Douglas Kahn

Last updated

Douglas Kahn (born 1951 in Bremerton, Washington, USA) is known for his historical and theoretical writings on the use of sound in the avant-garde and experimental arts and music, energies in the arts, and history and theory of the media arts. His writings have been influential in the scholarly area of sound studies and the practical area of sound art. He is Honorary Professor at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, Professor Emeritus at University of New South Wales, Australia, and Professor Emeritus at University of California, Davis, where he was the Founding Director of Technocultural Studies. He was a recipient of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship from 2012 to 2016 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. [1]

His book Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts was published by MIT Press in 1999. The Times Literary Supplement called the book "an impressive combination of solid academic research and theoretical pyrotechnics." [2]

Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts was published in 2013 by University of California Press. [3] Support was provided by a Guggenheim Fellowship to investigate the history of naturally occurring electromagnetism in telecommunications, science and the arts, and by a 2008 Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation. Slate and Public Books listed Earth Sound Earth Signal as one of the books of the year.

Energies in the Arts, his edited collection published by MIT Press in 2019 argues for a pluralist notion of the concept of energy to inform research in the humanities inclusive of and beyond the dominant associations of energy with fossil fuel use and physics. MIT Press summarized the book as, "Investigating the concepts and material realities of energy coursing through the arts: a foundational text."

He proposed the term "ecopath" in relation to psychopath and sociopath in his essay "What is an Ecopath?" published by Sydney Review of Books.

With composer and founding editor Larry Austin, Kahn edited Source: Music of the Avant-garde, a collection of material drawn from the original Source: Music of the Avant Garde magazine series and, with the art historian Hannah Higgins, he has edited a collection of essays and historical documents, Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts. He was editor (with Gregory Whitehead) of Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-garde published by MIT Press in 1992; author of John Heartfield: Art and Mass Media published by Tanam Press in 1985; and editor (with Diane Neumaier) of Cultures in Contention published by Real Comet Press in 1985. He has also written for The Wire , The Guardian and many other occasional publications.

Kahn was born and raised in Bremerton, Washington. He was in the first class of The Evergreen State College and graduated with a bachelor's degree; obtained a master's degree in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University, where he studied with Alvin Lucier and Ron Kuivila; a Master of Fine Arts in Post-studio Arts at California Institute of the Arts where he studied with David Antin, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Yvonne Rainer, and James Tenney, and a PhD in art history and theory from University of Western Sydney under supervision of Helen Grace. [4]

Kahn created the audiotape cut-up Reagan Speaks For Himself [5] in 1980 using an interview conducted by Bill Moyers of Ronald Reagan when he was still a candidate for president. The first version was published on a Sub Pop audiocassette and the second version was published on a flexi-disc in RAW magazine. The audiotape was used in a dance mix by the Fine Young Cannibals and sampled by Eric B. & Rakim in their song "Paid in Full (Coldcut Mix)". Kahn appears in the 1995 film Sonic Outlaws by San Francisco filmmaker Craig Baldwin.

Kahn lives in Katoomba, New South Wales, Australia.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Avant-garde</span> Works that are experimental or innovative

In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde identifies an experimental genre, or work of art, and the artist who created it; which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maya Deren</span> American experimental filmmaker (1917–1961)

Maya Deren was a Ukrainian-born American experimental filmmaker and important part of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Postmodern art</span> Art movement

Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art and multimedia, particularly involving video are described as postmodern.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry Flynt</span> Musical artist

Henry Flynt is an American philosopher, musician, writer, activist, and artist connected to the 1960s New York avant-garde. He coined the term "concept art" in the early 1960s, during which time he was associated with figures in the Fluxus scene. He later received attention for his anti-art demonstrations against New York cultural institutions in 1963 and 1964.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jackson Mac Low</span> American poet (1922–2004)

Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004) was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practitioner of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff. He was married to the artist Iris Lezak from 1962 to 1978, and to the poet Anne Tardos from 1990 until his death.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Antin</span> American poet, critic and performance artist

David Abram Antin was an American poet, art critic, performance artist, and university professor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hal Foster (art critic)</span> American art critic and historian

Harold Foss "Hal" Foster is an American art critic and historian. He was educated at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the City University of New York. He taught at Cornell University from 1991 to 1997 and has been on the faculty at Princeton since 1997. In 1998 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans Hofmann</span> German-American painter (1880–1966)

Hans Hofmann was a German-born American painter, renowned as both an artist and teacher. His career spanned two generations and two continents, and is considered to have both preceded and influenced Abstract Expressionism. Born and educated near Munich, he was active in the early twentieth-century European avant-garde and brought a deep understanding and synthesis of Symbolism, Neo-impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism when he emigrated to the United States in 1932. Hofmann's painting is characterized by its rigorous concern with pictorial structure and unity, spatial illusionism, and use of bold color for expressive means. The influential critic Clement Greenberg considered Hofmann's first New York solo show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in 1944 as a breakthrough in painterly versus geometric abstraction that heralded abstract expressionism. In the decade that followed, Hofmann's recognition grew through numerous exhibitions, notably at the Kootz Gallery, culminating in major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1957) and Museum of Modern Art (1963), which traveled to venues throughout the United States, South America, and Europe. His works are in the permanent collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, National Gallery of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago.

Rosalind Epstein Krauss is an American art critic, art theorist and a professor at Columbia University in New York City. Krauss is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting, sculpture and photography. As a critic and theorist she has published steadily since 1965 in Artforum,Art International and Art in America. She was associate editor of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and has been editor of October, a journal of contemporary arts criticism and theory that she co-founded in 1976.

Scott Richard Johnson was an American composer known for his pioneering use of recorded speech as musical melody, and his distinctive crossing of American vernacular and art music traditions, making extensive use of electric guitar in concert works, and adapting popular music structures for art music genres such as the string quartet. He was the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim fellowship, and a 2015 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award.

Tracie Morris is an American poet. She is also a performance artist, vocalist, voice consultant, creative non-fiction writer, critic, scholar, bandleader, actor and non-profit consultant. Morris is from Brooklyn, New York. Morris' experimental sound poetry is progressive and improvisational. She is a tenured professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

John Meade Haines was an American poet and educator who had served as the poet laureate of Alaska.

Experimental music is a general label for any music or music genre that pushes existing boundaries and genre definitions. Experimental compositional practice is defined broadly by exploratory sensibilities radically opposed to, and questioning of, institutionalized compositional, performing, and aesthetic conventions in music. Elements of experimental music include indeterminacy, in which the composer introduces the elements of chance or unpredictability with regard to either the composition or its performance. Artists may approach a hybrid of disparate styles or incorporate unorthodox and unique elements.

Alice Denney was an American art curator and arts administrator. Denney has been considered to be an important figure of the Washington, D.C. avant-garde arts and had been the mentor to a number of Washington D.C.'s artists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gerard Béhague</span> French ethnomusicologist (1937–2005)

Gerard Henri Luc Béhague was an eminent Franco-American ethnomusicologist and professor of Latin American music. His specialty was the music of Brazil and the Andean countries and the influence of West Africa on the music of the Caribbean and South America, especially candomblé music. His lifelong work earned him recognition as the leading scholar of Latin American ethnomusicology.

Source: Music of the Avant-Garde – also known and hereafter referred to as Source Magazine – was an independent, not-for-profit musical and artistic magazine published between 1967 and 1973 by teachers and students of the University of California, Davis, California. It emerged from the flourishing Californian musical experimentalism of the late 1950s-early 1960s, at UC-Davis and Mills College. The 11 issues document new music practices of the period like indeterminacy, performance, graphic scores, electronic music and intermedia arts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lynn Garafola</span> American Linguist

Lynn Theresa Garafola is an American dance historian, linguist, critic, curator, lecturer, and educator. A prominent researcher and writer with broad interests in the field of dance history, she is acknowledged as the leading expert on the Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev (1909–1929), the most influential company in twentieth-century theatrical dance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deborah Kapchan</span> American folklorist

Deborah Kapchan is an American folklorist, writer, translator and ethnographer, specializing in North Africa and its diaspora in Europe. In 2000, Kapchan became a Guggenheim fellow. She has been a Fulbright-Hays recipient twice, and is a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. She is professor of Performance Studies at New York University, and the former director of the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts is a book by historian and theorist, Douglas Kahn. First published in 1999, the book charts a history of sound in the arts through the arc of modernism, the avant-garde, late-modernism, the experimentalism of John Cage, the work of the generation following him including artists such as Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, and Yoko Ono, as well as writers William S. Burroughs and Michael McLure, and filmmakers Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov. In doing so, Kahn uses the book to call for a form of historiographic listening that through which a new understanding of cultural history and theory can be drawn.

References

  1. ""Guggenheim Scholar to Study Implications of 'Atmospheric Radio'"". University of California, Davis. 17 April 2006.
  2. Bradley, Fiona (26 May 2000). "Musical silence and schlupp". The Times Literary Supplement. p. 19.
  3. "Naturally, electromagnetic". RealTime (94). December 2008 – January 2009.
  4. M.A. Theses in Ethnomusicology and Composition, Wesleyan University. Department of Music. Kahn, Jay Douglas, 1987. Retrieved 30 January 2013.
  5. "Some Assembly Required".