Bring Da Noise: A Brief Survey of Sound Art

By Kenneth Goldsmith
Published: March 1, 2004


Over the past few years, sound art has been more visible in America. The Whitney has been including it in its Biennials and it even had its own section in their "The American Century" retrospective a few years ago. As a matter of fact all over the country, it's not too unusual to walk into a museum, art gallery, or university-sponsored exhibition space and hear nothing but sound. Websites like my own UbuWeb, the San Francisco-based Other Minds, and numerous independent sites of American composers are sprouting up, offering dozens of hours worth of sound art MP3s for free. Once relegated to specialty shops like Printed Matter, Inc. even record stores seem to be carrying these sort of discs. If you're interested in sound art, a trip to Other Music in New York City or to the new airplane-hanger sized Amoeba in Los Angeles will prove fruitful, with offerings from everyone from Vito Acconci to Mike Kelley cramming the racks.

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FUTURISM & DADA REVIEWED 1912-1959

LTM Recordings

Our CD anthologies Futurism & Dada Reviewed and Voices of Dada feature historic archive spoken word recordings by key Dada artists as well as a small number of more recent recordings, and are widely acknowledged as definitive. The Festival Dada Paris CD features unique recordings of music perfomed at key Dada events in Paris between 1920 and 1923. All CDs are mastered and packaged to a high standard, with booklets containing archive images and detailed historical notes.

René Clair - Entr'acte (1924)

In 1924, a film named Entr'acte premiered as entr'acte for the Ballets Suédois production Relâche at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Relâche is based on a book and with settings by Francis Picabia, produced by Rolf de Maré, and with choreography by Jean Borlin. This short film was directed by René Clair with the music for both the ballet and the film composed by Erik Satie (the last music he composed). For this production, the dadaists collaborating on the project had invented a new flavor of dada or surrealism: instantanéisme. The complete film takes about 20 minutes using such techniques as watching people run in slow motion, watching things happen in reverse, looking at a ballet dancer from underneath, watching an egg over a fountain of water get shot and instantly become a bird and watching people disappear. The cast included cameo appearances of Francis Picabia, Erik Satie, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. The conductor of the orchestra at the premiere was Roger Désormière.


René Clair - Entr'acte (1924)

Interpretation & Reflection

Interpretation

I decided to choose oobleck for it's enigmatic qualities and it's reluctance to conform to classification as any one state of being and could be a metaphor for creative ability.

The random scattering of words on the satellite is a reference to Hugo Ball's 'word salad' form of poetry, breaking down the structures of language.

The satellite dish is a symbol for the repressive powers who manage to filter out some of the work being produced by artists but the majority of it carries on regardless.

The briefcase has an obvious reference to travel and how many people had been exiled, abroad or to concentration camps. However in this case it is a point of collection which is then focused down through the opening and along the gutter.

The vinyl is then not only a means of expression through music but is a further means of creating something new and unpredictable by spattering the mixture around again.

Reflection

Although initiated by myself the work then left to become very much in the realm of the audience. Their reaction on the opening night was one of curiosity, because of the viscosity of the mixture the process was quite drawn out and the audience feel quite for the good part of ten minutes almost expecting something spectacular to happen. It seemed like it was a nice focal point for people to talk about or even just to talk about something completely unrelated whilst still observing the unravelling of the piece.

Exhibition Piece

The composition of the final piece consisted of a Milk trolley frame to which various found objects were attached with cable ties or slotted into different levels. At the top we have a:

• bucket which is attached to a vacuum cleaner tube
• funnel slotted into the white plastic pipe
• smaller funnel inserted into a shower hose

A mixture of cornflour and water (oobleck) is then poured into these containers which then slowly dispense it into the satellite dish which acts as a sieve, however the mixture just passes through the holes.

It is then collected in one half of a briefcase which has been tilted at an angle so that the mixture runs down to one end where a hole has been drilled into one of the corners.

From here it is funneled down a piece of black guttering where it eventually drops into a vinyl which has been melted around a glass bowl to form a container.


At this point the vinyl in spinning and consequently the centrifugal force causes the mixture to be flung out causing a random accumulation of the mixture on the surface of the player which then soon dries out.

Cabaret Voltaire & DADA

Cabaret Voltaire was the name of a nightclub in Zürich, Switzerland. It was founded by Hugo Ball, with his companion Emmy Hennings on February 5, 1916 as a cabaret for artistic and political purposes.

The cabaret featured spoken word, dance and music. The soirees were often raucous events with artists experimenting with new forms of performance, such as sound poetry and simultaneous poetry. Mirroring the maelstrom of World War I raging around it, the art it exhibited was often chaotic and brutal. On at least one occasion, the audience attacked the Cabaret's stage. Though the Cabaret was to be the birthplace of the Dadaist movement, it featured artists from every sector of the avant-garde, including Futurism's Marinetti. The Cabaret exhibited radically experimental artists, many of whom went on to change the face of their artistic disciplines; featured artists included Kandinsky, Paul Klee, de Chirico and Max Ernst.

Dada Manifesto (1916, Hugo Ball)
Read at the first public DADA soiree, Zurich, July 14th (1916)