From the e-flux list. This looks really interesting.
Has anyone seen it
already?
11/23/04
CENTRE
POMPIDOU
Sons & Lumieres
A History of Sound in the Art of the 20th Century
22 September 2004 - 3 January 2005
Gallery 1, Level 6
CENTRE POMPIDOU
75191 PARIS CEDEX 04
00 33 (0)1 44 78 12 33
http://www.centrepompidou.fr
"Sons & Lumieres" exhibition at the Centre Pompidou is
the largest event devoted to the relationship between music / sound
and 20th century art since the "Vom Klang der Bilder" show
in Stuttgart In 1985.
In his poem Correspondances, Baudelaire wrote that
"scents, colours, and sounds commune", and the 20th century,
often considered the era when the Arts converged and entered into
dialogue, provides countless illustrations of this notion. After the
rise of Abstraction around 1910 and painting's strivings to commune
with music - the abstract Art par excellence - the new electric
media kept up the pursuit of this ancestral myth. Down through the
century the arts of light, cinema and later video, were fertile ground
for experiments in bringing image and sound together, while at the
same time other approaches drew extensively on theories running
counter to the possibility of any match between sight and hearing:
using processes involving notions of chance, random noise and silence,
new performance-art musical gambits challenged the
"correspondences" ideal. To the question raised by the
Romantics and then by the Symbolists - "Can images be translated
into sound and vice-versa?" - the century came up with a host of
different replies, some of them utopian and others emphasising the
purest sensory pleasure.
The 2100 square metres of the Sons & Lumieres exhibition are
divided into three areas, with over 400 works - many of them on show
for the first time - providing an enormous range of sensory
experiences and highlighting the crucial moments of the interaction
between music/sound and the visual Arts.
PRESENTATION OF THE EXHIBITION
The exhibition is built around three successive themes. The first of
these themes -Correspondences, abstraction, colour music, light in
motion - is the evolution of Baudelaire's notion of
"correspondences" within a form of pictorial abstraction
drawn - as in the case of Kandinsky, the Synchromists and Klee - to
the intangibility of music. Painting very early cut free of the fixed
support, becoming temporally inflected colour in movement via Vladimir
Baranoff-Rossine's famous "optophonic piano" (an idea going
back to the Baroque period), Viking Eggeling's "scroll
pictures", Thomas Wilfred's play with light, and other systems
culminating in the early masterpieces of abstract cinema by Hans
Richter, Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye and others.The abstract works
presented in this first segment point up a quest for musical analogies
that sometimes involved instrumental accompaniment. Their musical
field of reference extends from the classical - Bach was an enduring
model - to the avant-garde work of Arnold Schonberg and jazz and
boogie-woogie as used by such artists as Stuart Davis and Piet
Mondrian.
The second part of the exhibition - Imprints, conversions,
syntheses, remanence - takes us into a markedly different world,
where the notion of giving visible expression to sound - by
transcription, imprint or conversion via the new technologies - makes
sonic vibration one of the work's raw materials. In the 1920s the
cinema, newly endowed with the sound track, undertook the
"photography of sound" to be found in the works of Rudolf
Pfenninger and Norman McLaren. Photoelectric cells and oscilloscopes
were put to work by artists like Raoul Hausmann and Ben Laposky in
experiments with translation of sound into image. The Sixties and
Seventies went deeper into the question: with the coming of the
"environment" the work became a means of global perception
that plunged the viewer into the actual physical experience of sound
and light vibration. Drawing on a dreamlike suspension of
consciousness, James and John Whitney, Brion Gysin, La Monte Young and
Marian Zazeela, Paul Sharits and other artists offered a meditative
experience in which waves, whether of light or sound, shaped the
vocabulary of a new audiovisual landscape open to the full gamut of
sensory experience. By contrast other artists, for instance Bill Viola
and Gary Hill pushed the energy and impact of acoustic pressure to the
limits of what the senses could bear. At this time the idea of writing
with sound was taken up - by Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka,
and others - in the first video works, which made bold play with
interaction between sound and visual signals and pointed to the advent
of new audiovisual languages.
The third segment of the exhibition - Ruptures, chance, noise,
silence - takes the form of a questioning: via the Futurists
"noise", the work of John Cage, and the Fluxus movement, it
focuses on the overall theme's most iconoclastic aspects. Working from
the jumbled, uneven textures of urban noise, Luigi Russolo offered a
musical model that found tangible equivalents in collage and the
tactility of matter, while Marcel Duchamp set about using the laws of
chance to pare down compositional procedures. This dual vein would
triumph in the tutelary figure of John Cage and in the 1960s with
Fluxus, the latter advocating a philosophy of commitment in which the
frontiers between art and life would be totally abolished. The works
in this part of the exhibition bring real irony to their dismantling
of the correspondences myth: chance and accident dictate interaction
between the arts and lead in the final analysis to the experience of
silence in the work of artists like Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman.
The exhibition concludes with two very recent installations, one by
Rodney Graham and one by Pierre Huyghe, that hark back to ideas raised
in the preceding sections. Firmly anchored in the 21st century, this
epilogue leaves the way open to fresh interpretations.
Conception of the exhibition
Sophie Duplaix, curator of the exhibition
Marcella Lista,
associate curator