The first major art exhibition dedicated to sound was MOMA’s Sound Art, which took place in 1979. This landmark exhibition was a manifestation of various ideas and movements around sound – conceptual music, experiments with tape, feedback, installation – by artists that had been incubating since the late 1950s.1 Since then, varieties of sound (Sound Art, recorded and live music, installation ambience, soundtracks, audio tours) are frequently found in museums and galleries of all sizes. Sound’s position as a stable material within official exhibition spaces, artistic practices, and curatorial endeavors is reflective not only of a general increase in access to sonic technology, but also represents evolving institutional attitudes towards the valorising of ephemeral creative forms. While both of these attributes are a boon for the greater legitimation of sound as a usable art form, it is important to consider just what happens when sound is formalised through museological or gallery processes.2 As Jason van Eyk notes, sound does not “submit to the gallery’s rectilinear logic, nor to its sealing, aesthetic glaze”; given these constraints, the curator of sound’s “impulse to spatially contain and control sound remains difficult to escape.”3 Despite its prominence in major exhibition sites, sound remains an unstable material within the contexts and affordances of those spaces.
I am interested in what happens when the curator of sound might tend to its material instability. I want to speculate, alongside conceptual musician and Shakespeare scholar Drew Daniel, that sound has an inherent signifying resistance, and on account of that, it is not only at odds with a system and history of rarified and codified exhibition practices, but is also queer. Here, Daniel is following theoretical articulations of queerness that critique monolithic identification, which is to say, a fluid understanding of things being one thing. Daniel argues that signifying resistance is also true of sound, yet amidst efforts to capture, identify, and place sound to source it, it becomes unmoored from its queer possibilities. Sound “stands aside from the purposes and aims which occasion its production,” says Daniel. When insisted upon as a queer potential, sound evades pat instrumentality as a phenomenon that finds language fugitive in denotation (signification).4 To use some examples, we might think of the onomatopoeia used to identify birds (“cuckoo”) or Batman’s fist hitting the face of a hired goon as “thwak!” These examples show that sound is often undermined by an “empire of signs” that limits its potential and attempts to impose normative meaning on its use.5
Considering these sonic problems, which we might understand as the taming of sound, the curator of sound is already at a disadvantage when working with sound as an exhibition material. As Van Eyck notes, the curator or organiser of sound in a museum or gallery space must un-queer it for the sake of legible public encounter.6 What space is there for such gestures in curatorial modes of public address, and how might noise, when considered in an expanded sense, continue to be a conduit for radical encounters and relational galvanising in exhibition formats? There is one facet of sound that can evade nominalist imposition and that is noise. Noise’s contextual polysemy gives it a useful fecundity in relation to the instability of curatorial practice. As David Novak articulates, noise “can only take on meaning by signifying something else… must remain incommensurably different from that thing we do know and understand.”7 Noise is not particular in its signifying representation but is instead dictated by its effects (which have, in turn, much to do with its problem of lacking legible signification). Furthermore, noise, “as a discrete subject in itself… resists interpretation.”8 If “all sound is queer,” then noise, in its polysemic richness, is especially so in its disorienting and disruptive effect.9 Noise is the queerness of sound in action.10 It is precisely on account of what noise does that it can provide a useful framework when considering how to maintain the “transcendental failure of sound to verifiably align itself with the signs we use to describe it.”11 Noise demands we consider both its effect and its ranging interpretations, which is to say, parsing Novak, it carries a relational quality, it is understood through its network of affiliative gestures and associations.12
If an exhibition is, as Elena Filipovic suggests, “the site where deeply entrenched ideas and forms can come undone, where the ground on which we stand is rendered unstable,” then the use of unstable exhibition materials, such as noise, should and can be a boon for exhibition and curatorial practices.13 I want to consider a few semi-contemporary exhibitions that centralise the production of sound and its receivable implications. The three examples I will discuss, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s From Here to Ear, Chris Larson’s Land Speed Record, and Nadia Lauro’s ode to Sun Ra in Nottingham Contemporary’s Alien Encounters, all embrace certain facets of museological practice – visitor relationships, catalogues, archives – and complicate their conventions for the sake of accommodating sound. I suggest that it is the troubling of these standards that makes them noisy. These minor subversions are not quite critique proper, but nonetheless they craft openings for modes of encounter that escape a traditional or more known general calculus of experience in arts institutions. From here, I will conclude with a few examples from my own collaborative curatorial work around sound and its becoming noise as a means to further illustrate both the possibilities and difficulties in attempting curatorial exercises in this manner. It is my hope that in some of the provocations and examples outlined, there might be modes of action or thought that could carry into a queer curatorial practice that finds value in learning through doing, and exemplifies the transformative potentials of the provisional and unstable.
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Noise escapes stable rhythms, but this does not mean that cacophony is not rhythmic. This is the lesson that Henri Lefebvre suggests in his unfinished final text, Rhythmanalysis. For Lefebvre, a rhythm can develop out of the disparate assemblage of things or a diverse stratum of events — the noises — that capitalism produces in time and space,notably, in urban societies. As patterns emerge and become rhythms, noise recedes into the background, but there is still, as Kevin Hetherington suggests, the possibility for noise to be felt through a re-engagement with its initial undefined character.14 To understand the rhythms of everyday life, one might have to return to its noisy source, which is to say, become arrhythmic.
Tending to arrhythmia, which we can think of as the queer dissonances and resonances of daily life, is a major element of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s many versions of From Here to Ear (1999-current). Boursier-Mougenot’s installation creates a seemingly stable space that, when entered into, produces a number of indeterminate relations that consistently disrupt the generation of stable rhythms. Differing from location to location, From Here to Ear is a large, improvised composition that is performed by a flock of zebra finches. In the space, several electric guitars are laid out flat, and when the birds land on them, their contact with the amplified guitar string creates a sound that adds to the total composition. The behaviour of birds in a tamed environment is of great concern for Boursier-Mougenot, and From Here to Ear embodies a larger poetics on the sharing of human and non-human space. On From Here to Ear, Boursier-Mougenot says:
I invite the viewer to take a stroll into ‘the land of birds.’ It is a walk that incorporates pauses and the slowing down of time, forcing us to perceive very intensely our presence within the work. This is precisely the point: I invite visitors to become a temporary part of the work as they walk through it.15
In experiencing From Here to Ear, the visitor’s movements become hyper attuned, perhaps in ways neglected in daily life, to their body’s relation to the general environment. From Here to Ear transforms the white cube space and thus, the rhythms of exhibition encounter. Through this disruption of encounter, the visitor is invited to contend with the way they are socially trained to listen. In Boursier-Mougenot’s poetic gesture of accentuating relational nodes of interaction between human and non-human, the viewer becomes conscious of how the social emerges from conditions that repress noise (e.g., how time and space have been hegemonically constructed).16
The concept of hearing noise in a new way was a motivating factor in the creation of Minnesota artist Chris Larson’s Land Speed Record (Walker Art Center, 2017). Titled after a 1988 live album by Saint Paul punk band, Husker Dü, Land Speed Record featured photographs and a film by Larson. These materials documented a variety of damaged objects pulled from a fire that partially destroyed the childhood home of Husker Dü drummer, Grant Hart. Intermittently playing throughout the duration of the exhibition as a sonic accompaniment to the film was a recording by Minneapolis punk drummer, Yousef Del Valle, that recreated the isolated drum parts from Land Speed Record that inspired the exhibition’s title. The communion between these materials implied a meditation on partial loss, and, in its incompleteness, Del Valle’s re-recording of the album, reflected the partially functional objects featured in the photographs and film.
There is a symmetry between the intermittent playing of the audio in relation to the gallery experience of Land Speed Record and the occasional noise that would arise from guitar-string contact from Boursier-Mougenot’s zebra finches in From Here to Ear. Both use an irregular presence of sound in the space as a rupture for a stable viewing experience. I want to focus, however, on a less literal presence of noise: the exhibition catalogue for Land Speed Record in the form of a gatefold vinyl record. This catalogue includes the standard accoutrements of a museum catalogue (curator and artist affiliate essays, reproductions of works seen in the show), but Del Valle’s drum track is also pressed on the transparent record.17 The Land Speed Record exhibition catalogue, while pointing at the exhibition it emerged from with references and essays that demystify the core of Larson’s project, nonetheless acts as its own discrete experience as an object. What is left is a record of punk drum beats meticulously culled from a nearly forty-year-old live recording by a cult punk band and a mostly unknown local drummer. Land Speed Record’s record is both a slippery sign and an unstable object that can provoke those in its possession to question just what it is they are supposed to do with it. Is it a document? Is it a record as record? Is it an ornery tribute to the subterranean histories of punk?
In its instability, accented by its confusing elements of an art object, historical document, exhibition catalogue, and vernacular object, Land Speed Record’s record becomes an unofficial denouement to the exhibition, suggesting that the sonic loss it represents is a queer one, failing to “have any effect whatsoever beyond its own dissemination into space.”18 Where it goes further and becomes noise is in the effect that it might have. Playing Land Speed Record’s record allows one to experience an exhibition on terms that escape the priorities of its creation, mirroring the relational subjectivities that noise can incur.19
The final exhibition I want to consider is Sun Ra: The Cosmo Man, which took place at Nottingham Contemporary in 2015. This is one of many exhibitions in the last decade to explore the life and work of poet, musician, composer, artist, and philosopher Sun Ra. Born Herman Blount, Sun Ra gradually transformed himself in the mid-twentieth century into a living myth. Claiming to be from Saturn, Ra fused his own personal mythology – a hybrid of mysticism, Gnosticism, and science fiction – into a public presentation that manifested itself in musical performance. Aided by an ever expanding and evolving Arkestra of musicians and artists, Ra melded experimental and free jazz modes of expression into a fantastic public presentation that would crystallise eventually as a touchstone for Afrofuturism.20 We can consider Ra’s self-fashioning and mythologising as converting notions of what Nancy Fraser calls “misrecognition,” the othering through social exclusion in hegemonic society. Ra’s disidentification with hegemonic mandates of presentation and the resultant creation of a mythological private world was a defiance of ideologies that demand identification.21 For Ra, disidentification was not about escapism or inhabiting a character, but living in a self-fashioned cosmology, enacting a universe on his own terms.22
Music and its communal processes and productions were important to Ra. Sound was, what he called, “the immeasurable equation,” a way to find balance within a multiplicity of meanings. The organisation of sounds into music, from songs to freely improvised performance, was a way to recognise subjectivity within ideology and poetically negotiate resistance to it. As Jayna Brown writes, “[Ra and the Arkestra’s] performances were more than jazz; they were cosmodramas – the enactment of a collective worldmaking that extends beyond the band.”23 Thus, of all the sonic engagements discussed so far, Ra’s project would seem the most daunting to harness into a legible public exhibition. Nonetheless, gallery and museum curators have been compelled to approach it often in the last decade.24
Unsurprisingly, given the underground status and outré nature of Ra’s life and work, all of these exhibitions are decidedly demystifying in character and rely on familiar forms of museological display and archival presentation (the museum or gallery’s “sealing aesthetic glaze” of vitrines, didactic wall texts, and ordered chronological display) to introduce him to a general public. Through record covers in frames, printed matter and archival materials under glass vitrines, mannequins adorned in his or other Arkestra member’s costumes, and the looping videos of his live performances or filmed work (almost always 1974’s feature Space is the Place), the very excess that defined Ra as a statement of re-definition is tamed into a stable and didactic museum presentation. I don’t want to suggest that these curatorial efforts amount to a failure, but rather that they suffer from the same tension that occurs when any noisy material encounters the rigidly immutable production of knowledge. In these exhibitions, it is as if the simple presentation of fragments from a radical Black historical figure might productively enable new encounters for evaluation without considering how their radicality usurped such standard experiences in the first place.
While it is important to be mindful of how archival dumps in a gallery space might unintentionally render the radicality of an artist’s life quaint, one redeeming attribute of these exhibitions has been their privileging and foregrounding of Ra and his Arkestra’s music. At 200 albums (more released posthumously), Ra’s discography is intimidating, and one cannot help but consider how its voluminousness represents both a literal dedication to his vision and a symbolic portrait of his evolving philosophy in action. The volume of official recordings released during his lifetime marks a weaponization of excess that explicates the need for a world unseen before.
To this end, it is Nadia Lauro’s installation design in Sun Ra: The Cosmo Man that gets closest to exemplifying a way towards honouring Ra’s project that used excess as a necessary mode of Black artistic resistance. Excess is polyvalent and disrupts normative readings and is, to return to Lefebvre, Novak, and Daniel, a feature of blurry, arrhythmic, and noisy signifiers that have everything to do with resisting the construction of monolithic nominalism (e.g., hegemonic systems of normative dominance). It is for this reason that excesses of meaning have been strategised as necessary tactics by those deemed aberrant under normative social systems.25 In Lauro’s installation, fifty odd headphones dangle from the ceiling of a cadmium yellow room, housing additional Ra archival ephemera. On each headphone is a different recording from Ra and his Arkestra, implying that one must navigate around the mass of dangling cords to reach other materials. This is a symbolic and tangible visual. The viewer sees, translated through contemporary technology, the weight of Ra’s sound, and by extension the sonic weight that disrupts the flow of standard movement through space. To pause the flow of movement for a communal offering of listening is already a gesture that accents the artfulness of Ra’s work, but has further potency when considering what those sounds are. Ra pushed the boundaries of the sonic to approximate the cosmic, crafting noises as material to reflect their very effects by using musical technology that could approximate the cosmos and escape their more limited uses (we could broadly understand this as a general poetic for Ra’s own riposte against the limits of ontological recognition). Lauro intensifies this vision by putting a primary focus on the visual weight of the sonic component of Ra’s work, a canny honorific that revises the archival impulse of more standard exhibitions of his work.26
There is a quality of unruliness to all of the exhibitions mentioned above that have facets of creative exhibition practice or institutional critique embedded within them: bringing the outside into the gallery (Boursier-Mougenot), displacing the primacy of the white cube (Land Speed Record), inverting exhibition space to foreground listening devices (Lauro). By allowing creative or experimental modes of organisation, display, or exhibition intervention (formal or otherwise), the exhibitions draw attention to their own noisy effect, representing novel attempts at curating sound that attend to its queer potential.
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In November of 2022, I co-curated with artist, Aaron Walker, an exhibition at Chicago apartment gallery, The Plan, titled Soft Noise. This exhibition was born from a larger critical research project on the hierarchical implications within the technicity of musical play. That is, how the expression of organised sound is traditionally bound to physical standardisation and repetitive training, or how the use of various instructional materials reproduces power in forms of creative activity (such as the “right” and “wrong” ways to play a musical instrument).27 Lessons are learned from historical examples that have sought to break with such standards, such as free jazz, punk, and the extra-musical conceptualism of Fluxus. Working against the consolidation of meaning can lead to new structures in musical play.28 This matters. Without fixed grounds, meaning in musical play is put in flux and open to new definitions. A part of this larger project is thus to speculate on new musical classifications that could both avoid a stable calculus of profitability in relation to the neoliberal scaffolding of much musical invention today, and emerge as a collective praxis of relational meaning making.
Soft noise was considered as a speculative music classification, a queer rejoinder to the aesthetic-driven sub-genre of harsh noise. Unlike harsh noise, soft noise was conceived of as exceeding sonic terrain, an aesthetic of softness that could be exemplified in a number of ways. While sound was present, Soft Noise was largely made up of objects commissioned from seven artists around a prompt asking them what material form might best suit this speculative category. Noise in Soft Noise was thus considered in an expanded sense, exemplifying the uncapturable, potent, and continuously emerging quality of noise. While there were plenty of outstanding works in this exhibition, I want to focus on one, Pink Mass, by Chicago artist, Eileen Mueller, that exemplifies the conceptual ambitions of the show through its unexpected relational noisiness.
The appearance of Pink Mass lived up to its name as a pile of pink party curtains with a hidden vibrating cat toy that made the object quietly oscillate. When activated, the sound of Pink Mass could best be described as a kind of shimmering, a rustling of plasticised aluminum foil gently shuffling that masked the barely legible physical vibrations of the automatic cat toy. As a visual representation of noise, Pink Mass is an abstraction, (although not “pure” in the sense of a Clement Greenberg formulation) in that its materials have a legible function (a party curtain).29 Yet, in the material transformation from party curtain to symbolic noise approximation, it goes beyond the abstract and without a stable precedent. The viewer is perhaps left wondering, how might this be a noise?
Upon its installation, Pink Mass immediately caught the attention of The Plan’s housecat, Dilly, attracted by the work’s discreet sounds and many tiny motions. (Fig. 1) Eventually, Dilly took to using Pink Mass as her resting space, sleeping and sitting on the sculpture, altering the sound and flow of the piece’s vibrations in the process. There are shades of symmetry with this art and animal interaction to Boursier-Mougenot’s guitar-playing zebra finches, altering the valence of conventional art experience. By becoming a comfortable resting place and soothing sonic space for an animal, Pink Mass wound up exceeding its original function. No longer simply an art object, Pink Mass escapes stable evaluation for what it actually does and recalls Roland Barthes’ category of the receivable, an “enigmatic disorganisation” or “aberrant grammar” that is unreadable, provokes uncertainty, and therefore a crisis of signifying associations.30 It is in this crisis of stunted judgement or evaluation that we can find a symmetry to noise, with its continuous shifting of the valence and clarity of what we receive.
Fig. 1: Eileen Mueller’s Pink Mass with Dilly the cat in Soft Noise at The Plan, Chicago, 2022.
A second example of the unstable queerness and noise of sound production is Green Noise, an exhibition I curated at Granite City’s Art and Design District in Illinois. For this exhibition, seven artists chose a favourite noise, and these written descriptions were given to fourteen object makers who translated them into objects and then photographed them. The photographs from these artists were given to seven sound artists to translate back into noise. Born from a loose definition of the phenomenon of green noise as “the background noise of the world,” Green Noise the exhibition took the term as an analogic possibility.31 As mentioned before, Lefebvre’s formulation of noise can be stabilised and foregrounded as hegemonic and therefore muted and ignored. This tension holds symbolic political importance. Through its relational and response-driven design, Green Noise works to find radical potency in background noise.
The display for Green Noise was relatively simple. Photographs from the fourteen artists were individually mounted on a hinged wooden board that, when opened, featured two adhesive cards. One card was on the back of the board and revealed the artist’s name and the noise they responded to, the other on the wall featured the noise description and who selected it. Next to the wood panel was a small mp3 player with audio of the noise citing the person who chose it. This curation aimed to create a miniature ecosystem of the discrepancies that can occur between visual, sonic, and linguistic arts. As in Soft Noise, Green Noise hoped to avoid extremely literal interpretations, e.g., the visual representation of the sound of a quack should not be depicted by the image of a duck. The aim was rather to explore the deeper meaning of any given sound. The viewer might be left wondering how the given image might possibly link to the description, emphasising the disconnect between noise and a representation of noise, much as in the Sun Ra exhibition. This discrepancy would get further complicated when the response images were translated into a sonic palette, both referencing sound and moving away from the signifying aspect. Recalling notions of excess and the receivable mentioned above, Green Noise was an attempt to become noisy, to revel in the inability to fully capture, and therefore reconsider the effect of sound as queer subject.
Lastly, I want to consider Dance to Anything, an exhibition that, like Green Noise, featured a telephone game as a means to amplify relational sonic interaction and ambiguity. Emanating from a larger, but nonetheless related, research question around the deregulation of certain behaviours – tendencies towards ordered experiences – in mediated environments, Dance to Anything aimed to look at how sound could provoke bodily movement in relation to noise. There’s a long tradition in history and cultural studies, from Brazil to Detroit, of the liberating power of improvisation that a dance commons might provoke, particularly in resistance to an authoritarian regime. A smaller utopia, the improvisatory commons of the dance floor/space/place is nonetheless a site of deregulation, where choreography is ad-hoc and the movement of daily life’s fixation on rhythms at the service of various powers is temporarily abandoned. A space such as the dance floor/space/place, and the minor liberation they evoke exemplify what Lefebvre calls “tiny epiphanies,” those moments where it seems feasible to discern possibility or power, where things appear on the brink of alteration, reform, or crisis.32 It can be empowering to exist in a space where rhythm guides but does not impose, where a body can move (or not) how it wants to.
Arabella Stanger, in their book, Dancing on Violent Ground, is sympathetic to the utopian possibilities of the dance floor, while also challenging dance within institutional frameworks (especially art spaces), calling such attempts “sanctioned effervescence.”33 What Stanger means is that a temporary autonomous zone that might erupt within a managed context (art space) conjures up the “neoliberal condition of governing conduct as if it were granting liberty.”34 Stanger further quotes Andre Lepecki on dance and rhythms:
If dancers are trained in rhythm, but through their training they become just as those who tame, just as those who impose rhythms, then it follows that we must be witnessing the emergence of a kind of proto-model for how rhythms aimed at curating tamed subjects may simultaneously be embodied by those who are supposed to own their movements – whether they are citizens of contemporary democracies or dancers.35
What Lepecki is getting at is that our regulated choreographies are embodied and difficult to shake, and often function at the service of institutional power rather than as liberatory practice. Through apparatuses of power and capitalism, performance, such as dance, gets mediated, tamed, and controlled. This critique of capitalist absorption is not a novel one but nonetheless an important one in relation to exhibition spaces.36 Queerness and noise are helpful here. They challenge apparatuses of power to confront the utilitarian with joy: dancing to architecture, singing to economics, and other similar performance ideas.
Dance to Anything realises this challenge. Five sound makers contributed a piece that was designed to be difficult to dance to and then given to a dancer to interpret. (Fig. 2) The idea was to question what is considered conventional dance movement, especially in its relation to sound, and to re-evaluate what gets us moving. This conceit was not meant simply to evoke anachronisms between movement and sound, but rather to suggest how a rhythm could become arrhythmic, to shake off regulated choreography, and to make experimental dance in an art space more legible.
To return to Stanger’s critique: does the attempt to evoke ambiguity in Dance to Anything escape a schema of “sanctioned effervescence” or can it elicit the “tiny epiphany” that gives permission to a series of possibilities beyond the management of agency regulation? Is a “framework” of “indeterminate,” “improvised,” “unknown” “noise” yet another container waiting to be extrapolated as useful for capital and power? Or does the experiment of Dance to Anything’s inherent instability and lack of grounded profitability give it some oppositional possibilities? I would like to think that to dance to anything, in a very literal sense, implies no metric for “success” (or neoliberal absorption) but rather advocates for joy. To say that we could dance to anything, and mean it sincerely, is a minor gesture, but one that suggests new and resistant rhythms.
Fig. 2: Kezia Waters performing in Dance to Anything ACRE, Chicago, 2022.
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In closing, I want to return to the questions of sonic classification, rhythm, and research production to tie up some final threads. In the fall of 2020, I was invited to put on a solo exhibition at artist Breanne Trammell’s then-home in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which was also a project space called Public Storage. Drawing on ideas around rhythms and a poetics of stable beat-making, I conceptualised a performance lecture titled, How to Rhythm. The theme of the exhibition was accidentally expanded upon by a crucial typo from Trammell in the exhibition press, in which “rhythm” became “rythmn.”37 This new word required its own consideration and contemplation. At the time, there was no public opening due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, and activity was relegated to an impromptu performance that was live streamed and later posted on the internet. Much of Arkansas, in this early to mid-phase of U.S. lockdowns and masking, remained defiant to any public health protocols, and my visit to Fayetteville was christened by a downtown traffic standstill caused by a long caravan of pickup trucks adorned with enormous flags supporting Donald Trump. While Trammell and I quietly, and to a limited audience, worked out the possibilities of a new type of rhythm that could emerge on account of the unprecedented social standstill, others were desperately clinging to familiar rhythms. It seemed as if the rhythm we were considering had no similar features to this other rhythm, represented by violent honks and hollers and flags that blockaded physical and figurative movement more than any face mask would.
Both inside and outside the divergent rhythms of Fayetteville – one dependent on rhythms of dissent that were simultaneously about security and disruption (protesting to keep things the same), and one about experimenting with the potential of rhythm in the first place – complicated the potency of the event and the research, itself already fraught with complications around visibility and accessibility. This environment made me realise that, like the Fayetteville Trump truck procession, my insistence on rhythm changing while remaining tied to its tenets, was a logical flaw. To borrow a line from the artist Henry Flynt: “throw away the crutch of the label…[and] crystallise unprecedented, richly elaborated activities around unprecedented purposes.”38 Perhaps more so than the work or in the event and exhibition, the typo in the title of the exhibition got to the crux of what I was looking for.
“Curating noise” is synonymous with a mindfulness to “unprecedented purposes,” to other ways of producing knowledge in the world that do not necessarily find clear dividends. This might feel antithetical to the nature of curating, in which art, always a way of doing rather than an object, is more often than not stabilised into organised material in space, regardless of critical intention. Furthermore, in some of the noisy curatorial moves discussed above, we might sympathise with Filipovic who sees such thematic organising as giving the artwork “little possibility to articulate itself against its contexts.”39 Yet I would argue that it is precisely the hermeticism of art and exhibition-making, its solipsistic public isolation, that mirrors the sound works it demotes to headphones attached to hidden audio players behind drywall. These methods keep the presentation of art – sound or otherwise – as more of a rhythm than a “rythmn,” a known world rather than another way of knowing the world.
One of the hallmarks of becoming noisy, as I hope I have illustrated with the examples in this essay, is to further queer sound, to move it towards a potential cacophony of unexpected relational possibilities and a wealth of effects and affects. Daniel writes, “you do not need to know what you are hearing to be moved by what you hear,” and it is in stolen moments of experiencing the limitless that such ambiguity can provoke us into becoming noisy.40 To be clear, I am mindful of the limits of this proposal and the potential for its transcendental and romantic character to be misunderstood as a semi-utopian blueprint for exhibition-making. I am not trying to argue that novel experience in art and exhibitions can only occur through a rejection of stable forms or from a disregard for intentionality. Rather, what I hope to have argued around the potentials of reassessing the qualities of sound and their effects that become noise, is that curating noise and becoming noisy can encourage one to explore limitations, and therefore grant permission to stray from them.
From the MOMA press release: “sound art is another manifestation of the increasing contemporary tendency to extend the range of artistic possibilities by moving between different mediums and exploring new modes of presentation.” The Museum of Modern Art, “Museum Exhibition Features Work Incorporating Sound,” (Press release, 1979), https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_327230.pdf. Despite the novelty of this exhibition, being the first known major institutional use of the term “Sound Art” in a title, it has largely been understudied by sound art historians. For a critical examination of this exhibition and its reception see Judy Dunaway, “The Forgotten 1979 MOMA Sound Art Exhibition,” Resonance 1, no. 1 (2020): 25-46, https://online.ucpress.edu/res/article/1/1/25/109397/The-Forgotten-1979-MoMA-Sound-Art-Exhibition. ↩
I am reminded of the term “formal thickening” by the artist and Latinx sci-fi pedagogue Josh Rios. Rios explains the term at the four minute mark in School of Visual Arts, “Josh Rios- Media Artist, Writer & Educator” February 12, 2019 YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Wrfm8B8kT4. ↩
Jason Van Eyck, “From Control to the Non-Cochlear – Evolving Strategies of Sound Art Curation,” Interference, no. 6 (2018),http://www.interferencejournal.org/from-control-to-the-non%C2%ADcochlear-evolving-strategies-of-sound-art-curation/. ↩
Drew Daniel, “All Sound is Queer,” The Wire, no. 33 (November 2011): 46. Daniel uses an encounter with Lil Louis’ song “French Kiss” at the leather bar the Eagle as an example of how sound, organized here as music, can be absorbed into cultural and identitarian hegemony that, upon transforming into representational material – queer community anthems – delimits its sonic possibility (making it decidedly un-queer). ↩
As an anecdote, consider the case of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. An unrelenting hour of modulated guitar feedback that avoided any conventional musical structure, Metal Machine Music, the follow up to Reed’s Billboard Charting rock record, Sally Can’t Dance, sold 100,000 copies and quickly became “the most returned album in [Reed’s parent record label] RCA’s history” (Mitch Myers, “Metal Machine Music”: The Sound and the Fury of Lou Reed’s Most Controversial Album,” Magnet: Real Music Alternatives, November 16, 2022, https://magnetmagazine.com/2022/11/16/metal-machine-music-the-sound-and-the-fury-of-lou-reeds-most-controversial-album/.). If the consumer sentiment on Metal Machine Music was measured by product disavowal and buyer’s remorse, its critical appraisal could be found in a wealth of analogies. Rolling Stone magazine likened the sounds of Metal Machine Music to the “tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator” (James Wolcott, “Metal Machine Music,” Rolling Stone, August 14, 1975, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/metal-machine-music-99547/.); Anthony O’ Grady went with the record sounding “like a dentist’s drill battling a pneumatic drill for possession of a tattered Moog riff from [progressive rock band] Tangerine Dream” (Anthony O’ Grady, “An Afternoon with Lou Reed and Metal Machine Music,” RAM, August 9, 1975, https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Artist/lou-reed.); John Rockwell wrote of the record in The New York Times that “next to this, Kraftwerk sounds like Chuck Berry” (John Rockwell, “Lou Reed Turns Up the Volume,” The New York Times, June 20, 1975, 24). Not content with fantastic written comparative exercises, other critics went with symbolic gestures, such as a review from Creem magazine that simply repeated the word “no” over 800 times, or Tony Drayton’s illegible glyphs, which attempts to comment on the record by mirroring its seemingly indiscernible sonic vocabulary (Ripped & Torn, no. 3 (February/March 1977): 6). What this situation of assessing and experiencing Metal Machine Music represents is a cacophony of affective response that indicates not just the noisiness of the record, but the increasingly fantastic efforts that occur when confronted with an evaluation deficiency. The increasingly desperate attempts by critics to find a sonic equivalent in language to the noise on Metal Machine Music illustrates a salaciousness of critical hyperbole when it comes to the pejorative, but more interestingly, evokes a creative response that finds them attempting to become noise-like. Critics of Metal Machine Music grappled with signifying a sign that evaded their traditional modes of evaluation – noise – and in that attempt found themselves stretching the boundaries of evocative illustration. Is there not something astonishing about a piece of music or a sound that escapes legibility and evokes the science fiction of a “galactic refrigerator?” ↩
The demystifying vinyl wall text that opens a museum or gallery exhibition is a pertinent example of how this occurs. ↩
David Novak, “noise”, in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 126. While I proceed largely in this essay following this particular articulation on noise from Novak, he takes great care to note that there is no monolithic understanding of noise. Novak crafts “three discursive contexts” of noise (aesthetic, technological, and social) that represent strands of, and have been generally productive for, contemporary scholarship. For more on sound, noise, and art see also: Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999); Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner, eds., Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (New York: Continuum, 2004); Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2006); Doug Van Nort, “Noise/Music and Representation Systems, ” Organised Sound 2, no. 11 (2006): 173–178; Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music, between Categories (New York: Rizzoli, 2007); Joanna Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Tara Rodgers, Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Salome Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2010). ↩
Novak, “noise,” 126. Consider a 1981 report on noise from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Noise Effects Handbook, in which noise is never outright defined outside of a vague relative decibel level – “loud sounds” – found in a given area. Further, the Noise Effects Handbook states that “Some studies have concluded that those with a fairly high level of empathy, intelligence, and creativity may be more sensitive to noise than most.” This somewhat astonishing generalisation, cited from a somewhat dubious scientific study, precisely underscores the notion of noise not as a thing but an effect, in this case, one that is aberrant to physiological and, if one believes the science, moral social behaviour. Environmental Protection Agency, Noise Effects Handbook: A Desk Reference to Health and Welfare Effects of Noise (Washington DC: 1981), 77. ↩
These are the terms of which Jacques Attali considers noise in his seminal book, Noise. Attali writes, “In noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among men. Clamor, Melody, Dissonance, Harmony; when it is fashioned by men with specific tools, when it invades man’s time, when it becomes sound, noise is the sound of purpose and power…” In Jack Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 6. ↩
In its ambivalent signifying, noise shares theoretical qualities with queerness, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of queerness as an “open mesh of possibilities…[that] aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 7. ↩
Daniel, “All Sound is Queer,” 45. ↩
Novak: “Noise is essentially a relational concept.” Novak, “noise,” 126. ↩
Elena Filipovic, “What is an Exhibition?” in Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating, ed. Jens Hoffman (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2013), 74. ↩
Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life (New York: Continuum, 2004). For a consideration of how Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis can be extrapolated into a wider discussion on urban cultural memory see Kevin Hetherington, “Rhythm and noise: the city, memory, and the archive,” The Sociological Review 61, no. S1 (2013): 17-33. ↩
Pirelli Hangar Biccoca, “Céleste Boursier-Mougenot from here to ear (v. 15)”, accessed January 15, 2024, https://pirellihangarbicocca.org/en/exhibition/celeste-boursier-mougenot-from-here-to-ear-v-15/. ↩
Lefebvre writes, “The everyday is simultaneously the site of, the theatre for, and what is at stake in a conflict between great indestructible rhythms and the processes imposed by the socio-economic organisation of production, consumption, circulation, and habitat. The analysis of everyday life shows how social time is itself a social product.” Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 73. ↩
The transparency of the vinyl is a reference to the transparent drumheads on the kit that Del Valle performed on. ↩
Daniel, “All Sound is Queer,” 45. ↩
I am reminded again of Novak’s suggestion that noise is a relational concept, and to this end we can consider the way that relations are threaded through materials in a quote from the Reverend Russell Rathbun, included in Land Speed Record’s catalog liner notes: “A record pressed is held captive in its 180-gram vinyl cage. Until that consequential moment, erosion moves slightly to address what was fixed by its maker. To deconstruct the intentions of the creator is to nearly return a thing to the limitless. I say nearly, for the possibilities lying at the heart of the ruins are stained by some essential beauty, so that all future forms seem somehow to carry suggestions from the past.” Rathbun’s ruminating on the past’s encroaching upon the limitless that could define the future was the very ontological dilemma poet, musician, composer, artist, and philosopher Sun Ra dedicated his life to considering. Rathbun in Chris Larson, Land Speed Record, exh. cat., (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2017), n.p. ↩
A general definition from the National Museum of African American History and Culture: “Afrofuturism expresses notions of Black identity, agency and freedom through art, creative works and activism that envision liberated futures for Black life.” “Afrofuturism”, National Museum of African American History and Culture, accessed January 20, 2024, https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/afrofuturism. ↩
Fraser writes, “insofar as the politics of recognition displaces the politics of redistribution, it may actually promote economic inequality; insofar as it reifies group identities, it risks sanctioning violations of human rights and freezing the very antagonisms it purports to mediate.” Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition,” New Left Review, no. 3 (May/June 2000): n.p.https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii3/articles/nancy-fraser-rethinking-recognition. To this end, Jose Esteban Muñoz’s thinking of disidentification, refashioning the world by working with or against dominant ideologies provides a useful critical scaffolding to think alongside Fraser’s sentiments. Muñoz writes, “Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture.” Jose Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 31. We might then consider Ra’s enacted and lived philosophy of “exploring beingness beyond the boundaries as what we know as possible, beyond the binding ideas of political engagement, organised religion, and biological evolution.” Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 158. ↩
“If it was not slavery / It was the freedom not to be / In order to get ready for the discipline plane / From other-greater worlds.” Sun Ra, “Of the Cosmic Blueprints”, in Sun Ra: Collected Works: Immeasurable Equation Vol. 1., ed. Adam Abraham, (Chandler, AZ: Phaelos Books, 2005), 103. ↩
Jayna Brown, Black Utopias, 175. ↩
There was Sun Ra: The Cosmo Man as part of Alien Encounters at Nottingham Contemporary in 2015; Monuments’ the final exhibition in a yearlong series of shows, We. Construct. Marvels. Between. Monuments at the Portland Art Museum in 2018; The Living Image of Sound: Notes on Jazz and Protest at Northwestern at Northwestern University Chicago’s Block Museum in 2023; which is to say nothing of his presence within the various exhibitions that have occurred globally around Afrofuturism. ↩
Sampada Aranke considers opacity as a necessary strategy used by Black artists writing, “opacity is a strategy that saturates the field of vision in the very matter of blackness as a means of obscuring desires to see and know entirely, to make transparent. Opacity denies complete incorporation and directs us to ways of being and knowing that are vibrant, untamed, and free-floating. Opacity strives towards an “opportune obscurity” such that a type of aesthetic autonomy and resistant, black inhabitation can exist.” Sampada Aranke, “Material Matters: Black Radical Aesthetics and the Limits of Visibility,” e-flux, no. 79 (2017), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94433/material-matters-black-radical-aesthetics-and-the-limits-of-visibility/. ↩
An apex of Ra and the Arkestra’s noisy excess can be found on their 1967 (recorded 1965) album, Strange Strings, in which the ensemble perform on instruments they are not already familiar with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2vNR0XOOqM. ↩
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 153. ↩
The “Event Scores” (cards with written instructions for performance events) of George Brecht summarise an extramusical tendency in Fluxus. An example can be found in Flute Solo from 1962, in which the instructions simply read “disassembling” and “reassembling.” Michael Nyman writes of how Brecht, indicative of a general Fluxus art into life project, differs from John Cage’s own aestheticising of daily life: “Cage, despite his desire to dissolve the art-life dichotomy, is still dealing with the facts of musical life, Brecht is dealing with the facts of life…When Cage noticed the horn player emptying the spit out of his instrument was more interesting than the sounds of the orchestra, he might put it into a piece whose complexity guarantees that it remains insignificant, a mere incident – but in a highly ‘significant’ context, no matter what Cage says. Brecht, on the other hand, by isolating the insignificant and making an event out of it, could – if viewed in conventional terms – be accused of raising its level of significance…Cage did not have the nerve to reduce musical performance to its essence – the horn player’s spit.” Brecht, and Fluxus more generally, did not necessarily stop at the production or collecting of sound when considering what music could entail. Michael Nyman, “The Experimental Tradition,” in Art and Artists, (October 1972), 46. ↩
Greenberg writes, “Purity in art consists in the acceptance . . . of the limitations of the medium…. The arts, then, have been hunted back to their mediums, and there they have been isolated, concentrated and defined.” Clement Greenburg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” Partisan Review 7 (July-August 1940): 305. Greenberg was writing from a position of Trotskyist privileging of autarchy in 1940 and his sentiments around purity were no doubt a means to emphasise a non-intermedial distinction between vanguard art production, materiality, and that of mass culture. See further: T.J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” Critical Inquiry 9, no.1 (September 1982): 139-156. ↩
Roland Barthes in Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974), 118. Further, this is what artist and writer Erin Manning calls “artfulness.” Manning writes that “when language becomes artful… [it is] used not to denote but to make felt the beneathness of language in the crafting.” Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 71. This artfulness is essentially the interstitial quality that musician and writer Drew Daniel finds in the space between hearing, locating, and naming a sound. ↩
The official consensus on who devised this definition is ambiguous. Green noise is technically defined on a colour noise scale as a mid-frequency component of white noise and with sonic symmetry to pink noise (500Hz relationship). “The background noise of the world” has been almost exclusively used for marketing purposes, such as in describing a 12-hour “Green Noise Sound Machine” on Apple Podcasts. The recalibration of noise for potentially ambient purposes of relaxation has a long history going back to the first white noise as sleep aid machine patent of 1963. See further: Chen-Pang Yeang, Transforming Noise: A History of Its Science and Technology from Disturbing Sounds to Informational Errors, 1900-1955 (London: Oxford University Press, 2023). ↩
Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (Penguin: London, 1971), 158-160. ↩
Arabella Stanger, Dancing on Violent Ground: Utopia as Dispossession in Euro-American Theater Dance (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2021), 165. ↩
Andre Lepecki in Stanger, Dancing on Violent Ground,166. Original quote from Andre Lepecki, “The Politics of Speculative Imagination in Contemporary Choreography,” in Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, eds. Rebekah J. Kowel, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin (London: Oxford University Press, 2017), 154. ↩
Andre Lepecki in Stanger, Dancing on Violent Ground, 165. ↩
For a critical analysis of neoliberal absorption in late capitalism see Eve Chiapello and Luc Bostanski, The New Spirt of Capitalism (New York: Verso Books, 1999). ↩
Breanne Trammell (@publicstora.ge), “Public Storage No. 4: Christopher M. Reeves “How to Rythmn,” Instagram Post, October 6, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CGBrKKblekS/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==. ↩
Henry Flynt, “Mutations of the Vanguard: Pre-Fluxus, During Fluxus, Late Fluxus,” in Ubi Fluxus Ibi Motus: 1990–1962, ed. A. Bonio Oliva (Venice: Ex Granai della Repubblica Alle Zitelle, 1990), 109. ↩
Filipovic, “What is an Exhibition?,” 73. ↩
Daniel, “All Sound is Queer,” 46. ↩
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Issue images produced by the media installation All We'd Ever Need Is One Another (2018) by Adam Basanta.