CONCEPT

SOUND AND VISION: BEYOND REASON

“Working with sound frees my head. Always did.”
— Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven

Popular music accompanies or is constitutive of some of our most meaningful and widely shared cultural moments. The ecstatic potential of rock music provides a space to exceed standardised terms of representation, language and control. The artists in ‘Sound and Vision: Beyond Reason’ explore the intersections of music, contemporary film and video and post-conceptual art. Rather than staging a meeting of isolated fields of cultural production (music and art), ‘Sound and Vision: Beyond Reason’ seeks to trouble the autonomy of art, music and film, and the singular identities of artist, musician or filmmaker. More than an exercise in juxtaposition, translation or transposition, this exhibition offers a complex matrix of sound, image, signal, noise, and meaning.

As in any medium, the structural components of film and video – light, sound, motion and optics – are dependent upon the human body and consciousness to cohere meaning. The transformation of experience, and the expansion of consciousness, has historically been a preoccupation in rock music (for example, psychedelia), one that combines both physical and conceptual realms. The body has always been implicated in rock music; during its early formation, to ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ was a euphemism for having sex. The mythologised promise of rock music is freedom and rebellion, and by extension, utopia. Malcolm McLaren states, “No matter how shallow people say pop music is, and in particular, its origins (part organized crime, part teenage werewolf), it continues to confound, astound and seduce something deep in all of us—that is the desire to change the culture and possibly, if it only be for a moment, change life itself.”¹

Rock music instigates and carries the means to communicate beyond formal language —transmitting intelligence beyond reason. Through communicating with sound, movement, and the body, alternative discourses are propelled through multiple senses, fostering meaning that is physically enacted as well as cognitively interpreted. Simultaneously performative and symbolic, the collision of sound and vision encompasses both presence and signification, opening up multiple levels of communication.

Theorist Herbert Marcuse, in his 1969 essay, ‘On Liberation’, discussed the transformation of society as the new spirit, following May 1968, proposing an end to the distinctions between so-called high and low cultures, and an end to the separation of art and life. Marcuse describes: “…where the higher culture in which the aesthetic values (and the aesthetic truth) had been monopolized and segregated from the reality collapses and dissolves in de-sublimated, ‘lower’, and destructive forms, where the hatred of the young bursts into laughter and song, mixing the barricade and the dance floor, love play and heroism. And the young also attack the esprit de serieux in the socialist camp: miniskirts against the apparatchiks, rock ‘n’ roll against Soviet Realism.”² Marcuse further describes the repressive tendency as an ethos of capitalist functionality, which promises a progressively ‘better life for all’. He proposes the possibility of an unrepressed culture that, having successfully sheltered and fed itself, need not labour further and is free to play.

Walter Benjamin theorised an ‘optical unconscious’ in relation to photography and film. “The camera’s ability to capture spaces and events not ‘informed by human consciousness’, particularly through its capacity for enlargement (as in a microscope) or slow motion, was a means of revealing previously unseen possibilities for comprehension, interpretation, and action. “On the one hand, film furthers insight into the necessities governing our lives by its use of close ups, by its accentuation of hidden details in familiar objects, and by its exploration of commonplace milieux through the ingenious guidance of the camera; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of a vast and unsuspected field of action [Spielraum].³

Contour consciously uses the image of a mirror for it’s 2011 biennial identity. Like the camera, the mirror reveals and conveys much, from phenomenological experience to symbolic signification. One immediately becomes aware of subjectivity and objectivity before the mirror. Mirrors are central to the work of Dan Graham: they multiply perspectives, allow for self or collective recognition, both literally and theoretically. Part of the apparatus of a film camera, the mirror also refers to the reflective material of the ‘silver screen’. The mirror image was chosen for these reasons, providing an opportunity to consider the audience in the work of art as much as the artist-producer.

Whereas Benjamin emphasised the manner in which an optical unconscious, propagated by film and photography, reveals the historical nature of all events, thus making possible political action and change, composer John Cage saw potentially liberating force in the opening up of sound to reveal its components. For Cage, the goal of music is not to isolate the listener within an acoustic space…but to dissolve the boundaries of the ego that, to Cage’s mind, already separate the individual as a self-enclosed, monadic being from the environment and from others. Such, for Cage, was the path to both enlightenment and political liberation.”⁴

The accumulation of knowledge, emotion, and physical experience in art, music and film can exceed the boundaries of language and knowledge management. As a biennial of the moving image, particularly one that foregrounds the architectural space of the city as part of its program, these notions might provide a forum the social construction of space. The crossroad of sound and vision pushes the limits of cultural transformation, in the ways that we may implicate the excesses of the human body as a conduit and agent in radicalising social practice.

1 — Malcolm McLaren
Musical Paintings. Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2009, 5.

2 — Herbert Marcuse
An Essay On Liberation, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, 25.

3 — Branden W. Joseph
Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage. New York: Zone Books, 2008, 113.

4 — Branden W. Joseph
Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage. New York: Zone Books, 2008, 115.