- Venue
- South Hill Park Arts Centre
- Location
- South East England
The development of sonic art is not often recognised within the visually oriented art world, whether due to that history being tied to the evolution of a technological world that many people are still struggling to come to terms with, or, as Max Eastley, lead artist at the Sound:Space symposium at South Hill Park comments; it brings it’s visitor into an essentially dark world, where the phenomenon of sound presents it’s listener with an intimate and perhaps unfamiliar relationship to their own inner world.
The spacious surroundings of the Georgian mansion house that plays host to the event, impart a dignified and stable quality to the presentation of such a delicate artform. Starting the day, master sound recordist, Chris Watson’s surround installation of audio from the African savannah creates a hyper-real experience where the natural world is magnified by the recording process into near abstract detail.
The theme of the natural world is continued later in the presentation of kinetic sculptor, Max Eastley who ran through an impressive portfolio of wind and water-powered works. Surely one of the UK’s most undervalued artists, Eastley’s modest approach to outlining influential works exhibited at the Serpentine, Haywards Gallery’s “Sonic Boom” show, involvements with the Cape Farewell Artic voyages, Brian Eno, and London’s avant garde musicians over 30 years, speaks of something recognisably British. Highlighting chance and the expectation of viewers, his tale of the wind flute installation in the Serpentine Gallery, which remained dormant for it’s opening week due to unusually calm weather. When cast as art in a gallery setting, we are used to works delivering on cue for us at the flick of a switch. Eastley’s interest in chance and co-incidence becomes more apparent in the associated “Kinetic Drawings” gallery show, where a set of his delicate kinetic sound machines seem to interact with an almost supernatural will, due to the visitors senses striving to connect events into a coherent whole.
Norwegian artist, Jana Winderen gives a chatty catalogue of her hydrophone recording trips in frozen climates. The audio from her microphones plunged into the icy sub -Arctic seas provides an enveloping blanket of creaking and fizzing sounds as demonstration. The question of, at what point this becomes artwork arises, with the sound recordists dilemma of whether the sound of their own presence in the environment is desirable or, can the artist representing recorded evidence of the natural world claim influence or ownership of such material.
A grave Ray Lee presents his projects based on research into magnetism and electricity. His early performance projects playing Theremin led him to Moscow University’s undergound vaults which house unique, early electronic instruments that work on raw principles of transmuting light into sound via photo-electric resistance. With this context, Lee’s large scale work “Siren” seems to hark back to a pre-transistor age where banks of unfathomable machines where necessary to marshal the forces of sound and awe the listener.
Closing the day with a performance by Max Eastley and improv saxophonist, John Butcher provided a welcome burst of live sound. The duo improvised through surprisingly dense layers of sound, interspersed with pauses that let the sounds and silences of the kinetic sculptures break through.
The wealth of work selected for presentation during this absorbing event did not so much provide a focus, but demonstrated the sheer breadth and diversity of contemporary sound arts.
