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8/12/2019 The aesthetic ear: sound art, Jacques Ranciere and the politics of listening

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pure historicity and endeavour to highlight itsunique aesthetic and political impact.

From this vantage point, I wish to posit soundart as a potently critical medium, capable of expressing ideas and revealing perspectives notmerely concerned with sound as a sensory phe-nomenon. Culling definitions and critiques of sound art by Alan Licht, Paul Hegarty, BrandonLaBelle and others, I wish to purport sound art asa medium that is more than a specimen of postmodern interdisciplinary arts, more thanwhat its deceiving moniker implies. Buttressedby Jacques Rancieres recent aesthetic writings onwhat he calls critical art, I will clarify soundarts core objectives and its flexibility as a practicethrough individual analyses of four active artistswhose work engages contemporary themes via the

aesthetic ear.Sound art, as an independent term, is a young

one; its origin by name dates to the 1980s, but wasnot fully realised in practice until the 1990s andnot committed to the typical institutional exhibi-tion strategy until the first years of the newmillennium. 1 Due in part to the confused curationof these millennial exhibitions and to the scatter-shot PR programming of progressive or outmusic publishers, sound art has become erro-neously synonymous with mediocre contemporary

experimental and electronic music forms.2

Readany digital or printed music review publicationand one is bound to stumble upon a blandmusician being falsely inflated by the term soundartist. Reacting to this unmitigated and largelyunreflected upon growth of sound art, severalwriters have recently devoted themselves to chart-ing its winding history in order to situate it as alegitimate, although at times confusingly defined,practice. Such surveys have been greatly beneficialin outlining the history of sounds role in exhibitedart and in doing so correcting some of the PR gaffes mentioned above. However, the criticalterminus of these generally art historical textsrarely extends beyond tracing nomenclature andoffering compilations of like-minded artists. 3 Inorder to understand how sound functions as anartistic medium and as a valid contemporaryvoice, we must understand its aesthetic means,its socio-political ramifications and move beyondmere cataloguing.

What follows is a concentrated review of con-temporary literature on the subject, its objectives,

its shortcomings and finally its alternative inapproaching the matter through aesthetics, parti-cularly Rancieres recent art theory. By invokingRanciere, it should be clear that I am notconcerned with sound art as an isolated meth-odological or art historical footnote; I am ratherintrigued by sound as a vehicle for aestheticexperience and political activation. I considersound art capable of being critical art, or rather,art that Ranciere claims intends to raise con-sciousness of the mechanisms of domination inorder to turn the spectator into a conscious agentin the transformation of the world. 4

Alan Lichts 2007 book Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories hints at such an aes-thetic programme by concluding with a vaguelyoptimistic sentiment: sound art can potentially

point to the kind of cosmic consciousness that somuch art aspires to. 5 Unfortunately, this obser-vation is left dangling at the back cover and isnever elaborated upon; it is treated like anexhausted response to the complicated questionof sound arts importance, and yet it is the correctanswer. Despite being a wonderful repository of historical photographs and other documentation,Lichts book, perhaps the most widely known inthe field, is too preoccupied with classifying soundart as a restricted set of practices to continue this

line of thought. Licht instead battles with separat-ing music and visual art from his titular subject sothat he may place it in a transcendental positionbetween categories. This untangling of verbiagemuddles the critical potential of sound art andleaves many of the artists and their works unex-amined. From the outset he draws a set of rigiddefinitions: Sound art belongs in an exhibitionsituation rather than a performance situation,Sound art rarely attempts to create a portrait orcapture the soul of a human being or expresssomething about the interaction of humanbeings, and Sound art, then, rejects musicspotential to compete with other time-based andnarrative-driven art forms and addresses a basichuman craving for sound. 6 Kenneth Goldsmith,in reviewing Lichts book, too champions itsimport as a historical document, but cautionsthat these stringent precepts dont hold up. 7

Lichts categorisations are easily eroded becausethey do not treat sound art as a viable contempor-ary art form, but as a fringe element quarantined toits own special space in the gallery and on the

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bookshelf. Although Licht is obviously invested inthe topic, by surgically removing sound art fromthe theories and themes that envelop the rest of thecontemporary art world, he is ultimately under-mining its legitimacy and doing a disservice to theartists involved. 8 Applying theory to artworks mustnot be done so microscopically; if it is an effectivepiece it will hold up to rigorous and wide-rangingappraisal. Much of the criticism levelled at soundart has honed in on its perceived methodologicaland conceptual myopia: Joe Milutis, a professor of sound art at the University of South Carolina,notes that the sound art that has emerged fromgalleries has attempted to define itself by exclu-sion. 9 In his 2007 history of noise, Noise / Music ,Paul Heagrty argues sound art as somethingporous and very hard to describe but . . . it is tooself-contained, and sets up the listener as self-contained. 10 I am not supporting all sound-basedartwork without discretion; there certainly areworks being exhibited that tumble into thesepitfalls. Yet, the above criticisms fail to analysework on an individual basis within the context of the contemporary milieu. They take instructionfrom the notion that sound art is a specialised andprecisely defined genre, which in turn limits thedepth of their critique. The approach is narrowand contained, not the art.

Superficial definitions perpetuate superficialcriticisms, leading then to no stable point of understanding. Hegartys assertion that soundart . . . is kept at a level of sufficiency, the pre-sentation of sound in its own right, in a rejectionof formal experimentation and judgment alike,reads like a counterpoint to Licht arguing soundarts human-less operation and negation of possi-ble narrative. 11 Likewise, Milutis exclusioncomment stems directly from the arbitrary condi-tion that sound art must be in an ordainedexhibition space and draped in the pretense thatfollows it. 12 What this discourse highlights is afundamental lack of panoptic scope, or in otherwords, a perspective on the practice of sound artthat incorporates it into the major streams of contemporary art and theory. Meanwhile, muchhas been written about sound art as it is bound toart and music history; the standardised tale nowfixes it in a web surrounded by conceptual art, thevisual impact of minimalism, the racket made byearly Fluxus happenings and the musical experi-mentations forged by a generation of composers

working with electronics, silence and the libera-tion of noise. 13 Each genealogical point can betraced to work being made today, but what makessaid work more than just a compilation of itsinfluences and worthy of discussion?

Sound art functions via listening; this is anobvious but easily overlooked (overheard?) point.By listening, we interact with sound, the mediumof sound art, not only as phenomenon, but alsoas a conduit of information. In the past fewdecades a bevy of books have been publishedhoping to reinvigorate our consciousness of hear-ing, and its more concentrated brother listening,in a culture that is primarily, and sometimesoverwhelmingly, visual. 14 Interesting reads nodoubt, however, they too often concoct the earas a mystical appendage that (solely because it has

been all but forgotten) is supposedly capable of tapping into a holistic universal awareness that oureyes cannot. They construe listening as a sensuousprimitivism that provides a calming singularity toour lives rabid multiplicity. Many musical experi-menters from the 1960s onward have also carriedthis banner, each with their own idiosyncraticprojects: Pauline Oliveros deep listening, LaMonte Youngs almost endless drones, and otherssought to extract the listener from their personalsituation and transport them to a plane of pure

experience.15

I do not contend the point that ourears are sometimes forgotten and the soundsaround us taken for granted, but I do not considerhearing a more exalted sense; both eye and ear areequally able to transmit information. Sound artscritical importance is indebted to its ability tocommunicate the everyday experience and com-ment on contemporary happenings via sound notas its own end, but as the means towardscriticality. 16 As such, sound art treats the ear asan aesthetic organ just as visual art does the eye; itempowers one to hear the complex structures welive for, against and persistently with. Sound artsown aesthetic potential liberates it from theaforementioned historical and methodological ex-clusion, rendering it an utmost inclusive art formcapable of expression and keen investigation.

Perhaps it has been assumed that the writers Imentioned above have forgone all mention of aesthetics in relationship to sound art; this is nottrue. However, what is true is that very little pagespace has been offered to its discussion. Further-more, what has been offered up are but discreet

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and unelaborated upon references to relationalaesthetics, a term and concept that is very easy todeploy but often done so too nebulously to be of any effect. Hegarty concludes the 11th chapter of Noise/Music with the following unnamed allusionto Nicolas Bourriauds system of relational aes-thetics: The disjunctions are mostly in therelational aspect of sound art (how it makes usaware of relatedness and our position as related toenvironments), in its other relation to the visualarts and its homes, in the relation set up between ahere and a there in the representing of sound fromsomewhere else and another time. 17 Despite hiscriticisms, this is Hegartys appeal to sound artsdisjunctive potential, its potential to be what hedefines as noise, a disruptive and transformativeentity that we are forced to react to. 18 Yet, the

fact that noise is negative: it is unwanted, other,not something ordered makes sound art or rathersuccessful sound art in Hegartys definition,nothing but a sample of institutional critiquetrying to gnaw at something from the insideout. 19 Its relational radius then seems very limited;it extends from the gallery to another gallery orperhaps a museum but beyond, it withers. PerBourriaud, however, relational art extends itself and creates relations outside the field of art (incontrast to relations inside it, offering it its socio-

economic underlay): relations between individualsand groups, between the artist and the world, and,by way of transitivity, between the beholder andthe world. 20 This schema goes far beyond thegallery and would consider successful sound artmore than a disruptive noise.

As a theoretical perspective, relational aes-thetics bolsters an art that endeavours to informits viewers of societys waning interpersonalcognisance and activate an informed responseto it. It is an art that no longer wants to respondto the excess of commodities and signs, but to alack of connections and thus intends to createnot only objects but situations and encoun-ters. 21 According to Hegarty, sound and soundart are relational and though the works describedbelow (by Christian Marclay, Toshiya Tsunoda, Janet Cardiff and Janek Schaefer, respectively)may also be considered as such, I wish toconsider them outside of this defined context.

Brandon LaBelle, writer and sound artisthimself, invokes relational aesthetics as the theo-retical crux of his 2006 book Background Noise:

Perspectives on Sound Art : It is my view thatsounds relational condition can be traced throughmodes of spatiality . . . This no doubt stands at thecore of the very practice of sound art * theactivation of the existing relation between soundand space. 22 LaBelles relationalism is foundedon sounds inherent qualities of spatiality; follow-ing his equation, sound is a social and site specific,and therefore democratic and open to the rela-tional input between the beholder and theworld. 23 Though LaBelle, like Licht, goes on totell the history of sound art and similarly juxtaposeit between visual art and experimental music, hedoes so with a keen sense of sounds aestheticprogression while deftly handling sound art as apractice that extends beyond its own noise.Following his history, we witness sound art (and

art in general) enmeshing itself more and morewith everyday experiences. From John Cagesseminal 4?33 ?? (1952), to musique concre tes rein-vention of recorded sound (c. 1951), to Fluxusinvasions of the prosaic and so on up to today,sound as it is used by artists has been continuouslyapproaching a point of conceptual and methodo-logical cohabitation with our own lives. 24 Thisprogression has been one driven by equal forces of abolition and expansion: the abolition of a hier-archy that values certain sounds over others and

the consequential expansion of means and subject.The result is an equalisation and democratisationof the ways in which the sound functions in artand may be approached in the everyday.

Rancieres aesthetic political programme, out-lined in the recently translated The Politics of Aesthetics , Malaise dans lesthe tique and a constantinflux of various lectures and interviews, leapsfrom this key intersection. In his schema, allcritical art and the effective relational art that issubsumed by this category, is political because itfunctions on the same level as a politics thatexists when the figure of a specific is constituted,a supernumerary subject in relation to the calcu-lated number of groups, places and functions insociety. 25 Just as relational art appeals to thecommon person via situation, installation orsound, Rancieres politics is concerned with thesubjectification of the demos or the process bywhich a political subject [the individual] extractsitself from the dominant categories of identifica-tion and classification. 26 Bettina Funcke de-scribes his politics further as one that doesnt

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regime destroys the system of genres and isolatesart in the singular. 37 Mirrored here is the oft-repeated history of modern sound that leads towhat we know as sound art. But what we knowtoday has been treated awkwardly in this newregime; it is more often met with questions of definition or shallow exclamations about its owntechnology than given solid analysis. The culprit isnot the writer necessarily so much as the term,sound art. If we are to consider sound art acontemporary art form, we are to also consider itwithin the aesthetic regime of art, within a regimethat ushers in the demise of the ontologicalscaffolding ordering (separating yet connecting)the different arts, genres, vocabularies, subjects onthe basis of the ontological scaffolding of socialoligarchy. 38 The effect is a clearing out of

cluttered nomenclature; gone are genre place-holders, gone are terms that only function asmeans for advertisement and finally gone arediscussions about the boundaries of these terms.Sound art is not sound art, it is art that utilisessound to, as Ranciere notes, play the game of exchanges and displacements between the worldof art and the world on non-art. 39 It is art. Justas the visual arts are liberated from the con-straints of representing action, liberated from thehegemony of language in the new aesthetic

regime, so is art that appeals to the ear so thatthey may both claim to present the world itselfin an aesthetic pursuit. 40

Heretofore, I have used the label sound art asa reference point to the literature I have commen-ted on, not as an agreement to its validity; it is aconfusing and obsolete notion. The ear is anaesthetic organ, not only a receiver of phenom-enon. It functions in our day-to-day experiencesby aurally mapping what we consider normal,abnormal, meaningful, etc. This mapping is whatRanciere calls the distribution of the sensible.Rockhill further describes it as a system of self-evident facts of perception based on the sethorizons and modalities of what is visible andaudible as well as what can be said, thought, madeor done. 41 Art that targets the ear in order todisrupt the meaningful fabric of the sensible isthen a political and critical art, not only a soundart. 42 Effective visual art functions through thesechannels by radicalising what we already arefamiliar with, constructing meanings in theform of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful

situations. 43 Effective aural art travels those samechannels.

Heterogeneous art of the twentieth centurywielded polemics as its primary tool, mockingthe art world as too insular and too self-distractedto be involved with the everyday world. 44 Rancierecites Dadaist collage, Wolf Vostells photographicjuxtapositions, Hans Haackes museum tags andmany others as examples of the heterologicalpredisposition to shock the viewer into awarenessof violence behind the happiness of consump-tion. 45 Art projected itself as a parallel to the realworld, allowing for sharpened intersections whereits own self-criticism blended with criticism of the mechanisms of state market and domina-tion. 46 However, the pointed shock intended bythis work has invariably been dulled over time and

replaced with a certain humorous distance.47

Overlapping the polemical strategies of the past,Ranciere observes four unique themes of con-temporary art that push yesterdays dialecticalprovocations towards new figures of the composi-tion of the heterogeneous: the game, the inven-tory, the encounter/invitation and the mystery. 48

Explored below are four active artists whosecritical work engages these themes and employssound to do so. For the purposes of continuing myanalysis, I am borrowing the open lens of Rancierewhose vocabulary appraises contemporary art noton a basis of media, style or even on a spectrum of good/bad, but instead with only a consideration of its criticality. 49 Adopting this viewpoint, the belowanalyses offer a glimpse of sounds critical abilityand its aesthetic capacity to express varyingconcepts, stories and emotions.

LAUGHING QUIETLY: CHRISTIANMARCLAYS GAME

There is no answer to the question What isfunny? How could we possibly define what isinside and outside of that slippery sixth sense,humour? The more appropriate question is in factWhy is it funny? What implies that onlycertain scenarios can be humorous, but humouris contextual; what is funny in a certain location orsequence is merely part of the serious routine inanother. Why considers this context and asks usto evaluate the humorous based on juxtapositions.Creating humour is a process of juxtaposition, aprocess of conceptual collage where one unites

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seemingly disparate elements to showcase theirabsurd connections. For the artist, it is a gamewhose playing pieces are the infinite spectacles,props and icons of ordinary life presented in away not to shock, but to amuse and sharpen ourperception of the play of signs. 50 The artistbecomes, in essence, a cultural DJ blaring mixesand remixes of a game system we are all involvedwith.

Taking this artist-as-DJ image to its most literallevel, Chrstian Marclays (American, b. 1955)work strives to synchronise our ears to signidentification through his own brand of signsubversion. His early work grew out of an attach-ment to the turntable and its vinyl partner, therecord. Cutting and gluing records together,placing records on floors, scratching, bending

and breaking records; all the methods to evokesounds outside the groove and other than whatwas originally intended. 51 The juxtaposition of theoriginal intentions of the recorded medium andMarclays own subversions construct a gamewhere the meaning of the record is suspended inan amalgam, lost in the constant flux of the mix.The flux is what Ranciere dubs the undecid-able; it is what we enjoy playing with and throughthis play we derive humour. 52 In the mix, humourrebuffs the predictability of music and sound in

media, inversing and juxtaposing how we readsigns through a new contextual frame. 53

Marclays record-oriented work functions as alight-hearted critique of how we interact with themedium. From the record itself, to the coverartwork each is evaluated as a sign and a simulta-neous appeal to the eye and ear. Continuing thisline of investigation, Marclays video work de -tournes film footage of specific sound events viarepetition or combination. His 1995 piece Tele- phones serialises short snippets of telephone scenesfrom an array of films. 54 But the call is neverresolved, there is no Goodbye and the humour,the absurdity of a chained phone call between acast of vastly disparate characters highlights notonly the tropes of the film medium, but also thesounds of our own similarly patterned interac-tions. The piercing ring of the phone and the dullanswered Hello? of the actor or actress registerswith what we consider normal and yet thisnormality is disrupted by its own repetitiousness.

Expanding repetition into seamless interaction,his 2002 piece Video Quartet montages brief sound

moments from film, be they loud objects, singingor instruments being played and projects themonto four separate screens creating an aleatoricquartet. 55 The result is filmed musique concre te,a noisy conflagration that removes the originalnarrative context and situation of the sounds andrecasts them as players in an endless jam session.Our eyes and ears dart from screen-to-screen, butthe heterology is never finalised. As the auralfabric of the film is torn apart, humorouslymimicked is the cacophony of our commonexperience; a critical line is drawn between thetransplanted film clip and our capability to makesounds. The critical pen blurs the world of art andnon-art, allowing us to laugh, play the game andbecome a likewise DJ to our own personal soundenvironments.

COMMON VIBRATIONS: TOSHIYATSUNODAS INVENTORY

Field recording is a somewhat abstruse term fora very simple concept: capturing sound. The lineof separation between field recording, studiorecording and instrument recording is minor asall are concerned with capturing a sound in spacein a way that is able to transmit both object and itsinteraction with a given environment. Yet, field

recording as it is referenced today is more oftenassociated with the guerilla tactics of film andradio sound producers who position microphonesin our everyday places. These techniques haveproved to be a rich vein for artists wishing torebroadcast and hyper-realistically radicalise theprosaic sounds we encounter on a daily basis. Duein part to the boom in experimental electronicmusic, its continuous transition towards a morenatural aesthetic, and the growing affordability of the technology, field recording has become a keymethodology in contemporary sound-making.

Toshiya Tsunodas (Japanese, b. 1964) richdecade and a half of recording is a highlight of this tradition. Tsunodas focus is not on the macrolevel; rarely does he reproduce massive spaces andreverberation, instead he works on a micro level.The resonances and vibrations, the tiny buzzesand windy thrusts that populate our listening field,these are the actions that he pursues and recreateswith an almost scientific detail. He experimentsoccasionally with the installation format, but hiswork can be more readily found on CD. The notes

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for his 2004 album Scenery of Decalcomaniaread like a laboratory report, a testament to hisunflagging dedication to detail: An event causesvibrations to travel through a certain space and thevibrations affect this space. Or to put it anotherway, a space is made to appear through vibration.A similar example; the stain of paint on texturedpaper is pressed into a new surface, a decalcoma-nia. 56 Setting-up microphones in pipes, bottlesand adhered to sheets of metal, Tsunoda man-ifests space through sound and collects the data.

Such an approach encapsulates Rancieres in-ventory theme where the artist is at once anarchivist of collective life and the collector whostrives to create a stock which evidences thepotential of objects and images collective history[and] shows in this way the relationship between

the inventive gestures of art and . . . of living thatconstitute a shared world. 57 Tsunodas recordedscrapbook of aural decalcomania impresses uponus the objects and scenes of a shared world. Whatis handed to us is incredibly modest; the artistrecognises the futility of shock and the power of materials that we all share. Heterology is presentedas a rupture of the sensible not by disjunction, butby joining the sensible and showcasing the col-lective historical potential of places and things. 58

In interview, Tsunoda describes the conceptbehind Scenery of Decalcomania as means todemonstrate the inseparable relationship betweenthe experience of perception and the target of perception. 59 The documented and collectedvariability of sound experience due to placementis explored as an analogue to human variability of perception and comprehension. A metaphor forpolitical activation, for Rancieres subjectivisa-tion, is decaled or impressed upon our aes-thetic ear. 60 The inventory is therefore not merelya static body or dusty museum collection, it is abody that invites dynamic re-appropriation of thedistribution of the sensible.

WALKING THE LINE: JANET CARDIFFSINVITATION

Propelled by the intriguing dual spatiality of soundand our personal interaction with space, JanetCardiff (Canadian, b. 1957), alone and in colla-boration with George Bures Miller, has spentnearly 15 years crafting audio narratives that guideparticipants through hazy dramatisations of and

confrontations with the everyday. Calling thesepieces sound walks, Cardiff arms listeners witha Discman and headphones, and guides themthrough real-life spaces via a binaural recordingthat blends field recordings, sound effects andvocal narration. Walks have been woven throughcrowded metropolises and tucked away in lushcountryside and yet no matter the setting, Cardiff consistently strives to activate what MirjamSchaub calls a point of friction between you[the listener] and the world. 61 Schaubs wonder-ful The Walk Book , a dense textual primer to thisarea of Cardiffs work, warns that her walks arean irreproducible experience, yet the succinct-ness of concept makes it at least imaginable. 62

That intangible quality, the sensation of al-most is fundamental. In conversation, George

Bures Miller, who works as an equal collaboratorand technician to many of the walks, underlinesthis notion: I like the idea that we are building asimulated experience in the attempt to makepeople more connected to real life. 63 As thelistener is wearing headphones playing recordingsdrawn from the very same environment he or sheis at that time navigating, a parallel scenario isconstructed where we cannot immediately assignwhat we hear to the outside world or the worldinside the headphones. 64 Cardiffs own voice

orchestrates the walks, acting simultaneously asnarrator and guide, shifting from romantic ob-servations and memories recalled to directions of where to next walk, look or sit. Her voice carriesthe invitation and in it we place trust; where is shetaking me, how will I get back, what will I find?Following her we sign an individual pact with thevoice out of apparent mutual regard and con-tinue, thinking that she is speaking to us one at atime, personally and singularly. 65

The loose narrative that is draped over the realinhabited space and offered to the listener nullifiesLichts definitions of sound art; the walks are oftensituated outside of the gallery space and injectedwith a palpable humanity. If it were locked in anexhibition hall, it would stagnate, Daniela Zymanagrees: a Cardiff site is not static; instead it is a netof possible references and relationships betweenthe inner space of the walker and their externalenvironment. 66 The imprint of relational aes-thetics is visible here and from this Rancierefashions the invitation/encounter theme. Withinthis framework, the artist-collector institutes a

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space of reception to engage the passer-by in anunexpected relationship. 67 Cardiffs space of reception is New York City, Mu nster, the VillaMedici, the woods of Wanas and others, each astage for Cardiffs method of plucking the dramafrom the screen and conveying it through theheadphones so that real life takes on an almostexemplary quality. 68 This is Cardiff s heterology;through dynamic story-telling she disrupts thedistribution of the sensible and informs us of ourinherent political being by casting us as the storysmain character. By listening we transform ourspace from centre of commodity into an arena forRancieres game between art and non-art. There isno shock of heterology, no sudden awarenessgranted; this would be disingenuous. Instead, anuncanny sensation is expressed that situates us on

the razor-thin line between reality and virtuality,again acutely disrupting the distribution of thesensible.

THE MEMORY RECORD: JANEK SCHAEFERS MYSTERY

Janek Schaefer (British, b. 1970) works withmysterious shapes: he dives deep into dusty vinylstacks to pull out spacious sound washes viaturntable manipulation and looping, evoking

grainy nostalgia and analogue longing. He recordsalbums of abstract music out of very concretesources, statements of almost mute indecision andyet Schaefer himself is not much of a mystery.Documented on his website are pages and pagesof explanation, lists of equipment, statements of intent and descriptions of process. 69 The image of contemporary electronic musician as aloof scien-tist is pierced through as you look through picturesof his notes, his workspace and even his wedding.Mystery is used as a medium, not as a lifestyle.

He is perhaps most well-known through hisrecorded work, but 2007s installation piece, Ex-tended Play: Triptych for the Child Survivors of War and Conflict , pushed him out from the moreesoteric circles of experimental music and solidi-fied his position as an intercessor between theunnecessarily separated realms of composition,gallery art and music. The piece earned him theBritish Composer of the Year Award in Sonic Art2008, the Paul Hamlyn Award for Composers2008 and the recorded version of the piece wasreleased by 12k/Line records later in the year to

critical acclaim. 70 Installed at Huddersfield ArtGallery as apart of the Huddersfield Contempor-ary Music Festival, Extended Play s conceptualcore was born out of Schaefers own familyexperience: I started my own family in 2005,and have been very aware of how lucky we all arein our own situation/I have been constantlycomparing this to the fact that my mum wasborn in Warsaw in 1942. They say your first fewyears on earth sets the tone for the rest of your life.How opposite can two beginnings be. It dazzlesand inspired me. 71 Drawing from this Polishconnection, Schaefer appropriated a piece of Jodoform entitled Tango Lyczakowskiewhich was originally broadcast by the BBC duringthe Second World War and intended to relayspecial information to the Polish Underground. 72

This piece of music was dissected by Schaefer andhis arranger Michael Jennings and reconstituted asan extended three-part composition for piano,cello and violin. Each part was pressed onto itsown 12 record and placed in one of nine recordplayers situated in the exhibition space. As parti-cipants walked around the space, motion sensorscut power to individual record players if one gottoo close, rendering the composition in a constantstate of flux and recasting interruption as a naturaland unavoidable fact. 73

The historical and emotional duality introducedby Schaefers own family biography is abstractedinto a universal and arranged in a manner thatallows the individual viewer/listener to input theirown experiences. The connecting material be-tween the past and present, between the here andthere, and between you and me isnt a material atall, it is sound. Herein lies the pieces appeal to thepolitical/critical via Rancieres heterogeneoustheme, the mystery. Relating mystery to itspartner symbolism as a means for suggestion,Ranciere positions it in opposition to the dialec-tical practice that accentuates the heterogeneity of elements to provoke a shock, bearing witness to areality marked by antagonisms, mystery empha-sises a kinship of the heterogeneous. It constructs agame of analogies in which they witness a commonworld, where the most distant realities appear as if cut from the same sensible fabric. 74 The situationpresented by Schaefer highlights not the disjunc-tion between today and yesterday but rather thekinship, therefore disrupting the fabric of thesensible by reconnecting its affecting history. Two

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worlds separated by time and perception arerejoined through sound. The ear is an enabler of the political where politics is at base a short-circuit between the Universal and Particular: theparadox of a singular which appears as a stand-infor the Universal, destabilising the natural func-tional order of relations in the social body. 75

Schafers particular history is projected as a uni-versal, rendering the historical tissue between hisdaughter and his mother a critical window for theparticipant.

And such is the capacity of all political interac-tions through sound. Rancieres aesthetic schemaexplodes any self-limiting definition of sound inart by establishing critical art as a vehicle of heterology for all modes of perception. TheRancierean enmeshment of aesthetics and politicsembodies itself through the critical disruption of perception; this fact does not limit itself to theimage, to the eye. If the seen image is an aesthetic/political gateway, then so too is the heard image.As our personal and environmental identities areconstructed by what we hear, critical art, notsound art, is given the opportunity to redis-tribute these facts through the same sensorychannels. The four above artists exemplify this.Likewise, Rancieres four themes of heteroge-neous strategy exemplify sounds variability of

method, how different artists choose differentroutes towards subjectification. Kristin Ross, con-cluding her Artforum preface, encapsulates thisnotion and boils down how Rancieres writingsmay be applied to always illuminate these differentroutes, stating that his work does not offerprescriptions, prophecies or norms for action.But it can make us attentive to the fractures inour own present, the moments when anotherversion of democracy, predicated on dissensus,equality and the emergence of new politicalsubjectivities, may now be perceived. 76 If weare to hear these fractures, what is required fromus as participants is a willingness to listen beyondphenomenon, to listen with an aesthetic ear.

NOTES

1. Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music, BetweenCategories (New York: Rizzoli International Publica-tions, 2007), 11.

2. Exhibitions include Sonic Boom: The Art of Sound at Hayward Gallery, London in 2000,

FREQUENCIES [Hz]: Audio-Visual Spaces atThe Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 2002, andBitStreams at the Whitney Museum of AmericanArt in 2001. See also, Licht, Sound Art , 11 12.

3. I should reiterate that although I disagree withLichts analysis, Sound Art s collection of photo-graphs and other documentation is invaluable.

4. Jacques Ranciere, Problems and Transformationsin Critical Art, in Malaise dans lesthetique , ed. andtrans. Claire Bishop. as Participation (London andCambridge, MA: Whitechapel Ventures Limitedand The MIT Press, 2006), 83.

5. Licht, Sound Art , 218.6. Ibid., 14 16.7. Kenneth Goldsmith, The Noise of Art, review of

Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories , byAlan Licht, Postmodern Culture 18, no. 2 (2008),http://journals.ohiolink.edu/ejc/pdf.cgi/Goldsmith_ Kenneth%2C.pdf?issn=10531920&issue=v18i0002&article=_tnoa (accessed January 25, 2009).

8. Licht has been a mainstay in the New York scene foryears and has amassed a sizeable discography of warped guitar experiments.

9. Joe Milutis, The Biography of the Sample: Noteson the Hidden Contexts of Acousmatic Art,Leonardo Music Journal 18 (2008): 71 5.

10. Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (New York:Continuum International, 2007), 170.

11. Ibid., 175.12. Milutis, The Biography of the Sample, 74.13. Look to the sound work of John Cage, David Tudor,

AMM and countless others who are coveredin greater detail by both Hegarty and BrandonLaBelle.

14. Veit Erlmann, ed., Hearing Cultures: Essayson Sound, Listening, and Modernity (Oxford andNew York: Berg, 2004) is a recent example thattypies this style of anthropological-cum-acousticecological writing.

15. If space provided, there are more historical exam-ples I could give, and even more contemporary, asthis style of drone psychedelia and emphasis onlistening phenomenon has experienced an under-ground renaissance in recent years.

16. Licht, Sound Art , 16.17. Hegarty, Noise/Music , 177.18. Ibid., 3.

19. Ibid., 5.20. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics: Art of

the 1990s, in Right About Now: Art & TheorySince the 1990s , ed. Margriet Schavemaker andMischa Rakier (Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Valiz,2008), 46.

21. Ranciere, Critical Art , 90.22. LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art

(New York: Continuum International, 2006), ix.23. Ibid., ix xi. See also, Bourriaud, Relational Aes-

thetics, 46.24. This is not necessarily LaBelles thesis, however, the

blending of art and non-art has been a com-

M. Mullane

http://journals.ohiolink.edu/ejc/pdf.cgi/Goldsmith_Kenneth%2C.pdf?issn=10531920issue=v18i0002article=_tnoahttp://journals.ohiolink.edu/ejc/pdf.cgi/Goldsmith_Kenneth%2C.pdf?issn=10531920issue=v18i0002article=_tnoahttp://journals.ohiolink.edu/ejc/pdf.cgi/Goldsmith_Kenneth%2C.pdf?issn=10531920issue=v18i0002article=_tnoahttp://journals.ohiolink.edu/ejc/pdf.cgi/Goldsmith_Kenneth%2C.pdf?issn=10531920issue=v18i0002article=_tnoahttp://journals.ohiolink.edu/ejc/pdf.cgi/Goldsmith_Kenneth%2C.pdf?issn=10531920issue=v18i0002article=_tnoahttp://journals.ohiolink.edu/ejc/pdf.cgi/Goldsmith_Kenneth%2C.pdf?issn=10531920issue=v18i0002article=_tnoa


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mon theme in modern and avant-garde art-makingfor the past century.

25. Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics , trans. GabrielRockhill (New York: Continuum International,2006), 51.

26. Ibid., 84, 92.27. Bettina Funcke, Displaced Struggles, Artforum ,

March 2007, 284.28. Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics , 64.29. Ranciere, Critical Art, 84.30. Ibid.31. Ibid.32. Jean-Philippe Deranty, Democratic Aesthetics: On

Jacques Rancieres Latest Work, Critical Horizon: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 8, no. 2(2007): 230 55.

33. Kristin Ross, Regime Change, Artforum , March2007, 252.

34. Ibid., 255.35. Deranty, Democratic Aesthetics, 248.36. Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics , 91.37. Ibid., 81.38. Deranty, Democratic Aesthetics, 248.39. Ranciere, Critical Art , 86.40. Deranty, Democratic Aesthetics, 248.41. Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics , 85.42. Ibid., 63.43. Ibid.44. Ranciere, Critical Art , 86 7.45. Ibid., 87.46. Ibid.47. Ibid., 87 848. Ibid., 88.

49. Ibid., 84

7.50. Ibid., 88.51. Gordan Gonzalez and Matthew Higgs, Christian

Marclay (London: Phaidon, 2005), 34 7.52. Ranciere, Critical Art , 88.53. Ibid., 89.

54. Gonzalez and Higgs, Christian Marclay , 61.55. Ibid., 82 91.56. Naturestrip Records Website, Toshiya Tsunoda Re-

views, Naturestrip Records, http://www.naturestrip.com/reviews pages/tsunodareviews.htm (accessedFebruary 2, 2009).

57. Ranciere, Critical Art , 89.58. Ibid.59. Plop Website, Toshiya Tsunoda Interview, Inpart-

maint Inc., http://www.inpartmaint.com/pdis/pdis _e/plop_e_feature/toshiya_tsunoda.html (accessedFebruary 2, 2009).

60. Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics , 90.61. Mirjam Schaub, Janet Cardiff: The Walk Book , ed.

Thyssen-Bornemisza (Vienna, Austria: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, 2005), 16.

62. Ibid., 27.63. Ibid., 18.64. Ibid., 63.65. Ibid., 23, 13.

66. Ibid., 11.67. Ranciere, Critical Art , 90.68. Schaub, The Walk Book , 24.69. See, http://www.audioh.com for details of Schaefers

various projects.70. Janek Schaefers Personal Website, Extended Play,

audiOh!, http://www.audioh.com/projects/extendedplay.html (accessed February 10, 2009).

71. Ibid.72. Ibid.73. Ibid.74. Ranciere, Critical Art , 91.75. Slavoj Z izek, afterword to The Politics of Aesthetics,

by Jacques Ranciere (New York: Continuum Inter-national, 2006), 70.

76. Ross, Regime Change, 255.

The aesthetic ear

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