Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound In The Arts

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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.

Contents

Background

Noise, Water, Meat draws upon some of Kahn's prior writing, including articles for October and The Musical Quarterly, and book chapters in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde (MIT Press, 1992), In the Spirit of Fluxus (ed. Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss, Walker Art Center, 1993), and his PhD dissertation "Techniques and Tropes of Sound, Voice and Aurality in Artistic Modernism" (supervised by Dr. Helen Grace). According to Kahn, the book was composed during stints on Sydney commuter trains using readily available material and his own personal collection. [1]

Significant Themes

Sound in the Arts

While Noise, Water, Meat addresses the use of sound by artists, it is not a history of the field of contemporary art known as Sound art. [2] According to Kahn, the category of Sound Art came to prominence within the United States during the 1990s and 2000s largely in the wake of Dan Lander's edited collection, Sound By Artists. [3] Artists outside the art-market centre of New York had long been developing techniques, practices, and works that would be considered within the space of sound art well before the boom of the category around the turn of the new millennium. [4]

The subtitle of the book therefore marked an important distinction between Kahn's work and artistic category that emerged during the later half of the 20th century. As Kahn later noted, his use of the word "art" is here more generalised, referring to the broad sweep of the synthetic arts, encompassing, "the various intersecting social, cultural, and environmental realities wittingly and unwittingly embodied in any one of the innumerable factors that go into producing, experiencing, and understanding a particular work." [4]

Noise

The book breaks down the demarcation between what was considered sound and musical sound within European art music and Euro-American Modernism. [5] What used to be understood as "non-musical sound" was otherwise recognised as noise, but Kahn argues that modernist and avant-garde artists recuperated this category by rhetorically and practically invoking the totality of all sound associated with the capacities of audiographic technologies. [6]

This recuperation first takes form within Italian futurist Luigi Russolo's manifesto and book, The Art of Noises, where "noise" refers to an expanded pallet of timbre.

However, in Kahn's telling it was John Cage who took this recuperation of sounds to its logical conclusion in his writings and with his composition, 4'33". In the piece, sounds are transformed into music just through the act of listening. In a close examination of Cage's understanding of "sound," Kahn argues that the previous demarcation between significant sounds and significant noises remained within the composer's work. [7] Rather, Kahn recognises that Cage's notions of all sound and always sound were part of a larger tradition of the impossible inaudible; that is, the idea that sound either doesn't dissipate, is both indelibly inscribed and still moving, or is continuous and ubiquitous in a subatomic movement.

Reception

Noise, Water, Meat not only introduced up sound in the arts as a field of study, but has also been recognised as a pioneering text in the field of sound studies. [8]

Writer and artist Seth Kim-Cohen describes Noise, Water, Meat as a "deeply informed, idiosyncratic, and at times visionary account of the incursions of the aural into the visual and literary arts from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1960s." [9]

Philosopher Christopher Cox praised the book as a "magisterial account" of the context out of which sound art emerged. He highlights "Kahn’s theoretical sophistication, however, is extraordinarily rare among critics and theorists of the audio arts whose tools are generally restricted to physical and phenomenological description." [10]

In one review, David Williams praised the book as "one of the most stimulating and provocative studies of art practices and discourses in social contexts I have read for many years." [11]

Related Research Articles

Modernism Philosophical and art movement

Modernism is both a philosophical movement and an art movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, new technologies, and war. Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it New" was the touchstone of the movement's approach.

Avant-garde Works that are experimental or innovative

The avant-garde is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society. It is frequently characterized by aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability.

Noise music is a genre of music that is characterised by the expressive use of noise within a musical context. This type of music tends to challenge the distinction that is made in conventional musical practices between musical and non-musical sound. Noise music includes a wide range of musical styles and sound-based creative practices that feature noise as a primary aspect.

Postmodern art 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.

Dick Higgins

Dick Higgins (1938–1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement. Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was an early pioneer of electronic correspondence. Higgins coined the word intermedia to describe his artistic activities, defining it in a 1965 essay by the same name, published in the first number of the Something Else Newsletter. His most notable audio contributions include Danger Music scores and the Intermedia concept to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 1960s.

Avant-garde music is music that is considered to be at the forefront of innovation in its field, with the term "avant-garde" implying a critique of existing aesthetic conventions, rejection of the status quo in favor of unique or original elements, and the idea of deliberately challenging or alienating audiences. Avant-garde music may be distinguished from experimental music by the way it adopts an extreme position within a certain tradition, whereas experimental music lies outside tradition.

Antonio Russolo (1877–1943) was an Italian Futurist composer and the brother of the more famous Futurist painter, composer and theorist Luigi Russolo. He is noted for composing pieces made with the intonarumori and, together with his brother, introduced The Art of Noises.

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Sound art is an artistic discipline in which sound is utilised as a primary medium or material. Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art may be interdisciplinary in nature, or be used in hybrid forms.

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References

  1. ↑ Kahn, Douglas (2014-02-12). "On the Aelectrosonic and Transperception". Journal of Sonic Studies (8).
  2. ↑ Engström, Andreas; Stjerna, Åsa (April 2009). "Sound Art or Klangkunst? A reading of the German and English literature on sound art". Organised Sound. 14 (1): 11. doi:10.1017/S135577180900003X. ISSN   1355-7718. S2CID   62217210.
  3. ↑ Kahn, Douglas (1999). Noise, water, meat : a history of sound in the arts. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. pp. 363, n.21. ISBN   0-585-25598-9. OCLC   45728186.
  4. 1 2 Kahn, Douglas (2005). "Sound Art, Art, Music" (PDF). Iowa Review Web. 1 (8).
  5. ↑ Kahn, Douglas (1999). Noise, water, meat : a history of sound in the arts. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. pp. 110–122. ISBN   0-585-25598-9. OCLC   45728186.
  6. ↑ Kahn, Douglas (1999). Noise, water, meat : a history of sound in the arts. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. p. 9. ISBN   0-585-25598-9. OCLC   45728186.
  7. ↑ Kahn, Douglas (1999). Noise, water, meat : a history of sound in the arts. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. p. 4. ISBN   0-585-25598-9. OCLC   45728186.
  8. ↑ Smith, Mark M. (2014). "Futures of Hearing Past". In Morat, Daniel (ed.). Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe. New York: Berghahn Books. p. 15.
  9. ↑ Kim-Cohen, Seth (2009). In the blink of an ear : toward a non-cochlear sonic art. New York: Continuum. pp. ix. ISBN   978-1-4411-8307-1. OCLC   676700640.
  10. ↑ "Christoph Cox on sound art". www.artforum.com. Retrieved 2021-04-13.
  11. ↑ Campbell, Duncan; Williams, David (January 2001). "Book Reviews". Performance Research. 6 (3): 134–138. doi:10.1080/13528165.2001.10871820. ISSN   1352-8165. S2CID   220341608.
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