Frankly, every artist here deserves a monograph about him or herself (and many already have one). I don’t have room to talk about more than one or two pieces by each artist. What follows is a subjective first attempt at breezy chronology from 1902-2002 (when I lecture on this the title of my talk is“100 Years of Sound Art in 90 Minutes”). And incomplete… It’s such a vast field that I’m bound to miss a lot of work that, say, you might consider vital. Where does, say, experimental music end and sound art begin? Or, take spoken word: can a sound poem-language meant to be heard not necessarily seen-be construed as sound art? But what about opera that slides into performance art? It’s a fabulous mess, where the lines are ill-defined and disciplines overflow into one another and co-mingle in ways that are not easily categorized.Īny survey of this stuff is going to be messy. Having helped curate some of these shows at the Whitney, I’ve found it’s a difficult thing to define what sound art is. If you’re interested in sound art, a trip to Other Music in New York City or to the new airplane-hanger sized Amoeba in Los Angeles will prove fruitful, with offerings from everyone from Vito Acconci to Mike Kelley cramming the racks. even record stores seem to be carrying these sort of discs. Once relegated to specialty shops like Printed Matter, Inc.
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Websites like my own UbuWeb, the San Francisco-based Other Minds, and numerous independent sites of American composers are sprouting up, offering dozens of hours worth of sound art MP3s for free. As a matter of fact all over the country, it’s not too unusual to walk into a museum, art gallery, or university-sponsored exhibition space and hear nothing but sound. The Whitney has been including it in its Biennials and it even had its own section in their “The American Century” retrospective a few years ago.
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Over the past few years, sound art has been more visible in America.