Book Review: Sound Art Revisited by Alan Licht
I. The new museum Alan Licht maps in Sound Art Revisited (2019), “the first full-length study of sound installations and sound sculpture to appear in English,” is the imaginary museum/archive of works of sound art, spanning from the early twentieth century to the present. In addition to this survey, the book gives air to a number of deadlocks that haunt sound art, aporias which can only arise through such diligent mapping and which point to sound art’s situation within a broader history of both art and music. In the final analysis, Licht admits that “sound art’s standing as a no man’s land persists,” that is, “its perennial outsider status in both the art world and the music world.” In this review, we first address questions of how to approach the taxonomy of sound art as well as how to discern its origins. From here, we proceed to study sound art and Minimalism in constellation, and tease out their unexpected homologies in view of sound art’s tendential claim, like that of Minimalism, to in fact be art.
II. Licht keenly favors placing sound art within the larger field of art history rather than that of music, a move which mirrors sound art’s own tendency to assimilate itself to contemporary art. Douglas Kahn highlights how it has been in the interest of sound artists to form this bond: “The recourse to art was because it was more capacious, discursively and institutionally, than music… art, no matter how awkward and reductive, seemed hospitable as well as adept at reworking its concepts to fit contemporary activities.” As Licht shows us throughout Sound Art Revisited, it is arguably only in relation to the crucible of the history of art that sound art becomes fully intelligible and its stakes become clear.
One of the central stakes of Licht’s inquiry concerns none other than the ability of sound art to be art: for it to engender an audience and gather a community that transcends individual, subjective experience, without at the same time neglecting the claims of individual experience. Another one of his project’s stakes is for sound art to, somehow, encode within itself an awareness of its own historical origins, a desiderata Sound Art Revisited critically achieves through its pedagogical and archeological emphases.
Licht makes a strong case for it being not mere chance “that the first generation of sound artists (Annea Lockwood, Bill Fontana, Maryanne Amacher, Bernard Leitner, [La Monte] Young, and [Max] Neuhaus) emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s at the same time as the Earthworks and Land artists.” He’s certainly right to pair sound art with Earthworks, for which, he notes, “art could be environment rather than object.” Writing on the music of Jon Hassell in 1974, critic Tom Johnson observed that his approach to sound had “more to do with recent developments in the art world than with the mainstream of music,” Hassell having at this time performed at a range of museums and galleries. Licht points out that “The term ‘sound art’ itself would seem to descend from the visual art world’s habitual use of ‘art’ in denoting new styles, i.e., Pop art, Op art, Kinetic art, video art, performance art, etc.” But is sound art more of a style name (Cubism), (sub/)genre name (serialism, jazz), or something closer to a movement name (Surrealism, Conceptualism, Fluxus)? Licht errs on the last side, and in a lucid and provocative moment he describes it as “a kind of civil rights movement for sound, which is as ubiquitous as the visual yet in many ways subservient to it”: this direct analogy to the social being a way of getting at or highlighting the aesthetic politics of sound art, which center on sound mattering (at all).
Sound art gains a certain legibility in and through the art world and the gallery space, but this “home” and context remains insufficient, sometimes improper, for reasons Licht is well aware of: “For all the interest in sound art, there is still often little effort made in exhibitions to distinguish it from music in a decorative mode and showcase sound works as distinct pieces.” What’s more, Licht tends to favor the disciplinary hermeneutic of art history over music/musicology because it also gives us a much-needed lens of history to see these radical works (and this broader artistic movement), works of sound art that after all are scandals from the perspective of the (modernist) museum/encyclopedia (which excludes the theatrical) but are nevertheless absorbed by the art world. Having invaded the museum, the art world is the new “museum.”
Though sound art can be seen as in many ways at odds with music and its history, by the time of its emergence in the ’60s and in the wake of Minimalism in the visual arts, as well as to a certain degree Conceptualism and Fluxus, and their various offshoots, “sound” had already been emancipated in late-modern music (or alternatively had become what Licht calls an “independent entity”), whether that be in Black free jazz (in all its iterations), the New York School composers, or the AACM. As Morton Feldman puts it tersely in 1972, “sound, which is what music becomes, …was the least important aspect of musical thinking.” Sound, in other words, was for a long time “mere” supplement to music, not unlike, say, how paint was to painting until it was liberated by Pollock and his followers, and thus became pure paint. (Interestingly, sound art, along with its sibling, sound studies, frequently offers a useful lens by which to approach many properly musical works that are outliers within the field of music itself, often those works which promote sound, or a certain grasp of sound, to the status of a medium of music; “Musicology, the least intrepid of academic disciplines…”) Contrasting sound art against music, Licht notes that “Sound art’s focus on the individual is at odds with music as a connector of people and a shared activity.” Indeed, sound art tends, like Minimalism, to isolate and address the individual in their singularity rather than address an aesthetic We.
III. Ascertaining sound art’s precise moment of origin proves to be a harder task than determining whether to align sound art more closely with art or music. Licht identifies sound art as emerging “alongside Conceptual art, Kinetic art, Land art, and video art.” He writes in another passage: “Sound art developed, in the late 1960s, as an environmental art, its spatialization derived not just from musique concrète and modern classical composition but from real-world rural and urban soundscapes, encompassing both natural and man-made sounds.” By classically allying itself with the plastic arts rather than music, sound art has tended to elevate spatiality over temporality, but sometimes without the hang up of the art object. For my money, sound art emerges on the scene at a distinctly post-Minimalist moment.
Through Licht’s survey, the art world comes the closest to seeming like the proper home of sound art, and so also perhaps its origin. Consider his commentary on curator Carsten Seiffarth’s writings on sound art and the matter of site specificity:
Seiffarth has written “in my understanding, the term sound art primarily covers sound installations and sound sculptures that can be experienced in a unique physical space that cannot simply be replaced,” although he does go on to quote Helga de la Motte-Haber that sound sculptures “can be hung in different rooms, meaning they are not necessarily dependent on site.” Seiffarth’s idea that a gallery for sound should be more than a display room respects the site-specific nature of sound installations to begin with and makes the venue a factor in the conceiving of new work, not just a destination.
An inescapable point of comparison to this nexus of issues lies in Richard Serra’s critique of Minimalism, whose imagination he shows to be hemmed in by the gallery. So too, may we ask of sound art: can it survive after being taken out of its gallery space? Or should it perhaps aspire to not survive such extirpation?
IV. If sound art seems to belong neither entirely to music nor art but instead to the space we have come to call the art world, this should be understood as the post-Minimalist rather than the post-Warholian art world. The art world uncovered by Minimalism is primarily concrete and architectural, and is importantly grasped by the formalists as constituting the ruins of the museum. Licht quotes Land Art curator Jennifer Licht who states that “Art is less and less about objects you can place in a museum,” which is an observation that is true not only of Land Art and sound art but also a whole host of post-Minimalist practices. Sound art’s intransigent standing as a no man’s land may ultimately be read as a reflection of the post-Minimalist art world, the virtue of this claim being that it helps us perceive its tendency to forget its own origins, a forgetting that the archaeological and pedagogical dimensions of Licht’s approach work to rectify.
Sound art’s affinity with Minimalism is evidenced in part by sound art’s emphasis on art as a mode of experience (rather than an object of experience). In the Minimalist object, syntax and meaning is eclipsed by the experience of a situation; and indeed, one of Minimalism’s chief discoveries is art’s architectural situation or context. The following are several quotes from Sound Art Revisited by Licht and others on sound art and experience:
Rather than an art form, sound art is a mode of experience…In a concert hall, the audience’s temporal and spatial experience is essentially determined by the composer/performer. In sound art, the temporal and/or spatial aspect of the experience is the responsibility of each individual listener. (Jørgen Larsson)
Sound art is directed toward the individual by highlighting perceptual experience (Licht)
sound’s ubiquity [pace John Cage] dovetailed with the Earthworks belief that art could be environment rather than object (Licht)
Whereas a concert hall strives to bring the same acoustic experience across to all members of the audience, disregarding their seating, most sound artworks want to achieve the opposite experience as the perception changes and depends on the viewer (Laura Maes and Marc Leman).
If, following all of the above, sound art is ultimately seen as only aimed at, and so only for, the single individual, how easily can this experience be shared with others? Can it be shared without falling prey to skepticism that one’s experience isn’t intersubjectively communicable or is entirely subjective? Are we able to say anything more than, as Michael Schumacher does, that “Sound is experience…So I’m trying to create situations where people come to it as experience, and value that”? Doesn’t a reticence to advance more robust goals and aims for sound art spell a deep skepticism concerning sound art’s prospects, a retreat from the stakes of art (that its name nominally claims)? And if sound artists are content for their work to remain strictly individual-oriented, does the achievement of authority vis-à-vis their work defeat its stated goals?
While Licht observes that sound art has increasingly acknowledged the social (“If sound art was found to be lacking, in some way, a recognition of the social, that lack has been addressed”), it’s not exactly clear how sound art is to balance its focus on individual experience with its presumably larger appeals to an a priori We or collective (no matter how unconscious or inchoate this We may be), through which it could gain greater aesthetic (and extra-aesthetic) traction. Licht notes that “much sound art is predicated on” a “listener-to-listener relationship” (which “has come to mean person-to-person”), but this still leaves unaddressed, as we see below, the question of a We. Might sound art then irrevocably be given over to plurality, to dispersion, which might ultimately be reflective, again, of the multiplicity or indeterminacy of the broader art world?
What I’m driving at here is that an art focused on being a mode of experience alone fails to acknowledge not only the fact of beholding (the notion of audience emerging in and through experience), which in some sense makes each of us individuals and additionally binds us together in a collective, but also the work’s ability to generate an audience. (In other words, such an art simultaneously acknowledges and skirts the conventions that shape our engagements with art, in conceiving of art’s language as both private and publicly accessible, i.e., telepathic.) Moreover, in focusing on experience over grammar, relation, and articulation, works of sound art tend to run the risk, to follow the formalist line of argument, of being “merely” interesting versus carrying and compelling conviction. In Minimalism, the formalists see an art given over entirely to the evasion of its own condition, as evidenced in its trademark self-baffled expression. After all, it is on account of Minimalism’s insistence on being purely experiential that Michael Fried identifies it as ideological.
A further resonance between sound art and Minimalism is the former’s inhabitation of both theater and Minimalism’s privileged experience of temporality, duration (muted is modernism’s temporality of instantaneousness). Minimalist theater, which sees the introduction of duration and endless or indefinite time within the field of art, opens up a de facto space, the art world, for something like sound art (not unlike Fluxus activities) to appear legible and intelligible. Yet comparing, as we are doing, sound art with Minimalism and framing it as a post-Minimalist enterprise is not to reduce the former to the latter but rather to acknowledge the difficulty of finding the appropriate terms for seeing sound art.
In Sound Art Revisited, Licht is true to what he calls sound art’s “paradoxical nature,” and so his object, by never coming down firmly on a single interpretive lens that might promise to do away with such indeterminacy and contradiction.
Like the work of postminimalist artist Robert Smithson, who is strongly associated with Land Art, much of sound art classically works the rift between the gallery space and the thought of its outside (e.g., the natural world), a relation between non-site and site that connects the gallery piece to an external location. Licht notes that “Liz Phillips’s work expresses a defining dynamic in sound art’s classic modes by mapping the space of a specific indoor room through sound while also suggesting the properties of an outdoor environment.” Sound art’s attempts to think beyond the architectural and the concrete often give way to institutional critique (they are its native ground when politicized), as in the work cited in Sound Art Revisited of Michael Asher, Andrea Fraser, and Marco Fusinato. If, as Licht convincingly argues, “sound art belongs in an exhibition situation rather than a performance situation,” then the question of “whether sound art is truly just a form of installation art” is a question that appropriately haunts it.
V. As with Minimalism, the culprit seems, if this is not already clear, to be a certain literalism, the literalist imagination of sound art having no existence apart from its architecture container and concrete context, which are its horizon, limit, and end (not unlike the concert hall for new music). Licht observes that “the aesthetic of foregrounding a space through sound is so essential to sound art,” and Carsten Seiffarth, in a similar vein, notes that “sound art has so far proven to be more of an ideal medium for charging the atmosphere of places which, thanks to their architecture or because of their historical and social context, already have a certain aura, and for turning them into a special venue for experiencing new things.” In both of these senses, sound art’s sonic tableau assumes the ground of the post-Minimalist gallery as architectural context. Like much sound art, Minimalist work, Melville writes, is “characterized to a high degree by the simple fact of its taking, claiming, a place in the gallery such that the work presents itself as the center of a situation.”
Here it is worth recalling how Serra, who begins making sculpture at a time of Minimalism’s dominance, resists delivering sculpture over to its architectural circumstances, as seen in the self-supporting One Ton Prop (1969) which can be compared to Robert Morris’ Corner Piece (1964). For Serra, sculpture will only succeed if it both addresses and defeats its architectural situation, disavowing a dependence upon the gallery. It is artists such as Serra, Smithson, and Eva Hesse, all working in the wake of Minimalist literalism’s radical theater, who may offer sound art some of the best resources for moving beyond the literalist imagination.
Literalism may also be seen as an indicator or symptom of a vicious circle in contemporary sound art (which results in stasis) that Licht identifies. If, as Licht writes, sound art suffers from both a “dearth of recordings” as well as its own immateriality/invisibility, these are deficits it can be seen as sharing with that of Conceptual art, the non-availability of much of the latter work reflecting its politically motivated withdrawal from visibility in favor of something like telepathic invisibility. How might sound art’s recurrent positing of a direct listener-to-listener relationship, which resembles Conceptual art’s own aspirations and procedures, partake in such a dream of telepathy?
VI. Licht presciently returns to sculptor Tony Smith’s infamous line, “There is no way to frame it, you just have to experience it.” Melville notes that “The time since 1967 is the time of the sentence’s historical success in spite of Fried’s objection; the question for us is exactly what that objection is.” If, following Licht, “much current sound art, or art with sound, could even be viewed as being ‘post-sound art,'” then this article would be an argument for reconsidering and tarrying with sound art’s origins, from which sound art could draw self-understanding and strength. Licht shows how such self-understanding tends to be eclipsed by a fixation on “the primary inspirations of [sound art’s] progenitors, rather than its own history or a sense of a movement or community.” As such, “to some extent contemporary sound art keeps recycling itself.”