survey exhibitions on music and its objects emerged: exhibitions such as Record as Artwork 1959–73 at the Royal

College of Art Gallery, London (1973) and Narrative Themes/Audio Works, An Exhibition of

Artists Cassettes at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (1978). The curators of these exhibitions installed listening stations with headphones to present numerous sound pieces. The use of headphones was part of a curatorial effort to reconsider new ways for sound to “fit” into limited gallery space. A Spoken Space at Galérie Gaëtan, Geneva, (1977–79) pushed this even further, discarding the exhibition space altogether. This series of exhibitions combined telephone networks

25 A list of the musicians and scientists were hung on the dome’s walls, along with scores and information on the experiments.

46 and the symbolic place of the gallery. Each A Spoken Space exhibition included sound works broadcasting for eight days and nights via the automatic answering machine of the gallery.26

Another curatorial method of managing sound popularized during the 1970s was sequential display. In sequential display, sound works are separated in time, displayed one after the other.

One of the earliest exhibitions to include this format was Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture,

Instrument Building, and Acoustically Tuned Spaces at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary

Art (LAICA) in 1979. The Sound exhibition included the work of forty-four artists, and the curators, Robert Smith and Robert Wilhite, noted in the catalogue’s foreword that

…[t]here have been several problems in presenting an exhibition

that deals with sound in a visual art gallery space. Because the pieces

share exhibition areas, the works must be played one at a time, thus

removing a certain spontaneity in the ways and amount of time one

spends perceiving the exhibition. (1979, 5)

Sound included live performances of experimental music “for a more complete appreciation of the instruments,” but the curators also described this as problematic because the performers did not perform during all open hours, and the performances therefore were not always available for audiences to experience.27

26 The popularity of the Walkman toward the end of the 1970s, which elevated ‘private’ listening, led to more exhibitions using headphones in listening stations. Another example from that time is A Sound Selection: Audio Works by Artists, a traveling exhibition organized by Barry Rosen for the Artists Space, New York, (in collaboration with Hartford Art School, University of Hartford), 1980. Artists included: Barry Rosen, Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Beth B, John Baldessari, Marge Dean, Guy De Cointet, Bruce Fier, Bob George, Jack Goldstein, Alison Knowles, Micke McGee, Jim Pomeroy, Jim Roche, Martha Rosler, Stuart Sherman, Michael Smith, Mimi Smith, Keith Sonnier, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, and Reese Williams. 27 This led the curators to produce an LP recording of all the works in the show.

Sound was subsequently installed that same year at MoMA PS1(figures 18-24). According to

MOMA’s website, the LA show was smaller compared to its P.S.1 iteration, which featured more than 160 artists and filled the entire building. Visitors approaching P.S.1 in 1979 “were greeted by seesawing ladders sticking out of the former school building’s third-floor windows. Hanging from cables holding the ladders aloft, bird cages containing tape recorders played recordings of birdsongs” (figure 18).

Figure 18: Vito Acconci, Decoy for Birds and People (1979), Sound, MoMA PS1 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/4127?locale=en&installation_image_index=10

The website indicates that many of the works on display involved audience participation, such as

Bruce Fier’s The Sound Spiral (1979), in which a spiral formation structure suspended from the ceiling of aluminum tubes in, resembling a giant wind chime. “Visitors could walk inside the spiral and touch the tubes, which when clanged together issued pitches of varying tones” (figure 19)

Figure 19: Installation view of Bruce Fier’s The Sound Spiral (1979), Sound: Special Projects PS1 (1979) https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/4127?locale=en&installation_image_index=0

Figure 20: Installation views of Norman Tuck’s Water Wheel, 1979 Sound: Special Projects PS1 (1979) https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/4127?locale=en&installation_image_index=2

Figure 21: Bob Bates, Fuser (1978), Installation View Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture, Instrument Building, and Acoustically Tuned Spaces, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in 1979, and MoMA PS1 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/4121?installation_image_index=3

Figure 22: Bob Bates, Fuser (1978), Activated Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture, Instrument Building, and Acoustically Tuned Spaces, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in 1979, and MoMA PS1 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/4121?installation_image_index=4

Figure 23: Jim Pomeroy, Untitled, 1978, Installation View Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture, Instrument Building, and Acoustically Tuned Spaces, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in 1979, and MoMA PS1. Photo from MOMA https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/4121?installation_image_index=7

Figure 24: Jim Pomeroy, Untitled, 1978, Activated Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture, Instrument Building, and Acoustically Tuned Spaces, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in 1979, and MoMA PS1. Photo from MOMA https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/4121?installation_image_index=15

A similar solution involving the sequential display28 of sound works was embraced by curator

Barbara London, who in 1979 exhibited recorded pieces by Maggie Payne, Julia Heyward, and

Connie Beckley one after the other, for six weeks, in MoMA’s auditorium gallery. The show was titled Sound Art, and according to the press release it was a focused attempt to show how the combination of the aural and the visual represented the newest direction in art (MoMA, 1979).

London is quoted in the press release as saying that “sound art pieces are more closely allied to art than to music, and are usually presented in the museum, gallery, or alternative space” (MoMA,

1979).

It seemed a time of transformation: performative experimental music was now “art.” But this transformation was also received by some as being somewhat problematic. In a lecture/performance by artist Hank Bull at Audio Scene ’79, Sound: A Medium for Visual Art,29

Bull questioned this transformation, pointing out that

…[s]ound can be visual art if it happens in an art context. This is the

old idea that it’s art if it’s in an art gallery. But as soon as we step

outside this idea we run into art problems. Because sound is difficult

to present in a museum, teach in a school, or sell in a gallery. (1979)

28 Historically we can see many exhibitions following this format. Another example is I Am Sitting in a Room: Sound Works by American Artists 1950–2000 (2000), a survey curated by Stephen Vitiello as part of the American Century exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York. I Am Sitting in a Room offered almost 100 recordings of works by American composers made between 1952 and 1999. According to Kyle Gann of the New York Times, the gallery was rearranged to make it easy for listeners to come and go during the five-and-a-half-hour programs “without disturbing other audience members”: lights were kept low and chairs less densely spaced than for video screenings (2000). 29 Audio Scene was organized by Grita Insam at the Modern Art Galerie, Vienna, in 1979. The show included an exhibition of phonograms, sound installations, and performances, in addition to a symposium dealing with the history and conceptual background of the border-crossings between visual arts and sound, as well as experimental music.

Bull concluded that this new hybrid of music and visual art might not be suitable for the concert hall, but at the same time, it was just as problematic to treat it as visual art. Instead, it needed a genre of its own.

2.3 From the 1980s on: Manifesting Sound Art as Visual Art

In the early 1980s, “sound art,” so it seems, was established as a genre with two exhibitions: Für

Augen und Ohren (For Eyes and Ears) at the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin, (1980) and Sound/Art at the Sculpture Center and BACA/DCC Gallery in New York (1983).

Für Augen und Ohren was organized by gallerist and curator René Block as a major attempt at a historical survey: Block’s intent was to show transgressive experiments with sound, by both artists and experimental composers, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of the 1970s.

Block organized a wide spectrum of avant-garde musical events before and after Für Augen und

Ohren (starting in 1964 with Galerie Block, and continuing through his position as director of

DAAD’s artistic program from 1982 to 1989). But Für Augen und Ohren was still quite notable in that context, with a single show featuring a variety of sound installations, performances or recordings of experimental music, happenings, and Fluxus events by 130 artists, musicians, composers, and technology developers (figures 25-27).

Sound/Art was a group show of 23 artists organized by avant-garde composer and sculptor William

Hellermann, who had founded the SoundArt Foundation the year prior (figures 28-30)

Figure 25: Für Augen und Ohren, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1980, Installation View. https://www.art-agenda.com/features/238088/the-gallerist-ren-block-and-experimental-music-1965-1980-part-ii-iii

Figure 26: Für Augen und Ohren, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1980, Installation View. https://www.art-agenda.com/features/238088/the-gallerist-ren-block-and-experimental-music-1965-1980-part-ii-iii

Figure 27: Für Augen und Ohren, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1980, Installation View. https://www.art-agenda.com/features/238088/the-gallerist-ren-block-and-experimental-music-1965-1980-part-ii-iii

Figure 28: Sound/Art, 1984 Sculpture Center, New York. Exhibition View https://sculpture-center.tumblr.com/post/37037203282/from-the-archives-soundart-1984

Figure 29: Carolee Schneemann, War Mop, 1983, Sound/Art, 1984, Sculpture Center, New York https://sculpture-center.tumblr.com/post/37037203282/from-the-archives-soundart-1984

Figure 30: Vito Acconci Three Columns for America, 1976 Sound/Art, 1984 Sculpture Center, New York. Installation View https://sculpture-center.tumblr.com/post/37037203282/from-the-archives-soundart-1984

While these two exhibitions differed significantly in scale, both shared a focus on the relationship between sound and art. More specifically, the shows looked at the merging of sound and art as a natural movement toward the manifestation of a multi-sensory art. In the introduction to the Für

Augen und Ohren catalogue, Block and Nele Hertling write that the exhibition surveyed the conditions for the development of intermedia art, showing canonical works by artists and composers who explored sound and technology while manifesting the Gesamtkunstwerk—the multi-sensory art. In the Sound/Art catalogue essay, Don Goddard writes that even though there is evidence of collaborations among artists, composers, choreographers, writers, and architects in the early modern period,30 it is “only in the past fifteen years or so that these elements have been fused together to make sound another, continuous aspect of image, and vice versa” (1983).31 As of the early 1980s, he asserts, sound and image are an inherent part of the work itself. This wholeness, according to Goddard, is created by artists and composers by positing the human body, activity, and power at the center of the work as form and content. “Sound in these works is, often literally, the breath, voice, and rhythm of life. Sound is no longer tied strictly to music; it is the will to communicate through art” (1983).

Goddard’s text for Sound/Art came to be recognized as significant in articulating what sound art is. This is primarily because of his argument that the art object that “rattles,” the artist who

“chants,” and the musical composition that “dissolves into its surroundings” all demand another level of existence, and therefore create for themselves a special place “in the realm of all actions, not just aesthetic actions” (1983). In his essay, Goddard also concludes by quoting Hellermann’s

30 For instance, writes Goddard, there are “multidisciplinary schools such as the Bauhaus; movements and publications involving artists of all kinds; the teamwork of movies” (1983). 31 Block and Hertling, as well as Goddard, look at Italian Futurists, Dadaists, and Erik Satie as the origins for this re- merging of the senses. The first acknowledged that modern music should include modern life’s sounds and noises; the second began making noises while incorporating common materials into their work; and the latter introduced the idea that music could be ignored or observed with the same attention one would give to objects of everyday life.

59 belief that “hearing is felt as another form of seeing” (1983). Goddard takes this even further and adds that

sound has meaning only when its connection with an image is

understood. Hearing a recording of any one of these works could

produce meaning through imagination, but it is the actuality, the

action of the work that has ultimate, useful meaning. The

conjunction of sound and image insists on the engagement of the

viewer, forcing participation in real space and concrete, responsive

thought rather than illusionary space and thought. (1983)

I suggest that Goddard’s assertion that “sound has meaning only when its connection with an image is understood,” in one of the foundational texts defining what sound art is, helped shape the understanding of sound art as the continuation, or rather a branch of, visual art. Further, while much of an artwork’s meaning is realized through the audience’s engagement with the sound work in the gallery, as Goddard notes, this is also the case when experiencing most any medium, and not just sound. Furthermore, experiencing a sound installation in a gallery space would not be the same as listening to a recording of it elsewhere, as Goddard adds; however, this, too, is not specific to sound work. An excerpt of a video work, a picture of a sculpture, or a video of a performance are other examples of segments of a work “itself.”

Goddard was not the first to articulate sound art through its visual qualities. In the catalogue for

Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture, Instrument Building, and Acoustically Tuned Spaces

(1979, LAICA & MoMA PS1) Richard Armstrong compares the exploration of the materiality of sound in space to other materials explored by 1960s Minimalist artists, such as Donald Judd,

Robert Morris, and Carl Andre. Armstrong argues that if an object is placed alongside a sound,

60 questions of how a thing looks seem inevitable. But he adds that even a work that “takes the isolation and manipulation of a single sense, hearing, as its subject” will, once installed in the museum, accrue and convey tactile qualities. Sound in the museum presents itself through space— and therefore, for Armstrong, it should be measured and articulated as a sculpture: a sonic sculpture

(1979, 6-8).

Adding Armstrong’s and Goddard’s reading of sound art’s visual qualities to Alan Licht’s assertion that, historically, most sound by visual artists is not classified as sound art (2007, 141), and we can understand why most curators who have organized survey exhibitions of sound art— primarily featuring works by visual artists—ended up displaying the artists’ sounds as the continuation of their visual practices. I maintain that to achieve this—to exhibit sound as visual art and allow it to queue, along with the other works, in the labyrinth of display—the diffusion of sound must be restricted with acoustic barriers.

Thus, while it is true that curators of early exhibitions that surveyed sound in the 1960s were experimenting with the new medium themselves, permitting its free diffusion in the gallery, from the 1970s until today, the common format for sound display is constraining it to one spot, isolated from most of the other sounds in the gallery. This way, multiple musical pieces and sound recordings can join the exhibition’s conceptual conversation, but not ‘interfere’ with one another and clutter the exhibition’s acoustical space. This sonic curatorial method is what I call the sonic image, and it leaves the performative philosophy and aesthetics of experimental music out of the exhibitory, scheduling it only as part of the external programing and events of the exhibition.

The Control of the Visual Experience of the World and the Taming of Sound in the Exhibitory

A perfect example of a sound exhibition curated by following the sonic image methodology was

Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery in London (2000). Sonic Boom explored the relationship between 1990s techno, ambient, rave music, and sound art, and according to Steve Connor, when its curator, David Toop, was installing the show, he was faced with the “positively suburban problem of sound pollution” (2005). Connor adds that the solution that Toop and some of his artists arrived at was “the traditional one: they put up extra walls, and built rooms of sound, to insulate and contain the different sound events” (2005). Returning to the question, posed in the introduction, of why sound artists require acoustic boundaries in museums—even at the cost of limiting the diffusion of their sounds, one answer might be simply pragmatic: as explained by Seth

Kim-Cohen, “artists who want to exhibit sound in spaces designed for visual art must accede to the realities of such spaces” (Carrigan, 2017). But much is revealed by Kim-Cohen’s statement of a seemingly inevitable situation.

Kim-Cohen’s statement is predicated on two main facts: 1) there are different “realities” in spaces designed for visual art (such as museum and galleries) and spaces dedicated to experiencing sound

(such as concert halls); 2) visual-art institutions have not adapted their philosophy around welcoming sound inside their spaces. I would stress that the form of adaptation required to create such a welcoming environment for sound is not limited to acquiring better acoustic equipment, or covering the gallery walls with extra layers of sound proofing. Rather, this adaptation, I believe, should include recognizing those realities, as the first step toward wrestling with the entrenched barriers and contradictions which led to the sonic image dictum—the practice of isolating sound within exhibitions.

I believe museum goers’ experience within the museum—as an institution designed for visual art—is structured by our need to control our visual experience of the world at large. The museum as a part of our visual surroundings is included in what Susan Buck-Morss argues is the negative chaotic essence which floods the human consciousness with an overall feeling of nimiety, that is, of excess or redundancy. In her discussion of Walter Benjamin (“Aesthetics and Anaesthetics:

Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” 1992), Buck-Morss comments on the experience of constantly being surrounded by sensory data, writing that Benjamin defines the human experience of modernity as a stupor. Human consciousness defends itself from the inflation of the senses by avoiding the recall of any memory of it. In other words, our consciousness shuts down our synesthetic system in order to survive a flood of information, allowing us to experience only what is necessary, and only to a limited extent. The result is the isolation of our present experience from our past memories. But without the depth of memory, our experience is emptied.

The result of this anaesthetization—not caused by the dullness of sensations, but rather by a flooding of the senses—is a loss of capacity for direct experience. The result is a loss of control over one’s own visual surroundings, and by extension, loss of control over one’s own life. Can we say the same about our sonic experience of the world? Does the flooding of sonic data shut down our ears?

In A Landscape of Events (2000) Paul Virilio defines the difference between our relationship with the visual image compared to our relationship with the sonic phenomenon. He argues that when humanity broke the sound barrier, we gained control over it. Our failure to do the same with regard to the speed of light leaves control of the visual image out of our hands. It follows that we can only see the image if we have enough time to do so. If the image changes too fast, it is simply impossible to see it or make any real sense of it (2000, 44–7). This might sound trivial, but it actually describes the essence of the visual image’s supremacy over us, especially in its present digital

63 manifestations. We are not always aware of what we see—we are just not able to grasp it all. The supremacy of the visual field affects the way we observe images, leading us to try to tame visual experiences. This supremacy guides the way we build our visual surroundings, and the art exhibition is no exception.

The anaesthetization of our visual experience of the world is articulated slightly differently in

Emmanuel Levinas’s famous argument that in the twentieth century the visual domain turned into

‘façade’ (Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, 1985). According to him, the depth and hierarchy that marked the long, modern visual tradition flattened from three-dimensional to two-dimensional. This shift in the visual image came along with a new speed of appearance, which changed, first of all, the relationship between spectators and their visual surroundings. As

Ronald Barthes notes, in modernity the experience of one’s surroundings is infused with nothing but the power of one’s own eyes.32 Barthes explains this ‘time for nothing’ as the difference between the classical picture (or a written scene) and the modern one. The first is motionless,

“frozen by eternity,” and the latter is infused with time as it leaves the wall and oppresses the spectator “with an aggressive space” (1972, 18). But this adding of a temporal dimension is not of a ‘classical time,’ but rather ‘a time for nothing’ (1972, 22). These structural changes to time (as depth) and hierarchy become a cultural element that, for Levinas, Barthes (and others, such as Jean

Baudrillard33), creates a new order: the triumph of instantaneity over time as depth.

32 In his reading of Alain Robbe-Grillet. 33 Jean Baudrillard writes of this empty time as ‘triumph of instantaneity over time as depth’ (in America, 1986): “Speed is the triumph of effect over cause, the triumph of instantaneity over time as depth, the triumph of the surface and pure objectality over the profundity of desire. Speed creates a space of initiation, which may be lethal; its only rule is to leave no trace behind. Triumph of forgetting over memory, an uncultivated, amnesic intoxication.” (2010, 7)

Museums, so it seems, have no other choice but to adapt to the new order of instantaneity. The average visitor spends fifteen to thirty seconds in front of a work of art.34 Didactics became available as an efficient means by which museums can compensate for the loss in depth of experience. The fifteen seconds of our attention to the work of art is partly dedicated to reading the label placed beside the work in order to ‘better understand’ what the work is about. This format of display dictates our ‘experience’ of the work through reading. It turns the descriptive label into part of the object itself. In fifteen to thirty seconds I see it and ‘know’ it.

Seeing as knowing is not an unfamiliar experience, of course. According to Michel Foucault’s The

Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), the origin of seeing as knowing could be found in the classical era (the nineteenth century), when vision was a form of immediate knowing, of perceptible knowledge. Foucault argues that during the classical era, representation was assimilated to thought. A map, a sign, a drawing, a table: these are all examples of classical representation, for they consist of symbols that represent what we know. By looking at them, we can ‘see’ the representational structure of the knowledge they hold. But Foucault asserts that in the modern episteme, however, knowledge is no longer just the representation of ideas. In the modern era, knowledge becomes the attribution of history to objects, so that human beings, artifacts, and language begin to have a history, and sciences for tracing these histories begin to form. In order to achieve this, Foucault argues, systems of classification not previously in existence are born.

Without these systems, objects of study cannot be seen as each having their own history. “To classify, therefore, will no longer mean to refer the visible back to itself... it will mean... to relate the visible world to the invisible, to its deeper cause, as it were” (1970, 229).35 The modern

34 This is according to the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/travel/the-art-of-slowing-down- in-a-museum.html; and Artsy: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-long-people-spend-art-museums; 35 For instance, studies of language become philology, studies of species become evolutionary, studies of the human psyche become typological.

65 episteme, in which both the human and natural sciences were born, eventually brought about the type of scientific approach to collecting, classification, and formats of knowledge display in museums that we know today.36 Through the text on the wall, placed beside the object on display, museum visitors can become acquainted with the object’s historical context in fifteen to thirty seconds, while reading their experience of the object on display.

In this function, didactics formulate and control the information and narratives we are exposed to when visiting the museum. This element that immediately empowers the museum as a political vehicle was recognized over the course of the nineteenth century, along with the birth of the public museum—when the displaying of private treasures to the public was understood to be insufficient.

Recognizing the museum as a political vehicle, the institution was articulated with responsibilities to enlighten and improve its visitors morally, culturally, and politically. The consequence of this move toward public enlightenment meant, firstly, changes in terms of public access—the museum had to be open to all. Or, as Tony Bennett notes, it had to be reconceived as “an institution in which the working class...might be exposed to the improving influence of the middle classes,” (1995,

29). Secondly, and most relevant to my argument here, the museum’s collection had to be collected and installed according to a different order, one that was “harnessed to new social purposes” (1995,

33) as Bennett adds. But when looking at a painting (or listening to music, reading a book, or taking part in any discourse)—in order to ‘understand’ it—I must be aware of its syntax, understand its semiotic symbols. These symbols are noted on the exhibition’s didactics, assuring the accuracy of this understanding.

36 The earliest collections were not scientific, of course: by the mid-sixteenth century, as colonialism expanded throughout the globe, the phenomenon of the “curiosity” emerged in Western Europe, and, with it, its particular mode of display, the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ or Wunderkammer, in which objects were displayed together in groupings based on perceived similarities or the aesthetic considerations of the owner.

Jonathan Crary’s investigation into how vision itself developed in the mid-nineteenth century as an object of knowledge, rather than being “simply” a form of knowing, is also directly relevant to the formulation of the sonic image dictum. Crary’s main claim is that the observing subject is both the historical product and the site of certain practices, techniques, institutions, and procedures of subjectification. In his articulation of individual seeing,37 Crary shows the separation between the interior representation of things and their exterior reality.38 Crary goes on to challenge the wave theory of light in earlier, more classical forms of optics, where the stimulation of the eye demonstrates false reactions to light, turning humans into the victims of such retinal knowledge.

Now the issue was not only knowing what is real, but also that “new forms of the real were being fabricated, and a new truth about the capacities of a human subject was being articulated in these terms” (1990, 92). It became a question of an eye that sought to avoid the repetitiveness of the formulaic and conventional, even as the effort to see, time and again, entailed its own pattern of repetition and conventions, and thus the “pure perception,” the pure optical attentiveness that modernism aspired to, had to exclude or submerge that which would obstruct its functioning as a

37 He starts with the camera obscura and notes that, while it has been known for at least two-thousand years that when light passes through a small hole into a dark enclosed interior, an inverted image will appear on the wall opposite the hole, from the fifteenth to seventeenth century the idea itself of the camera obscura manifested the status and the possibilities of an “observer.” He further turns to the shift from the camera obscura of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the stereoscope of the nineteenth century, mapping the development that brought the potential for individual seeing. His examples include Karl Marx, Henri Bergson, and Sigmund Freud (among others), which he uses to show how by the nineteenth century, the camera obscura becomes a tool to “conceal, invert and mystify truth” (1990, 29)—representing a “metaphysic of interiority... a free sovereign individual.. and decorporelized vision” (1990, 39). 38He does so by taking Goethe’s experiments with retinal after-images (that is, staring at a bright circle of light allowed through a camera obscura, then sealing the hole and staring at the darkest part of the room, looking for coloured circles). Crary understands Goethe’s experiment as post-Kantian because the after-image representations do not conform to things as they are, but rather to our perception of them. In Goethe’s work, Crary adds, the body itself produces phenomena that have no external correlative. In Foucault’s terms, this means that the body itself is the site of the structures of knowledge: when the camera obscura was the dominant model of observation, it was a form of representation that made knowledge in general possible. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, “[T]he site of analysis is no longer representation but man in his finitude …. It was found that knowledge has anatomo-physiological conditions, that it is formed gradually within the structures of the body, that it may have a privileged place within it, but that its forms cannot be dissociated from its peculiar functioning; in short, that there is a nature of human knowledge that determines its forms and that at the same time can be manifest to it in its own empirical contents” (1970, 319).

67 direct revelation. The result, as Crary explains, is that the visual regime has been articulated not as a “tabula rasa, on which orderly representations could be arrayed, but into a surface of inscription on which a promiscuous range of effects could be produced” (1990, 96).

Taking this idea into the museum, we can see why the labels and curatorial panels are ‘essential,’ as observers no longer trust their eyes and ‘need’ textual cues to explain, in detail, what they see.

In other words, we need the exhibition to be explained to us in order for it to ‘make sense.’ The labyrinth of display, which controls the observer’s path in the exhibition, as well as the path of the knowledge on display, adds weight to this effect. But at the same time as the observers are reading their way through the exhibition, the experience of the exhibition is itself curated as a reading experience—a succession of objects, queued one after the other, each with its own label prescribing the specific experience and interpretation of what one sees. The result of this is that most of the time, we know what the work is about before we even enter the room and experience it. Therefore, if sounds from one work were to dissolve into and mingle with another, one might mistakenly read the wrong label, and thus become confused regarding what the work is about. We are left with spectators who are used to reading exhibition labels, as instructions on how to perform their own experience.

While this may sound absurd, it is true that most museum goers welcome didactics with open arms.

Linda Nochlin goes some distance toward answering the question of why this is the case by drawing our attention to a large-scale study that was conducted in Toronto in 1969 by UNESCO’s

International Council of Museums. This study concluded with the somewhat shocking finding that people do not want to experience anything new or unfamiliar in the museum.39 The omnipresent

39 “Despite all the claims within the professional communications field … that the inventions of the current generation have vastly increased the pace of assimilation of information and the dissemination of knowledge, or of certain artists and critics that, ergo, any novelty in art will enjoy rapid acceptance, we can now confidently accept the long observed peculiarity that there exists a generally stable gap of two generations or a minimum of half a century between important

68 didactic panel on the gallery wall shows that the situation today has not changed since 1969. And while we are used to knowing what we will see before we see it, knowing immediately what we hear discharges the temporality of sound, along with its dissolving, ephemeral, and seductive qualities. Thus, reading what one hears is another dictum of the sonic image’s curatorial methodology, where visitors are encouraged to experience sound, in exhibition settings, as if it was a visual object.

Marshal McLuhan, who distinguishes what he calls the “visual space” from the “acoustic space,” claims that to move from one of those spaces to the other is a big shift, “the same shift that Alice in Wonderland made when she went through the looking glass” (1970). For McLuhan, visual space

(which is the prevailing paradigm spanning the sixteenth century through the nineteenth century) is a linear, quantitative, classically geometric model. By contrast, acoustic space (which is the digital electric world) is simultaneous, has no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, and no stasis. Acoustic space, he adds, “has the basic character of a sphere whose focus or center is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere" (1970).40

The concept of Acoustic Space, though deployed by McLuhan, has its origins in what T.S. Eliot named the ‘auditory imagination,’ a concept McLuhan had been quoting since the late 1940s. Eliot describes the ‘auditory imagination’ in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) as a

creative innovations and its general acceptance by the ordinary public remains true. For all the technical innovations in communications and the vast spread of education, we doubt that the acceptance gap has been shortened by so much as a week.” A. Zacks, D. F. Cameron, and D. S. Abdev, et al., “Public Attitudes Toward Modern Art,” Museum 22 No. 3/4 (1969), 125–80, cited in Linda Nochlin, “Museums and Radicals: A History of Emergencies,” Museums in Crisis, ed. Brian O’Doherty (New York: George Braziller, 1972), 32. 40 McLuhan saw in technology the extension of our senses. For him the new electronic age created an environment in which the electric media penetrates into our bodies, extending our nervous system. By translating our senses into information systems, technology extends our bodies. Accordingly, for McLuhan, the translation of our bodily experience into information is a move toward a technological extension of our consciousness into a single global consciousness. In contrast, Maurice Merleau-Ponty asserts that the perceiving body and the perceived thing are two equally active parts of bodily perception. I will elaborate on this in the following chapter.

69 space “far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back” (1933,118-

19). For Eliot and McLuhan, the ‘visual’ and ‘acoustic’ space each represent a form or structure of perception rather than implying that something is ‘seen’ or ‘heard.’ The eye, according to

McLuhan, as mentioned in the introduction, is the only one of our senses that is able to separate or capture single aspects; unlike the ear, which hears ‘simultaneously’ sounds from all directions, we can focus our eyes upon an object, and the eye must consider things in sequence, one-thing-at- a-time. Therefore, the person who lives in the acoustic world, McLuhan argues, lives at the centre of a communications sphere, and is bombarded with sensory data from all sides simultaneously.

That, for McLuhan, is the essence of acoustic space.41 The curatorial methodology based on the sonic image helps curate one consistent linear experience in the gallery – and avoids what

McLuhan sees as the (flinging) movement from the linear visual space to the simultaneity of the acoustic space. When sound gives up its simultaneity and becomes static, it can also wait for its turn to perform, queued along the labyrinth of display. The price of the sonic image configuration, is that it cannot behave according to its natural properties: it cannot seduce us to follow its voice, then dissolve into another, or leave us a trail to come back if we wish to do so.

The Separation of the Senses and the Museum as a Silent Chamber While it is certainly true that the sound work may easily become incorporated into the exhibition’s conceptual discussion if a label is placed beside the headphones that explains the piece’s historical context, ideas, and thoughts, it nevertheless cannot be fully experienced in this format. The sonic

41 And this is why the ‘mosaic’ newspaper and the ‘tactile’ TV image are, to him, acoustic in structure, and not visual.

70 image doctrine does not allow the space or time for sound to be, but rather, only a moment for signaling what it could be.

In searching for the origins of the tolerance shown by sound artists and musicians toward acoustic boundaries in museums we must recognize that technological development has had implications not only for the way we control our visual surroundings, but also for how sound is conceived and created, for how music is composed, and also, most importantly, for how we listen.

In general, it would be accurate to say that due to technological developments, the twentieth century underwent a transformation in all its socio-political structures. More specifically, this technology-driven transformation—technology itself never being neutral—created new signs that changed our semiotic surroundings and the way we perceive them. For Friedrich Kittler, in the digital age humans themselves have become information systems: the body has been reduced and broken down into isolated senses and pieces. Consequently, in order to develop “sense-media” such as audio systems, our understanding of our bodies needed to shift from one whole continuous experience into fragmentary sensations.42 As Kittler puts it, our bodies have come to function in response to those technological systems, and thus have themselves become a system, so that our way of creating and thinking is determined by this new experience of the body. Bringing this into the museum, we can now recognize artists, as well as curators and museum visitors, as listeners who create, curate, think, and understand sound, through a body/system that is broken into separate senses.

42 Friedrich Kittler understood this new way of experiencing life, in the digital age, as a mere illusion, proposing that in the digital age reality became fragmentary and could no longer be experienced as a whole-that is, could not be experienced in itself (1997, 45).

Further, technological developments in the control and manipulation of sound behavior cancelled the distinctive effect of each particular space on a given sound, as Emily Thompson argues, resulting in spaces that all sound the same. These same technologies, she adds, implied that there is a clear definition and distinction between what is a ‘good’ sound and what is a ‘bad’ one, predetermining the average listener’s means of critical hearing (2002, 2). Accordingly, listeners in museums are very much aware of what an exhibition should sound like, as well as what a ‘good’ sound in the exhibition sounds like. This standard affects the quality of the sound and its volume, but beyond that, a ‘good’ sound needs to ‘belong’ to the exhibition, to be clearly set off or staged as the principal sound. The sounds of projectors, the air conditioning and ventilation systems, the liquidation of sounds from the outside world, etc., share the acoustic space of the exhibition but they are also ‘bad’ sounds that museum-goers have learned to ignore. The sounds that we do hear, and do not ignore, are by default ‘good’ sounds—that is, the high-quality sounds of the sonic works on display. This is, of course, as long as the exhibition space performs as any other silent chamber—a concert hall, theatre, cinema—that is, organized for acoustic effects, so that listeners may distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sounds. This arrangement became essential in order for listeners to know what they should be attending to.

Furthermore, in order to clean unintended sounds that listeners cannot simply ignore, such as the intrusive human voice, we have the museum guards in place to maintain the quiet. As composer

Robert Barry notes, our own voice is marked as ‘bad’ in the museum context, muted by the presence of (sometimes uniformed) security guards, and by the architecture of the gallery spaces

72 themselves whose “typically echoey, reverberant form tends to throw back upon the speaker their own voice as something alien and uncanny” (2017).43

Taking into consideration R. Murray Schafer’s famous declaration that Western music is strongly architecturally determinant, I suggest that sound artists and musicians might even prefer to present their sounds in silent surroundings because this came to be regarded as the proper way to perform music: in an acoustically isolated environment. Schafer notes that in European and other northern cultures, music has become an activity that requires silence for its proper presentation, resulting in the manifestation of “containers of silence called music rooms” (1992, 35).44 As he explains, with indoor living the experience of music as an outdoor soundscape is gone: “No longer are we at the centre of the soundscape with sounds reaching us from all directions; now they reach us from one direction only and to appreciate them we must point our ears, just as we point our eyes when we read” (1992, 38).

The sonic image doctrine of displaying sound follows this set of assumptions: It waits, along the narrative of display, isolated, for the visitors to direct their ears toward the work and listen. Thus, the sonic image’s isolation of sound corresponds to guidelines related to our visual experience of the world, and the art exhibition display format, such as the labyrinth of display, but at the same time, it reflects historical developments which have influenced the way we listen to music today— in order to differentiate sound work from the ‘bad’ sounds in the gallery, and to signal that it should be listened-to, differentiating it from noise.

43 This is not the case in all exhibition spaces—MoMA’s galleries, for example, are a series of acoustically padded cells. 44 Schafer goes on to note that it “would be possible to write the entire history of European music in terms of walls, showing not only how the varying resonances of its performance spaces have affected its harmonies, tempi and timbres, but also to show how its social character evolved once it was set apart from everyday life (1992, 35).

But galleries and museums are not concert halls. Gallery visitors are not seated audience members who listen to a musical piece from its beginning to its end. The sound of the works is usually looped, and gallery goers are moving along the labyrinth of display, picking up a set of headphones and listening to a fragmented part of the work. Thus, the isolation of sound does not equate listening in the gallery to listening in a concert hall. On the contrary, if the sound is isolated and bound to one spot, it can only be experienced for a limited time. This format of fragmented listening, is the sound of the sonic image-oriented curatorial methodology, it is a broken experience of the sound work; it is only a moment of its sound.

Chapter 2

The Exhibition as Spatial Music (or the Composer as Curator)

In this chapter I explore the exhibition-as-spatial-music curatorial philosophy, and how it encourages the surrounding of the listener with multiple sound, allowing visitors to listen to the different works together. I examine if this format of sound curation embraces a longer duration of audience listening, during, and through, movement within the gallery space. I demonstrate how this form of sound display can only be performed if curators listen to the works and consider how they sound while curating the exhibition. Or simply put, the exhibition can be performed as spatial music only if curators compose the exhibition’s acoustic space as music. This sound curating methodology does not eliminate or contradict the necessity of building the exhibition’s coherent conceptual and visual environment. It actually coincides and supports these environments by providing another layer of unity: a sonic whole.

The exhibition-as-spatial-music sonic curatorial methodology holds a more auditory mode of perception, and is thus more sonically appropriate. Such an approach pushes beyond the limitations of the visual institutions’ realities pointed out by Kim-Cohen.45 It also discharges the technological implications for the sound of music and our experience of it—such as the separation of our senses

(Kittler), the silent chamber (Schafer), and critical listening (Thompson), as outlined above. This curatorial methodology divests from the need to keep every sound isolated and insulated, by instead designing the gallery space through listening to the space and composing the exhibition using musical composition methodologies. In doing this, the foundation for the exhibition-as-

45 As noted in the previous chapter, Seth Kim-Cohen suggests that: “artists who want to exhibit sound in spaces designed for visual art must accede to the realities of such spaces” (Carrigan, 2017).

75 spatial-music sonic curatorial methodology falls within the work of composers of spatial music and their methods for designing a space.

Spatial Music and the Composer as Designer of Space

Spatial music has been composed since at least the mid-sixteenth century, when composers designed the layout of their chamber music, composing for multiple choirs separated in space.46 In the late nineteenth century, a new approach to music was developed—one which celebrated the simultaneity of the modern world—expanding the definition of music and its layout.47 But it was after the Second World War, with magnetic tape becoming more commercially available,48 that

46 In his essay “A History of Spatial Music: Historical Antecedents from Renaissance Antiphony to Strings in the Wings,” (1999) Richard Zvonar points to the mid-sixteenth century for the first published musical piece using space as a compositional element. It was composed by Adrian Willaert for the Basilica San Marco in Venice, which housed two organs, encouraging Willaert to compose antiphonal music for two spatially separated choirs and instrumental groups. Spatial compositions spread across Europe and continued throughout the Baroque period, after which the interest in spatial antiphony gradually tapered off. 47 While Charles Ives defined modern experimental music, Luigi Russolo manifested the art of noise as the “sound of the future,” developing a new musical instrument—the Intonarumori—to create those sounds. Further, the invention of sound recording, radio, and telephony led to the invention of electronic instruments, introducing a new musical era. Instruments such as the telharmonium, which was invented by Thaddeus Cahill in 1896; and the theremin by Leon Theremin in 1923. At the same time, Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch experimented with the use of phonographs as musical instruments, and collaborating with the scientist Friedrich Trautwein, a collaboration that led to the invention of the Trautonium. Hindemith and Toch also played a role in another development—the manipulation of pitch and speed alteration in phonograph records as well as changing the order in which the sounds occurred, and combining different recordings together by recycling records and creating sound montages. Hindemith and Toch influenced other composers, for instance, John Cage was inspired by their work to compose his Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) which called for variable speed phonograph turntables and recordings of test tones. Cage was also quick to adopt the performance possibilities of radio broadcast. His Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) used 12 radios, 24 performers, and a conductor who beat 4/4 time. At each radio, one performer controlled the frequency and the other controlled the volume. 48 With the availability of electronics, spatial music became much easier to compose: in the United States at that time, for example, composers associated with the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape produced octophonic tape works, such as Cage’s Williams Mix (1952), Morton Feldman’s Intersection I (1951), and Earle Brown’s Octet I (1953).

76 composers gained access to more possibilities, pushing them to challenge and modify physical space.49

Three examples of such spaces that I find to be inspirational moments for sound curating are the three World Expo pavilions co-designed by composers: (1) The Philips Pavilion at the Brussels

World Fair, 1958 (co-designed by Le Corbusier and composer Iannis Xenakis); (2) The West

German Pavilion at the 1970 Expo in Osaka, Japan (co-designed by composer Karlheinz

Stockhausen, together with architect Fritz Bornemann, acoustician Fritz Winckel, and engineer

Max Mengeringhausen); And (3) the Pepsi Cola Pavilion, also for the 1970 World Expo in Osaka

(co-designed by the virtuoso pianist and composer David Tudor together with engineer Billy

Klüver, and the artists Robert Breer, Robert Whitman, and Forrest Mayers).

In all three pavilions, the composers who co-designed the pavilions each used their own musical composition philosophy and aesthetics as methodologies for building spaces.

5.1 The Philips Pavilion (1958) The Philips Pavilion (figures 31-32) was conceived by Le Corbusier, and co-designed by Le

Corbusier and composer Iannis Xenakis, who worked at the time at Le Corbusier’s office. Le

Corbusier conceived the pavilion as a human stomach: an ‘S’ shaped structure, which the audience entered at one end and exited at the other after being ‘digested’ by loud sounds and fragmented images of human history. A black-and-white film featured in the pavilion was created by Le

49 In 1950, for example, Jacques Poullin, a composer-engineer at Pierre Schaeffer’s studio, developed a new device, the pupitre d’espace, that could route sound from five-track tape to five loudspeakers, and thus locate sound in space, just as any other object may be placed in a location.

Corbusier himself (with editor Jean Petit),50 while the sound—Poème électronique—was composed especially for the pavilion by Edgard Varèse. In an interview Xenakis gave to Roberta

Brown and John Rahn, the composer asserts that the reason for choosing Varèse’s music was that

Le Corbusier detested all music except that of Varèse, “whom he had known personally” (1987,

20). But Edgard Varèse was one of the most significant composers whose work brought spatial music into being in the early-twentieth century. For Varèse, this act of rendering music spatially was a way of liberating music from its stationary perspectives. He imagined an addition of a

“fourth dimension” to music, wishing to set “music into space.” In the early 1950s Varèse got himself an Ampex tape recorder, and could finally compose the new sounds he imagined: Déserts

(1954), his first electronic tape piece, for two-track tape and orchestra. But it was only in 1958, with his piece for the Philips Pavilion, Poème électronique, that his idea of a spatial music was fully realized.

Poème électronique, an eight-minute combination of musique concrète and electronic sounds, was played continuously in the Philips Pavilion through 425 speakers, and Le Corbusier’s film was projected on the walls without any attempt to sync it with the sound. Xenakis also contributed a piece for the pavilion—Concret PH (1958), a two-minute interlude within the continuous playing of Varèse’s Poème électronique.

50 Joseph Clarke reads this film as an illustration of the “evolution of the human species, artistic expressions of faith, the devastation of war and the desire for redemption” (2012, 216). Clarke explains that Le Corbusier was immersed in Nietzschean philosophy, and believed in the “continual recurrence of spiritual themes such as tragedy, heroism and purification as well as the relentless march of modernisation, bringing irreversible changes to human society” (2012, 216).

Figure 31: The Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair, 1958 (exterior view). http://www.musicainformatica.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/xenakis-pavillion-philips.jpg

Figure 32: The Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair, 1958 (exterior view). http://architectuul.com/architecture/view_image/philips-pavilion/1528

I find Xenakis’s role in the design process of the Philips Pavilion inspirational and particularly relevant to sound art curating. This is especially because his most significant innovations, in both music and architecture, were rooted in his signature experiments with interweaving the two mediums. As he explains in his Formalized Music (1971):51

It is possible to produce ruled surfaces by drawing the glissandi as

straight lines. I performed this experiment with Metastasis [1955]

… Several years later, when the architect Le Corbusier, whose

collaborator I was, asked me to suggest a design for the architecture

of the Philips Pavilion in Brussels, my inspiration was pin-pointed

by the experiment with Metastasis. Thus, I believe that on this

occasion music and architecture found an intimate connection.

(1992, 10)

Xenakis worked as an engineer and architect at Le Corbusier’s office before turning to composing music. Even though he was interested in learning music composition from an early age, Xenakis went to Polytechnic University in Athens, where he started to study engineering. In 1940 Greece was invaded by Italy, and he was forced to join the Greek Resistance to fight back. After the war, in 1947, when he escaped Greece to France, he decided to invest himself in music. But after being refused the guidance of composer Nadia Boulanger, he joined the team of Le Corbusier as an engineer. In a reflective interview, Xenakis explains that at that time, for him, “architecture had stopped at Antiquity,” and that “[a]ll architecture—Byzantine, Roman, Gothic and modern—was nonexistent” (1987, 20). This did not stop him from being an architect, and soon enough Xenakis asked Le Corbusier to join his team as an architect. The latter agreed. Le Corbusier himself was

51 An earlier version was published in French as Musiques Formelles, 1965.

80 never officially trained, and thus Xenakis’s request made sense to him. It was only in the early

1950s that Xenakis found his musical guidance in the class of Olivier Messiaen (Stockhausen attended Messiaen’s class with Xenakis during 1951-1952). It was there that he developed his revolutionary compositional process of interlacing architecture, music, and mathematics after

Messiaen had advised him to seek out inspiration in his Greek roots, his engineering background, and his work as an architect. This unique compositional process is demonstrated throughout the making of the Philips Pavilion.

Le Corbusier, who was busy in India with the planning and designing of Chandigarh, left most of the decisions about the Philips Pavilion to Xenakis.52 In his essay on Xenakis’s role in the pavilion’s development, Joseph Clarke offers an in-depth discussion of the significant influence those decisions made by Xenakis had on the pavilion’s structure. Clarke compares the initial drawings of the pavilion by the two architects and shows53 that while Le Corbusier sought to evoke mathematical complexity, Xenakis made calculation part of the design process. Clarke adds that the latter may have accepted the stomach metaphor conceived by Le Corbusier, but it was Xenakis who conceived the pavilion as “an architectural grammar of ruled surfaces” (2012, 219).

Xenakis designed the pavilion as a cluster of nine hyperbolic paraboloids (constructed in pre- stressed concrete), with three ‘peaks’ extending at their intersections. Clarke adds that at that time, before three-dimensional modeling software, the algorithm could not be made explicit, and thus,

52 For example, Le Corbusier himself wrote of the choice about whether or not to use the material of plaster: while Le Corbusier considered a construction of plaster, which is the basic, fragile material used for temporary exhibitions, “Xenakis, who was put in charge of the study, quickly abandoned the plaster…. After having considered timber and concrete, Xenakis, who had known [French engineer] Bernard Lafaille well, turned towards self-supporting, curved surfaces” (1958, 24). 53Referring to S. Sterken, ‘Travailler chez Le Corbusier: Le cas de Iannis Xenakis’, Massilia: anuario de estudios lecorbu- sierianos (2003), pp. 209, 214.

81 could only be designed by an engineer with an “innate mathematical capacity.” Xenakis’s solution, he writes, was an “astonishing departure not only from the organic analogy of the stomach concept but, more fundamentally, from his employer’s formal method” (2012, 219). Therefore, even though Poème électronique demonstrated the ultimate spatialization of Varèse’s idea of spatialized music, the structure of the Philips Pavilion, at the same time, was characterized by Xenakis as a translation of his own music.

Figure 33: The Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair, 1958 (Diagram of the Sound Routes). https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Var%C3%A8SE's-PO%C3%A8me-%C3%A9Lectronique-Regained%3A- Evidence-from-Dobson-ffitch/bd150d881cd74914df1c82b36cedcfd3d3626a06/figure/3

Figure 34: Iannis Xenakis, Metastasis (1955) By Angeldo - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63470390

Xenakis had already started to explore the form of the hyperbolic paraboloid in 1953, in Olivier

Messiaen’s music composition class, where he used it as the harmonic frame for Metastasis—his first musical work using the parabola to signify the sliding glissando (a glide from one pitch to another, figure 33). But a discussion of the significance of Xenakis’s use of a spatial frame for music in this instance should not be limited to merely illuminating the likeness between the score of Metastasis and the structure of the pavilion. As Clarke notes, “[a]lthough the curved graph was an important step in Xenakis’s compositional process, he maintained elsewhere that the quiddity of music lay in the sound of the performance rather than the notated materials used to conceive or produce it” (2012, 221). It is therefore important to clarify that for Xenakis, while music may have

83 been innovative54 and intellectual, it was also, at the same time, emotional and overwhelming. Or to use his own words, music had the power to “[transport] you from one state to another. Like alcohol. Like love... The power of Dionys” (1987, 18). I would therefore add that the ‘intimate connection’ between the Philips Pavilion and Metastasis, though it might have originated to a degree in their likeness, and in the resemblance between the processes by which they were composed, also lay in the function of the pavilion as Xenakis designed it—as a way to transport the visitor from one state of mind to another, as the mimesis of his music philosophy.

5.2 West German Pavilion (1970)

Twelve years later, for 1970’s Expo in Osaka, Japan, 55 composer Karlheinz Stockhausen co- designed a spherical auditorium for the West German Pavilion—a blue steel spherical auditorium, twenty-eight meters in diameter, holding an audience of 600 (figures 35-37).

Stockhausen was among the composers who followed Pierre Schaeffer’s RTM studio in the 1950s.

The first ever quadraphonic composition was probably Stockhausen’s Kontakte (1960). In

Kontakte, Stockhausen created the effect of sounds orbiting the audience by means of a four- channel arrangement of speaker positions (Front, Left, Right, and Back). For this, he used a turntable system with a rotating loudspeaker mechanism surrounded by four microphones, enabling the re-recording of spinning sounds.56 From the point of Kontakte onward, spatial

54 He later developed the idea of composing music by drawing, and in 1977 developed UPIC, a computerized musical composition tool, at the Centre d'Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales: “Equipped with a special pen, the musician traces lines on the table. The computer interprets these signs and reconstructs them in the form of isolated sounds or of music” (1987, 22). 55 Xenakis also presented a work in Expo 1970. A 12-channel tape composition Hibiki Hana Ma at the Japanese Steel Pavilion, projecting the sound through a system of 800 speakers situated around the audience, overhead, and under the seats. 56 Kontakte also exists in a later version which combines live piano and percussion performance with the quad tape, and it forms the musical core of the composer’s “happening”-like theater piece Originale (1961).

84 movement of sound was at the core of Stockhausen’s music,57 and thus, the West German

Pavilion’s uniqueness.

Figure 35: West Germany Pavilion, World Fair Expo 1970, Osaka, Japan (exterior view) Courtesy of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music

In 1968 Stockhausen, in collaboration with Bornemann, started to develop the idea of the spherical auditorium. The pavilion’s dome was striking, and as Michael Fowler writes, its overwhelming effect was mirrored inside: “[U]nder Stockhausen’s stipulations the interior would house enough loudspeakers to create an immersive sound field that relied on utilizing rings of loudspeakers that

57 Additional examples are Gruppen (1957) for three orchestras and Carré (1960) for four orchestras and four choruses. Both explore the spatial movement of musical materials from ensemble to ensemble. Stimmung (1968) for six vocalists was amplified through six equally-spaced loudspeakers surrounding the audience, placing the listener at the sonic center of the ensemble.

85 extended well above and below the seated position of the audience” (2010, 185). Stockhausen was trying to create a device to direct a signal to eight different speakers, but since the necessary technology was nonexistent, he instead incorporated this rotation into his compositional process, as indicated in the sketches for the piece that he originally designed for the Expo entitled Hinab-

Hinauf. In Hinab-Hinauf Stockhausen intended to use film projection, automated sound, and lighting control, and to allow the audience to move through the space—and inside the music.58

This work was never realized due to its high cost and technical difficulties,59 and was, as Sean

Williams adds, the reason much of the programme of Stockhausen’s works ultimately included improvisations.60

Eventually, a structure of sixty loudspeakers was designed to envelope the seated audience. The loudspeakers were controlled by a spherical sensor which allowed any geometric combination of loudspeaker groups (to create circles, spirals, or diagonals). Concerts at the auditorium ran throughout the period of 5 March to 13 September, 1970 and in addition to performances of

Stockhausen’s existing works,61 two new works (Pole and Expo) were composed especially for the pavilion to make full use of its sound projection. In addition to Stockhausen’s works, the concerts also included contemporary tape pieces by other German composers, such as Boris

Blacher, Erhard Grosskopf, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and Gerd Zacher.

58 And in that sense, it seems to have a clear historical link to Xenakis and Varèse’s work in the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair, which Stockhausen had attended. 59 “The problem of audio control was partly down to the design of the Sensor-spheres, which needed two hands for operation. If the sound projectionist took their hands off the sphere, for example to make an adjustment on the mixing desk, then the sound would be switched off. Another problem was the terrible grounding in the pavilion which made the switches misbehave, and seemed to significantly reduce the range of volume control” (Williams, 2015). 60 Examples include such works as Kurzwellen, Spiral, and Pole, which all use +/- notation and can be quite flexible in length and use of instruments. 61 Hymnen, Stimmung, Kontakte, Kurzwellen, Carre ́, Telemusik, Aus Den Sieben Tagen and Spiral.

Figure 36: West Germany Pavilion, World Fair Expo 1970, Osaka, Japan (interior view) Courtesy of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music

Figure 37: West Germany Pavilion, World Fair Expo 1970, Osaka, Japan (audio layout) Courtesy of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music

Fowler writes that with Spiral, Pole, and Expo, Stockhausen not only invented the spherical auditorium (and in doing so reimagined the pavilion as an electronic instrument) but also manifested a new aesthetics of transformation in musical structure. Stockhausen, he writes,

“focuses on how thematic recollection and development becomes a musical shape and an audible

88 foil to the dynamic and complex sounds of the short-wave radio” (2010, 187). This is taken to even further lengths in the works he composed for Osaka, as Fowler writes, where the thematic transformation is transmediated from the discrete confines of musical space to create an aural environment in which “time and movement act to build an ephemeral architecture through the three-dimensional projection of sound sources” (2010, 187). In that sense the pavilion became a

“device” which Stockhausen could use to investigate the intersection of music-space, which he would later state represented what he saw as the future for musical composition.62

5.3 The Pepsi Pavilion (1970) Whereas the Philips and West Germany pavilions were designed as multichannel venues for the presentation of a particular artist’s work, the Pepsi Cola Pavilion for the 1970 World Expo was conceived as an adaptable multimedia instrument, which could be performed by a variety of artists.

Created under the umbrella of the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.),63 the Pepsi

Pavilion was initiated by IBM engineer Billy Klüver, artists Robert Breer, Robert Whitman,

Forrest Mayers, and composer David Tudor64 (figures 39-44). Two years earlier Breer was invited to participate in the pavilion by the vice president of Pepsi-Cola International, who happened to be his neighbor at the time. Breer contacted Klüver, who had experience with coordinating large scale avant-garde projects after the successes of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering (1966). For the Pepsi Pavilion, Klüver and Breer invited Whitman (who created theatrical happenings and

62 “I think that all music will become space music and that space becomes as important as pitch in the traditional music, as durations and rhythm and metre and there is a very new development of harmony of space and I mean space chords, space melodies and that doesn’t mean pitches, it means movement on several levels around the listener: above, below, in all directions” (Worrall 1998: 93–9). 63 This organization was co-founded in 1966 following 9 Evenings, by Billy Klüver, Robert Whitman, Robert Rauschenberg and engineer Fred Waldhauer. 64 They were later joined by artists Gordon Mumma, Lowell Cross, Fujiko Nakaya, Tony Martin, Ardison Phillips, Pauline Oliveros, architect John Pierce, and many engineers and consultants

89 environments throughout the 1960s) to be in charge of the pavilion’s interior, and Mayers (known for his giant light sculptures) to be in charge of lighting the exterior. Tudor was invited to design the sound of the pavilion after Klüver recalled the manipulation Tudor performed on the 69

Regiment Armory acoustics (where 9 Evenings took place), for Bandoneon! a combine (1966), his performance at the event—or, as Klüver puts it, how Tudor “performed” the Armory as an instrument65 (figure 38).

Figure 38: David Tudor, Bandoneon! (a combine), [1966], 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, 1966 Performed October 14th and 18th, 1966, as part of 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering The 69th Regiment Armory, New York, NY. Still from the factual footage shot in 16 mm film by Alfons Schilling. Daniel Langlois Foundation. 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering fonds. Courtesy of E.A.T. and Daniel Langlois Foundation.

65 “In 9 Evenings the Armory space had an echo of 6 seconds, which was problem for some of the artists. But I remember I saw David once on the balcony, with pickup microphone in his hand. He rotated it 180 degrees to listen to the different reflections of sounds from each corner of the Armory. In his piece David played the bandoneon, but he also used a giant hall as an instrument and literally played the Armory” (Klüver in an interview with Matt Rogalsky, Barkley Heights, NJ, May 8 2002. Quoted in Nakai 2017, 172). Nakai adds, “Tudor picked up its sounds through a number of contact and air microphones and used them to control the modulation process of the same sounds, as well as to activate a multiplicity of audio-visual devices, lights, and loud-speakers distributed across the entire performance space” (Nakai 2017, 172).

Audio: https://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=2152 Tudor was a member of John Cage’s circle, known best in the earliest stages of his career as a virtuoso organist and pianist. Tudor devoted the rest of his life to interactive environmental sound installations based on complex networks of resonant circuits. Perhaps the best example of this, and probably the best-known of all his work, is Rainforest (1968), which was initially written for Merce

Cunningham’s dance company. This composition is centred on the use of audio transducers to activate small resonant objects, causing each object to produce a sound determined by its physical materials. A revised version of this piece, Rainforest IV (1973), is a collaborative environmental work, spatially mixing the live sounds of suspended sculptures and found objects, with their transformed reflections, within an audio system.66 In 2015 Tudor conceived Rainforest V

(variation 1) (1973–2015), which was purchased by Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and realized by Composers Inside Electronics Inc. (John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein, and Matt Rogalsky).

The piece was on view at MOMA from October 21, 2019 to January 5, 2020. According to the exhibition catalogue, Tudor conceived the concept for Rainforest V out of a “dream-vision of an orchestra of loudspeakers, each speaker being as unique as any musical instrument” (MOMA

2019). The piece comprises twenty constructed sculptures and everyday objects (such as a metal barrel, a vintage computer hard disc, and plastic tubing). The exhibition catalogue states that the objects were fitted with sound transducers and suspended in a dynamic spatial composition to increase their resonance. “This way, each element produced a unique sound according to its inherent physical properties and resonant frequencies, ranging from chirping and croaking to clicking and ringing. The cumulative effect is a polyphonic chorus of diverse voices that evoke the

66 The sound system used in this work varied, including, by turns, from four to eight independent speakers. But because the sculptural objects themselves emitted sounds there were actually a larger number of discrete sources.

91 natural world” (MOMA, 2019). Visitors were invited to walk among the objects, and inside

Tudor’s sounds, experiencing the installation as a large instrument.

The Pepsi Pavilion offered a somewhat similar experience. The Pavilion also followed the sphere theme, only it was smaller, white, and had structural ridges. At different moments of the day fog enshrouded the pavilion—tiny water droplets, partially evaporated, increased the humidity of the air surrounding the pavilion and generated the fog.67 At the top of the Pavilion a Suntrack was installed: mirrors constantly followed the sun and reflected the sunbeams. At night, the Pavilion was framed in a square of intense blue and white lights. Seven floats in the shape of small white domes, designed by Robert Breer, moved slowly on the plaza in front of the pavilion. A tape-loop transistor player inside the floats created a floating landscape of sound (a mix of people talking, everyday sounds, and music). After entering the pavilion (through a tunnel), every visitor received a handset with a small speaker, a circuit board, a battery, an antenna coil, a light bulb, and a recharging jack. The antenna picked up, by magnetic induction, electromagnetic signals produced by a loop embedded in the floor. A Clam Room was installed in the Pavilion’s basement: walls were painted black, and visitors had to use the handsets to find their way around, which created a display of differently colored laser lights. The Dome Room contained a large hemispherical mirror dome, ninety feet in diameter.68 Thirty-seven speakers were placed in a rhombic grid behind the flexible mirror.69 The floor of the Dome Room was divided into twelve areas, each covered with different materials, creating a multi-textured space. At the center of the floor a window revealed a view into the Clam Room in the basement. The floor gently sloped down from this glass floor.

67 The fog was a piece by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya. 68 Conceived by Whitman, the spherical form was inspired by his earlier experiments in optics. Standing below this mirror, a holographic image of the interior appeared above. 69 Combinations of three types were possible. First, the line sound: a sound was switched at a rapid rate from speaker to speaker in any desired pattern. Second, the point sound: a sound was heard from one speaker in the dome (the point sound could be shifted to any other speaker in the dome). Third, the immersion or environmental sound: the visitor seemed be in a forest or in a street (sounds came from all directions).

Handsets allowed the visitor to hear, very clearly, the sound loops emitted from each section, coordinated with the floor material.70

Figure 39: Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, World Fair Expo, Osaka, Japan, 1970 (exterior day view) Photo: Shunk-Kender. Daniel Langlois Foundation, collection of documents published by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Courtesy of E.A.T. and Daniel Langlois Foundation.

70 Above the grassy area, the visitor heard lawn mowers, birds etc.; above the asphalt floor, city sounds could be heard. Other sections were bouncy, rubber, wood, lead, stone. Each material presented different sounds, providing individual localized environments.

Figure 40: Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, World Fair Expo, Osaka, Japan, 1970 (exterior night view) Photo: Shunk-Kender. Daniel Langlois Foundation, collection of documents published by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Courtesy of E.A.T. and Daniel Langlois Foundation.

Figure 41: Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, World Fair Expo, Osaka, Japan, 1970 (interior view). Photo: Fujiko Nakaya. Daniel Langlois Foundation, collection of documents published by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Courtesy of E.A.T. and Daniel Langlois Foundation.

Figure 42: Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, World Fair Expo, Osaka, Japan, 1970 (interior view) Photo: Shunk-Kender. Daniel Langlois Foundation, collection of documents published by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Courtesy of E.A.T. and Daniel Langlois Foundation.

In his essay on Tudor’s Pepsi Pavilion’s sound design, You Nakai shows how, just as he performed the Armory, he also “performed” the pavilion, converting it into a sound work. He further notes that what pushed Tudor to engage the pavilion as an instrument is actually the different technical conditions distinguishing 9 Evenings from the Pepsi Pavilion. At the Armory, the instrumental configuration of Tudor’s own electronics and the gigantic Theater Environmental Modular

Electronic (TEEM) system was in use for two performances by different artists every night. In between these two performances the seated audience would wait and watch “without interfering in the haywire of cables and equipment” (2017, 172). By contrast with this, the Pepsi Pavilion was designed to host 350,000 visitors per day, and to be active for the full duration of six months.

Further, the massive crowd was intended to move freely within it, at all times. “These conditions

95 demanded the sound system to be fully composed in advance and rigidly installed into the interior architecture of the free-standing dome” (2017, 172). Or as Klüver notes, the sound system was “an

‘instrument,’ so that the sound would not be fixed in advance but would result from the visiting artists playing it” (1972, 15). This dovetailed with the pavilion team’s initial aim, which was to conduct a visitor experience that would “involve choice, responsibility, freedom and participation”

(1970, 1).71

To conduct this fluid experience, Tudor, together with Gordon Mumma, Fred Waldhuer, and

Lowell Cross, developed the 37-channel sound system with both automated and performer- controlled sound modification and distribution, as well as sound-activated laser deflection. But only a month prior to the planned opening of the Pepsi Pavilion, the Pepsi-Cola International

Company dismissed E.A.T as the administrator-programmer of its pavilion due to mounting costs.

As a result, Pepsi cancelled the quasi-theatrical performances in favor of more traditional theatrical activities; however, even in this more scaled-back form, the Pavilion’s audience experienced the space with all their senses. Through the creation of this experience, as Cyrille-Paul Bertrand notes, the Pepsi Pavilion “emphasized the human, the organic and the natural. Its flux and fluids reflected the contemporaneous and collective consciousness” (2012, 195). This ‘collective consciousness’ was supported by Tudor’s conception of the pavilion as an instrument, allowing the artists as well as the audience to ‘perform’ the pavilion in their own way, thereby enabling the pavilion to sound differently when performed by the visitors and artists.

71 “The Pavilion would not tell a story or guide the visitor through a didactic, authoritarian experience. The visitor would be encouraged as an individual to explore the environment and compose with his own experience” (1970, 1).

Figure 43: Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, World Fair Expo, Osaka, Japan, 1970 (operating system) Photo: Shunk-Kender. Daniel Langlois Foundation, collection of documents published by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Courtesy of E.A.T. and Daniel Langlois Foundation.

Figure 44: Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, World Fair Expo, Osaka, Japan, 1970 (interior view) Photo: Shunk-Kender. Daniel Langlois Foundation, collection of documents published by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Courtesy of E.A.T. and Daniel Langlois Foundation.

The Pepsi Pavilion, the German Pavilion, and the Philips Pavilion are all examples of spaces designed by composers who each translated their distinct musical philosophies into realized spatial visions of how music could be built and space could be composed. Inspired by his Metastasis,

Xenakis co-designed the Philips Pavilion as a cluster of nine hyperbolic paraboloids; Stockhausen, following his own research on sonic spatial movement, co-designed the German Pavilion as a spherical auditorium; and Tudor, the virtuoso performer and composer of environments that he was, co-designed the Pepsi Pavilion as a multilayered instrument.

These historic examples of musical composition philosophy becoming realized in the form of built spaces introduce a number of questions that guide the following discussion of the potentials of the exhibition as a musical piece. Can musical philosophy be the structure for an art exhibition? Can the art exhibition be performed by using a score? Can the gallery itself become an instrument?

Moreover, how should one listen to such exhibition? Should the audience be educated for such listening? And might listening to such exhibition suggest different (or additional) phenomenological questions?

Spatial Music and the Composer as Curator My examination of historical literature has helped me to identify a small number of exhibitions that did not use barriers to constrain sound to one spot. Each of the curators of these exhibitions is a composer, musician, or sound artist: and each of them can be described by my term “composer- curator.” These composer-curators have allowed sound to behave according to its natural properties, reconstructing the sonic experience of the exhibition space. All of these exhibitions took place during or after what Jim Drobnick described as the “sonic turn” of the 1990s. Building on W.J.T. Mitchell’s conception of the “pictorial turn” from a decade earlier, Drobnick claims that

98 this turn saw “the increasing significance of the acoustic as simultaneously a site for analysis, a medium for aesthetic engagement, and a model for theorization” (2004, 10). The sonic turn led to the emergence of sound studies and the inclusion of sound as part of the information and/or knowledge economy, which annexed sound art as a type of research, and appointed the sound artist/musician as a researcher.

This hybrid category of composer-curator prompts a number of significant questions. First, and most basically: Would the phenomenon of a composer working with the exhibition space indeed raise distinct phenomenological questions and issues? Other questions of definition also merit examination: Should the process of merging the sounds produced by different works be referred to as a compositional process? If so, does composing an exhibition turn the exhibition itself into spatial music? Can music as a structure for an art exhibition become a model of meaning? Must the exhibition-as-spatial music bring forward and reveal itself only through listening? And, given the elusive properties of music, how can curatorial practitioners draw from this elusive medium in a way that serves to inform an art exhibition?

6.1 The Exhibition as a Musical Installation As a sound artist and curator, I curate exhibitions by composing their acoustic environments. In doing this, I follow a number of guidelines that I have developed over the course of my practice:

First, and most simply, I select sound works according to how they sound. (Certainly, I also consider a sound work’s conceptual meanings, but I will not include a work in a space if it requires me to isolate it from other sounds.) Second, I keep the space at a low tempo and volume in order to “seduce” the audience into an unfolding sonic experience—to prompt them to listen and explore the borders where one work begins and another ends. Third, and perhaps most importantly, I

99 believe that the gallery space must include comfortable seating arrangements in order to invite the audience into meditative listening; this allows for a process of deep, rather than interrupted or superficial, listening.

In 2009, I co-curated (with Ido Govrin and Eyal Vexler) Laptopia #5, which took place at MoBY:

Museums of Bat Yam in Israel. This exhibition involved twelve international sound artists and musicians (including Govrin and myself),72 each of whom made a different site-specific sound installation for the museums’ open spaces by using a laptop as a platform for creation. The facility in which the exhibition took place is a two-storey, circular structure, with no permanent walls or any other acoustic barriers. All the artists, therefore, shared the acoustic space of the museum and all had to consider the sounds from the other works when creating their own works. This pushed the participating artists to create their pieces in a kind of joint process that was individual and collective at the same time. After two weeks of installation, a sound exhibition was composed. The first floor consisted solely of a seating area that invited the audience to stay and listen. Since the area was pitch black, the invitation was simply to listen, and only to listen. When visitors went up to the second floor, they were able to distinguish different sounds coming from the different works simply by experiencing the increase in volume afforded by closer proximity. The emphasis on experiencing the exhibition through listening, without a prescriptive order or ready interpretation of the installations’ relationships to one another, caused it to have an effect as one sonic experience composed of independent sound pieces (figures 45-47).

72 Amnon Wolman (IL), Carsten Goertz (DE), Duprass: Ido Govrin and Liora Belford (IL), Gilles Aubry (CH), Karl Kliem (DE), Marcus Schmickler (DE), Mark and Laura Cetilia (US), Yaron Lapid (IL), Yossi Marc-Chaim (IL), Hans W. Koch (DE).

100

Figure 45: Laptopia #5, MOBY, 2009 (first floor) Courtesy of the author.

Figure 46: MOBY Architecture Plan (detail) Courtesy of MOBY, Bat Yam

101

Figure 47: Laptopia #5 exhibition view, MOBY, 2009 Courtesy of the author.

Another exhibition that explored the relationship of the format of the art exhibition to the musical piece was SOUND (2009), at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, Florida. Curated by composer Gustavo Matamoros with the assistance of David Dunn, SOUND featured sound works and installations by Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, George Lewis, Alison Knowles, and others, all sharing the same space (figures 48-53). Matamoros explained in an interview that his intention was to curate a show where the pieces could live next to each other without conflict: “It’s kind of

102 like when you go to the park and hear children playing and birds singing and dogs barking”

(Davis). The show is currently available for future installation through its website (Matamoros), and according to that website, the works are operated by a central computer and routed to a multichannel sound system. The core of the exhibition is a pre-curated set of sound installations, but it has a flexible format that responds to different hosting institutions, individual programs, and distinctive architectures.

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In an email correspondence with Matamoros in 2019, I noted that I found his SOUND curatorial process akin to musical composing, and by extension, viewed the display of this show as analogous to a curatorial performance. He wrote back that he agreed and further noted that he does not consider himself a curator (nor an impresario); he expressed that his interest is in the performative part of a musical piece, and that in SOUND, his interest lay specifically in the installation of the exhibition. This is why, he added, a curator must listen to the space itself and compose the exhibition accordingly.73

73 “[F]irst let me say that my impression is that most people (including some of the artists I’ve presented) think of me as curator, impresario, etc. which I am not. I learned from Cage early on (I’m talking mid 80s): he wouldn’t consider a piece finished “until it was performed.” As a composer (in the 80s) and soon after as a sound artist, I was always obsessed with the idea that the performance/presentation had to be part of the composition. SOUND is a terrific example of this, but an example applied to the challenge of organizing an exhibit composed of pieces by me and other artists. I, of course, began by choosing pieces I understood, from artists I knew intimately and cared about, and whose work strengthened the notion of what I perceived sound art to be about. Other criteria for the selection of the pieces were the particular qualities (acoustical, spatial, etc.) of the exhibition space, the available equipment, the installation

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SOUND, as a sound exhibition waiting to be performed, can be contemplated as a score of a musical performance. Matamoros has highlighted the fact that the works are designed acoustically for any given space, and that the different works not only function together, but also bring the venue and its own acoustic behavior to the foreground. Therefore, as Matamoros writes, a curator must first learn how a space sounds and how sound behaves in that space before any attempt at curating or composing a sound show is made. This also explains why every reinstallation of

SOUND must be recomposed.74 Matamoros, however, has yet to reinstall SOUND and has instead moved on to experiment with and explore other ideas.75

SOUND and Laptopia #5 enveloped sound objects within the format of an art exhibition space by engaging the philosophy of site-specificity. In SOUND it was Matamoros who composed the exhibition as one sonic whole by merging the sounds of existing works, and in Laptopia, the merging of sounds was a mutual process composed by the artists while installing the show. In both projects, the decision to allow the works to share the acoustic space not only redefined the notion of sonic bleeding from being a ‘problem’ (one of the main problems curators encounter when sound enters the museum space) to being a ‘composition method’ but also turned the exhibition into an evolving-ongoing musical piece. And above all, by curating an exhibition by composing one acoustical experience, SOUND and Laptopia #5 are both performed as music, and thus manifest themselves as a medium that should be listened-to.

staff, and other such resources which became the elements of the composition/site-specific exhibit. The goal of the exhibit was sound, and more specifically, the experience of sound” (Email to author, March 14, 2019). 74 Email to author, March 14, 2019. 75 These include the “Listening Gallery—which sought to investigate the role sound art might play within the context of public space, being attached to the façade of an iconic building owned by Art Center/South Florida and located on Lincoln Road Mall, Miami Beach; or the recent Audiotheque 2.0—a 30-channel sound-art project that I staged in a former studio at Art Center” (Email to author, March 14, 2019).

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This brings us to the question of the relationship between concepts and listening, and the potentials for the composed exhibition to impart ideas in a unique way. Can listening to exhibition-as-spatial- music communicate conceptual ideas? Can music be a model for meaning?

For Leonardo Da Vinci and Immanuel Kant, the distinction between the experience of music and the experience of plastic arts comes from the more lasting impression made by the latter in contrast with the fleeting one of the former. Both the artist and the philosopher compared the eternal experience of looking at a picture, and the ephemerality of listening to a musical performance, and pointed to the limited time of music’s performance as its main obstacle—one which limits the duration of its experience. For Leonardo, this argument was part of his attempt to include his beloved practice of painting into the Liberal Arts: painting, he claimed, through its eternally experienced form, is a better mimesis of nature. This is of course not the case today. Through recording technology and the separation of the performance from its music, sound work, like

Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (1503), can now loop for as long as needed and play during the museum’s opening hours.

But in favor of plastic arts, Kant adds that the latter entails a translation of ideas into sensations, while music translates sensations into indefinite ideas. Kant’s study of experience determined its conditions and the presuppositions attending it through the validation of a priori truth. He showed that the human mind, through its fundamental categories (space, time, causality, self, etc.) constructs our experience along certain lines. Therefore, according to him, we cannot know the object in itself, but rather its appearance, and, even then, only under conditions that our minds supply. Thinking in terms of time and space, for example, we understand the object under these conditions—as an object that we experience spatially and temporally. It is through the

108 transcendental synthesis of imagination (of time and space), he adds, that the sense-impressions of an object result in judgments of understanding.

These judgments are possible because we bring to knowledge what Kant calls the transcendental unity of apperception: an essential condition of experience, and the ultimate a priori. This unity of apperception gives validity to the principle of analogies by which experience, through the necessary connections created by perception, is possible. With this conception, Kant introduced the human mind as an active originator of experience rather than just a passive recipient of perception—and significantly, this paradigm for thinking of the perceiving mind as an agent or creator rather than a mere node or receptacle includes the way in which our minds experience the world through music.

Therefore, Herbert M. Schueller suggests that Kant’s limited reflective judgment in music is comparable to his judgment of communication, since, according to Schueller, the philosopher held a belief in the subservience of music to language, accepting the popular Affektenlehre of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (a language-in-music by means of the association of tones with concepts, feelings, and emotions. If indeed this association exists, it explains the power of music to communicate). Schueller adds that Kant relates all arts to communication in speech, which in itself is divided into three parts: (1) word (or articulation, such as in literature or drama);

(2) gesture (or gesticulation in visual art, as in sculpture, painting, etc.); and (3) tone (or modulation: change in time, as in music). Only the combination of the three modes of expression constitutes complete expression for Kant, and thus music, for him, must be a partial type of expression. Schueller explains that Kant judges music to be not cognition (science or learning) or logic, but rather pure pleasure, aesthetic contemplation that is a reflection on the tonal structure

109 alone. He adds that for Kant, while poetry is closer to cognition than music is, music affects the mind more directly, as “its charm rests on its association with feeling, not with ideas” (1955, 235).

I would argue that while the exhibition-as-spatial-music would certainly stimulate emotions and feelings in visitors, their experience of the exhibition could never be limited to that. This is due to the fact that we are used to experiencing exhibitions conceptually. Visitors are educated to connect the exhibited works into a narrative. Thus, while walking in the exhibition and listening to the different sounds, we hear a story that is being told to us. This story is primarily one that we tell ourselves. It is the clean listening (Stravinsky, Paul Sartre, Cage)76 that must be approached more intentionally, I find, and it requires a specific attentive effort from the listener, especially in the setting of the art exhibition (which is mostly conceptual to begin with). Thus, conceptual listening—that is, capturing the different sounds in the exhibition into one collective meaning—is the default listening experience of the exhibitory.

Mark Evan Bonds explains this default of conceptual listening when he claims that for listeners after Kant’s self-proclaimed Copernican revolution, the sonic apparatus suggests new possibilities.

He argues that the emotions aroused by the experience of music could now be transformed into particular ideas. As an example, he considers Beethoven’s audience, noting that along with Kant’s

76 For some, such as Igor Stravinsky, music is by its very nature incapable of expressing anything at all, whether an idea or an emotion (1936, 53). Based in an acceptance of the prevailing view that musical notes refer to nothing exterior to themselves, some, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, have exempted music from the necessity of being committed to or engaged in anything (1949, 8). Or, as John Cage puts it in his own (wonderful) way, sound does not need to “pretend that it's a bucket or that it's president or that it's in love with another sound” (1992). But whether it has been understood through analogy, expressiveness, or affective or intellectual effect, music and its unique, difficult-to-define impact on the listener has been an enduring focus of fascination and investigation throughout history. For example, both Plato and Aristotle identify music as an aesthetic activity that prepares the soul for reasoned judgment, or, rather, as a musical mimesis of nature. In their writings on music and our understanding of being, both compare the enjoyment of music to the intellectual enjoyment of mathematical order—the enjoyment that arises from listening to music was related to the joy of feeling well-ordered emotional movements and the intellectual satisfaction such a feeling creates. In this way, music was related to mathematics through the concepts of measure and harmony and was therefore believed to be among the forces that governed the universe, together with Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy. It was categorized as scientific and placed among the Liberal Arts.

110 revolution, the audience experienced the French Revolution of 1789 through the music.77

Encountering the confluence of these two major revolutions together in the form of music, Bonds claims, listeners in Beethoven’s lifetime were inclined to “hear the symphony as the expression of a communal voice, and many were inclined to hear it as a distinctively national genre at the very moment when German nationalism first began to emerge” (2006, xv).78 Thus, Beethoven’s listeners were no longer experiencing only happiness or sadness determined by emotions embedded in the music, but could now better connect those emotions to specific ideas.

But can a collective audience experience really be identified with such specificity? Do we all experience the same music in the same way? Perhaps, after all, as suggested by Gestalt psychologists, music does not represent emotions or ideas but instead embodies them. Or perhaps, applying Alfred Pike’s explanation, the musical work serves merely as a vehicle onto which one projects one’s own emotions. Moreover, as Pike suggests, emotions are “internal conditions of animate, sentient beings, and are intimately connected with bodily or organic processes” (1970, 9–

10), while music is prelinguistic, and its meaning is immediately given and grasped without interpolated extramusical meanings (1970, 35).

One may attempt to specify what each musical element means in the language of emotions.

Personally, it has been my experience that in the process of pursuing musical specificity, in an attempt to better understand and categorize its emotional effects and meanings, its magical proposition vanishe. In the search for a model of meaning in the exhibition-as-spatial-music we might therefore instead satisfy ourselves with putting together what we know.79 That is, we can

77 This, in turn, raised fundamental questions about the nature of the state and its relation to the individual. 78 This can also be seen as a factor in the frivolity of the aristocracy in Maria Theresa’s Austria (in Mozart or Haydn), as Paul E. Robinson notes (1973, 451). 79 As Ludwig Wittgenstein explains in his remarks on James George Frazer’s study on the relation of science to mythology and religion (Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, 1979): “the satisfaction we are trying to get from the explanation comes of itself” (1979, 2e). Wittgenstein, who believes in the absence of fixed meaning, later decided to

111 focus on the compositional method and philosophy, and not on how the sound of the exhibition is experienced by the listeners, which I believe to be a diverse, personal experience.80

In Laptopia #5, for example, the process of ongoing listening and responding turned the two weeks of installation and preparation into an operation that very much resembled a performance of

Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations (1974). Sonic Meditations stresses a unique conception of where and how a piece of music is conceived and realized. Oliveros’s practice focused on the cognition of sound, largely through the practice of meditation and group participation. Her process of making music, whether by imagining, listening to, and/or remembering sounds, is achieved through a group sound meditation. Sonic Meditations is a set of twelve text scores that aim to help practitioners realize these new relationships to music-making. Laptopia #5 was inspired by

Oliveros’s practice and also made use of a collaborative, communal structure. Through this work’s creation, we aimed to illuminate the social power of music, a power which goes beyond the recognition of its sources.

The interconnected yet independent installations in Laptopia #5 were conceived by Govrin and myself as being analogous to how people exist in the larger world via communal composing and creative interacting. As such, the installation was not an easy process, and I recall some mutual frustration. Sound artists and musicians were moving constantly within the museum space, changing their placements and sounds. One artist, in the early stages of conceiving the project on paper, insisted on installing a huge bell at the centre of the MoBY space; this led to all of us

omit this from the manuscript. He argues against Frazer’s attempt to explain ‘primitive’ myth, rituals and magic, and adds that by using ‘magical’ words to describe what is ‘magical,’ Frazer is no different from the ‘savage’ rituals he wishes to study: “[A] whole mythology is deposited in our language” (1979, 10). Wittgenstein is proposing using descriptive methods alone when investigating (any) phenomena, and this might explain why he decided to dismiss the opening paragraph of his Remarks: “I think now that the right thing would be to begin my book with remarks about metaphysics as a kind of magic. But in doing this I must neither speak in defence of magic nor ridicule it. What it is that is deep about magic would be kept” (1979, V). 80 More on this will follow.

112 mutually agreeing that there would not be an installation made by a single artist at the centre of the exhibit’s space. We also agreed that listening and reacting to the other sound works on display would be mandatory.

Therefore, while communicating with the space and with each other, these sound works functioned as components of a conceptual argument. The exhibition took place in January 2009 in Israel, and the physical and conceptual connections established throughout the exhibition directly referred out beyond its specific time and location to the possibility of framing a utopian manifestation of society. And in this function, Laptopia #5 was also referring to what was then taking place not far beyond the museum’s doors: namely, the armed conflict in Gaza.81 A recorded listening tour of

Laptopia #5 is available for listening here.

6.2 The Exhibition as a Musical Performance In 2015, I curated an exhibition entitled Piece For Two Floors and a Corridor by Amnon Wolman for the Israeli Center for Digital Art. Wolman is a sound artist, professor of composition, and experimental composer who has been active since the early 1980s. His work is wide-ranging and includes electro-acoustic works, pieces for various ensembles and soloists, operas, computer-based music, text works, sound installations, performance art, and collaborations with artists from various fields. His Piece was created specifically for the Center, and it incorporated fragments of previous works by him alongside a newly created series composed for the exhibition. The exhibition’s title describes the main initiative of this show, which was to envelop the entirety of the works displayed as one single composition for the venue, a composition functioning throughout the acoustic space of the Center (figure 54-55).

81 This was known as Operation Cast Lead.

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Figure 54: Amnon Wolman, Towing Zone (2012) Performed by Naama Ensemble at A Piece for Two Floors and a Corridor by Amnon Wolman, 2015 Photo: Eyal Levinson Courtesy of Amnon Wolman Video: https://vimeo.com/120350517

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Figure 55: A Piece for Two Floors and a Corridor by Amnon Wolman, 2015 Exhibition view Photo: Eyal Levinson Courtesy of Amnon Wolman

More videos of Laptopia #5 can be found here - https://vimeo.com/120345836

Wolman’s Piece was a response to the basic concept of John Cage’s “compositions for museums,” which had been introduced by Cage in a series of experiments done during the last years of his life. The peak of these experiments was Cage’s 1993 piece Rolywholyover A Circus, a composition for museum he created for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MoCA), as mentioned in the introduction. Through such work, Cage elaborated his and Schaeffer’s definition of music from the early 1950’s (when including “noise” into their music),82 by addressing objects

82 Wolman further claims that by uniting music and noise, and observing art and life as one, Cage and Schaeffer introduced the continuum between a creation and its surroundings—and in doing so, clarified the supremacy of present experience over remembrance of the past. Both popular music discourse and the art world share this linear concept of time, and this hierarchical perspective of near and distant memories. In his composition for museum in 2015, Wolman

115 as sounds (a subject that will be discussed in greater detail in the following chapter). Following

Cage, Wolman composed an exhibition as noise: with different sound works surrounding the listener from all directions, all at once, with no clear hierarchy.

But in Piece For Two Floors and a Corridor, Wolman suggested a formulation complementary to

Cage’s and Schaeffer’s redefinition of music. An opposite configuration, in fact: Wolman’s composition defines music as part of the noise that surrounds us. In conversations, Wolman explains that music—music written as music—is perceived by us today as a form of noise: for example, the music we hear coming from a passing car, or from a house as someone practices the trombone, or even from the headphones of someone standing next to us in a public space. In this flood of music, music turns into a kind of noise—something that does not require our full attention and can thus be overlooked. And as far as Wolman is concerned, music as noise is also a material that a composer or sound artist can use. To stress that idea, Wolman integrated live performers

(players, dancers) into the first floor of the Center as part of the sound works presented. The beginning of a given performance was not contingent on the arrival or ongoing presence of an audience; the performance took place even without any Center visitors, in the same way that a sound installation occurs even when no one experiences it.

A more recent project that brought sound artists and musicians together in a performance is Xavier

Veilhan’s Studio Venezia (2017) for the French Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Veilhan’s practice includes photography, sculpture, film, painting, and installation art, and his Studio Venezia

confronted this idea of time as continuous by including imaginary sound scores, scores which ask the listener to imagine ordinary sounds based on written instructions. With this inclusion, Wolman emphasized that memories (as fragments of our experience of time) are not linear—they, too, are not organized in a chronological order, but take place simultaneously. Memory might relate in part or in whole to a different time, but the act of remembering—the re-experiencing or re-living of a memory—happens entirely in the present. We might better understand this concept if we consider, for instance, the way we look at a work of art. It might contain within itself a certain historical, social, or intra-artistic discourse narrative, but the action of looking or listening takes place in the present time.

116 was designed as a giant sound sculpture. The building’s exterior remained the same while the interior was transformed into a recording studio through a monumental cubist landscape of wood and fabric. Veilhan, together with curators Lionel Bovier and Christian Marclay, invited more than a hundred professional musicians and artists to perform, work, think, and play their music in the recording studio/sculpture for the duration of the biennale—leading some artists, like Joakim, a

French New York–based electronic producer and DJ, to record a full-length album there (figure

56-58).

Figure 56: Xavier Veilhan, Studio Venezia (2017) Vue d’installation/Installation view French Pavilion, Biennale di Venezia Photo © Giacomo Cosua © Veilhan / ADAGP, Paris, 2020

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Figure 57: Xavier Veilhan, Studio Venezia (2017) My Cat is an Alien en cours d’enregistrement sur le Crystal Baschet / My Cat is an Alien recording new work on the Crystal Baschet Pavillon français/French Pavilion, Biennale di Venezia Photo © Diane Arques / ADAGP, Paris, 2017 © Veilhan / ADAGP, Paris, 2017

Figure 58: Xavier Veilhan, Studio Venezia (2017) Joakim Bouaziz en cours d’enregistrement /Joakim Bouaziz recording new work Pavillon français/French Pavilion, Biennale di Venezia Photo © Giacomo Cosua © Veilhan / ADAGP, Paris, 2017

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In Studio Venezia, as in Wolman’s Piece, there was no fixed schedule the audience could follow.

Visitors were invited to witness musical creations in progress and experience firsthand their physical and intellectual impacts. As Veilhan explains in an interview, “[i]t can make you dance or cry or have goosebumps... and I try to bring this level of emotions into art, into visual art”

(2017). In another interview, conducted by Selina Ting for CoBo, Veilhan notes that the idea behind Studio Venezia originated as a response to the seven-month duration of the biennale: “The concept of time is very strong in this project because of the obvious link with music. However, the idea of time is also tied to architecture, space and the relation between aesthetic and function”

(Ting, 2017). He added that he wished to create a space of fragile moments and thus focused on an experimental creative process in which musicians were encouraged to take chances by creating something that is not immediately ready to be broadcast83—it was the attempt itself he wished to capture and share with the public, and he wanted it to be engaged by several artists, in order to share their process of taking these chances together (Ting, 2017).

Marclay, one of the curators of the French pavilion, is an artist who works in a variety of media, and who has been exploring audio cultures through performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography, and video since the late 1970s.84 When Marclay was asked by Ting about the curatorial process of Studio Venezia, he noted that there were similarities between his own art practice and a curatorial practice; for instance, he noted that his own artistic practice involves collaging: taking disparate things from different places and putting them together. He continued by comparing this to his process of music-making, DJing and mixing records from different

83 Studio Venezia was a fully functioning recording studio, and it broadcast live, in real time, around the globe. This allowed listeners who could not experience it as a sound sculpture to enjoy it virtually as an intimate musical moment. 84 One of his most famous videos, Guitar Drag (2000), shows a Fender Stratocaster being dragged behind a pickup truck along rough country roads in Texas. Another example is Video Quartet (2002), a four-screen projection featuring hundreds of clips from old Hollywood films that show actors and musicians making sounds or playing instruments.

119 sources: “When I’m doing my visual collages or my videos I feel like I’m curating” (Ting, 2017).

Perhaps the most famous example of his work in video collage is The Clock (2010), a masterpiece constructed out of moments in cinema when time is expressed. Relevant to Studio Venezia is his collaboration with the independent British music and arts label Vinyl Factory for his White Cube gallery show of 2015 in London: Over the course of three months, on every weekend, artists and musicians were invited to perform improvised works in the gallery space in response to the exhibition. The Vinyl Factory Press was installed in the exhibition space to press (on records) those performances that happened live in the gallery.

Both Wolman’s Piece and Veilhan’s Studio Venezia enveloped sound performance within the format of an art exhibition space by engaging the philosophy of music as background noise. Music as background noise is not new, of course. Erik Satie, with his “furniture music” (or “musique d’ameublement”), introduced the idea of music as a backdrop to everyday activities.85 The first public performance of Satie’s furniture music pieces was at the Parisian Barbazanges Gallery on

March 8, 1920, during the intermission of Ruffian toujours, truand jamais (1920), a play by Max

Jacob. While Satie’s music was also central to the play itself,86 it was at the intermission that he first performed his idea of music as a backdrop to everyday activities. Alan M. Gillmor writes that

Satie, together with Darius Milhaud, stationed three clarinets, a trombone and a piano around the hall and provided them with fragments of well-known pieces along with ostinato patterns “repeated

85 Alan M. Gillmor quotes the painter Fernand Léger, Satie’s dear friend, in saying that the term was first coined by the composer after meeting some friends for lunch at a café with an extremely loud orchestra; Satie turned to Léger and said: “You know, there’s a need to create furniture music, that is to say, music that would be part of the surrounding noises and that would take them into account. I see it as melodies, as making the clatter of knives and forks without drowning it completely, without imposing itself. It would spare them the usual banalities. Moreover, it would naturalize the street noises that indiscreetly force themselves into the picture” (1988, 232). In her 2015 essay “Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement and Max Jacob’s Ruffian toujours, truand jamais” Caroline Potter dates the first record of Satie using the “furniture music” definition regarding his own music to 1916 (based on a text by Emile Lejeune) (2015, 346). 86 Potter shows that unlike what has been noted up until now, Satie’s music was not performed only during the intermissions of Jacob’s play, but also on stage as part of the play itself.

120 endlessly, while Satie circulated in the audience exhorting people to talk, walk about, drink, to carry on as if nothing was happening” (1988, 232). But the audience, according to Gillmor, was not yet familiar with the new hall-performance format, and thus stood around the players, listening silently.

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Satie was a pianist at Montmartre café, and it was there that he contemplated music as a comforting essential (like a chair) that is enjoyable but, at the same time, unnoticeable. With the evolution of sound technology, pianists were soon replaced with audio systems, and music made by companies such as Muzak began to be broadcast in public establishments. Unlike ambient composers such as Brian Eno, who followed Satie’s furniture music philosophy of music as a background to the everyday,87 in both Wolman’s Piece and Veilhan’s Studio Venezia, the philosophy of music-as-noise refers to music that was intended to be listened to in full, but that is now experienced as part of the noises of the everyday.88 The information on the pieces as well as the performers was all available, but no labels or any other didactics were placed on the walls. Further, the timings of the performances were not predetermined. As such, the performative musical piece was juxtaposed with the gallery sound

87 Brian Eno coined the term “ambient music” in 1978 in his liner notes for Music for Airports /Ambient 1: “The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces—familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention. Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music” (Eno, 1978). 88 Wolman pushed this even further when he made sure his different works were performed all together, as noise, surrounding visitors from all directions, without any hierarchy, or any clear beginning or an end. Due to a limited budget for this Wolman project, not all of the performative pieces were performed all the time. When they were not being performed, Wolman chose to present their residue—such as six pairs of handcuffs in the case of No U Turn (1993), a piece for six percussionists wearing handcuffs, or two helmets and one set of drum sticks in the case of Speed Limit Applies (1997), a piece for a percussionist playing on two seated performers wearing helmets. These objects were displayed not only to signify a given work’s presence in the project, but also to provide a visual representation of the potentiality of their sound.

121 installation, allowing a performance to take place even if the gallery was empty of visitors (in the case of Studio Venzia this was only a possibility due to the large crowds of the Venice Biennale).

In Wolman’s Piece, this allowed for a surprise encounter with, for an example, a large vocal ensemble performing ‘just for you,’ without preliminary notice that a performance was taking place. This decision liberated both the performers and the audience: the performers were liberated from the responsibility to bring in an audience, and the audience was liberated from the need to sit still. This choice by Wolman turned the exhibition to a dynamic space of exploration for both constituencies.

6.3 The Exhibition as a Sound Walk Sound walks, like listening walks,89 are also focused on listening (Schafer, 1994, 212). The main difference between the two is the content that is listened to. A listening walk focuses on composing your own soundtrack by listening, while a sound walk is a composed soundtrack one listens to while walking. Wolman’s Piece combined the two philosophies. In it, he divided the Center’s space into two floors: on the first, the visitor encountered a visual overload that produced sounds; on the second, which acted as a music box, the visitor entered an area featuring subdued visuals overloaded with cluttered sounds.90 The apparent chaos created by Wolman on the first floor was

89 Since their emergence in the 1960s in North America listening walks have been developed by experimental musicians and sound artists. Charlotte Bates and Alex Rhys-Taylor write that the impetus for these developments can be traced to John Cage’s ideas about sound and silence. In their “Listening Walks: A Method of Multiplicity,” (2017) they mentioned the sound walks led by Philip Corner and Max Neuhaus, “who both led groups of listeners through urban environments in an attempt to take attentive listening beyond the confines of the concert hall, aestheticising ‘everyday’ sounds.” They quote John L. Drever’s comment that while some of these walks were “about chance experiences with sounds, others were undertaken with an idea of the sounds to be encountered, such as Max Neuhaus’ listening walks inside industrial locations normally inaccessible to visitors” (Drever, 2009, quoted in Bates and Rhys- Taylor 2017, 163). Examples for contemporary artists who continue to develop the medium of sound walks while conducting them in museums are John Kanneberg (and his ongoing project The museum of Portable Sounds ,2015) and Salomé Voegelin (“Curating Volumes: Hearing Architecture, Light and Words, 2016). 90 The first floor of Piece for Two Floors and a Corridor was also conceived as a Dadaist composition, enabling anything from everything, simultaneously, without any hierarchy or concrete organization. In keeping with the Dada

122 intentional and orchestrated. To aid the visitor, a map was distributed daily in the lobby, acting as a score for an individual performer—that is, the visitor. Visitors could follow the map/score, and at the same time they themselves became performers in the show by adding incidental sounds to the space. These simultaneous experiments—that is, the elimination of the standard model of the exhibition’s labyrinth of display, and the granting to the listener of a complete authority over a work—dovetail together. Taken in tandem, these gestures convey the ultimate understanding that the artist has passed the creative torch to the visitor because of his decision that the work, in its entirety, will take place in the listener’s mind.

The visitor to Wolman’s composition played a role in directing their experience of the composition and the space. This action, which signals a disconnection between the artist and their work, is augmented by Wolman’s encouragement of the listener to take up a personal interpretive action in conversation with the creative act.91 Further, since the works were played together and shared an acoustic space, the score enabled the auditor/visitor a passage between the works according to a time and space map—thus producing a soundtrack that is always different, yet always in accordance with the composer’s intention. In Wolman’s view, however, this map was not indispensable, and he readily allowed for any improvisation of the route taken through the space.

aesthetic, Wolman’s work also makes use of the element of randomness. An excellent and amusing example is evident in the artist’s employment of phrases from road signs to name his pieces: “No U Turn,” “Slow Down,” “Junction with a minor side road” and even “Israeli, if you got to that point—you are wrong” (the latter can be seen along the Israeli borders). 91 In a text from 1957 called “The Creative Act,” Marcel Duchamp describes the role of the spectator, through the encounter with a work of art, as being to revive the creative act—what he calls the “art coefficient.” According to Duchamp, who read this text at the American Federation of Arts conference in Houston, Texas, (where he presented himself as “just an artist”) the work of art is created with the help of its viewer, who animates the artwork and enables its construction of meaning. Wolman’s 2015 composition for the Israeli Center for Digital Art is based on this exact idea, as it disassembles the art institution’s normative power structures, which usually ask the viewer to absorb the art but not to be part of its creative process.

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According to Wolman, the map existed in its own right—as a stand-alone piece—and exposed the two central issues that run through all his works: mechanisms of power and time information.92

The integration of a map as a score for a sonic exhibition was also an element of the 2004 exhibition

Shhh… Sounds in Spaces. This exhibition was co-curated for the Victoria & Albert Museum in

London, UK, by Lauren Parker, the museum’s curator of contemporary programs, and Jonny

Dawe, an external curator and musician. Shhh... included sound pieces by ten musicians and artists that were merged into a single sound walk using a custom-made MP3 player, headphones, and a map. This sonic journey changed as the audience moved throughout the museum, responding to the art on display and inviting visitors to enter the different rooms of the museum while hearing a series of sounds meant to operate in tandem with a given space. Parker explained to Charlotte

Cripps from the Independent that the aim of Shhh... was to “open the visitor’s eyes to the museum’s collections and spaces in a new way” (Cripps, 2004) (figures 59-60).

92 A perfect example of these concerns can be observed in SoundTallit (2014). In it, Wolman embedded speakers into six prayer shawls and hung them from the ceiling. The prayer shawls were wired with low-volume prayer sounds which, in order to be heard, required listeners to wrap themselves in the tallit. While in Orthodox Judaism these prayer shawls are used only by men, in Wolman’s work anyone may wear them, including women, regardless of their religion. The SoundTallit series is part of a long study by Wolman about the speaker’s function as an integral part of the sound it produces. Regarding this issue, while I was in conversation with Wolman, he quoted a statement made by the composer Henry Brant during a lecture in the 1980s that Wolman attended: according to Brant, Wolman says, composers of electronic music should bring to each and every one of their concerts their own speakers, in the same way that violinists or flautists bring their own instruments. Brant’s advice is based on musicians’ intimate familiarity with their instruments—and the fact that in the case of electronic music composers, their performance tool is the speaker. Wolman agrees with Brant, believing that a composer should foster an intimate familiarity with the audio speakers that perform his work. Wolman’s Piece displayed more objects that engulfed their own speakers, such as a wedding dress (Speakers’ Wedding Dress, 2014), three petticoats (Speakers’ Petticoats, 2014) and a military jacket (Speakers’ Army Jacket, 2006), each garment allowing a listener to be wrapped within it.

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Figure 59: Shhh… Sound in Spaces (2004), The Victoria & Albert Museum, Exhibition Map and Sound Kit. http://christophebuffet.com/portfolio/shhh-sounds-in-space-va-london/

This enterprise began with inviting ten musicians to each create a new sound piece in response to any space in the V&A. Some of these new sound pieces reflected the context of the objects in the rooms; some focused on the different architectural and acoustic qualities of the museum’s spaces; and some questioned the nature of headphones as a personal experience.

In Expectant Mood, for example, Elizabeth Fraser, the former lead singer of the Cocteau Twins, responded to Raphael’s tapestry designs for the Sistine Chapel, in particular The Healing of the

Lame Man, commissioned by Pope Leo X in 1515. These designs deal with the Pope’s authority and illustrate scenes from the lives of St. Peter and St. Paul, who were seen as the founders of the

Church and sources of the Pope’s authority and power. While listening to Fraser’s soft dreamy voice, a spectator in the V&A might better imagine the miraculous healing powers of St. Peter’s touch as pictured by Raphael. Another melodic response was the dark electronica of

Faultline/David Kosten. Cripps notes that Kosten’s sounds made English post-medieval statues in the museum seem to “come alive” (Cripps, 2004).

Not all the works in Shhh... were melodic. Some manipulated listeners into focusing on specific sounds and moments in the museum’s negative spaces. The Wondering by DJ, producer, and

125 composer Leila consisted of low-volume conversations heard through the headphones at a point where one could see the other visitors eating and drinking through the glass windows of the museum’s cafeteria. Another example was I Will Not Pick Up The Phone by David Byrne of the

Talking Heads: fifty-five seconds (repeated) of mobile phones ringing. He also contributed Water

Walking Symphony, a composition of flushing toilets, footsteps, and the sound of a person coughing.93 Byrne’s pieces for the show (four in total) were placed in the museum’s negative spaces—in between the V&A galleries at corridors, ramps, and a washroom.94

Figure 60: Shhh… Sound in Spaces (2004), The Victoria & Albert Museum. https://www.domusweb.it/en/design/2004/07/07/sound-and-space-at-victoria-and-albert-museum.html

93 The pieces are available for listening on Byrne’s website. 94 Byrne notes that “there is a little bit of a trompe l’oeil involved in my pieces—I do hope that someone hearing a mobile phone ring on the recording will turn to see if someone is answering it, or someone hearing a toilet flush might believe that a person is about to emerge from a nearby stall” (Cripps, 2004).

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A more recent exhibition that focused on the museum’s negative spaces was Soundtracks (2017) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. According to the curatorial statement, Soundtracks explored the possibilities of the exhibition’s trail—the gap in between the works on display—as a performative act conducted by visitors. The exhibition was curated by Rudolf Frieling, SFMOMA curator of media arts, together with Tanya Zimbardo, SFMOMA assistant curator of media arts, and it included works in different mediums by twenty-two artists (among them Brian Eno, Bill

Fontana, Susan Philipsz and Christina Kubisch). Soundtracks spread throughout the seven floors of the museum, and the curators conceived of it as a part of the wider contemporary lifting of barriers between the performing arts and the visual arts. Accordingly, the curators of Soundtracks extensively narrated the exhibition trail, stressing the potential of sound in museums as a trace of something we cannot yet see or of what is no longer in our sight.95

Supporting this conception of engagement with the museum’s negative space in a later text,

“Composing a Sonic Cosmos” (2019),96 Salomé Voegelin claims that the sonic trace is the emancipatory power of sound. Sound, she writes, can draw us into the in-between that exists among objects. Sound can voice the unseen, unheard, and unrepresented, but even more, she writes, sound blurs the lines and erodes borders, and in doing so, it manifests the space that accommodates the relationships between things and voices the voluminous space of the in- between. Voegelin adds that in doing this, “sound dissolve[s] the language as well as the architecture of the exhibition…[generating] the institution as ephemeral volume instead” (2019).

95 The curatorial focus on the exhibition trail was done without limiting the attention to the works themselves, as is evident is the exhibition’s online catalogue, which offers an extensive reading for each and every work exhibited. 96 Written for the catalogue of Big Orchestra: Music with Sculptures of Contemporary Art (2019).

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The inclusion in Soundtracks of a narrated description of the trail, accompanied by the museum’s map, acted as score for a listening walk, offering a curated sonic experience of what Voegelin points to as the space of the in-between, the interval between things displayed in the exhibition, all in the form of a soundtrack—a listening walk. As in Wolman’s Piece and Shhh…, the decision to curate a trail in-between the works in Soundtracks added dimension and extended the functions and potentials of a museum space. This effect was achieved even more fully through the integration of the element of a map as a score for a single listener—a single performer. In arranging the experience in this way, the curators of these projects lifted the boundaries not only between mediums, but also between the art exhibition and the work of art, enabling the visitor to relate to the exhibition itself as a medium.

But as a headphone-led exhibition, Shhh… offered something more—it performed solely inside the listener’s head. The use of headphones can be seen as a point in the evolving artistic use of museum audio guides. The audio guide (invented in the 1950s by Valentine Burton), has long been explored by artists as a form of institutional critique.97 In La Visite Guidée (1994), for example,

Sophie Calle used it to describe the significance of her own belongings, which were placed in displays of the Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen’s permanent collection. Calle’s guided tour offered her thoughts and memories (accompanied by music by Laurie Anderson) as another layer of interruption to museum discourses and spaces. Another example is Untitled (An Introduction to the Whitney Biennial) (1993) by Andrea Fraser. For this work, Fraser interviewed the Whitney

Museum’s staff and used the audio guide to reveal “behind-the-scenes” information usually hidden from public attention. In a later performance, Little Frank and his Carp (2001), Fraser used the

97A thorough discussion of the history of the museum audio guide and its exploration by artists can be found in Jennifer Fisher, “Speeches of Display: Museum Audioguides by Artists,” in Jim Drobnick, ed., Aural Cultures, Toronto: YYZ Books, 2004.

128 official audio guide of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in her work: While wearing a green minidress and black high heels, she listened to the institution’s audio guide and followed the instructions for touching the large pillars of the museum’s atrium, which led to her responding emotionally and erotically to the building.

An example of an earlier exhibition that explored the format of the audio guide was Les

Immatériaux (1985). The exhibition was curated by philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and theorist Thierry Chaput for the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. At the entrance, visitors to Les

Immatériaux were encouraged to wear headphones and listen to a soundtrack. The soundtrack, consisting of different programmes for twenty-six different zones throughout the exhibition space, was indirectly related to what was on display. Yuk Hui and Andreas Broeckmann write that the sounds heard were in use by the curator-philosopher, along with the images and artifacts on display, as a vehicle for presenting his philosophical discourse:98 “in both cases he made extensive use of being out of sync, as the quintessence of the anti-narrative” (2015, 128). They explain that the layer of sounds interfered with the exhibition, and that this helped express Lyotard’s observations about what was happening in art, science, and philosophy under the contemporary conditions of communication technologies. Les Immatériaux followed the philosophical assertion that this new condition demanded a new sensibility; as Lyotard stated in a proposition for the exhibition: “The insecurity, the loss of identity, the crisis is not expressed only in economy and the social, but also in the domains of the sensibility, of the knowledge and the power of man

(futility, life, death), the modes of life (in relation to work, to habits, to food, etc.).”99 Hui and

98 “During the visit one could listen to different emissions/programmes—just like a car radio passes from one station to another during a journey. In this case, the relationship between the soundtrack and the visual images was complex in nature and echoed the method Lyotard had used in various videos in the 70s and 80s” (2015, 128). 99 Les Immatériaux catalogue, Album (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1985), p. 26. Translated and cited in Yuk Hui and Andreas Broeckmann, 2015, 9.

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Broeckmann add that the constant return to the postmodern condition became a general method of

Lyotard’s philosophical thinking for going beyond the modernist imagination, and that this method guided the construction of the exhibition which was, in Lyotard’s own words, a “manifestation,” or a “non-exhibition.” (2015, 9).

In contrast, Shhh... was not a “non-exhibition,” nor did it suggest a critical reading of the exhibitionary order, of the V&A, or even of the institution at large. I would suggest that the use of headphones in Shhh... worked to create a barrier between the space within the exhibition and the space outside of it, and thus afforded its listeners a personal experience crafted and embedded into their own, much like in Janet Cardiff’s audio walks, for example, in Chiaroscuro (1997).

Chiaroscuro was the first sound walk inside a museum that Cardiff created.100 It was curated by

Gary Garrels for the group exhibition Present Tense: Nine Artists in the Nineties at the San

Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1997. Cardiff, who until that time had created walks in open spaces such as parks or urban habitats, notes that Chiaroscuro, as her first sound walk inside a museum, posed challenges inherent to dealing with a limited soundscape and space. Cardiff chose the museum stairwell as a “memory map,” and as Garrels writes on the artist’s website, she explored the museum as a space for storage of personal experiences and memories. But there was a complication: in 1997, the SFMOMA was a new building, one largely without a history. As

Garrels explains, “what Janet did was to add layers to time, to add events one could not possibly have experienced before in the building” (Cardiff). Garrels further explains that:

100 At that time Janet Cardiff had already created audio works for the outside spaces of a museum (Louisiana Museum) and further, had created audio works for the inside of an art space (Eyelevel Gallery). Chiaroscuro is her first walk inside a museum.

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every time you go into a museum where you have been before, you

bring something from your previous experiences. Of course, when

you’re in a new building, that doesn’t exist. Janet built histories,

memories, voices, and events that had not yet occurred… (Cardiff)

Shhh..., like Cardiff’s walks, triggered emotions and brought back memories. Further, similar to

Cardiff’s audio walks, Shhh… manipulated the sensual experience of the exhibition and turned it into a mobilized pocket of sonic space, what Peg Rawes calls a “sonic envelope.”

In an essay of the same name (2008), Rawes considers the writings of Henri Bergson and Cardiff’s walks in order to examine how physical and psychic perceptions of sound inform the way we experience spatial environments. In particular, she looks at similarities between Cardiff’s methods of manipulating the experience of a space through sound and Bergson’s ideas of duration (durée).

Bergson’s durée is the individual’s perception of qualitative multiplicities of heterogenous time, and the continuation of time in our consciousness. Bergson famously critiques measurable time

(the time measured by a clock) for confusing time with space, for turning it into units that can be quantified. He explains that even though time has nothing to do with space, the fact that it is measured and experienced as units turns it into a medium that is nothing but space.101 The inner duration, he explains, is the melting of states of consciousness one-into-another, and is not measurable. It is our consciousness that organizes these states as a whole, in memory, as a series perceived and disposed of, as a fourth dimension of space (1959, 110). Motion, too, is perceived

101 Bergson follows Kant, who showed that space is usually reduced to an abstraction, an extract “possessed by certain sensations called representative [or] as a reality as solid as the sensations themselves” (1959, 92). But Bergson argues that Kant distinguished space and time by separating space from its contents—in order to represent space, the sensations through which we come to form the notion of space must be juxtaposed through intuition, what Kant calls the a priori. Bergson adds that if the representation of space is made homogeneous through an effort of the mind, then every medium that we perceive as homogeneous is space, including time.

131 via the space the body passes through, but Bergson adds that while it is true that motion takes place in space, the action itself, by which the body moves from one place to another, is also a durational act that has little to do with space. It is because of a synthesis—a synthesis of the homogeneous body that moves and of our memory remembering its previous placements—that movement appears as homogeneous (and therefore, as space).102

Shhh…, like Cardiff’s audio walk, manipulated (or as Rawes might say, “rematerialized”) the way we experience the psychic and physical phenomena of the museum space. By adding a layer of movement (through the use of a map in Shhh... or the use of a museum’s stairwell in Chiaroscuro) and sounds (through the use of headphones in both), both projects embedded layers of different dimensions, of multiple, heterogenic qualities, to the museum space, all in the form of a sonic envelope. These were embodied experiences generated both internally (by the listener) and externally (by the museum and the other visitors). These sonic envelopes, as Rawes explains, are predominantly defined by dynamic interactions between individuals and their environments, and are an a priori aesthetic expression constituted by sensibility rather than a concept of space (a concept, in contrast, being generated out of rational, scientific a priori knowledge).

102 It is thus, when the operation of memory renders time as space, as Bergson notes, that time collapses into space. And it is the same with any case of repetition—and not just with movement, because we articulate this repetition, through space, as homogeneous. This is how we experience the world, Bergson explains, as well as ourselves in the world. This is why there is no way to avoid homogeneous time, which came to be the representation of duration. For him, “In a word, pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without any tendency to externalise themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number: it would be pure heterogeneity” (Bergson [1888] 2002: 61).

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Listening to Snow

As a sound artist and a curator, I use the curatorial process as a way to research and experiment, and I use the exhibition space as a studio, a place in which to explore questions and ideas in a practical way. It was my reflections on the exhibition-as-spatial-music sonic curatorial approach that informed my own approach to my curation of Listening to Snow (figures 61-66).103 In this project, I wanted to further explore the idea of the composer-curator, composing an exhibition as a listening space: Merging different dimensions of sound into one sonic experience, in the same way music is composed from different tones. This, I imagined, would turn the gallery space into an instrument, and the exhibition itself into music. Later, I articulated my intuition via the words of Bergson; he noted that we experience music in the same way we perceive duration. The latter, he argues, consists of unified states of consciousness, the former, unified states of tonality.104 Thus, the exhibition as spatial music, I thought, could open up the phenomenology of the works and the exhibition itself, to encompass new meanings.

I chose to work with Michael Snow on this project exactly because it is almost impossible to say something new about Snow, an artist appreciated and well known across the globe. Furthermore, in 2016 when I started contemplating this project, no exhibition had yet focused on his sounds, even though he is a composer and a virtuoso pianist. Actually, Snow’s seventy years of internationally acclaimed experimentation and innovation in diverse media offers sound in multiple forms:105 composed and improvised music, sound installations, and sound recordings, as

103 Listening to Snow took place at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto from January to March, 2020. 104 Bergson analyzes our experience of the striking bell and the oscillating pendulum, and he argues that both qualitative and quantitative natures form duration via the simultaneity of sonic succession, as exemplified by the image of a chiming bell or a swinging pendulum. This simultaneity—constituted by the quantitative sonic succession and qualitative perception of the sonic event as a whole—determines our perception of it as one-after-the-other, even though it can also be understood as one-in-the-other. 105 Or as he stated in 1967: “My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor. . .

133 well as sounds visualized in sculptures, paintings, and experimental films. In an interview with

Annette Michelson, Snow described his work with sound in terms of “departments of interest”:

[M]y background is partly in jazz, so that’s a certain lineage. But

then there are other things that really were more related to the way

I’ve made films or some of the multitrack recordings that I’ve done

that really don’t have any improvisation. They are compositions that

use the possibilities of multitrack: of layering, of superimposing one

element of music on the other, and so on. And it’s a compositional

tool. (2005, 44)

In the early stages of this project, I went to Snow with a proposal—to curate an exhibition of a selection of his sound-related works by composing a listening space. Works would be chosen according to how they sounded and, moreover, they would together constitute a single sonic experience. Listening to Snow, I suggested, would itself be an experiment: a space where one could listen to the ideas and thoughts arising from the selected sounds. Snow, the indefatigable experimentalist, was interested.

After a long process of listening to his different mediums, I composed and tuned an exhibition from one screening [Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids) (2002)], one recording [W in the D

(1975)], and three sound installations [Diagonale (1988), Waiting Room (2000), Tap (1969–

1972)]—with all of these works sharing the same acoustic space. As in the manner of a composed musical piece, Listening to Snow’s sounds were pre-determined; however, a piano was also placed

sometimes they all work together. Also many of my paintings have been done by a painter, sculpture by a sculptor, films by a filmmaker, music by a musician” (1994, 26).

134 in the gallery awaiting Snow’s improvised performance.106 Additionally, Falling Starts (1975) was available in the gallery for audience members to play on a record player, should they wish to add it to the mix of the listening space.

Figure 61: Michael Snow, Listening to Snow, 2020 Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy of Art Museum, University of Toronto.

The gallery was dimmed, the walls were painted dark grey, and the works in the show contemplated listening as a straining towards the self. For example, Solar Breath (Northern

Caryatids) is a video and sound recording of a unique wind phenomenon that Snow experienced in the remote Newfoundland cabin where he spends one or two months each summer. Snow

106 This performance was scheduled for the last day of the exhibition, March 21, 2020, and was cancelled due to the Museum’s closure as a result of the COVID 19 pandemic.

135 describes the making of this work when he writes: “Near sunset the wind blows the single curtain on a window in the room, each time with varying style and force and then, mysteriously, sucks the curtain back to make it smack against the pane of a nonexistent window” (2015, 167–68). The dimensions of Solar Breath’s installation were determined by Snow to be as close as possible to the actual window he filmed. As a result, the window seemed real and the curtain fluttered as though bouncing on the dark gallery wall. At times, the curtain stopped and stayed still; at others, it revealed a view of a familiar Canadian landscape. As in other experimental films by Snow,107 a repetition of imageries and sounds enveloped the audience, creating a meditative, attentive space— a space that might start on the gallery wall, but that is almost immediately mirrored inwards, prompting the audience to listen to their own thoughts. Jean-Luc Nancy claims that this type of power is inherent to sound, and that meaning and sound share the space of referral: meaning refers simultaneously to a sign, a thing, a quality, a subject—or to itself, the way sound spreads and resonates not only in the space where it resounds, but also within the listener. Thus, for Nancy, the manifestation of being is arrived at by listening to the truth “itself” rather than by seeing it (2007,

1–22).

107 Examples include Wavelength (1967) and La Région Centrale (1971), which were screened as part of the programing of this exhibition.

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Figure 62: Listening to Snow, 2020 (Map) Courtesy of Art Museum, University of Toronto

The Listening to Snow exhibition was designed as a cochlea and Diagonale—a dark room in which sixteen speakers, gently and punctiliously tuned by Snow, generate a single chord—was at the end of the dark spiral of the inner ear (figure 62). The listening experience created by the dark gallery space throughout the exhibition engaged listeners’ entire bodies, not just their ears. This was especially notable when moving inside Diagonale, where listeners perceived the space by sensing slight differences in sound as their bodies changed position relative to the speakers. This form of bodily listening, as articulated by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is private, personal, and almost emotional, as the auditor must listen to their bodily experience of the space— that is, listen to their listening body.

As noted earlier, Merleau-Ponty suggests that sensing, in contrast to knowing, is a living communication with the world—that perception is dynamic; that there is always something more to experience; and that objects exist as they are perceived through my body. And in Diagonale, the foregrounding of sound—by limited access through other senses—creates disorientation, but a

137 kind of disorientation that allows heightened access to the sonic and its effects, and therefore allows the audience a kind of re-orientation to their relationship with space through sound. The darkness and the voluminous space allotted to Diagonale in Listening to Snow, along with the fact that there were no lights or objects in the room (apart from the audio system), created a space which offered the experience of a room, filled-with-sound rather than empty-of-objects.

Figure 63: Michael Snow, Waiting Room (2000), Listening to Snow, 2020 Photo: Dominic Chan Courtesy of Art Museum, University of Toronto.

Merleau-Ponty adds that such self-attentiveness allows us to confront our experience of time not as an object of knowledge but as a dimension of our being, what he calls a “field of presence”

(2002, 492). Time, in this sense, is understood not as an eternal consciousness, but rather as an experience. In Waiting Room (2000), Snow manipulates this experience by controlling the duration of his audience’s attentiveness: Each visitor is instructed to take a number, then to wait for their number to come up on a sign, at which point they are to leave. All the while, a loudspeaker plays the sound picked up by a microphone that was installed, in the case of Listening to Snow, within a

138 reading room at Hart House, the structure which houses part of the art museum. The instruction to stay still for a fixed duration and listen to sounds from elsewhere expanded the gallery space and captured the experience of one’s own being situated in time (figure 64).

Figure 64: Michael Snow, Waiting Room (2000), Listening to Snow, 2020 Photo: Dominic Chan Courtesy of Art Museum, University of Toronto.

Another work in the show was Tap (1969–1972), consisting of three elements that must be shown in different rooms, allowing the spectator/listener to experience each one separately. One element is a framed photograph of hands holding a microphone; another is a text describing the sounds made by fingers tapping on the microphone; and another is a speaker emanating the actual sounds arising from this action. The display of components in separate rooms engages the

139 spectator/listener’s memory as they combine the sound, imagery, and text into one piece. The spectator/listener’s movement through these components turns their fragmented parts into a single durational piece.

Further, while walking through the gallery, the sounds of all the works in Listening to Snow were mixed and experienced together—but the different duration of each piece, along with the different placement of the listener in every given moment, made the exhibition sound different through movement and time. To adapt Heraclitus’s famous epigram, just as one cannot step into the same river twice, it was impossible to experience the exhibition in the same way twice. It was circulating, fluid, dissolving, and ever-changing.

Diagonale’s chord was the background to the entire exhibition and unified it sonically as one. The chord was generated by an oscillator which, according to Snow, plays “all the frequencies humans can hear, all at once.”108 The sounds were then transmitted to sixteen speakers—eight pairs of different speakers. Snow modified the speakers so that each pair plays only certain frequencies.

He then arranged them in the room from highest to lowest: the smallest set of speakers was placed at the entrance, playing the high frequencies, while the largest speakers were set at the back of the room, playing the low frequencies. The room was dark, lit only by some light leaking in from outside the space. Therefore, while entering Diagonale, one experienced the space getting darker and the frequencies lower.

During the show, I was gallery-sitting every Wednesday for five hours. I wanted to engage visitors in conversation, to allow them to reflect on their experiences of the space. Diagonale was certainly the piece that took the most out of people. One spectator, for example, ran out of the room saying

108 This is excerpted from a conversation between the artist and the curator upon installing the piece on January 8, 2020.

140 they found the piece to be “frightening.” Another came in and out of the room, multiple times, saying they felt “filled with emotions” every time entering the room, “almost like it’s pushing a button within me.” Another interesting response was from Chris Hampton, a reporter visiting the show. Hampton expressed his amusement at the piece by running around and jumping in different spots in the room.109

The furniture in the exhibition—a red sofa and two white chairs in the Waiting Room area, along with a silent baby grand piano110 and two grey armchairs alongside the record player where W in the D and Falling Starts were playing—turned the gallery into a familiar habitat, a domestic room.

The lack of didactics on the gallery walls, along with the dim atmosphere and the ongoing chord of Diagonale, transformed the entire gallery into one large music box, one sonic experience, allowing the audience to “walk inside” Snow’s sounds.

Further, while W in the D was looping in the gallery, Falling Starts was on a record player, available for the audience to experience via headphones. Falling Starts is a short piano composition; at the beginning, it is compressed, and then slowly it gets back to its original pace, moving on to become slower and slower, and allowing one to hear sounds in between the notes.

During the work’s installation, Snow noted that the listener should experience the stretching of time while listening to this piece. Therefore, we decided to include Falling Starts on headphones, creating a moment where one could still hear all of the exhibition (the headphones were not sound-

109 Chris Hampton wrote for the National Gallery of Canada Magazine of his visit that “the exhibition houses the quietly droning Diagonale in its innermost chamber. …When you stand still, you hear a pure tone, but as you move around the room, you perceive variations that sound like a siren or perhaps musical like an arpeggio” (2020). Hampton further shares that he ran in small circles around the room, “half-giddy from the invitation to play. It is a profound experience art can sometimes provide,when you get to perceive yourself perceiving” (2020). 110 The tuned baby grand piano was situated silently, waiting for Snow’s performance on the last day of the show. The decision to include a silent piano was intended to refer to the significant part the instrument has played within Snow’s sonic practice, and also to signal Cage’s discussions of silence as unintentional sounds. The performance did not take place as planned due to the COVID 19 pandemic lockdown.

141 cancelling) and at the same time, concentrate on listening to the changes in time. Further, there was only one set of short corded headphones, turning available only to one listener at a time, requiring them to sit and listen, ensuring they take their time with the piece. The decision to include the piece on a record allowed the audience to interact with the object itself as well: namely, the record and its sleeve (figure 65).

Figure 65: Michael Snow, Falling Starts (1975), Listening to Snow, 2020 Photo: Dominic Chan Courtesy of Art Museum, University of Toronto.

Furthermore, this ‘music box’ setting for Listening to Snow can also be reviewed as an installation, a sound sculpture curated from different works. Historically, we can see other examples of environments built in the same way by composers. Aside from the three pavilions I mentioned earlier in this chapter, perhaps the most famous example is Dream House (1969-present)111 a

111 The Dream House installation has taken on various dimensions through the years. It was initiated in July 1969 as a sound and light environment at Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich. Later, it was presented by Dia Art Foundation between 1979 and 1985 at a six-floor building at 6 Harrison Street, New York. In 2000, Dream House opened in Polling, Bavaria, and it is intended to exist as long as possible. The MELA Foundation version of Dream House at 275 Church Street, New York, is the piece’s longest installation to date.

142 collaborative sound and light environment by composer La Monte Young and visual artist Marian

Zazeela in New York City.112 Another example is Longplayer (1999) by composer Jem Finer.

Longplayer is a one-thousand-year-long musical composition which began playing at midnight on

December 31, 1999, and will continue to play until the end of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Located in Bow Creek Lighthouse in London, UK, Longplayer allows the audience to “walk inside” the music and experience the lighthouse itself as part of the installation—or better, to experience the lighthouse itself as an instrument. Listening to Snow shared this embedded feeling with Longplayer, gathering the gallery itself into the function of an instrument. While walking around the exhibition, one could hear the sounds circulating in the room, and then returning back into one’s ear—bouncing back from the walls and then penetrating the listener again, each time adding another layer to a unique composition unfolding in the ear.

112 The light environment contains four works by Marian Zazeela—two environmental, Imagic Light and Magenta Day, Magenta Night, in installations specifically designed for the site, and two sculptural, the neon work Dream House Variation I and the wall sculpture Ruine Window 1992 from her series Still Light. In the environment Imagic Light, Zazeela projects pairs of coloured lights on mobile forms to create seemingly three-dimensional coloured shadows in a luminous field. In the concurrent sound environment, La Monte Young presents The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119, a periodic composite sound waveform environment created from sine wave components generated digitally in real time on a custom-designed Rayna interval synthesizer (Mela Foundation).

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Figure 66: Michael Snow, Listening to Snow, 2020 Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy of Art Museum, University of Toronto.

In terms of the environment’s atmosphere and effect, walking inside the gallery arranged as a domestic room, while listening to the ongoing chord, along with the occasional familiar sound coming from the Hart House Reading Room, felt to me like walking inside a diorama of Snow’s experimental film Wavelength (1967). Wavelength is a continuous zoom which takes 45 minutes to go from its widest field to its smallest and final field. It was shot with a fixed camera from one end of an 80-foot loft, shooting the other end. In his statement about the film Snow explained that the setting, and the action which takes place (“4 human events including a death”) are equivalent, interrupting the room and the zoom. He adds that

The sound on these occasions is sync sound, music and speech,

occurring simultaneously with an electronic sound, a sine wave,

which goes from its lowest (50 cycles per second) note to its highest

(12000 c.p.s.) in 40 minutes. It is a total glissando while the film is

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a crescendo and a dispersed spectrum which attempts to utilize the

gifts of both prophecy and memory which only film and music have

to offer. (1994, 40)

The cochlea-shaped structure of Listening to Snow captured this glissando experience: the ongoing chord was heard from outside the gallery, and while entering the gallery the volume increased and different sounds were added or omitted, smoothly, according to the movement around the gallery space. In his Wavelength statement Snow further explains that he wanted to make a summation of his “nervous system, religious inklings, and aesthetic ideas” (1994, 40). Walking inside Snow’s sounds definitely stimulated such an experience. Many of the visitors mentioned that Diagonale’s chord remind them of chamber music, and that it manipulated their emotions, lifting them up or bringing them down, according to their own individual vocabulary of memories and experiences.

As Edmund Husserl famously argued, what makes an experience conscious is a certain awareness one has of the experience while living through or performing it. Thus, the most characteristic property of our familiar types of experience is their intentionality—arising from a consciousness of or about something—or the way things are experienced or presented or engaged with in a certain way. How I see or conceptualize or understand any object I engage with (including sound) defines the meaning of that object in my current experience. In Near to the Wild Heart (1943), Clarice

Lispector contemplates this beautifully when she observes that music and thought belong to the same category. She explains that both are private and self-revealing (2012, 36–7). Music, like my thoughts, forms the background of my being.113

113 She adds that with both, the privacy feeling evaporates as soon as it is sung or said by someone else. When I hear the same music or thoughts from outside of me, I experience them differently—they are not solely mine anymore, especially, she adds, when a particular piece of music, or an idea, becomes popular. The object’s effect, the repetition, may bring the listeners closer to the object or may push them away. But, as Gestalt psychology avers (when it explores

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This brings me to the most wonderful remark expressed by one of the visitors after visiting the show, which brought to light in a succinct form one of the most striking potential effects sound can have on the visitor to an exhibition composed as spatial music. He noted that for him, listening to such an exhibition, where all the sounds from the different works share the same acoustic space, felt like a private experience, and that in that sense it reminded him a great deal of listening to music through headphones.

In his essay on headphones as an acoustic spatialization of subjectivity (2007), Charles

Stankievech looks at headphones as the creators of interior space.114 He writes that headphones are the ‘new addiction,’ and that with the use of headphones “a sound field can be virtually located within the head. More accurately, space is created within the mass of the body where sound masses float in an impossible space” (2007, 56).

This is the main strength I find in sound exhibitions composed as one sonic experience, as spatial music: They bring back sound’s sensibility with the effect of stimulating a virtual subjective field.

In other words, when sound display is conceived by auditory perspectives—that is, freed from acoustical barriers and allowed to behave according to its spatial properties—its fluidity, temporality, and elusiveness are captured inside the listener, in a form resembling Bergson’s inner duration, as states of consciousness, melted one-into-another. But this can only be experienced when the exhibition itself is composed as music—that is, as unified states of tonality. In Listening to Snow, unifying the sounds of the different works into one sonic experience allowed listeners to

how we recognize musical phrases thorough memory) fragments of this intimacy can be reexperienced—even when they are only partly played, or are played in a different key. 114 He also notes that most sound works are not produced specifically for listening through headphones, and that the use of headphones is usually a compromise chosen over a multichannel sound system. He later looks at works by Ryoji Ikeda, Bernhard Leitner and Janet Cardiff and George Miller as examples of artists who also produce works specifically for headphones, and how they manipulate and use this interior space manifested by headphones (2007).

146 walk inside Snow’s sound-related works—engaging with space, time, imagination, and memory— as dimensions of self-attentiveness.

All the projects composed-curated by sound artists and composers that I have mentioned in this chapter are examples of exhibition-as-spatial-music, and thus, as spaces that hold unified states of consciousness. Applying different compositional methodologies, these composer-curators allowed sound to surround the listener, and stimulate the spatialization of subjectivity. In all of these projects, sound envelopes the listener, creating virtual space located within them. This interior space is of course very private, personal and each experience of this space is unique, but it is only when the exhibition as a whole becomes the soundtrack—the background sound of one’s own interior space—that the exhibition itself may be experienced as personal and private (rather than

‘dictated’). And this is because, while we might listen to the same sounds, these sounds move us in different ways—through the listening process, we claim it, make it our own. The exhibition-as- spatial-music, like music, manipulates us without us knowing it.

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Chapter 3

(John Cage’s) Musical Compositions for Visual Objects

Should listening—as an act, an experience, a form of sensing, and as a mode of relating to things that we are in the presence of—be limited to the sphere of sound? Can curatorial practice embrace methodologies of listening when addressing visual objects? If music, as John Cage averred, is not limited to sound, can visual-object-based art exhibitions be musical too? The final part of this thesis focuses on Cage’s three compositions for museums as examples for curating a visual-object- based art exhibition through the use of a musical score. I maintain that while Cage was not the first artist to engage with the art exhibition, his compositions for museum demonstrate something new.

They show how the private, subjective experience of listening to music may be translated to perceiving installations of objects in space, and what it means to ‘listen’ to such an exhibition.

In 1989 Cage started working on a commissioned project for the Museum of Contemporary Art,

Los Angeles (MOCA): a chance-derived, four-movement composition for museum entitled

Rolywholyover A Circus (spelled with three silent spaces before the ‘A’). This was a long-term, performative, multicentred event for gallery installers, audiences, artworks, artifacts, scores, plants, stones, books, chess tables, chairs, and pieces of ephemera. According to Julie Lazar,

MOCA curator who worked with Cage on this project, the composer, while doing trials and preparations for Rolywholyover, composed two other compositions for museum. Both of these other works were smaller in scale: Changing Installation (1991) for the Mattress Factory in

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Pittsburgh and museumcircle (1991) for the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue

Pinakothek in Munich.115

By using a score—which included chance operations as well as instructions—to compose his exhibitions, Cage applied the same ideas and methodologies he had used to create his music.116 In doing so, Cage’s exhibitions are a spatial adaptation of his sound-composition principles: thus, we can experience his exhibitions the same way we might listen to his music. Moreover, when Cage performed a sculptural space through a musical score, he showed us how sound could also become a structure for conceiving the visual, in the exhibitory.

John Cage in the Gallery – Making the Abstract Tangible

It was on February 7, 1943, that Cage had his first performance at a museum space. This was a performance of percussion works that featured his wife, the artist Xenia Cage, and the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, at the New York Museum of Modern Art.117 Subsequently,

115 This is according to Julie Lazar, MOCA curator who worked with Cage on this project in 1991. All the information regarding Rolywholyover A Circus, if not noted otherwise, was provided to me by Lazar, whom I interviewed. I would also like to acknowledge the help of Laura Kuhn, director of the John Cage Trust, who gave me access to 12 boxes of archival material related to Rolywholyover A Circus. 116 For example, the composer who allowed sounds to be themselves—that is, without any need of descriptive information—treated objects in the same manner, detaching them from language. In all three of Cage’s compositions for museum, no labels were placed beside the objects, though the objects were numbered and a numbered list of the objects on display was available. This label omission could be read as an agitative act. But according to Lazar, this act was decided on by Cage, together with key museum staff, after realizing the extreme height at which some pieces were to be hung and the proximity of some hangings. According to Lazar, it was Cage’s ongoing interest in “collage”—both in sound art and visual art—that led him to situate “high art” alongside ephemera and non-art objects. She contends it was this interest in collage, along with Cage’s rejection of authorship, that formed the main impetus behind his three compositions for museum. 117 Cage often told the story of how Peggy Guggenheim meant to cover the cost of transportation of his instruments from Chicago, as well as the cost of their stay in New York, and how she cancelled her generous arrangement after she learned of this event at MoMA - “I’d come from Chicago and was staying in the apartment of Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst… Peggy had agreed to pay for the transport of my percussion instruments from Chicago to New York, and I was to give a concert to open her gallery, The Art of This Century. Meanwhile, being young and ambitious, I had also arranged to give a concert at the Museum of Modern Art. When Peggy discovered that, she cancelled not

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Cage performed his music in museums and galleries many times; another fifteen years later, he exhibited his graphic scores alone, as these were of interest due to their links to his performances, as well as because of their calligraphic qualities and aesthetic appeal. That exhibition of scores debuted on May 15, 1958, at the Stable Gallery in New York, an event timed to coincide with a twenty-five-year retrospective concert at Town Hall. Today Cage’s scores, along with his drawings, lithographs, and watercolours, are included in gallery and museum exhibitions and collections worldwide.

Water Music (1952) represents one of the first times Cage deliberately emphasized a score’s visual nature. Inscribed on large sheets, the score for this work is to be mounted like a poster during the performance, positioned so that it is visible to both performer and audience. In a 1984 interview with Ev Grimes, Cage explained the evolution of his graphic scores and their relationship to visual arts and music in this way:

I began doing graphic notations, and those graphic notations led

other people to invite me to make graphic works apart from music.

And those led me in turn to make musical scores that were even

more graphic… I don’t feel that I’m being unfaithful to music when

I’m drawing. (1989, 184)

The plexigram118 Not Wanting to Say Anything about Marcel (1969) was John Cage’s first visual art piece, made while he was a composer in residence at the University of Cincinnati.119 Cage

only the concert, but also her willingness to pay for the transport of the instruments. When she gave me this information, I burst into tears. In the room next to mine at the back of the house, Marcel Duchamp was sitting in a rocking chair, smoking a cigar. He asked why I was crying, and I told him. He said virtually nothing, but his presence was such that I felt calmer” (1989, 11). 118 Cage titled his silk screen prints on Plexiglas panels ‘plexigrams.’ 119 This plexigram came about after he was approached by a local art patron, Alice Weston, with the idea of producing a commissioned lithograph in response to the then-recent death of Marcel Duchamp. Cage said: “I had been asked by

150 created his plexigrams by using chance operations120 to select a group of pages from the 1955 edition of The American Dictionary, and to derive a word or word fragment from those pages.121

But it was in 1978 that his serious exploration of the field of visual art began, through his experiments with printmaking at Crown Point Press, San Francisco. He began with etching and later added watercolour, smoke, and fire. During the last years of his life, Cage created a significant body of work in this vein.

On the subject of his process of printmaking at Crown Point Press, Joan Retallack once asked Cage whether the performance of printmaking, which also produces sound, is music, or whether it is no longer music since it is a process of making a still object that does not vibrate. Cage replied that

“if in doing something you do it without regard to itself, but to hearing it, it then is music” (1996,

112). Retallack asked further what the difference was between looking at a performance of 4’33’’ and looking at Global Village (aquatint, diptych on smoked paper, 1989). To that, Cage answered that it depended on what you were doing when you were looking at these two works, and that if you were listening while looking at Global Village, then this too could be considered “musical theatre” (1996, 142).

one of the magazines to do something for Marcel… I had just before heard Jap [Jasper Johns] say “I don't want to say anything about Marcel,” because they had asked him to say something about Marcel in the magazine too. So, I called both the Plexigrams and the lithographs, ‘Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel,’ quoting Jap without saying so” (1996, 131). 120 He used three coins—the first flip of the coins established the vertical location of one of the sixty-four squares; subsequent flips located the horizontal. Once this process had isolated a group of pages, he would toss the coins again to determine a specific page, and then again for an individual word. 121 He collaborated on both the plexigrams and lithographs with Calvin Sumsion, an artist, designer, and visual communications consultant. Art historian Barbara Rose notes that while Cage usually used chance as a means of determining image, composition, and colour, he was, in the plexigrams and lithographs, also examining the problem of meaning. She adds that by posing to himself the problem of creating an homage to his late friend Marcel Duchamp without referring to Duchamp, “he is asking what happens when one avoids something deliberately. Among the things he is trying to avoid are conscious choice, or taste, harmony and quality as deliberately imposed elements” (2011, 233).

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Theatre Piece (1952) at Black Mountain College, as well as David Tudor’s performance of 4’33’’

(1952) in Woodstock, introduced Cage’s theatrical music. His most ambitious theatrical piece is probably HPSCHD (1967–69), which he created with Lejaren Hiller, a composer and, at that time, the head of the computer music facilities of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Lasting for four and a half hours, it premiered on May 16, 1969 in front of an audience of roughly six thousand as part of the university’s centennial. It included seven harpsichords, fifty-eight channels of amplified sound, NASA films of space travel, six thousand four hundred slides from eighty projectors on a three hundred-and-forty-foot circular screen, and two hundred and eight tapes.

Cage started working with magnetic tape in the early 1950s. For example, Williams Mix (1952–

53) is a piece for eight tracks comprising quarter-inch magnetic tape. Cage used chance based on the I Ching122 to compose a pattern for the cutting and splicing of sounds recorded on tape, with a rhythmic structure123 of 5-6-16-3-11-5 and six categories of sounds.124 Pitch, timbre, and loudness

122 Cage applied the principles of the I Ching to his music for the first time in the third and final movement of his Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950–51). Until then he worked with the magic square (an arrangement of distinct numbers, usually in a square grid) placing groups of sounds, instead of numbers, into his charts (1981, 43). It was the visual resemblance of the magic square and the I Ching hexagram chart that first drew Cage to apply the latter to his Concerto. As he told Daniel Charles: “On seeing the I Ching table I was immediately struck by its resemblance to the magic square. It was even better! From that moment on, the I Ching has never left my side” (1981, 43). Music of Changes, a 1951 solo piano piece that Cage wrote for David Tudor, was his first musical work done exclusively with decisions based on the I Ching. 123 Cage used what he called “rhythmic structures” to refer to the uniformity of the subdivision of the whole and the subdivision of its parts. As Jochem Valkenburg explains: if a composition is “divided into five sections of 4,3,2,3, and 4 phrases each (for a total of 16 phrases), while the bars of each phrase are likewise arranged in groups of 4-3-2-3-4 bars (16 bars in total). The large-scale structure is thus filled with iterations of itself on a lower level, resulting in an overall structure of 16 * 16 = 256 bars (disregarding a small coda). In the actual composition, this structure is articulated in various ways, including changes in musical material, timbre, dynamics, or by the completion of linear processes and other cadence-like effects” (2010, 68–75). 124 A (city sounds), B (country sounds), C (electronic sounds), D (manually produced sounds), E (wind-produced sounds), and F (“small” sounds, requiring amplification). Cage made a realization of the work in 1952/53 (starting in May 1952) with the assistance of Earle Brown, Louis and Bebe Barron, David Tudor, Ben Johnston, and others, but it is also possible to create other versions. The most elaborate realizations in recent years have been undertaken by Larry Austin.

152 are also notated in the score and approximately six hundred recordings are necessary to make a version of this piece.125

A later example of his use of magnetic tape is Cage’s only sound-and-light installation Writings

Through the Essay: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1987). This piece debuted at Documenta

8 and consists of thirty-six channels of sound recordings, twenty-four theatrical lights, and six chairs. The recordings are of Cage reading 18 mesostics he created from “On the Duty of Civil

Disobedience” (1849) by Henry David Thoreau.126 Some of the mesostic recordings are twenty- two minutes long, and others just 30 seconds. In all of these recordings, Cage’s voice is manipulated by pitch and speed to refer to Erik Satie’s Messe des pauvres (1893–95).127 Cage explained to John Diliberto that he made these mesostics as a present from Thoreau to Satie: “Satie was known as Monsieur le Pauvre [‘Mr. Poor’] and Thoreau said that the best thing a man can do when he is rich is to carry out the projects he had when he was poor” (2005). Writings Through the Essay was installed in a church. The space was filled with Cage’s voice coming out from multiple auto-reverse cassettes, and as Cage further explained to Diliberto, “since the machines are not synchronized there’ll never be a real repetition. It’ll change all the time” (2005). The chairs were also repositioned daily and the lights were often fading in and out based on a chance-derived, computerized score programmed by composer Andrew Culver.128

125 For further information on Williams Mix (1952), see the John Cage Trust, http://johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Work- Detail.cfm?work_ID=246 126 In this text Thoreau asserts that citizens must oppose government attempts to implicate them in acts of injustice; he especially emphasizes this in respect to slavery and the Mexican-American War. 127 The Messe des pauvres (1893–95) (Mass for the Poor) is a partial musical setting of the mass for fixed choir and organ. 128 Andrew Culver worked with Cage for almost ten years. A list of programs used by Cage and available on the Internet as shareware can be found at Anarchic Harmony, http://www.anarchicharmony.org/People/Culver/CagePrograms.html.

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Cage conceived of technology as a path to a new landscape of the mind “that cannot be measured the way things were formerly measured” (1978/2014, 34:02), as he explained in a panel discussion on the problems of “Time and Space Concepts in Music” (1978). His chance operations were the ultimate tool for accessing this realm—expanding the meaning of sound and, with it, the content of the acoustic field itself.129 In that same 1978 panel discussion, Cage explained that in his scores for spatial compositions, the placement of any object, element, or performer “is their time”

(1978/2014, 45:08).

His method of translating temporal to spatial time (and vice versa) can be found in his series of drawings and music inspired by the sensibility of the Zen garden at Ryōan-ji Temple in Kyoto.

This garden includes a collection of fifteen rocks placed in a landscape of raked white gravel. Cage visited this garden in the early 1960s, and in the summer of 1983, he started a series of drawings entitled Where R=Ryoanji (1983–92) by drawing silhouettes of 15 different stones from his own personal collection.130 Around the same time, oboist James Ostryniec asked Cage to write a piece for him, which resulted in the first part in a series of musical pieces entitled Ryoanji (1983–85).131

Cage explained that while composing, he thought of the garden as “being four staves, or two pages

– each page having two staves. And the staves are actually the area of the garden. Knowing the whole of it, I can find by chance operations where to put which stone” (1996, 242).

129 As Cage explained in Experimental Music (1958), his interest in technology brought about his conception of sound as existing in a field. With two tape recorders and one disc recorder, the following processes are possible: 1) a single recording of any sound may be made; 2) sound may be altered; 3) electronic mixing permits the presentation of any number of sounds; 4) ordinary splicing permits the juxtaposition of any sounds. “The situation made available by these means,” he states, “is essentially a total sound-space, the limits of which are ear-determined only” (1961, 9). 130 In total, Cage created 170 drawings on the subject. He started with a piece paper with the same proportions as the garden, placed a stone on it, then drew a pencil outline around the stone. The selection of fifteen stones, the grade of the pencils he selected, and their placement on the page were determined by chance operations for each drawing. Repeated, this process resulted in a scale of densities of lines and curves according to the variety of stones and different pencils selected. 131 “For any solo from or combination of voice, flute, oboe, trombone, double bass ad libitum with tape, and obbligato percussionist or any 20 instruments.” For more information visit https://johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Work- Detail.cfm?work_ID=165

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By imagining each stave’s long lines on the garden’s white sand, Cage could apply chance to the garden’s structure and determine the placement of the fifteen stones (in his visual work) or notes

(in his music). He also used this methodology of time-space notation in his later musical pieces, such as Europeras (1987–92), which he considered to be collages of three-dimensional and aural phenomena.

Changing Installation, 1991; museumcircle, 1991; Rolywholyover A Circus, 1991–95

In total, Cage composed three exhibitions using a score: Rolywholyover A Circus, Changing

Installation, and museumcircle. Cage was not the first, of course, to explore the museum-exhibition apparatus. Duchamp, who significantly influenced Cage, produced a series of interventions as a curator-designer of exhibitions from as early as 1938.132 But while Duchamp’s interventions radically re-conceived what the space of an art exhibition could look like, Cage’s exhibition strategies manifested something new. As a composer, Cage composed his exhibitions by using a score, using the same methodologies he used to compose his music and visual objects, which could also be music, as long as one is listening to them (according to Cage).

9.1 museumcircle, 1991 museumcircle was performed for the first time in the exhibition John Cage: Kunst als

Grenzbeschreitung John Cage und die Moderne [John Cage: Art as a Transgression of

Boundaries: John Cage and the Moderns], which took place between July 18 to October 27, 1991,

132 The Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme was an exhibition by Surrealist artists that took place from January 17 to February 24, 1938, in the Galérie Beaux-Arts, Paris.

155 at the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek in Munich. In addition to museumcircle, the exhibition included some of Cage’s New River Watercolors series and the

Ryoanji drawings, along with concerts of Cage’s music presented during the course of the exhibit.

In the exhibition catalogue Clelia Segieth writes that Cage sent his “concept” for museumcircle in a short note:

To make an exhibition in the Bayerische Staatsgemälde-

sammlungen, in Munich of articles from other Munich museums,

hung or placed in chance determined positions. To bring this about

each museum may offer to come say, a dozen objects. From

the potential some chance formation will be used select the actual

ones to be used. (1991, 106) 133

I would suggest that this “note” is actually a score, and, like many of his later scores, it is indefinite and open to the performer’s interpretation. Segieth writes that the unfixed instructions triggered questions: Which museums to approach for the loans? Should the list of objects be related to Cage?

And most of all: Should a project which has, so it seems, no logical sense and structure, and therefore contradicts many conceptual and scientific patterns of thought, be executed in the first place?

133 The participating institutions were: Bavarian National Museum, the Bavarian State Collection of General and Applied Geology, the Bavarian State Collection of Paleontology and Historical Geology, the Bavarian Administration of State Palaces, Gardens and Lakes, the German Hunting and Fishing Museum, the Deutsches Theater museum, the Mineralogical State Collection, the Munich City Museum, the Munich Animal Museum, the Museum of Castings of Classical Art, the New Collection, the Prehistoric State Collection, the State Antiques Collections and Glyptothek, the State Graphic Collection, the State Coin Collection, the State Museum for Ethnology, the State Collection of Egyptian Art, and the Municipal Gallery in the Lenbachhaus (1991, 88).

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Soon enough it became clear to the exhibition organizers134 that they would be forced to make decisions that would directly affect the composition process—and therefore, the exhibition itself.

This turned the score-realization process into something as important as the performance/exhibition itself. Further, Cage’s open and ambiguous score welcomed interpretation and decision-making, but the use of chance ensured that no direct influence on the part of the exhibition organizers and/or the lenders would apply. Segieth writes that, in this way, Cage even eliminated the subjectivity of the artist; he allowed the objects a space to exist independently from language. Inspired by Buddhist thought, Cage’s museumcircle modelled a vision of the exhibition space not as self-determined and self-representative (whether in regards to objects, artists and their biographies, or lenders and their histories, etc.) but rather as non-intentional, anti-authoritarian, and non-hierarchical.

The result of the museumcircle score was as much a surprise to Cage, perhaps, as it was to everyone else: a juxtaposition of artifacts, art, and everyday objects. Segieth compares museumcircle to Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2, and states that they are another example of Cage’s approach to European art, as he brings Oriental thought to bear on Occidental materials in a particular situation in which nothing is conveyed in advance, thus potentially opening up new knowledge. In Cage’s museumcircle the traditional objet trouvé is detached from any genre, quality, value, or context, and the visitor to it is left to confront ‘only’ the complexity of the everyday. This visitor is obliged to create their own systems of reference within a chaotic structure—a situation comparable to the natural, asymmetrical structure of a Japanese garden,

Segieth writes. The visitor may feel the impulse to rearrange the objects on display, and thereby to change the ideas they seem to represent; and in that sense, museumcircle is not an exhibition

134 Ulrich Bischoff, Thomas Dreher, Sigrid Gareis, Robyn Schulkowsky and Bettina Wagner-Bergel.

157 that lies on one single plane of curatorial significance. In other words, museumcircle is a score for deconstructing the more traditionally orchestrated, governed gallery experience. In that respect, museumcircle was not an exhibition about Cage in the way a didactic retrospective exhibition of his works would be. It was, instead, a demonstration of his practice, an opportunity for the audience to be involved in its making. Visitors were able to not only look at or listen to his work, but also to become part of its realization: to perform it, to walk inside it, and experience it with all their senses.

9.2 Changing Installation, 1991 Changing Installation was performed at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh between October 19,

1991, and February 16, 1992, as part of the Carnegie International—the fifty-first in a series of contemporary art exhibitions organized in connection with the Carnegie Museum of Art.135 The artists Barbara Luderowski and Michael Olijnyk as co-directors of the Mattress Factory invited

Cage to install a new work. Cage produced an artist statement:

In an empty room the chair(s), the walls neither painted nor the paint

removed (the walls as they are), the use of chance operations to determine

the placement and orientation of the chair(s) and which fifteen of a source

of forty-eight works, twelve each by Dove Bradshaw, John Cage, Mary Jean

Kenton, and Marsha Skinner are presented each day. (Giannini 2001, 45)

Effectively, I would maintain, the above statement acts as a score; but unlike the score for museumcircle, Changing Installation’s score initiates a process for creating an exhibition from a

135 This exhibition was curated by Lynn Cooke and Mark Francis.

158 pre-determined pool of objects (rather than a more open-ended pool of objects). Cage chose twelve works of his own and asked the other three artists to do the same. He also wished to include chairs in Changing Installation, just as he had in his earlier sound and light installation Writing Through the Essay. Ultimately, Cage chose seven chairs from those available at the Mattress Factory, without concern for color or design (figure 67-69).

Figure 67: John Cage, Changing Installation (1991), Mattress factory (Map) Courtesy of the Mattress Factory

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Figure 68: John Cage, Changing Installation (1991), Mattress factory (Map) Courtesy of Mattress Factory.

Figure 69: John Cage, Changing Installation (1991), Mattress factory (Map) Courtesy of Mattress Factory.

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Cage performed Changing Installation on the fourth floor of the Mattress Factory, which was then a rough unfinished working space. The brick walls were exposed, showing marks and signs of past activities in the room. There were also large windows and a lot of natural light. Cage made a grid of the gallery floor and walls, and he assigned a number to each grid space, as well as to each work and each chair. Cage then used those numbers in his computerized chance operations program (IC) each day to determine a new daily layout for the wall-hung works and the chairs. Another element of the composition was a camera that was positioned each day according to a score; this camera made a chronicle of the changing gallery as it itself changed position, registering the impact of the natural light as an additional element in flux.136

In an interview with Retallack, Cage said that what he enjoyed most in Changing Installation was that for each of the 105 days of the exhibition, every successive day was different, and no two days over the whole duration were the same. He also added that for Rolywholyover, he would want to extend those daily changes, and to retain marks and traces of daily changes on the wall: “The marks that are already on the walls will be left — like that mark over there (pointing at a wall), or these.

I love these things to happen. All that kind of thing will be left” (1996, 135).

136 Michael Olijnyk, who changed the installation elements each day, as well as photographing the installation according to Cage’s score, writes that “[e]very morning for 103 days, I would get up at 5:00 a.m., walk downstairs from where I live at the 6th floor, take down the works from the previous day, and put in place the new arrangement of chairs and artwork. I would photograph the space each day as well. We had a cat that would always go downstairs with me. As I photographed the pieces for 103 days, you can see that there’s a cat in the center of the photographs” (2001, 44).

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9.3 Rolywholyover A Circus 1991–1995 Rolywholyover A Circus was performed for the first time at the Museum of Contemporary Art,

Los Angeles from September 12 through November 28, 1993. According to Lazar, Cage’s original idea for MOCA was to create an exhibition of circles, a form representing his long-standing interest in Asian philosophy. In her essay for the Rolywholyover catalogue, Lazar wrote that she suggested a “major, but non-linear, exhibition that reflected his wide-ranging interest” (1993), and that Cage was amused by this idea. She further noted that he immediately asked for the inventory lists of all major museums nationwide (but readily agreed to settle on ten museums instead), aiming to perform chance operations using his computerized I Ching system to choose objects for the exhibition from these lists. From early stages of contemplating the project, Cage wanted to keep the large gallery of MOCA open, where visitors could do “what they want[ed]” (dance, write music, read, etc.) while experiencing other happenings around them. Cage asked to turn the gallery into a place where one could live, and to include plants, rocks, books, chess tables, chairs, and even a jacuzzi (the latter was not approved). He also asked for the use of available daylight where possible and the inclusion of live performances and videos.

The Rolywholyover composition eventually included four movements: Main Circus, museumcircle, Cage Gallery, and City Circle. After Cage’s sudden death in August 1992,

Rolywholyover was enacted by Lazar; the exhibition/composition travelled, between 1993 and

1995, to four other galleries and cities worldwide: the Menil Collection in Houston; the Solomon

R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; Art Tower Mito Contemporary Art Center; and the

Philadelphia Museum of Art (figures 70-73).

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Figure 70: John Cage, Main Circus Computerized Daily Score, Rolywholyover A Circus (1991-95) Courtesy of John Cage Trust.

Figure 71: John Cage, Main Circus installation view, Rolywholyover A Circus (1991-95) Courtesy of John Cage Trust

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For Main Circus, Cage created a list of artists and works he wished to include. In this respect, the movement resembles Changing Installation to some extent. But where Changing Installation had four artists, for Main Circus Cage proposed more than fifty artists. Included among these artists were Dove Bradshaw, Joseph Cornell, Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, Morris Graves,

Jasper Johns, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Ryman, Fanny Schoening, Mark

Tobey and Cy Twombly.

In keeping with his understanding that in sound there is no such thing as an original note, Cage allowed copies and replicas to be incorporated into Main Circus. Each work (or replica) was numbered, as were the gallery walls (and in some locations, there were movable walls). These numbers were then inserted into ROVER, a chance-derived computerized score which indicated— daily!—the new placements, order and setting of the gallery.137

There were other new aspects in Main Circus. The score indicated the times that changes in placement order or setting should take place, which, unlike Changing Installation, were always during opening hours. Visitors could witness the computer printing out generated changes, which in turn were translated to works being hung on the walls and taken down by gallery installers before visitors’ eyes. Another significant change Cage composed for Main Circus was the inclusion of “storage” as a possible location of “display.” Every work, therefore, might by chance stay in “storage” throughout the period of the show. This “storage” space was actually inside the gallery, with the works not on display piled up, signalling the possibility of arrangements beyond one’s view.

The two other movements were Cage Gallery and City Circle. The former was a room with scores,

137 In her catalogue essay, Lazar acknowledged composer Andrew Culver for programming ROVER: “In this way Culver played a critical role in the realization of Rolywholyover A Circus following Cage’s death” (1993).

164 prints, watercolors, and drawings that Cage had done at Crown Point Press and at the Miles C.

Horton, Sr., Research Center in Mountain Lake, Virginia, installed with reference to Cage’s chance-derived plan. City Circle consisted of live and videotaped performances in celebration of what the exhibition’s press release described as “the spirit of Cage, by the city’s most innovative artist.” The schedule of performances was not published, in keeping with Cage’s own wishes. It was explained in the museum’s press release that, “the schedule remains unannounced until the day of the event, allowing visitors to experience in another fashion the serendipity of chance”

(1993).

Figure 72: John Cage, museumcircle installation view, Rolywholyover A Circus (1991-95) Courtesy of John Cage Trust.

The word Rolywholyover, which was coined by Irish novelist and poet James Joyce in Finnegans

Wake (1939), 138 was chosen by Cage to characterize his composition for MOCA as a celebration of dynamism and change. As noted above, the word “Rolywholyover” is followed by three silent

138 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1939), p. 597

165 spaces, then “A Circus.” This titling strategy implied two things: firstly, that Rolywholyover A

Circus was a performative event and secondly, that the composition was a continuation of Cage’s ongoing research on silence. As in 4'33'' and 0'00'', where audiences became part of their “silent” experiences, Rolywholyover empowered visitors and art installers as performers and participants.

While they were dealing with the objects displayed—moving chairs, playing chess, reading books, etc.—they were adding sounds and themselves becoming part of the work. The dynamic nature of the exhibition allowed visitors to return to the galleries often, and to experience the composition’s elements differently each time (1993, 17). Through the marks on the walls left from previous hangings, visitors could also experience time passing, as well as the reminder that something had

happened while they were away—that there were things happenings beyond their experience.

Figure 73: John Cage, Circle ‘storage’ installation view, Rolywholyover A Circus (1991-95) Courtesy of John Cage Trust

Another performative element in Rolywholyover was its circus-like structure. There was no right way or specific order in which to experience the exhibition’s four movements—it all happened at once, and spectators could enter and exit the movements from multiple points. This format of display followed Cage’s doctrine of a plurality of centres, a concept that was at the heart of his practice. A variety of circus-like events and compositions preceded Rolywholyover; among these were the happening at Black Mountain College (1952), Musicircus (1967), HPSCHD (1969), and

Roaratorio, An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), to name a few examples. When interviewed by Jeremy Millar in 2010, Lazar said,

In a Cage circus, events take place simultaneously within a single

space, and audience members come and go randomly. There isn’t a

specific beginning, middle or end—if you can’t hear or see

everything in the room, that’s okay, you can at least see and hear

something of interest. (2010, 42)

Moreover, the use of Cage’s circus-like structure ensured that Rolywholyover was, rather than a conceptual object made by one person, a conceptual process that engulfed the spectators and made them, intentionally or unintentionally, part of a group that set the process in motion. As such, the structure of this composition for museum is related to what Richard Kostelanetz defines in The

Theatre of Mixed Means (1968) as “pure happening,” for it “provides neither a focus for one’s attention nor sense of duration; and the performance envelops the audience” (1968, 5).139 By

139 Kostelanetz wrote the above statement at a time when Cage’s music was becoming more and more social and anarchic, with compositions that included direct statements such as “we don’t need government” (Untitled Anarchist Poem, 1966) or “the best government is no government at all” (The Song Books, 1970). Yet, according to Cage, he wasn’t practicing politics because “[p]racticing politics consists in accepting and using the principle of government”

166 167 composing Rolywholyover as a performative space, and offering visitors the opportunity to take part, Cage infused ‘experience’ into the format of the art exhibition, making it an evolving and central element of the exhibition. Spectators were able to open drawers, move chairs, sit and play chess, read the displayed books, touch objects, and talk openly. Through this openness, Cage offered visitors the opportunity to be part of the creative act itself, and he placed the final tune

(whether a crescendo or a fadeout) in their heads and hands.

In her essay for the Rolywholyover catalogue, Retallack explored realms relevant to Cage’s museum experience, focusing on Cage’s conception of play, which unfolds “at the moment of any disruption of habit” (2003, 223). Illustrating this notion, Retallack quotes the British psychoanalyst

D.W. Winnicott: “[p]laying is an experience, always a creative experience” (2003, 233). Such a concept suggests that the museum, in Cage’s composition, can also be read or structured as a playground—and not as an entertainment complex or an educational establishment. The museum,

Rolywholyover asserts, can be a place where visitors dynamically engage with artworks, with other visitors, and with the exhibition space itself. Also, the museum can invite “a practice or reading that enacts a tolerance for ambiguity and a delight in a complex possibility” (2003, 221), suggests

Retallack, quoting a line by Cage.

Cage’s notion of play is also why Rolywholyover was well-received (and likely well-perceived), even though it had no labels or didactic panels, its musical performances happened without any announcements, and the museum looked as though it was permanently in the middle of an installation process. This is a piece that maintained the curiosity of its audiences. In her notes from

(1981, 60). “On the contrary, anarchy is concerned only with the absence of government. And I believe that we would be able to live much better than at present if we were in a world which contained no nations—even united nations!” (1981, 60). For him, the way to influence and make change was by composing a music of social process and opening up his scores for interpretation. As he wrote in the forward to A Year from Monday (1967), “when you get right down to it, a composer is simply someone who tells other people what to do. I find this an unattractive way of getting things done” (1967, IX-X).

168 a school field trip she arranged early in her teaching career, Sara Wilson McKay describes her students’ experience of the Rolywholyover iteration that took place at the Menil Collection in

Houston:

[The students] saw works being hung and taken down right in front

of them... Pieces were listed by numbers, not names and artist

identifications, and hung in unusual ways... Additionally, just

outside the large gallery, there were drawers and drawers of items

connected to Cage such as letters from Ad Reinhardt and sketches

and ideas from Merce Cunningham. (2009, 62)

According to Wilson McKay, who is now Associate Professor of Art Education at Virginia

Commonwealth University, the opening of each drawer revealed new and unexpected bits of information that unfolded the exhibition structure, “making the students want to see more” (2009,

62).

Emptiness/Nothingness/Silence—Cage’s Exhibitions as the Evolution of His Silence

Cage, who died in 1992, did not live to write his own thoughts and reflections about his compositions for museum. However, from a set of interviews he gave to the poet and scholar Joan

Retallack while working on these projects, much can be learned about his ideas and intentions.140

For example, consider this comment on the mode of the art exhibition:

140 Joan Retallack interviewed John Cage extensively toward the end of his life. These interviews were later gathered and published in the book Musicage: Cage Muses on Words Art Music (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, 1996).

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You know that I have a kind of basic idea that music is music and

painting is painting, but I’m having recently new ideas, or I’m

getting ideas from one field that work in a different field…For

instance, the percussion piece that dips into silence. An exhibition

can dip into leaving a wall empty. And it’s out of that emptiness,

and not being put off by “nothing” happening – and when you see

it, it really impresses you – that hearing it, hearing the emptiness,

becomes a possibility all over again. (1996, 91)

I therefore suggest that Cage’s compositions for museum are a spatial translation of his silence, exploring the meaning of emptiness and nothingness, as he himself suggested. I further maintain that his compositions for museum demonstrate the evolution of his silence throughout the years.

Or better, that his understanding of ‘silence,’ in his two famous silent works, 4'33'' (1952) and

0'00'' (1962), as well as in his three compositions for museum, developed over time.

10.1 4'33'' (1952) The story is familiar. In 1951 Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, with deep concern for the opposition between sound and silence. While expecting to experience no sound, he was utterly surprised to hear two sounds: one high and one low. According to Cage, the technician who worked there informed him that those sounds were his own, the high was his nervous system in operation and the low his blood circulation. This experience made it clear for him: there was no such thing as silence, there was always something to hear, something to see.

This experience, followed by a viewing of White Painting (1951) by Robert Rauschenberg, encouraged Cage to create something similar in music.

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4'33'', also known as his silent piece, is probably Cage’s most famous work. Those familiar with the composer’s name are most likely to be familiar with it—and have a strong opinion about it, as well. But because 4'33'' is known far more by reputation then by actual firsthand experience, it is worthwhile to provide its precise description as well as its history. The piece is in three parts of fixed lengths: 30'', 2'23'', and 1'40'' (for a total duration of 4'33''). According to Cage, this duration was chosen by chance-based means after adding many shorter durations of silence (1990, 20–21).

4'33'' was premiered by pianist David Tudor at a Woodstock Artists Association concert in August

1952 at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock. The performance involved Tudor sitting in front of the piano, holding a stopwatch in his hand and not playing a tune for exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds. In an interview Tudor gave to Allan Miller for the documentary American Masters: John

Cage – I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It (1985) he said the audience was in an “uproar over the [first] performance.” And afterwards, when Cage opened the floor for questions, it is said that one of the artists present got up and said: “Good people of Woodstock, I think we should run these people out of town.” That was the reaction (1985, 00:52).

4'33'' was poorly received at its first performance, even by the Woodstock Artists Association’s supportive contemporary-art audience. Thus, the enduring debate on the essence of Cage’s silent piece began, with the piece steadily gaining proponents as well as opponents. Those who see it for the groundbreaking piece that it is—one that completely changed the field of contemporary music—understand that 4'33'' reveals that there is no such thing as silence. With this fundamental shift in perception, sound and silence are no longer opposites, but rather parts of a large field of aural experience. Silence, in fact, is sound that one does not expect to hear and, therefore, is not the absence of sound, but rather the presence of unintended sounds. Those who are detractors simply see (or hear) no beauty in a performer not playing his instrument.

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When Cage was asked, in the mid-1980s, what he learned from the debate around 4’33’’, he replied that he was not interested in learning, but rather in ways of changing his mind—as, he said, we all do. He pointed out that the way people felt about 4'33'' then, in the mid-1980s, was different from the way it was first received in the 1950s. The reason, according to Cage, was that people had less confidence in time as they proceeded further into the future. As people age, they might wonder, for instance, how long the “future” will be. “We don’t take for granted it will be forever.... [Y]ou might say we wonder if we may have ruined the silence” (1985, 00:53). To fully understand

Cage’s thoughts on 4’33’’, it is worthwhile to consider the philosophy that preceded this work, starting with the spiritual path that led him to conceive the piece. This will help to articulate his

“silence,” and, more importantly, what he means when he says we might have “ruined” it.

The mid-1940s was a critical time for Cage. He was in a difficult place in his personal life as well as his professional life. He had studied with Arnold Schoenberg and realized he had no interest in harmony. He had invented the prepared piano and begun composing music for dancers. He had also met the young dancer Merce Cunningham, and separated from his wife, the artist Xenia Cage.

These events made Cage question his own identity,141 and as he explained in an interview with

Holly Martin, he was looking for something more—a reason, a meaning for devoting his life to music.142 He would find some answers, as he further told Martin, in an encounter with Gita

Sarabhai. Sarabhai, an Indian composer who was worried about the influence of Western culture on traditional Indian music, came to the United States to study Western music. She asked Cage if

141 Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists (New York: Penguin Press, 2012). 142 “We’re taught that things are beautiful and ugly, and that in the case of music, for instance, through European influence, you’re taught not to have parallel fifths or parallel octaves, not to have certain dissonances unless you prepare them properly, and so forth and so on. And we gradually in modern music have found that that’s all nonsense, so that the situation actually of a modern composer was not so much a distinguishing between beautiful and ugly— because almost anything has been accepted as beautiful in the twentieth century already—but to find some, actually some reason for devoting one’s life to music. Why would one do that?” (2013).

172 he could teach her and he agreed to do so for free if she would teach him Indian philosophy and music. And so they did, daily, for six months. Cage often named her as “the angel who came from

India.” When she returned to India she gave him The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Sarabhai taught

Cage that “the traditional reason for making music in India was to quiet the mind and thus make it susceptible to divine influences” (2013). Other answers he found in the writings of Ananda K.

Coomaraswamy, whose lectures he attended at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1945 and 1946.

Coomaraswamy’s The Transformation of Nature in Art influenced Cage, teaching him, in particular, “that the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation”

(2013).

While Sarabhai and Coomaraswamy planted the seeds of Eastern wisdom in Cage, influencing his life and practice, it was his exposure to Japanese Zen Buddhism through the lectures of Dr. D.T.

Suzuki at Columbia University (between 1948 and 1951) that really altered his worldview. Cage makes one of his few extended references to Suzuki’s teaching in his collection of essays Silence, elaborating Suzuki’s take on the difference between Asian and European thinking: “In European thinking things are seen as causing one another and having effects, whereas in Oriental thinking this seeking of cause and effect is not emphasized but instead one makes an identification with what is here and now” (1961, 46). Cage goes on to share how Suzuki specified two qualities: unimpededness and interpenetration: “unimpededness is seeing that in all of space each thing and each human being is at the center...Interpenetration means that each one…is moving out in all directions penetrating and being penetrated by every other one no matter what the time or what the space” (1961, 46-7).

The idea that each and every thing is at the center came to be a central theme in the Suzuki- influenced Buddhism that Cage adopted. As Cage said:

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[T]his doctrine of nonobstruction means that I don’t wish to impose

my feelings on other people. Therefore, the use of chance

operations, indeterminacy, etcetera, the nonerection of patterns of

either ideas or feelings on my part, in order to leave those other

centers free to be the centers. (2003, 225)

Honouring all things (including all sounds), refusing intention, and embracing the unpredictable would be the themes that carried Cage’s practice forward.

This brings us back to 4'33'' and the meaning of Cage’s silence. When Cage introduced his new ideas to the Woodstock audience in 1952, most of them (if not all) did not listen. Maverick Concert

Hall is an open auditorium—meaning that it is open acoustically to the sounds that surround it.

Therefore, the audience might have heard the sounds that entered freely inside, but this was not music to their ears. They saw it as a political act, a provocative performance of some sort, not as pure music. It is important here to note that, only a few years earlier, Cage himself might have shared the same feelings as his Woodstock audience. In 1948 he wrote “A Composer’s

Confession,” which outlines his career in detail up to that point, ending with two pages of some of his “recent ideas.” Cage refused to publish his “Confession” until the end of his life, primarily because of the final section, which, as previously noted, upset the traditional Cagean lore of his famous silent piece. He wrote:

I have, for instance, several new desires (two may seem absurd but

I am serious about them): first, to compose a piece of uninterrupted

silence and sell it to Muzak Co. It will be 3 or 4 ½ minutes long—

those being the standard lengths of “canned” music—and its title

will be “Silent Prayer.” It will open with a single idea which I will

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attempt to make as seductive as the color and shape and fragrance

of a flower. The ending will approach imperceptibility. And, second,

to compose and have performed a composition using as instruments

nothing but twelve radios. It will be my Imaginary Landscape No.

4. (1948/2014)

Cage refers here to Muzak, a brand that delivers background music to retail stores. His idea to sell silence to Muzak in order to bring it back to the background of our lives can indeed be read as a political act—one that operates against the music industry, which turned the space between us, the silence, into a commodity. This passage from “Confession” also surely suggests that his initial ideas were there before he encountered Rauschenberg’s White Painting in 1951, and that 4'33'' was not the result of some sort of enlightenment or a sudden persuasion (as in the school of Zen which he preferred), but rather part of a longer endeavour. Above all, what “Confession” reveals is that, in 1948, his ideas about silence—along with his concerns about the way we can ruin it— were different from the conventional understanding of Cage. Silence was then taken, literally, as the absence of sound.

This is not to say that Cage’s encounter with Rauschenberg’s painting in 1951 did not have any influence on the process of realizing 4'33''. It surely did. But it was not the only factor that led to a sudden enlightenment.143 Cage’s explanation of the sudden school of Zen will give us some insight on that:

143 It is interesting to note here the influence Rauschenberg had on Morton Feldman, one of Cage’s dearest friends. In the early 1950s, Feldman saw one of Rauschenberg’s black paintings, which had black-painted newspapers stuck to it. He said that he immediately had to buy it, and that after living with it for a while, felt he must write music that would deal with being “neither life nor art, but something in between” (Feldman 1985, 135–6.)

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In the sudden school – which I prefer – there are three principal

truths. They’re called the whispered truths... [T]he first is that

creation is endless, hmm?... [T]he next is that your action should be

as though you were writing on water... not to make an impression.

And the final thing is to realize that the opposites are not opposite.

(1996, 163)

It is likely that in 1952, at the time he composed 4'33'', Cage might have considered that all sounds are equal, and that creation is endless, and even that sound and silence are not opposites. But still, in contrast to one of the above dictums, he chose to leave an impression. And that was because

4'33'' is a specific orchestrated situation, that of a pianist not playing the piano, onstage, for a determined period of time. These were a set of decisions that made 4'33'' obstructive and penetrative (and against Suzuki’s doctrine). The uproar of this first performance in Woodstock, and the long-lasting debate around this piece, are the result of those decisions, which he would change in composing 0'00'' roughly ten years later.

10.2 0'00'' (1962) James Pritchett states that the distinction between object and process describes Cage’s music from the 1960s on, when Cage “had moved from arranging things to facilitating processes” (1993, 146).

Pritchett attributes this change to the recognition Cage received after his ground-breaking ideas on silence and chance in the 1950s, with works such as Music of Changes (1951), The Ten Thousand

Things (1953–56), and, of course, 4'33'' (1952). This recognition affected the scope of Cage’s work, as the artist himself once told Morton Feldman:

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…once you pass the point of interesting people in what you’re

doing…then what they want is not anything new from you but rather

what you have done before. So that you could be kept busy week

after week, never having a chance to do anything but fulfill

engagements, answer the telephone, and answer your

correspondence. (1993, II)

Accordingly, between 1952 and 1959 Cage accomplished about forty compositions, but between

1962 and 1969 he completed only fifteen, due to obligations that had to do more with his career than his music. Because of this situation, Cage began including his life in his compositions.144

With life and music becoming one and the same, music shifted from being a compositional object to being a compositional process—in other words, an action.

Cage’s interest in actions can be seen in his works from the 1950s as well.145 The main change in his works from the 1960s onward is that he stopped indicating the sounds and the actions, replacing those directions with a process focused on the potential of sound. Among those works that exemplify this shift toward process is 0'00'', which is the third and final piece in a series corresponding to the three lines of a Haiku poem. Atlas Eclipticalis (1961) is the first in the series, representing “nirvana,” and Variations IV (1963) is the second, representing “samsara,” the turmoil of everyday life. 0"00'' represents “individual action.”

144 As Pritchett nicely puts it: “If notoriety was going to mean spending all this time answering correspondence, then Cage would adjust his art so that answering correspondence became a musical performance” (1993, 144). 145 One example is the Happening at Black Mountain College (1952), a joint performance with Cunningham, Rauschenberg, Tudor, artist and poet M. C. Richards, and poet Charles Olson. The happening had a simple guiding structure of random time brackets, and it incorporated films, slides, poetry, music, and dance. Another example is Water Music (1952), a composition for solo piano that also incorporated radios, whistles, water containers, and a deck of cards.

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0'00'' is also known as 4'33'' no. 2. Yet the compression between 4'33'' and 0'00'' shows the evolution of Cage’s understanding of silence over a decade or so. While 0'00'' is a “solo to be performed in any way by anyone,”146 4'33'' is a “tacet, for any instrument or combination of instruments.”147 It is clear that you need not be a musician to perform 0'00'', whereas 4'33'' invokes the presence of unplayed instruments.

But that does not mean that 0'00'' has no sound component, or that Cage’s focus was not on the sound, or even that this is not a musical work. The evidence for the importance of sound lies in the score, which contains only one sentence: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.”148 In specifically mentioning amplified sound, Cage clearly shows great concern for sound in 0'00''. This time, however, the focus was not on the unintentional sounds of the “silent” performer/s and their audience/s. Rather, 0'00'' was all about the unintentional sounds of an undetermined action. Accordingly, a day after writing the score,

Cage added instructions to allow interruptions of the action, to avoid repetition of the same action in another performance, and to exclude any action of a performative musical composition.149 These amendments show the evolution of his understanding of silence. In 4’33”, silence comprises the unintentional sounds of a composed situation. In 0’00”, the silence comprises unintentional sounds of the un-composed—that is, it is a piece that follows from the Zen Buddhist doctrine of non- obstruction, freeing the performer to follow their own centre.

The notion of embracing everything, including nothing at all, is at the core of Cage’s music from the 1960s onward, and this is why Cage turned to using chance as a method. Chance gave him a

146 John Cage Trust, http://johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Work-Detail.cfm?work_ID=17. 147 John Cage http://johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Work-Detail.cfm?work_ID=18. 148 John Cage http://johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Work-Detail.cfm?work_ID=18. 149 John Cage http://johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Work-Detail.cfm?work_ID=18.

178 means of avoiding his own ego; it allowed his compositions to surprise him, first and foremost.150

Daniel Charles recalls a conversation in response to his asking Cage the question, “Why chance?”:

“We talked about silence as the entirety of unintended sounds. Interchanging sound and silence was to depend on chance” (1981, 41).

Branden W. Joseph, interestingly, connects Cage’s ideas on silence and chance to Henri Bergson’s critique of nonbeing and disorder, as expressed in Creative Evolution (1911). Joseph quotes the reference Cage makes to Bergson in a lecture delivered at Dartmouth College in 1955: “Magnetic tape reveals to ears ... that things are in this life in a state of togetherness that is a real cause for joy, that their disorder, if so it appears to us, is simply (as Bergson has said) an order we had not been looking for.”151 Cage here embraces Bergson’s understanding of disorder as “the disappointment of the mind that finds before it an order different from what it wants” (1975, 234).

Bergson further states that the mind can go in “two opposite ways” and in both ways finds itself again (1975, 239): that is, the mind is able to embrace any chaotic disorder to the point at which it becomes the new order. The way we understand chance is no different. It holds inside itself the reason behind it—this chaos is due to chance. No further explanation is needed.

Chaos theory is one area in which attempts have been made to address the phenomenon of chance.

When Joan Retallack discussed chaos with Cage, she made a connection between his piece Art is

Either a Complaint or Do Something Else (1987–89) and a chapter on Mandelbrot in James

150 Moreover, this element of surprise, which is critical for chance, offers failure as a positive outcome. Failure, in this context, is no longer in opposition to success; they are both part of the same process. It is no surprise that Cage’s compositions often elicited questions about criteria of quality, questions like, “How are we to know if these artworks are any good?” Cage’s answer was that, in process-based works, “quality” might have a different meaning, process being a context “where ‘better’ or ‘'non-better’ lose their hold” (1978/2013 : 47:50). 151 John Cage, [“Dartmouth Spring '55”], folder 10, box 12, John Cage Papers, Collection 1000-72 Special Collection and Archives, Olin Library, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, quoted in Branden W. Joseph, “Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity” in The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art, ed. Julia Robinson (Barcelona: MACBA, 2010), 221.

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Gleick’s Chaos (1987). Cage responded: “I was thinking about this book that I haven’t read …

We know enough that the book exists. And we think of that as being a kind of corroboration. It makes chance operations not foolish, hmm?” (1996, 7).

Cage never did read Gleick’s book on chaos, it seems. However, in speaking over the years about chance as a method for achieving chaos, he expands the discussion, connecting rhythm and melody to the phenomenon of chaos. Rhythm and melody, he says, should be made “in the larger field where there was no beat and where there was no measurement” (1978/2013 34:02). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offer insights that I suggest help to explain Cage’s assertion, when they write:

“Rhythm is the milieus’ answer to chaos. What chaos and rhythm have in common is the in- between––between two milieus.... [I]n this in between, chaos becomes rhythm, not inexorably, but it has a chance to (2004, 313).” Cage’s chance, from this perspective, is his rhythm. “It is the difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition,” write Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 314). But it is not just that—it is also the path to new territories, as they add: “Chaos is not the opposite of rhythm, but the milieu of all milieus...” (2004, 313). Rhythm, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is a means of escaping from territories and forming new territories, or existing in a process of continual deterritorialization.

The use of technology in amplifying the sound of any action in 0'00" is another means of creating new, in-between territories. As Douglas Kahn notes, when Cage began using amplification to render audible a range of small and inaudible sounds, “he amplified amplification, extending audibility (thus musicality) to increasingly smaller sounds and to all sounds all the time” (1997,

585). As Cage noted, 0'00" is “the continuation of one’s daily work ... without any notion of concert or theater or the public, but simply continuing one’s daily work, now coming out through loudspeakers" (2003, 69–70). He also claimed that “the piece tries to say … that everything we do

180 is music, or can become music through the use of microphones.... By means of electronics, it has been made apparent that everything is musical” (2003, 70).

The idea that the amplification of everyday life is a new territory of the in-between—which in turn is the performance itself—relates to the Japanese term “ma.” (which influenced Cage and other artists and composers, such as La Monte Young, and Yves Klein). “Ma” is defined by Iwanami's

Dictionary of Ancient Terms as “the natural distance between two things existing in continuity.”152

Therefore, “ma” means an interval between two (or more) spatial or temporal things and events.

But it also means “among:” the relational situation of a person standing in, with, among, or between something or someone else. It carries both objective and subjective meaning; it is not only

“something,” but also signifies a particular mode of experience—the experience of the in-between.

Taking this idea further, we can see that “ma” represents a moment in which time and space collapse, in which silence/emptiness is not a break or a pause or a void, but rather the potential path for whatever might pass through it.153 Cage’s compositions for museum, as the spatial adaptation of his silence, act in this same way: as the Emptiness/Nothingness that has the potential to be everything (including nothing at all).

This leads me to the main difference between the silence Cage presented in 0'00'' and that presented in 4'33'': the element of time. While 4'33'' had a determined time frame of four minutes and thirty-three seconds, 0'00'' allowed for any given time, including no time at all. In other words,

152 Quoted in Arata Isozaki, Ma: Space-time in Japan (New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1979), 12. 153 Richard B. Pilgrim adds that our understanding of “ma” should not be limited to a “place” or “place-making” or to form/non-form, but should extend to “form/non-form as imaginatively created or perceived in immediate experience” (1986, 266).

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4'33'' needed to be performed in order to produce this experience of silence, whereas 0'00'' did not.

Silence is no longer “just” everywhere, in everyday life; it is everything, including us all.

To explain this assertion, I will use the Heart Sutra, a famous short Buddhist scripture that was one of Cage’s favourites. As is well known, nothingness/emptiness stands at the centre of all forms of Buddhist thought, including Zen Buddhism, and the Heart Sutra154 explains it through three stages. An excerpt states that “form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form.” (1958, 81). Conze, whose commentary on and translation of this scripture were also recommended by Cage, notes that Emptiness is the same as Nirvana and the same as Buddha, and “on another level of spiritual awareness Nirvana may reveal itself as the same as this world” (1958, 81). Emptiness is therefore the transcendental: “[I]t is nowhere, and nowhere it is not. This is the mystical identity of opposites. Nirvana is the same as the world. It is not only ‘in’ and ‘with you,’ but you are nothing but it” (1958, 83).

10.3 Emptiness – Cage’s Compositions for Museum Based on chance, Cage’s compositions for museum, like his other musical compositions, fully embraced the possibility of everything, including nothing at all. The Main Circus’s “storage” is one example, embracing the possibility that if all the works are “stored,” the walls could be left empty. Another example is in Cage’s instructions for museumcircle: that no forms of persuasion should be enacted on participating institutions. This prohibition against persuasion could, again, if no one responded, leave the gallery walls empty. But the use of chance created a space free of any

154 Estimated by Edward Conze to date from 350 CE.

182 didactic meaning. There was no narrative on display, and there was no visible order. Bergson describes this as the “existence of the nought” (1975, 287–315). What we see is the indication of what we do not see. Disorder is only the absence of order, and nothing is the indicator for everything.

Further, Cage’s compositions for museum engulfed the spectators in an environment of “pure happening,” allowing space for Suzuki’s doctrine of non-obstruction. Or, in Cage’s words:

From a non-dualistic point of view, each thing and each being is

seen at the center, and these centers are in a state of interpenetration

and non-obstruction. From a dualistic point of view, on the other

hand, each thing and each being is not seen: relationships are seen

and interferences are seen. To avoid undesired interferences and to

make one’s intentions clear, a dualistic point of view requires a

careful integration of the opposites. (1961, 38)

By allowing chance to conduct the pool of objects in his exhibition, and omitting any didactics,

Cage’s compositions for museum invited a “dualistic point of view.” The visitors were not able to experience the objects according to any historical, biographical, or conceptual reference, but instead experienced them simply as they are. The only meaning (narrative) that could come about in such an environment is through the relationships the visitors weave between themselves and the objects on display, or in between the objects themselves. In that sense Cage’s composition was the territory of “ma”—the emptiness/nothingness of the interval. The in-between: a pathway to whatever comes through.

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To better understand Cage’s compositions for museum as the evolution of his silence, let us compare it to attempts by visual artists to display emptiness; that is, the display of the empty gallery. The French artist Yves Klein’s The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility: The Void (1958), for example, aimed to display in the empty gallery only the aura of the artist. American artist Robert Barry’s Closed Gallery Piece (1969–79) was no more than a sign on the gallery door declaring the empty gallery’s space to be closed.

Another American artist, Robert Irwin, created a variation of this in Experimental Situation (1970): as it was stated in the exhibition publication, the gallery would be empty for a period of one month, during which Irwin would visit the space daily to conceive different possibilities of artwork for the space. Finally, Chris Burden’s performance White Light/White Heat (1975) displayed the vivid presence of the artist in the gallery (it was said he was lying on a high shelf placed close to the ceiling). There are more examples, but these few are enough to show that the empty gallery is not empty as long as it has even a single narrative on display. In other words, it is not enough to empty a gallery space of objects in order to capture a moment of emptiness. In Cage’s compositions for museum, the space is not empty—it is filled with objects, but it is empty of intended, prescribed meaning. And as such, it is a space of emptiness.

museumcircle: Cage’s Space Adaptation of Duchamp’s music (Erratum Musicale, 1913)

According to Lazar, “Cage acknowledged Erratum Musicale as a source for his idea for museumcircle and for how it would operate.”155 Erratum Musicale (1913) is the first musical work of Marcel Duchamp—a chance-based score for three voices. I argue that in museumcircle, while

155 Julie Lazar, e-mail message to author, 8 July, 2014.

184 adapting Duchamp’s music to a sculptural space, Cage demonstrates a method for translating a musical score into a structure for displaying objects in space, and even more so, the potential of applying the philosophy of listening while perceiving a composition of visual objects.

Figure 74: Marcel Duchamp, Erratum Musicale (1913) [score]. https://www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/resource/crgG8za/rpbEq5A

Erratum Musicale (1913) is the first of only two musical compositions that Duchamp composed, in addition to one conceptual sound piece.156 Along with other projects in a series from 1913,

Erratum Musicale threw into question the concept of the work of art. In an interview Arturo

Schwarz conducted with Duchamp for his book The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (1969),

156 The two other sound works are: Sculpture Musicale and La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même, Erratum Musical. All three sound works are included in The Green Box (1934), which Duchamp published and considered part of his notes for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), also known as The Large Glass. The original score of Erratum Musicale was lost and its size was not recorded. In The Green Box there is a facsimile size 31 x 24 cm (cat. 293); this size, according to Duchamp, should be very close to the actual size.

185 the artist revealed that around the end of 1912 he began having doubts concerning the concept of the work of art, which led him to create a variety of projects dealing with what he called the “beauty of indifference” (1969, 35). These doubts brought about the first readymade the following year— a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool (Bicycle Wheel, 1913)—and along with it, the declaration that it was the artist’s power of selection and choice that turned any object into a work of art.

Another project from the same year was 3 Standard Stoppages, in which Duchamp used chance to explore the idea of a metre. In this work, Duchamp threw each of three metre-length threads onto a separate rectangular canvas. He later painted each canvas and announced them as a new unit of measure: Duchamp’s metre. The same three chance-derived shapes were also used by the artist to create three “standard stoppages” carved from three wooden metre sticks. But Duchamp’s work with chance did not start with 3 Standard Stoppages; according to Schwarz, it was with Erratum

Musicale that Duchamp first exploited chance in his practice, applying it to the temporal dimension rather than to the spatial.

Duchamp wrote Erratum Musicale for three voices, his two sisters’ and his own, and he titled each part after their names: Yvonne, Magdeleine, Marcel. The three voices are written out separately, and there is no indication whether they should be performed individually or together as a trio. In composing this piece, Duchamp made three sets of twenty-five cards, one for each voice, with a single note per card. Each set of cards was mixed in a hat, then drawn out one card at a time, with the series of notes written down in the order in which they were drawn. Like his use of readymades, the words that accompanied the musical notes were from a French dictionary’s definition of imprint: “imprimer”—Faire une empreinte; marquer des traits; une figure sur une surface; imprimer un scau sur cire (“imprint”—To make an imprint; mark with lines; a figure on a surface; impress a seal in wax).

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Erratum Musicale embodied the same ideas as 3 Standard Stoppages or Bicycle Wheel, but this time the piece examined a composer’s role. As such, the theory behind Erratum Musicale, according to Schwarz, was indebted to Lewis Carroll’s guide to becoming a poet in Poeta Fit, Non

Nascitur (1869): “For first you write a sentence/ And then you chop it small;/ Then mix the bits, and sort them out/ Just as they chance to fall:/ The order of the phrases makes/ No difference at all” (1929, 125). The title of Carroll’s poem is a play on the Latin proverb poeta nascitur, non fit, which means “a poet is born, not made.” By inverting it, Carroll counters that a poet is made, not born. Duchamp takes it from there, and as he chops the notes and words for Erratum Musicale, he alters the concept and process of being a composer.

Like his Dada contemporaries, Picabia and Man Ray, who worked with performance and film,

Duchamp worked in a number of media. His musical works represent a radical departure from anything done up until that time in music, most notably because they showed that you did not need to be a composer to compose music. His three musical works are considered difficult material to work with, for there are very few comments or explanations by the artist to assist with resolving the pieces. They can be considered precedents for the Fluxus pieces of the early 1960s, which combined unknown factors and elements, both explained and unexplained, explicable and inexplicable.

The Czech-American composer and conductor Petr Kotik explained in his preparatory notes toward the performance of Duchamp’s composition that the lack of instructions forces a process of interpretation, which later can result in “an event/happening, rather than a performance” (1991).

Kotik suggests that the performance of Duchamp’s randomly ordered notes and textual repetitions allows the process of composition to be both heard and seen. It therefore uses sound to construct a visual space in what seems analogous to an abstract experience of a sculptural space. This spatial

187 realization of sound was far ahead of its time, even provoking a scandal, according to the French

Dada artist Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, who acted as the page-turner for the first public performance of Erratum Musicale. The performance took place at the “Dada Demonstration” on

March 27, 1920, in the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris. Ribemont-Dessaignes claimed to have been

“overwhelmed by an unprecedented din that was made up of this terribly dissonant music, and the restlessness, shouts, and whistling of the audience, all of which united with a crash of broken glass to give a truly most curious effect” (1958, 70–1).

The unique opportunity to perform these scores by Duchamp and Cage together yielded insights into the effects of both. Following Duchamp’s usage of found words from a dictionary, Cage composed museumcircle’s score as a list of instructions (Appendix A) as well as a description of how to use chance for creating a pool of objects for the exhibition. In the spring of 2015, I performed museumcircle and Erratum Musicale in order to compare the performances of the two scores, and more specifically, to contemplate the consequences of Cage’s spatial adaptation of

Duchamp’s sound. This project, entitled Image Coming Soon #1, was presented in Toronto at the

Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Art Museum, University of Toronto (figures 75-80)

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Figure 75: John Cage, museumcircle, (1991), installation view at Image Coming Soon #1, 2015 At Art Museum, University of Toronto Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy of Art Museum, University of Toronto

The first instruction from Cage’s score I followed was to send an open call to all public lending institutions (fine art, natural science, natural history, aerospace, anthropology, etc.) within a radius of thirty miles from Toronto, inviting them to submit a list of ten objects from their collection.

There are no guidelines provided regarding the preparation of this list in Cage’s score. Another instruction was that there should not be any persuasion involved in the process, thus, after sending the invitation, I did not follow up or attempt to convince any institution to participate. Eventually, twenty-nine institutions replied, sending each a list of ten objects they were willing to lend to the

189 exhibition.157 One object from each list was then selected according to a list of numbers created by Cage’s computerized I Ching program, named IC (figure76).158

Figure 76: John Cage, museumcircle (1991) IC list Courtesy of Julie Lazar

157 The lending institutions were: Art Gallery of Ontario, Blackwood Gallery, Campbell House, City of Toronto Museums & Heritage Services (Colborne Lodge Museum, Fort York National Historic Site, Gibson House Museum, City of Toronto Historical Collection, The Market Gallery, Spadina Museum, Todmorden Mills Heritage Site, York Museum), Design Exchange, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Gardiner Museum, Gendai Gallery, Hart House Collection, Museum of Inuit Art, The Morris and Sally Justein Heritage Museum at Baycrest, Malcove Collection, Mercer Union, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, MZTV Museum of Television, Open Studio, Ontario Science Centre, Royal Ontario Museum, Ryerson Image Centre, University College Collection, University of Toronto Collection 158 ‘IC,’ as well as the other I Ching computerized programs Cage used, was programmed by the composer Andrew Culver.

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The museumcircle IC list consists of 640 randomly repeating numbers between one and ten that are chosen by chance-operations; the object from the museum’s lists is then selected according to the order of their arrival. For example, if the first item in the IC list is the number two, then object number two is selected from the list of ten objects that are first to arrive. If the second item in the

IC list is the number five, then object number five is selected from the list of objects that arrive second, and so on. According to Cage’s score, these objects would later constitute the elements of museumcircle together with scores, rocks, plants, chess tables, shelves with reference books similar to those found in Cage’s private library, and pieces of ephemera.

For the last two elements in the composition I turned to Laura Kuhn, the director of the John Cage

Trust. Kuhn chose by chance a list of thirty titles from John Cage’s private library, which I was fortunate enough to find at the University’s libraries. In Cage’s score there were no guidelines regarding the ephemera to include in the show—it was totally up to me. I thought it would be fun to share with the audience the experience of joy I had when going through the twelve boxes containing archival materials documenting the production process of Rolywholyover. Kuhn was kind enough to support this idea and we had copies of selected documents available for audience members to take with them—if they wished to do so.

Following Duchamp’s chance methodology for Erratum Musicale, Cage’s score indicates that each object is to be numbered, as well as each potential placement in the gallery’s spatial grid.

These numbers were later pulled by the gallery staff from two “hats” (in fact, cardboard boxes), one for the objects and the second for the spatial grid of the gallery. The process of collecting the objects and placing them in the gallery was very playful and satisfying for all of us. Another instruction was to conduct the gallery meetings in the gallery, to allow transparency and exclude

191 any hierarchy, which might create a divide between the art on display and the mechanism that operates it. This element was not fully followed by all of the gallery staff—but those who did have their meetings in the gallery added their conversations to the orchestration, as part the “life-like” experiences happening in the gallery (such as playing chess and reading books).

Figure 77: John Cage, museumcircle, (1991), installation view at Image Coming Soon #1, 2015 At Art Museum, University of Toronto Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy of Art Museum, University of Toronto.

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Figure 78: John Cage, museumcircle, (1991), installation view at Image Coming Soon #1, 2015 At Art Museum, University of Toronto Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy of Art Museum, University of Toronto

Figure 79: John Cage, museumcircle, (1991), installation view at Image Coming Soon #1, 2015 At Art Museum, University of Toronto Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy of Art Museum, University of Toronto.

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Figure 80: Marcel Duchamp, Erratum Musicale (1913), installation view at Image Coming Soon #1, 2015 At Art Museum, University of Toronto Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy of Art Museum, University of Toronto

I would maintain that unlike Duchamp’s Erratum Musicale, Cage’s museumcircle did not aim to be provocative or critical regarding the institution of art and, accordingly, the spatial grid was conceived with utmost respect for the objects on display. For instance, it was instructed that objects were not to be hung too low, where they might be mistakenly damaged, or hung upside down or backwards.

It is true that while the participating institutions were listed in the accompanying Rolywholyover box publication (which needed to be printed prior to the tour), the selected objects were not.

Moreover, no labels were placed beside the objects, though they were numbered, and an enumerated list of all the objects on display was available in each gallery. I would suggest that this label omission allowed the audience to walk into the gallery and experience the objects on display as they are—without reading anything that would conduct their experience for them.

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With respect to this, I suggest that in museumcircle Cage achieved a critical break between the artist’s ego and the work itself—a break previously described by Duchamp in “The Creative Act”

(1958). In this text, Duchamp describes the role of the spectator in an encounter with a work of art—that is, the moment the spectator interprets the work of art— as the revival of the creative act, what he called the “art coefficient.” In Erratum Musicale, the performer created their own interpretation of the musical score, which was later viewed by the spectator, as an abstract musical sculpture. In museumcircle we witness Cage’s redefining of the creative act, his pushing at its limits via his interpretation of Duchamp’s musical work, by empowering the visitors as well as the gallery staff as performers. In so doing, Cage turned any activity into music. Thus, while moving a chair, opening a drawer, playing chess, talking in a meeting, or even choosing the ephemeral documents on display—we were all performing Cage’s museumcircle.

In her essay “John Cage and Investiture: Unmanning the System” (2009), Julia Robinson suggests that Cage’s redefinition of the creative act was part of his strategy of “self-authorizing,” a process through which he aimed to operate beyond the limits of musical discourse, and that initiated his model of “Experimental Composition.” This, according to Robinson, was part of Cage’s effort to turn musical-composition-as-intervention into a new discipline. “But,” she states, “it was the composer-performer-audience basis of his own discipline […] that first allowed him to contemplate the public register of the creative act” (2010, 56). I would add that in museumcircle,

Cage transformed the museum experience into a musical experience by composing an exhibition using the same chance methodologies he used to compose his music.

When Cage was asked by Moira and William Roth about the differences between Duchamp’s idea of chance and his own, he referred to Erratum Musicale, saying that he personally would not be satisfied with pulling notes out of a hat, but that he was delighted with this in Duchamp’s work.

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Cage indicated that he preferred his version of chance to be more intricate, but that, crucially, the main difference in their perspectives on chance “probably came from the fact that [Duchamp] was involved with ideas through seeing, and I was involved through hearing” (1973, 72). Cage goes on to define Duchamp’s use of chance as a form of translation, based in language, in contrast to his own goal, which is “to set a process going that is not related to anything” (1973, 76). Consequently, the open call for the city’s public lending institutions to submit a list of ten objects is the main difference between the chance methodology used in museumcircle and that used in Erratum

Musicale. While Cage used chance to create his pool of objects, Duchamp used chance as a method of selection. While the former opened his score up to include any object, the latter closed off outside possibilities by determining the notes and words that were used. Thus, as with his musical pieces, Cage used chance to conduct an unpredictable process that would surprise first of all himself; and Duchamp, as a conceptual artist, used chance as a translation tool to turn his ideas into conceptual objects.

Sophie Stévance rightfully crowns Duchamp the inventor of what she calls “conceptual music.” In her essay “John Cage Tunes Into the Redefinition of the Musical Field by Marcel Duchamp and the Emergence of a Conceptual Music,” Stévance states that through his compositions, Duchamp offered an experience in which the truth of music no longer depended on its acoustic dimension, but rather on its conceptual dimension; music becomes an object that leads to listening as thought.

Duchamp’s music might be “useless performance in any case” (1994, 50), as he himself suggested, but from an epistemological stance, his compositions, similar to other objects he worked with (such as the bicycle wheel), should be valued for the ideas they hold. Duchamp the composer showed that music could function on another level besides sound, one in which it does not necessarily need to be played. This observation is crucial to the understanding of museumcircle as Cage’s spatial adaptation of Erratum Musicale’s conceptual sound, and accordingly, it supports the argument that

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Cage’s composition confronts the role of the curator. However, I maintain that by using his own chance methodology, Cage managed to avoid the snare of imitation. By transforming Duchamp’s translative-chance methodologies to his own chance operations, Cage managed to surpass being simply provocative and composed a process-based exhibition that offers the opportunity “to get yourself in such a state of confusion that you think that a sound is not something to hear but rather something to look at” (1961, 183).

Further, by treating objects as musical tones, detaching them from descriptive didactics and allowing them to be ‘as they are,’ in museumcircle (as well as in Rolywholyover and Changing

Installation), as a curator, Cage gave visitors the opportunity to discover their own pathways. As he explained to Retallack, he hoped that visitors would experience his composition/exhibition via a “tourist attitude,” inviting such a visitor to “act as though you’ve never been there before” (1996,

129–30). This offer holds the key to Cage’s museum compositions, which claim to find the way while getting lost. By avoiding any didactics, Cage detached the gallery space and the objects within it from permanent definitions, and in doing so manifested his exhibition as what Jean-Luc

Nancy calls a space “on the edge of meaning” (2007, 7). Visitors to his musical compositions for visual objects were invited to explore, investigate, and ask questions. They were invited to ‘listen’ to the objects in the exhibition—in the same way Peter Szendy reads Friedrich Nietzsche’s listening in Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer (1888/89)—as doubting, as questioning: Nietzsche famously used a hammer for “sounding out idols” (1888/89, 155). By idols, Nietzsche refers to the various ideas, concepts, or discourses that are most fervently believed in. Szendy suggests that when Nietzsche taps on these idols with a hammer, he wishes not only to show them to be naked and hollow, but more importantly, to invite us to listen to the truth.159

159 Thus, Szendy notes, Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers who showed how listening can become a model of questioning, as an active act which involves the responsibility of decision making on the part of the listener.

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Jacques Derrida also famously used an (inner) hammer to free the text itself from the classical categories of history. Derrida suggests battering the tympanum with the inner hammer as a way to deconstruct the meaning of the written word, freeing it from its imposed meaning (1972/82).160

Thus, I argue, Cage’s musical composition for visual objects opens up listening not only as a chance to experience the sounds that those visual objects make, but also as attentiveness toward or in an approach to the ‘truth’ of these objects (Nietzsche, Derrida and Nancy). This ‘truth’ for Cage is the listening process itself. It is the authentic relationship of the audience to the objects and the experience while they engage with the objects in the exhibition—an engagement which is not mediated through language. By extending this invitation to visitors, Cage neutralized the sanctity and control of the museum over the narrative on display, instead privileging transparency and vulnerability. This act brought his compositions for museums into a fragile position, where truth resides, and in doing so, it opened up new possibilities for dialogue—possibilities where visitors play active roles in their experience of the exhibition. It is not dictated to them. Cage’s exhibition visitors are the performers of their own exhibition experience.

Thus, what makes Cage’s compositions for visual objects musical, is their embedded philosophy of listening. And I maintain he manages to infuse listening sensibilities into his audience’s experience of an exhibition by using a musical score in curating his exhibitions.

To better understand this effect, we should compare Cage’s compositions for museum to exhibitions by instructions. Exhibitions exploring the technique of art-by-instructions were popular in the late 1960s, when the international art world was exploding with the new phenomenon. One such exhibition is Seth Siegelaub’s January 5–31, 1969 (better known as The

160 In French, tympaniser is an archaic verb meaning to criticize, to ridicule publicly.

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January Show). The January Show featured the work of Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph

Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner. It was Siegelaub’s first group exhibition in which the catalogue was the primary manifestation of the exhibition. The exhibition was housed in a two-room space

(that vaguely resembled an office space): artworks were in one room and the catalogue in the other.

The catalogue, which according to Siegelaub, was the most prominent element of the show, was a list of 32 art-by-instructions pieces made by the same artists who exhibited their works in the adjacent room. Through this arrangement, Siegelaub juxtaposed the two formats: the finished object and the one that existed in the imaginative realm.

Other examples were created for radical exhibitions mounted in Europe and North America, where the proliferation of art-by-instructions was also driven by the great demand by curators of large shows for pieces from artists unable to travel to distant venues. Two examples, also from 1969, are Lucy Lippard's 557, 089 and 955, 000 (two versions of a show named for the populations of the cities in which they were mounted—Seattle and Vancouver), and Harald Szeemann’s When

Attitudes Become Form: Works – Process – Concepts – Situations – Information (Live in Your

Head).161 A famous later example is Hans Ulrich Obrist ongoing project do it.162

161 For 557, 089, Robert Smithson sent instructions for a work consisting of 400 photographs to be taken with a Kodak Instamatic camera of deserted Seattle horizons. For 955,000, Jan Dibbets sent directions for tape recording the sounds of a car trip lasting up to thirty miles, with the driver counting out the miles driven, to be played in the exhibition continuously, under a map of the route taken. For When Attitudes Become Form, Robert Morris instructed the Kunsthalle staff to collect as many different kinds of combustible materials as were available in Bern. Beginning with one material, they were to add different materials at increments to be determined by dividing the length of the exhibition by the number of materials. On the last day of the exhibition, with all the materials having been “placed freely in the space,” the materials were then removed and burned outside the museum. And for both Lippard’s and Szeemann’s exhibitions, Sol LeWitt sent detailed instructions for the creation of wall drawings. 162 do it began in 1993 with a discussion among artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. According to Obrist, this discussion revolved around the artists’ interest in various forms of instructional procedures, something they had both been interested in since the early 1970s. Lavier has made many works containing written instructions in order to observe the effects of translation on an artwork as it moves in and out of various permutations of language. Boltanski, like Lavier, explores the notion of interpretation as an artistic principle; he considers his own instructions, according to Obrist, analogous to musical scores which go through diverse realizations as they are carried out by others. From this, the idea of the DIY exhibition—one based on descriptions by artists— comes about, and until such time as a venue is found, the exhibition exists in a static condition. “Like a musical score, everything is there but the sound” (2013). do it, according to Obrist, is less concerned with copies, images, or

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The main difference I find between those projects and Cage’s compositions for museum is that unlike Cage’s exhibitions, these projects included scores/instructions to create artworks, while

Cage’s scores were of a process producing the exhibition itself. As the dimension analogous to time in a spatial context, space in a visual-object-based composition became a substitute for the function time performs in a musical composition, allowing Cage to apply the same ideas and methodologies to the mode of the art exhibition as he did to his music. Therefore, I would conclude, by composing his exhibitions in a manner akin to the one he used to compose a musical composition, Cage offers us an opportunity to listen to the entirety of the exhibition as music, but even more so, to actively ‘listen’—as a form of questioning, doubting, and articulating one’s own thoughts. I further suggest that these scores, like any of his other musical scores, should be available for curators who wish to perform them.163

reproductions of artworks than with human interpretation. No artworks are shipped to the venues; instead, everyday actions and materials serve as starting points for the artworks to be recreated at each “performance site” according to the written instructions. Each realization of do it occurs as an activity in time and space. And no realization is ever identical. The project extended its format to do it home (the domestic version) and do it TV (instructions to make video clips) and as of today there are more than 300 lists of art-by-instructions made by artists, musicians, scientists and others. 163 Such a score was what allowed Lazar to manifest Rolywholyover at MOCA after Cage’s unexpected death.

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Conclusion: Listening as a Curatorial Method

As demonstrated in the first chapter, Happenings and Fluxus encouraged artists and musicians to dismiss the boundaries between mediums, and explore new materials, each according to their own practice. In turn, the multi-sensory art and music produced as a consequence of this encouragement provided a strong impetus for curators to open the gallery doors to sound. At first, avant-garde musicians were invited to perform ‘new music’ at events in museums and galleries.164 Soon afterward, sound was welcomed as one of the new materials explored by visual artists in the 1960s.

I suggest that curators who included sound in their exhibitions in the 1960s were themselves experimenting with the new medium. Ralph T. Coe and Jasia Reichart were among these curators.

Coe surveyed current artistic engagements with new materials in his Sound, Light, Silence: Art that Performs (1966) while Reichart, two years after, focused on technology in the arts in

Cybernetic Serendipity (1968). Both curators were enabling sound’s experiential simultaneity, by permitting the sound to diffuse relatively freely in the gallery space. In allowing this free diffusion of sound (perhaps unintentionally), these curators merged sounds from different sources and surprised the audience with a sense of “commotion,” transforming the exhibition itself to a happening, environment, or a theatre piece.165

By the 1970s—beginning with Record as Artwork 1959–73 at the Royal College of Art Gallery,

London (1973), and Narrative Themes/Audio Works, An Exhibition of Artists Cassettes at the Los

164 Maybe the most famous such event was the “Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Music” (Fluxus Interna- tional Festival of Newest Music), at the Museum Wiesbaden, 1962. Fourteen concerts were performed on four week- ends in September 1962, marking the beginning of the Fluxus movement. A few other examples are: John Cage’s Music Walk, Jean-Pierre Wilhelm's Galerie 22, in Düsseldorf, 1958. Philip Glass’s Two Pages (1968) and Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music (1968) and Piano Phase (1967), at Four Evenings of Extended Time Pieces and a Lecture— part of the programming of Anti Illusion: Procedures/ Materials at the Whitney Museum (1968). 165 Jamie Croy Kassler uses the term “commotion” when defining her experience of Cybernetic Serendipity (1968).

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Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (1978)—this more open approach to sound in the gallery was viewed (so to speak) from a new, more ordered perspective. Acoustic means of separating sound, such as headphones, were first embraced, enabling numerous sounds to coexist in the gallery space, engaging in the given exhibition’s conceptual discussion. At more or less the same time, a new sequential approach, in which one work is activated after another, came into use, resulting in the separation of the different sound works over time. One of the earliest exhibitions to include this format was Sound Art, MOMA, 1979 and Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture,

Instrument Building, and Acoustically Tuned Spaces at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary

Art, 1979.166 The cuing of a sound that could wait in a queue with other works, further meant controlling when and for how long any individual sound might be heard. Headphones and cuing permitted a stronger curatorial, organizational grip on the audience’s gallery experience.

The headphones attached to a wall soon became perhaps the most common image signaling the presence of sound in museums and galleries. Paradoxically, this format of display, which I refer to as the “sonic image,” ensures that sound is heard only when it is seen. This doctrine of display aligns, I suggest, with the history of the exhibitory as well as with the domination of the visual in the hierarchy of the senses. I argue that the museum, as an institution dedicated above all to visual art, is structured by our visual experience of the world. Thus, when sound first came into play in gallery settings, adjusting it according to visual protocols seemed the natural thing to do. But in order to fit sound into the labyrinth of display it must effectively be rendered static and fragmented.

Binding sound to one spot, I suggest, constrains its natural properties. Sound can only authentically exist within space and time, and when it is limited to one spot, our experience of it is limited as well. It performs as a hybrid—as sound that is suppressed by the exhibitory context to the point

166 It was subsequently installed that same year at MoMA PS1.

202 where it behaves as a visual object. With the introduction of the term ‘sound art,’ which was coined by curators and theorists167 in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this conceptual shift was complete.

The sound that is (the extension of visual) art was accepted as the explanatory title of the new hybrid.

Sound is no longer relegated to the peripheries of the art world. And yet, to this day, the displacement of sound in institutions dedicated to visual art reveals that sound is often conceived in terms more suited to the visual object. Big Orchestra: Music with Sculptures of Contemporary

Art (2019), a recent exhibition, is one perfect example. In his curatorial essay, Matthias Ulrich writes that Big Orchestra was inspired by Fluxus events, and that it juxtaposes the gallery and the concert hall. Therefore, the exhibition included artworks by seventeen artists168 that can be performed-with as musical instruments. The performance of these artworks/instruments formed the center of the show. This, according to the institution’s website, turned the Schirn into a

“temporary concert hall.” The artworks/instruments were activated in various formats, such as workshops, concerts, and performances which took place one at a time, throughout the duration of the show. In taking these forms, Big Orchestra, like many other sound exhibitions, activated the sound of the works in sequential display. Originating in the 1970s, sequential display is another curatorial method used to manage the display of sound in the gallery which—as I explore at length in the first chapter—separates the sounds of the different works in time.

167 Such as Sound Art’s curator Barbara London for MOMA, 1979; Richard Armstrong, for his catalogue essay of Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture, Instrument Building, and Acoustically Tuned Spaces (1979, LAICA & MoMA PS1); Für Augen und Ohren (For Eyes and Ears)’s curator René Block for the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin, 1980; and composer and sculptor William Hellermann who curated Sound/Art, for the Sculpture Center and BACA/DCC Gallery,1983, and theorist Don Goddard who wrote the famous essay by the same name in the exhibition catalogue. 168 By artists: Doug Aitken, Nevin Aladağ, Allora & Calzadilla, Carlos Amorales, Tarek Atoui, Cevdet Erek, Guillermo Galindo, Constantin Luser, Christian Marclay, Caroline Mesquita, Rie Nakajima, Carsten Nicolai, Pedro Reyes, Naama Tsabar, Hans van Koolwijk, David Zink Yi.

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Figure 81: Constantin Luser, Vibrosaurus (2008) (workshop view) Big Orchestra: Music with Sculptures of Contemporary Art (2019), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Photo: Marc Krause. Courtesy of Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

Figure 82: Constantin Luser, Vibrosaurus (2008) (installation view), Big Orchestra: Music with Sculptures of Contemporary Art (2019), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt Photo: Marc Krause. Courtesy of Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

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For Big Orchestra Ulrich approached artists with whom he was interested in working, rather than choosing the works.169 Some of the works pre-existed, so Ulrich could listen to their sounds in advance. He listened to new works in the course of their making through recorded samples.

While featured in the show, only a small number of the included works were activated by the artists who had actually made them. Most of the works were played by professional musicians who learned how to play the new pieces of music, the artworks, which were reactivated with each performance. These activations were scheduled and open to the public in the forms of performances or workshops. None of the works were activated together. Further, these activations were documented (video and sound), and were displayed in the gallery, looped in a monitor placed beside the artwork. The sound from the monitors was available to the audience through headphones.

This layout might imply that the gallery was quiet during the time in between the activations

(which was most of the time), but in fact, this was not the case. Orm Finnendahl’s composition

Music for Exhibitions looped constantly throughout the space. Finnendahl’s composition brought together all the works/instruments in the exhibition into a single composition that could be listened to between the workshops and concerts (e-flux, 2019). The piece, according to an interview

Finnendahl gave to Leonie Reineke, was composed through a process that began with “listening attentively” to the works in the show. He started by visiting the exhibition with an instrumentalist who played the objects. Finnendahl recorded the sounds, and later processed them using computer algorithms that he programmed. He adds that it was important to him:

169 All the information if not otherwise noted was given to me by the curator Matthias Ulrich, whom I interviewed.

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that the visitors’ imagination is stimulated. On the one hand it

should be clearly traceable to the instruments in the exhibition, but

equally sounds should be alienated and advanced. This might then

open up new perspectives to the listeners, give them a different view

of the acoustic potential of artworks (2019).

I suggest that Finnendahl’s composition blurred the visual boundaries between the different works, melted the space between them and offered a new layer, a new dimension, to the show. Through this act of performing the acoustical relationship between the works, Finnendahl engaged the liminal territory lying in-between the works.

Music for Exhibitions was commissioned by Ulrich, Big Orchestra’s curator, after consulting

Finnendahl—who is also a professor of composition at the Frankfurt University of Music and

Performing Art—throughout the curatorial process. This is also why Ulrich decided not to list

Finnendahl’s composition as one of the works in the show, but rather as additional programing.170

I would therefore suggest that the curatorial decision to conceptually separate Composition for

Exhibition from the rest of the show can be seen as a curatorial impulse consistent with the use of headphones. Both are means of governing the audience’s experience: the headphones ‘help’ the audience to hear what the artwork sounds like only when it is also being seen, and Finnendahl’s piece illustrates the curator’s idea of the exhibition as a ‘big orchestra’ performance. But while they are muted through the use of headphones, the works cannot perform. At best, they are artworks on display with background music. This layout, I would venture to suggest, is incapable of transforming the gallery into a concert hall. The layout decision might contemplate such an idea,

170 As explained by the curator to the author on an email from April 16.

206 and the audience may ponder its potential, but they cannot experience it as a realized presence. I suggest that a more auditory orientation toward the display of the sounds of the works would help to more successfully realize a transformation of the gallery into a concert hall. In practice, I suggest a switch between the two formats of display—that is, to free the sounds from the monitor’s headphones, and allow the artworks to freely share the acoustic space. I also suggest that leaving the headphones in place for Finnendahl’s piece would contribute another layer to the show, in the form of a composed sound walk.

The sound walk is one of the sonic curatorial methods I focused on in my second chapter, when describing propositions for applying a more sonic approach toward sound curating. As demonstrated, for example, in Shhh… Sounds in Spaces (2004),171 an exhibition of different sound works which was available to the visitors as a sound walk through the use of a custom-made MP3 player, headphones, and a map. The exhibition in this layout was a sonic journey, which changed as listeners moved throughout the museum, responding to the art on display and the museum space.

This exhibition format used headphones too, only they were not used to isolate the sounds of different works, but rather to isolate the listeners themselves, placing the exhibition—as a sonic whole—inside their heads.

Another proposition for a more auditory approach to sound curating is the exhibition as a musical installation. Laptopia #5 (2009), SOUND (2009), and Listening to Snow (2020), are a few examples that I have discussed.172 Both Sound and Listening to Snow were curated in a process akin to musical composition methodology—selecting the works according to how they sounded

171 Co-curated for the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, UK, by Jonny Dawe, an external curator and musician, together with Lauren Parker, the museum’s curator of contemporary programs. 172 Laptopia #5, MoBY: Museums of Bat Yam in Israel, 2009, co-curated by myself and Ido Govrin (both sound artists) and Eyal Vexler (an art producer); SOUND, Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, Florida, 2009 curated by composer Gustavo Matamoros with the assistance of David Dunn; Listening to Snow, Art Museum, Toronto, 2020, curated by myself as part of this dissertation.

207 and composing the exhibition as spatial music. Laptopia #5 achieved this too through methodologies of deep listening, by both artists and curators.

Another method which involves a more auditory curatorial approach is the composition of a sound exhibition as an ongoing live musical performance.173 A Piece for Two Floors and a Corridor by

Amnon Wolman (2015), and Xavier Veilhan’s Studio Venezia (2017), are two examples of this.

Both projects included unannounced live musical performances, turning the institution into a concert hall, and even a recording studio (in Studio Venezia), engulfing the audience with ongoing musical performances.

The curators of these projects, myself included, felt an urgency to address the materiality of sound and allow it to move freely in the space. This led to the necessity of merging the sounds of different sound works and composing the exhibition as one sonic piece—as spatial music. All those curators were composers, sound artists, or artists who work with sound in their artistic practice, and who thus also felt comfortable working with the sounds on display. These curators did not consider sound roaming freely in the gallery to be a sound leak. Like composers of spatial music before them, this phenomenon of freely diffusing sound was not approached as a problem. On the contrary. By applying musical composition methodologies, these composers-curators approached the sounds on display as material to work with. The need to “protect the sound piece from other sounds,” as Gebbers suggested in 2017,174 was dismissed. Instead, by composing the exhibition as

173 Piece for Two Floors and a Corridor by Amnon Wolman (2015), Israeli Center for Digital Art, curated by myself. Xavier Veilhan’s Studio Venezia (2017), French Pavilion, Venice Biennale, curated by Lionel Bovier (curator, art critic and historian) and Christian Marclay (artist who works mostly with time-based mediums). 174 In a recent article on sound-art curation, Margaret Carrigan quotes Anna-Catharina Gebbers, a curator at the Hamburger Bahnhof, pointing to the curatorial need to “protect the sound piece from other sounds... in order to present a sound work in a way that adequately expresses the artist’s idea while making it accessible to the visitor” (2017).

208 spatial music, these composers transformed the gallery into an instrument, a concert hall, a performative space.

The exhibition as spatial music has many qualities in common with artists’ installations comprising works from different art collections. The latter can roughly be divided into two categories:175 firstly, as a form of institutional critique, as part of a struggle to redefine art history by revealing the demarcations of gender, race, and class (Halle, 1993);176 and secondly as an extension of the artist’s own practice (Bishop, 2015),177 that is, not as an effort to confront any element of art history, but rather to use the art collection in a manner that could be considered an extension of

‘archival installation’ (Foster, 2004).178 The exhibitions I have focused on, curated by composers, belong to this second kind. By composing a collection of sounds made by others, these composers turned the exhibition into an installation which extends their own practice. Given that, their exhibitions should be listened-to, according to their intention.

Thus, listening as a curatorial method must firstly encompass listening to the space and the sounds of the works, addressing their display with auditory sensibilities. By applying music compositional

175 Claire Bishop suggests that the origins of both approaches to working with a collection reside in two unfinished projects from the beginning of the twentieth century: Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–29)175 and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (1927–40): The juxtaposition of collected materials can show how experience from the past can tell us something about the past, present times, and even about the future. Artists working with collections in this way could create new readings of materials, leading to new knowledge of the institution, its collection, and more generally of art history, and beyond. 176 A few examples are Hans Haacke’s Manet Project, 1974, at the Wallraf-Richartz, Joseph Kosuth’s The Play of the Unmentionable (1990), at the Brooklyn Museum, and Mining the Museum (1992), an exhibition selected and installed by artist Fred Wilson for The Contemporary, Baltimore, using the archives and resources of the Maryland Historical Society. 177 For example, Raid the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol (1969). In early 1969 Andy Warhol was invited to select works for a traveling exhibition that intended to provide a fresh, and less academic, interpretation of the collections in the storerooms of the RISD Museum. This landmark exhibition was not only noteworthy for Warhol’s idiosyncratic choice of objects—including shoes, parasols, chairs, hat boxes, Native American pottery and blankets, wallpaper, bundles of auction catalogues, even a ginkgo tree growing in the museum’s courtyard—but for the radical way he chose to display the works: along with their storage cabinets, racks, and shelves, as they were stacked and grouped in storage when he first saw them. 178 In “Archival Impulse” (2004), Foster argues that through the archive-like installation artists collect and rearrange objects as part of an associative dialogue, jumping from one idea to the other, so that the installation acts only as a module of their taste.

209 methodologies, the sound of the exhibition itself is then unified into a sonic whole. This exhibition configuration surrounds its listeners. It becomes spatial music, stimulating a space within them— whether as unified states of consciousness (Bergson, 1959), as straining towards the self (Nancy,

2007), as acoustic spatialization of subjectivity (Stankievech, 2007), or as a sonic envelope (Rawes

2008).

In all of the exhibitions I have mentioned above, sound has enveloped the listener, creating an interior virtual space located within them. This interior space is of course very peculiar to each individual listener, and each experience of this space is unique. I argue that this interior space can only come about if the exhibition itself becomes the soundtrack, a background sound of each audience member’s own thoughts. Further, the exhibition as an interior space in the listener is personal, rather than governed and imposed, for the very reason that while we might listen to the same sounds, these sounds move us in different ways. Through the listening process, we claim a sound and our relationship to it, making it our own.

This is why the exhibition-as-spatial-music, like music, manipulates us without our knowing.

Sound is fluid and dissolving, like water. The durational quality of sound necessitates the inclusion of memory and imagination in the listening process, leading to its ability to “besiege[e], undermin[e] and displace[s]” space, as Merleau-Ponty writes: listeners to music are “unaware that the floor is trembling beneath their feet, like a ship’s crew buffeted about on the surface of a tempestuous sea” (2005, 262). Merleau-Ponty explains that this is because music tells us things

“over and above” (2005, 452) what our senses can ever do. In possessing this property, I maintain, the dynamic and durational exhibition-as-spatial-music expands the boundaries of the ‘art exhibition’ in a broad and deep variety of ways, with implications for everything from power relations to epistemology to the role of art in our lives and society.

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John Cage’s three musical compositions for museum belong to this type of work. But Cage’s compositions for museum demonstrate something more. Being as they are a set of multi-centered, chance-derived scores for an eclectic array of diverse objects, these scores are to be performed by gallery staff and audience. Through this, I argue, Cage demonstrates the possibilities of curating a visual-objects-based art exhibition through sound sensibilities and metaphors, including listening, the musical score, the performative, multiplicity of centers, and more.

Cage’s exhibitions can also be understood as installations extending his own practice. Following his research into the sound of silence—a key element that defines much of his practice—Cage composed his three exhibitions exploring the meaning of emptiness and nothingness.179 Cage’s silence is an absence of the intentional rather than the absence of sound,180 and therefore, his exhibitions were not empty of objects, but rather empty of intentional meaning. Thus, through his engagement with the art exhibition, Cage extended his research on silence into spatial dimensions.181 But by using a score, Cage managed to compose his exhibitions using the same methodologies he used to compose his silent pieces: He muted any intentional narrative, and infused the gallery space with a process of endless questions, assumptions, and interpretations which are effectively performed by the gallery staff and audience. Through that, Cage’s musical composition for visual objects offers different layers of listening: (1) to the sounds of the exhibition, (2) as attentiveness toward or in an approach to the ‘truth’ (Nietzsche, Derrida, Nancy), and (3) as the authentic relationship of gallery staff and audience, while they engage with objects, and with each other, allowing multiple interpretation of this ‘truth.’

179 As he suggested in a 1991 interview with Joan Retallack (1996, 91). 180 As he notes: “to me, the essential meaning of silence is the giving up of intention” (2002, 120-21). 181 But while his silent pieces (4'33'' and 0'00'') allowed the discovery of sound’s relationships, connecting them in time through memory and processing these relationships as musical, his compositions for museums allowed the discovery of haphazard relationships of random objects, connecting them in space through experiment, research and play, thus altering the concept of exhibition-making.

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Interpretation is an important aspect of Cage’s open scores; to a significant degree, their effect stems from the tension between ideation and material realization. This tension, firstly, raises the question of authority. While his exhibitions, like his musical pieces, seem to be created through the composer’s act of imagining them, as instructions for a physical art exhibition executed by others, they stake no further claim of authority. As with his other scores, once out of Cage’s hands, they no longer presuppose that meaning be derived from an authentic, originary source. Thus, curators who execute Cage’s exhibition, just like performers of his late music, must first interpret its score, and emphasize their own performance of it.

Further, the composer who allowed sounds to be themselves treated objects in the same manner.

The scores of his exhibitions dismissed all didactics from the gallery walls, separating the works from any determined historical, sociopolitical, psycho-biographical, or other frameworks.

Furthermore, corresponding to the idea that in music there is no such thing as a unique tone, replicas were accepted in Cage’s composition—treated with no hierarchy. This, relieving the objects from conformity to the traditional exhibitory framework, and allowing the audience to experience the objects as they are, might be the main idea Cage introduced to the curatorial field while treating objects as musical notes: Visitors to Cage’s exhibitions experienced the objects in a manner akin to listening to music. They investigated the objects on display by infusing them with their own thoughts, ideas, and memories. Through this, in an experience akin to listening to music, they claimed the narrative on display, made it the background of their being. And thus, I argue,

Cage’s exhibitions too, stimulate a space of subjectivity within their audience.

In this way, Cage’s sonic curatorial method of composing visual objects as musical notes confronts and challenges the conventional assumption that by controlling the narrative on display, and keeping it as ‘accurate’ and ‘historical’ as possible, curators oversee and minimaize any influence

212 on the exhibited works. But the exhibition of objects as an installation of sounds, in the ways Cage has suggested, implies that, conversely, the act of contextualizing the works on display is probably the most influential way of presenting it. Furthermore, curating visual objects, through sound sensibilities, as Cage’s compositions for museum do, diversify the audience’s interpretation while allowing the works on display to perform ‘as they are.’

With respect to curatorial authority, we might wonder why Roland Barthes’s famous claim of “The

Death of the Author” somehow skipped over the sphere of the curatorial?182 And why Duchamp’s earlier work “The Creative Act,”183 does not encompass the curatorial? I would counter that, on the contrary, descriptive didactics indicating the ‘real’ content of the artwork, turn the art museum into an educational establishment, the curator into its executer, and the artwork into an ‘article for use’ (Susan Sontag,1964184).

It is time to follow Cage’s suggestion and put into motion a reverse consideration of music’s response to the visual arts of the first half of the twentieth century. Sound, he suggests, offers possibilities to visual art and its institutions: it “produces a situation to which the visual arts must now reply, or may reply” (2002, 120).

First, as we can learn from Cage’s practice at large, it is up to the listener to experience any object as if it were a process. As he once explained to Daniel Charles in an interview, even when

182 Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” (1969), Critical Essays. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1972. In this essay, Barthes calls for the death of the author after a work is done in order to allow its evolution through endless interpretations. The artwork is not, should not be, and cannot stay static. 183 With its claim that the creative act, what he calls “art coefficient,” is only completed by the audience while perceiving the artwork. 184 In 1964’s “Against Interpretation,” Sontag uses Nietzsche’s famous claim that “there are no facts, only interpretations,” to address this very act of instrumentalization of the work. Sontag examines our culture’s perilous habit of interpretation, which she defines as a task akin to translation. This is the “modern way of understanding something,” she states, and it is what makes art an article for use and allows it to be arranged in a mental scheme of categories. She implores us to evaluate interpretation itself within a historical view of human consciousness, and as an immediate antidote, calls for making a work of art that can be “just what it is.”

213 he imagines himself composing a process, he ends up with objects. But Cage continues on to say that the reverse phenomena is more “interesting,” he finds. That even his early music, which he titles as nothing “more than an object or a collection of objects, can henceforth quite easily be integrated into process” (1981, 136).

Second, as he explained in a later interview to Joan Retallack, listening to objects has the power to convert those objects into sounds (1996, 112) and even to “musical theatre” (1996, 142). This might be better-demonstrated by a conversation Cage had with Morton Feldman during their Radio

Happenings (1966–67). Feldman tried to explain to Cage how sometimes sound can be an

“intrusion” into one’s life. Cage asked for an example and Feldman described what he called a familiar scenario at the beach: one is trying to enjoy the sun and the sound of the waves and instead hears different music from multiple radios, all at once. Cage explained that if he found something to be “intruding,” he would make a piece out of it, “in the same way the primitive people dealt with their fears” (1966–67). Cage implied that if ancient peoples drew images on the walls of their caves, he did something similar using radios: “Now whenever I hear radios, even a single one, not just twelve at a time, as you must hear on the beach… I think they are all just playing my piece”

(1966–67).

But, while it is true that Cage’s practice leaves it up to the listener to experience any object as if it were a process and even sound, the notion that it is within the power of the listener to convert any sound exhibition to music, and not solely the power of the curator to initiate that conversion, should not release the curatorial from all responsibility.

Therefore, listening as a curatorial method further points to a curatorial responsibility to explore and support auditory perceptions when curating sound. It suggests there are more compositional methodologies for curators to experiment with. More sound sensibilities, philosophies and

214 metaphors to research in relation to the exhibitory terrain. Following sound materiality, could for example, be a step toward questioning what was lost along the formulation of the sonic image paradigm, because the exhibition-as-spatial-music is the experience of contradicting the conventions which structure our perception. Allowing the auditory to call into question thought barriers and limitations is to resuscitate the moment in the 1960s when sound was free to behave according to its natural properties and to clatter traditional formats of display. As a sonic curatorial method, ‘listening’ suggests that there is an onus on the curator to be responsible for creating environments and even experiments that engulf the audience, inviting them to take an active role in listening.

While it is true that this phenomenon might still remain largely unfamiliar, but as Cage explains

(quoting Erik Satie), familiarity paralyzes any experience art might hold: “So, if you know how to do something, you paralyze yourself” (1996, 143). We could also heed Merleau-Ponty’s observation that:

…every language conveys its own teaching and carries its meaning

into the listener’s mind. A school of music or painting which is at

first not understood, eventually, by its own action, creates its own

public, if it really says something; that is, it does so by secreting its

own meaning. (2005, 208)

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Appendix (A): John Cage, museumcircle (1991), List of Instructions

1. The museumcircle will consist of objects borrowed from public institutions (of fine art, natural science, natural history, aerospace, anthropology, etc.) and be complemented in the gallery by plants, river rocks, furniture and books.

2. The museumcircle will involve any public gallery or museum within a determined radius of 30 miles from the hosting venue which holds a collection and agrees to participate in the composition. No persuading should be involved in the process.

3. Each institution will be asked to provide a list of ten objects from its permanent collection that it would be willing to lend for the duration of the exhibit. The objects should be chosen by the lending institution (with no particular theme suggested) and not by the borrowing one.

4. As the lists are received by the host venue, chance operations will determine the selection of only one object that would eventually be part of the museumcircle.

5. The final selection of borrowed objects will be placed in the exhibition space - along with rocks, plants, shelves with reference books, chess tables and pieces of ephemera – according to a chance operation score.

6. The participating institutions will be listed in the composition publication but the selected objects will not. Moreover, no titles with information will be placed beside each object but a list of all the objects on display will be available in the hosting gallery.

7. Lightning – the gallery will be lit in a manner that resembles natural light.

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An earlier reduced version of sub-chapter 1.2 was published in – “Why Are We All Too Familiar with Headphones Attached to a Wall? (Or the History of Sound Art Curating).“ Copyright © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press and Substance, Inc. SubStance #152, Vol. 49, no. 2, 2020. pp. 93-107

An earlier reduced version of Chapter 3 was published in – “The Composer as a Curator: Following John Cage’s Three Compositions for Museum,” Silent Agencies, Artistic and Curatorial Practices in a State of Crisis, SeiSmograf, June 2020. https://seismograf.org/node/19362