- Venue
- Frieze Art Fair, Regent's Park
- Location
- London
Listening to Frieze: Sounding art in a visual world.
I am a sound artist. As a practice sound art been humming away since the 1970s but in recent years it’s turned up the volume. Through mainstream media we now hear about Susan Phillipz singing across the City of London, David Byrne turning buildings into organs and Katie Paterson sending Beethoven to the moon and back. No longer a backwater of the contemporary art world, it’s developed its own language and logic. Sound art’s central and clearly iconoclastic claim is to privilege a sonic sensibility. This doesn’t just mean listening to an installation and going, “Ooooh, it makes a noise!” A sonic sensibility turns much of contemporary and historical art tradition on their head because, for once, the gaze is muted by the hearing ear. The immersive, physical and phenomenologically touching power of sound has always appealed to me more than the objectifying, distant, silent experience of the visual. So, when visiting Frieze Art Fair my natural response was to listen.
What did it sound like? I was chatting to a guy in the café, an art lecturer of the old school, who was impressed by the lighting at the fair. “…better lit than most galleries…’ he claimed. Perhaps, but it sounded bloody awful. On first hearing it was confusing, almost as confusing as first sight (…what a fantasmagoric array of facelifts). Under the PVC awnings voices rose to mingle in an inaudible space metres above our heads, snatches of conversations emerged at ear level, but vanished before they were understood. Close your eyes and you could be in an airport. Sound was not important here. Even Resonance FM had to turn down the volume and become a TV channel.
I was drawn to a piece by Tariq Alvi called Staples. It was a sound recording of the artist stapling onto a plank of wood. Exploring similar ideas to Robert Morris’ The Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, it’s hollow metallic noise suggested both the metal of staple and the space of room where the action was happening. The sound embodied the physicality of the repetitious act of stapling (…again and again and again). Next to the recording was the stapled wood object itself. I asked the gallery attendant about the work. He explained, “You see it’s wood that has been stapled, and the sound is the work being made.”
His reply is exemplary of the difference between the sonic and visual sensibility. For the gallery the work itself is visual. It is the wood with staples, and the soundtrack is supportive; it is the record of the action. However, when approached with a sonic sensibility the description is reversed. The work itself is the sound recording, and the piece of wood is the document of the moment of recording. It is an entirely different way of experiencing the piece. When indulging the sonic sensibility white walls, sympathetic lighting and ornate frames become secondary. I was disappointed that I couldn’t really hear the recording due to all the hubbub of intrusive sound around me.
Now, I’m not a fool. I don’t suggest that painters should make paintings that sound better (although they could do – David Toop’s new book Sinister Resonance is concerned with that very idea of listening to paintings, or at least looking at paintings that listen). Or even sculptures that sing (although Haroon Mirza’s do). The visual is of course the dominant medium in contemporary art, even at its most conceptual. But the sonic sensibility alerts us to the depths of sound and the limits of the visual. Frieze sounded the same wherever you were. Every work had a soundtrack of flicking catalogues, mobile ringtones, clanking stilettos and flapping sneakers. Even works that sounded-out were subsumed into an aural slop that had all the sonic charm of a shopping centre.
The only respite was Shannon Ebner and Dexter Sinister’s Of Words, which was housed inside a sound-proofed room. It was a treat to be excluded from the sonic mess of Frieze and be in a space where a solitary human voice could enter my body and tell it a story all about octopuses. It was womblike, slightly perverse and wholly sonic. For a few moments my bones, from the cochlear down, were warmed. Then out again: I switch on my iPod, turn up the volume and head for the tube station.
