M589624.FINAL 08/07/01 9:51 AM Page 1 NOISE WATER MEAT KAHN DOUGLAS KAHN A HISTORY OF SOUND NOISE WATER MEAT IN THE ARTS DOUGLAS KAHN In this interdisciplinary history and theory of sound in the arts Douglas Kahn reads the twentieth century by listening to it—to the emphatic and exceptional sounds of modernism and those on the cusp of postmodernism, recorded sound, noise, and silence; the fluid sounds of immersion and dripping; and the meat voices of viruses, screams, and bestial cries. Focusing on Europe in the first half of the century and the United States in the postwar years, Kahn explores aural activities in litera- ture, music, visual arts, theater, and film. Placing aural- ity at the center of the history of the arts, he revisits key artistic questions, listening to the sounds that drown out the politics and poetics that generated them. Artists discussed include Antonin Artaud, George Brecht, William Burroughs, John Cage, Sergei Eisenstein, Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Michael McClure, Yoko Ono, Jackson NOISE WATER MEAT Pollock, Luigi Russolo, and Dziga Vertov. Douglas Kahn is Associate Professor of Media Arts at the #589624 07/02/01 University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. “Kahn’s research is impressive, and his presentation is thorough and precise.” —Carol J. Binkowski, Library Journal “ . a unique and important contribution to this emerging, exciting field. It is overflowing with ideas, references, and conjecture.” —John Levack Drever, The Art Book The MIT Press Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 A HISTORY OF SOUND http://mitpress.mit.edu 0-262-61172-4 IN THE ARTS ,!7IA2G2-gbbhcf!:t;K;k;K;k Cover image from PhotoDisc, Inc. 1999 Noise, Water, Meat Noise, Water, Meat A History of Sound in the Arts Douglas Kahn The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England q 1999 Massachusetts Intitute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Janson and Rotis Semi Sans by Graphic Composition, Inc. and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kahn, Douglas, 1951± Noise, water, meat: a history of sound in the arts / Douglas Kahn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-11243-4 (hc: alk. paper) 1. Sound in art. 2. Arts, ModernÐ20th century. I. Title. NX650.S68K25 1999 700Ðdc21 98-51886 CIP To Fran, Aleisha, and Sy. All at once. And to the memory of my dear father. Contents Acknowledgments viii Introduction 2 Listening through History; Prelude: Modernism; Explanations and Quali®cations Part I: Signi®cant Noises 20 1. Immersed in Noise 25 Sentient Sound; Interpolation of Noise; Protean Noise; Oscillator Noise 2. Noises of the Avant-Garde 45 Bruitism; Noise and Simultaneity; The Future of War Noises Part II: Drawing the Line: Music, Noise, and Phonography 68 3. Concerning the Line 72 Resident Noises; The Gloss of the Gliss; Beethoven at Fifty Times per Second; ªI, the Accelerated Lineº 4. The Sound of Music 101 Demarcated Sounds; Drawing the Line in Theory; Synesthesia as Noise Abatement 5. Ubiquitous Recording 123 The Rotary Revolution; Russian Revolutionary Film Part III: The Impossible Inaudible 158 6. John Cage: Silence and Silencing 161 Much to Confess about Nothing; Canned Silence; Silencing Techniques; Cage and the Impossible Inaudible 7. Nondissipative Sounds and the Impossible Inaudible 200 Inaudibly Loud, Long-Lasting, Far-Reaching; Machines of Nondissipation 8. The Parameters of All Sound 224 Loud Sounds; Conceptual Sounds Part IV: Water Flows and Flux 242 9. A Short Art History of Water Sound 245 Water Music; Dripping; Surrealism and Submerged Women 10. In the Wake of Dripping: New York at Midcentury 260 The Object of Performance; Allan Kaprow: Immersed Noisician; George Brecht's Drip Music Part V: Meat Voices 290 11. Two Sounds of the Virus: William Burroughs's Pure Meat Method 293 A Culture for Growing Viruses; Schlupping; On Goo Behavior; The Cancer Virus; Cellular Phones 12. Cruelty and the Beast: Antonin Artaud and Michael McClure 322 Artaud in America; Musical Artauds: Tudor and Cage; Beats Language; Beast Language; Affected and Afflicted Screaming; Seraphic Screams and the Tortuous Blast Notes 360 Index 446 Acknowledgments There are a number of key individuals whom I would like to acknowledge. Some may have thought they were merely engaging in conversation, but they were unwittingly contributing to this text, while others could have had no illusions about wrestling with the manuscript. In chronological or- der: Alvin Lucier, Ron Kuivila, Mitchell Clark, Mladen Milicevic, Daniel Wolf, Dan Lander, Heidi Grundmann, Margaret Morse, Mel Gordon, Gregory Whitehead, Ken Sitz, Paul DeMarinis, Arthur Sabatini, Laura Kuhn, Christian Marclay, Ellen Zweig, Dick Higgins, Gerald Hartnett, Norie Neumark, Virginia Madsen, Martin Harrison, Adam Lucas, Paul Carter, and Sean Cubitt. I am particularly indebted to Jane Goodall, whose book Artaud and the Gnostic Drama (Oxford University Press, 1994) makes a great gift idea and who selflessly ®elded my every phone call, and to Helen Grace, my doctoral supervisor, whose special expertise in Russian Revolutionary cinema was icing on the cake to wide-ranging discussions on things art historical. In a different way I am indebted to the tutelage of Charles Amirkhanian's radio programs long ago while he was at KPFA-FM in Berkeley, the organological research of Hugh Davies, and the writings of Michael Nyman, who so deftly worked the art-music nexus. I would also like to acknowledge several individuals at The Listening Room of ABC Radio in Sydney, including Roz Cheney, Robin Ravlich, Tony MacGregor, and Andrew McLennan. Special thanks goes to the Faculty of Performance, Fine Arts and Design, University of Western Sydney, Nepean, and to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney. My deepest appreciation goes to both Roger Conover at MIT Press for his encouragement over the years and to Christopher Schiff, an inexhaustible font of knowledge and irreverence (who else working at | ix | | Acknowledgments Shorty's Barbecue was reading hieroglyphics?). Finally, I would like to note my good fortune of meeting not so many years ago one of the few artist- theorists of sound and new media, Frances Dyson, whose background in philosophy has been both a complement and challenge to mine in history. Above all, she is responsible for my greatest good fortune since we are together to this day, with our wonderful children Aleisha and Sy Samuel. Many of the ideas in this book are no doubt hers, although I have lost track. She can have any she wants. Noise, Water, Meat Introduction Listening through History Sound saturates the arts of this century, and its importance becomes evi- dent if we can hear past the presumption of mute visuality within art his- tory, past the matter of music that excludes references to the world, past the voice that is already its own source of existence, past the phonetic task- mastering of writing, and past what we might see as hearing. None of the arts is entirely mute, many are unusually soundful despite their apparent silence, and the traditionally auditive arts grow to sound quite different when included in an array of auditive practices. The century becomes more mellifluous and raucous through historiographic listening, just that much more animated with the inclusion of the hitherto muffled regions of the sensorium. Yet these sounds do not exist merely to sonorize the histori- cal scene; they are also a means through which to investigate issues of cul- tural history and theory, including those that have been around for some time, existing behind the peripheral vision and selective audition of estab- lished ®elds of study. Indeed, many issues have not been addressed pre- cisely because they have not been heard. Thus, the dual task here is to listen through history to sound and through sound to historyÐin par- ticular, the history of sound in artistic modernism, the avant-garde, and experimental and postmodern points beyond, from the latter half of the nineteenth century into the 1960s, shifting from a largely European con- text to an American one. Reconstituting the auditory dimension can pry open the century to question and, ideally, better attune us to the changing conditions of aurality and artistic possibilities for sound in our own time. The book concentrates on the generation of modernist and postmod- ernist techniques and tropes among artistic practices and discourses. Some | 3 | | Listening through History are soundful in themselves; others are contingent on ideas of sound, voice, and aurality.1 As products of the new possibilities for hearing and as func- tional constraints for actually doing so, these techniques and tropes pertain to three main practical areas: the early development of sound within and across artistic practices, the response and accommodation of sound within artistic practices, and the use of ideas of sound within the development of important tropes within the arts. It would be a mistake to put too much stock in abstract categories because when they are examined in their his- torical contexts, techniques, tropes, and practices overlap, mediate and influence one another, and, most important, alternate quickly and exist simultaneously. The main ones discussed here are noise,