. . . . made on November 5 & 6, 2011, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago symposium organized by Lou Mallozzi, SAIC faculty and executive director of the Experimental Sound Studio.
1. “Sick,” by Haroon Mirza is a “sonic intrusion” (Eng, reporting on the NY Times description of the piece) at the Venice Biennale. An intrusion, like a woman with heels who enters the lunchroom, whose presence suggests that the conversation should shift away from voice leading or the weekend’s sexual exploits.
2. Sound art creates “sonic leakage” (Eng); the feminized body whose fluids drain as waste, passively, not as seed. But like the ear, she won’t close; sound won’t go away.
3. Small soundings, taciturn, close friend of silence: an annoying display of power in the face of music: “Well, say something!” yells the boss/master/protester/composer and Melville’s Bartleby says, “I’d rather not” (Migone). See James Scott: the feminized space of hidden transcripts of resistance. See Robin D. G. Kelley’s Race Rebels on the black worker in subtle protest.
4. “Nature is full of recording surfaces” (Cox). Environmentalism’s “scars upon the land” and nature is gendered “woman.” The susceptibility of the woman’s body to the mark: Hester’s scarlet letter, the stretch mark, the dangerous wrinkle: even as her wisdom grows, her time might soon be up. Listening privileged over speaking=a good feminine upbringing. Receptors ready to collect.
5. Or “body as recording surface” (Cox); the gift of impressionable surfaces. A monk sits, waiting. Anyone or any space so available is a woman, regardless of the scientific gender—though this science is slippery—of the one who is imprinted.
6. “To sense is to contract something from a flow” (Cox). Who knows contractions; who is familiar with monthly flows.
7. Or, laughter bursts out of the symposium audience when a slide is shown of Claude Wampler who is knitting a dress from the dress she is wearing and at this point in her performance, her source dress has unraveled to show her bare bottom and this is projected into the auditorium (Migone). As example of “the DJ’s mix, the continuous, the loop, and non-teleological” and a way of “keeping silences” (Migone). Alfonso Lingis: “Anything unadapted or unworkable produces laughter.” Into the symposium the female body has arrived. “Adrift in a moment that no longer makes sense—no longer has to make sense—we feel giddy freedom” (Lingis). Laughter as sound result as contraction in the possibly unworkable and reticent discursive flow.
8. “Sound art is a symptom of music” (Cox [was this his own supposition, or one he was interrogating?—it was a hard philosophical discourse to follow at times]). As “woman” is symptom of “man.” The “slave” as symptom of “human.” “Other” as symptom of “Citizen.” Sound art recovering our senses from enlightenment dulling.
9. “Sound is unending change—is necessarily queer” (Evans). Her cycles won’t stop until menopause when her ovaries produce hormones toward pleasure: the erotics of non-productive desire: queer. What would be a non-reproductive sound?
10. Sound art’s “jouissance” evades representation (Kim-Cohen). Enter: Écriture Féminine. Now, in 2011, we don’t have to believe that there is “a woman’s writing” or that “sound art is a woman” but we may say it is gendered, feminized, especially if this jouissance is not necessarily phallocentric (achievement oriented) in its intensities or particularly concerned with lack but rather repetitive, additive frameworks, the “and, and, and” of rock and roll intensity (Kim Cohen). We all stare at the slide of Iggy Pop’s nearly feminine body: skinny, exposed, a martyr for the show of it.
11. The Max Neuhaus sound installation in Times Square becomes a storage area, and so sound reminds us that “territory is a process” (Stjerna). Sound art as particularly pedagogical: teaching us as much about the city around it as sound and art itself.
12. “Attention to the sonic field is attention to all matter generally” (Perez). Possible parallel: the “from margins to center” methodology of the Theories of Feminism course I took in 1989 with Minnie-Bruce Pratt. Locate the most marginal and you locate certain hidden truths about everything on the page.
13. Sound art students desire an accompanying image, installation, maybe even something to sell, but this visibility may render the sound art inaudible (Voegelin). What is an artist to do? Woman, a between person. Sound art, at the moment, as between, but becoming and insisting on the audible—not necessarily attached to the visual arts—could “complexify the music scene” (Voegelin). She walks into the lunchroom again.
14. Some arts and archives become “gifts” (Grubbs quoting Goldsmith of ubu web) which may be like feminized professions that carry high honors but low pay: teaching, for example. The pin on this badge of honor pricks her skin annoyingly but as a soldier of the avant-garde, the sound artist is encouraged to volunteer and buck up. See: Robin D. G. Kelley on Monk, who insisted on innovation but never wanted to, couldn’t afford to give it away for free.
15. Take “thinking sonically as a methodology” (Perez) and add “thinking gender as methodology” and find what is feminized in the language of sound art. You will be studying power, resistance, a frame that slips. “Sound undoes fixed relations of power” (Perez).
Then, to recognize that “power, in short, is force directed to securing a future in the face of its inherent openness” (Grosz), is to ask:
What future do sound artists want to secure and would it be possible to preserve an openness?
Study sound art and you will be studying potential, but not necessarily progress.
Sound art, a perhaps willful turn from “progression” or “secured future”: a turn from lullaby to composition, baby talk to poetry, infant to adult, notebook to book. Against the sophisticated, focused, legible, scored, IV-V-I chord progression.
16. Because “sound art collapses” the mind/body split and the passive/active split (Korrick). A feminine sexuality is sex all over. See Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One.
17. Because sound art “forces us to be self-reflexive about seeing” (Korrick) as a woman or person of color or person who codes queer sees oneself being seen by others on certain streets.
18. Because Echo is rejected by Narcissus (Gee). What will she find in the woods where she is banished? She has left the discursive frame but she is not completely gone.
19. Because to conceptualize sound art is to enter “a philosophical space that is always moving—this is like sound itself” (Korrick). To construct race, to construct gender, to construct “the other”—because these subjects are always on the move and won’t stay put—requires categories. The archive will always structure the enemy (Feldman), asking: Who are we up against?
Antidote for the anxiety of motion, refugee status, the anxiety of archive: to cease searching for a landing pad. What would the properties of such a cessation look like? Walk away from the definitional paradigm prone to aesthetic arguments, and the nervous habit of historical timelines. Where do the riches lie?
Two Disclaimers:
First, I am not a sound artist so I am writing about this symposium from what Elizabeth Grosz would define as the position of outsider. To borrow her words: “I don’t want to suggest that the position of the outsider is always or only negative, or necessarily critical, or bound up in envy, a yearning for an inside position. The outside is capable of great positivity and innovation. The outside of one field is the inside of another.” I hope I offer here some positive thing.
I am an experimental poet who sometimes finds shelter under the wing of an English department here and there, but mostly I crave to sit at a table with historians, scientists, policy makers, other artists, anthropologists, librarians, designers, and watch the very terms of any contemporary question or inquiry change.
20. I have tried to "write sound" (Cascella) and I have heard myself say "a poem is not a poem until it is said out loud" which is a version of Robert Pinsky's idea about poetry and breath.
Second, I base these writings on my notebook—things heard—all inaccuracies are my fault: the errors inherent in recordings.
Conclusions:
To trace and meet the feminized language of the discourse of sound art would be a process of slow touch: curiosity, no revolutions, no shame, few manifestos, and the word “community” would be banished from the lexicon to avoid any traumatic flashbacks.
A tracing—think delicate paper, the attention of a pencil, or of a fingertip—a certain quality of paying attention. Not to re-form the discourse, but to see how, in its feminized state, sound art may be beautifully susceptible to all the generative moves borne of “other than.” “Making room for the other part of myself who is the other, who can only exist, of course, if I am there to receive” (Cixous).
How sound art may make the most of the evolutionary potential of its at least slightly “degenerate” status—not quite white and certainly not pure—surfaces which risk “sterilization” campaigns—the threat to cleanse, discipline, make straight, to put something to use in service of defining “normal” (Painter).
How a symposium toward sound art theories might even rough up the surfaces further: Can sound art teach us how to speak from the whole body Cixous is referring to?
Alliances may develop, as the one who traces eventually wants to look for another body of knowledge with this same self-awareness: outsider-not-victim.
What, from hip-hop, might sound art learn? See: Tricia Rose’s Black Noise. Note the fact that there is a college, part of a public university system, in Harlem, whose faculty still ask, “but is it music?” and they are not only referring to John Cage but also to hip-hop. How does this happen and what are the potentials in this dismissal, this doubt, these property lines? Sound art: meet your friends if you haven’t already.
What are the limits to an art historical discourse? See many examples from literary studies, including Lorenzo Thomas’ idea of Afrocentric modernism. The “make it new” has been, for many, footnoted by the absolute need to “look to the old.” See also Toni Morrison on how Africa civilized Greece and how “to know” lineages is to trust your intuition and never banish memory.
What is very old about sound art? The sonic space of the cathedral? Canyon? The chant? A healer who murmurs? The mantra that, in vibration, encompasses everything? See Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred.
21. Speaking in tongues, internal voices, soundtrack of a contemporary danse macabre (Weiss). Lunacy, hysteria. The womb as first sonic space; death as nonsense (Weiss).
List every instance of intentional soundings that precede “modernism” or western art music. Look over the wall of each border as it pops up.
Who else has fallen off the trail called “mastery” either willfully or by birth and might be a companion?
How does the hybrid, the mongrel crash against the logic of aesthetic argument and make a very interesting future possible?
Source Lectures
Cascella, Daniela. "Something missing: notes on Writing Sound as Landscape."
Cox, Christoph. “Hearing-Things: Sound Art, Phonography, and Materialism.”
Evans, T. Brandon. “Sympathetic Resonances: Towards an Affective Model of Listenership.”
Eng, Michael. “From an Aesthetics of the Real to the Reality of the Aesthetic: Rancière, Sick, and the Politics of Sound Art.”
Gee, Erin. “Repetition as Radical Referral: Echo and Narcissus in the Digital Environment.”
Grubbs, David. “ ‘Remove the Records from Texas’: Parsing Online Archives.”
Kim-Cohen, Seth. “Burden Bangs Joy: Rock and Roll Aesthetics vs. Sound Art.”
Korrick, Leslie. “Sound Art Transcendent.”
Migone, Christof. “Taciturntablism: techniques of hairline fractures and tiny displacements.”
Perez, David Michael. “Vibrational Futures: The sonic field beyond perception, sound, and art.”
Stjerna, Åsa Helena. “Aspects on duration: the temporary and the permanent as ontological constructs in site-specific sound art.”
Voegelin, Salomé. “Sonic Possible Worlds.”
Weiss, Allen S. “Sonic Danse Macabre.”
Other Sources
Cixous, Hélène and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. Eric Prenowitz, Trans.
Feldman, Allen. “The Structuring Enemy and Archival War.” The New School for Social Research, New York. 5 March 2010. Lecture.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One.
Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class.
---. Theolonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.
Lingis, Alfonso. Body Transformations: Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture.
Morrison, Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, Eds.
Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People.
Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Muisc and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts.
Technicians of the Sacred. Rothenberg, Jerome, Ed.
Thomas, Lorenzo. Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry.
