YT: Do you consider yourself a sound artist?
EO: Yes, but that title doesn't say very much about what I do.
It says something about technique but it doesn't say anything
about the work. In addition, the term doesn't mean a great deal
to anyone who isn't already familiar with the field, so even though
I use the term to describe what I do, it is of limited usefulness.
The vagueness of the term points to the fact that the field isn't
as recognized as it should be and that there isn't a formalized
practice of it. The variety of forms in which artists are using
sound preclude a solid definition of the field. This is related
to the fact that most arts-presenting institutions are usually
ill-equipped to deal with sound art - no surprise since almost
none of them were designed for it. Gallery spaces are
generally set up to look at art but not to listen to it.
In those spaces there are often problems with sound from one
piece bleeding into another, or the sonic qualities of an exhibition
space aren't suited for sound work - the flat walls cause lots
of reverberation which may not be desirable. In addition, the
structures of institutions that present music or performance can
sometimes also be a detriment to the presentation of sound art.
Sometimes a theater-type space is all that is available and that
is sometimes not suitable to particular types of sound work. In
addition, sound art performances are occasionally scheduled on
concerts with music. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't,
at the very least it is difficult for a listener to change their
way of listening from musical habits to other modes in the middle
of a concert. So generally it is difficult for those kinds of
institutional structures to accommodate the variety of work that
is found in the field of sound art. All the organizations that
participated in SoundCulture were, to
their credit, very open-minded about all of these issues. But
even the most generous program director is going to think twice
before rebuilding their gallery space to handle a special project,
no matter what it is.
In some senses, the closest ideal institution is radio because
it is experienced only as sound and listening to radio tends to
be a personal kind of experience. But of course there are no visuals
with radio, so that knocks out a great deal of possible work right
there. That aside, radio is a very good medium for sound art.
The main problem lies in acquiring radio space for experimental
projects, since all of the commercial and non-commercial broadcast
channels available are very tightly formatted. And that formatting
has set up a rather rigid set of expectations among both programmers
and audience about what the possibilities of radio are. So spaces
on radio that are open to experimental work are not that common.
Fortunately for SoundCulture,
we had the cooperation of KPFA, which offers much more space for
experimentation than any other radio station around here except
maybe for the unlicensed radio transmitters.
So it's an art form that takes on a wide variety of
formats, but one of the artifacts of that is that doesn't fit
very well into any existing institutional frameworks.
In pursuing my own career, I have lost count of times when a gallery
director would say, "Well, that's very interesting but you
know, we never had a sound piece here before and we wouldn't know
what we would do with it." It's not really that hard to deal
with but it is true that galleries generally are not set up for
it. I had a review recently of an exhibition I did in Michigan
where the writer said that sound did not belong in gallery or
museum settings; he missed the fact that those places are not
designed for sound in the first place. But
that review did make clear two things. One, there is
a real need for education and the inclusion of sound in the standard
arts practices and two, there is likely to be a great deal of
resistance to the form in part because by its nature it slips
across the boundaries and categories that everyone is used to
in visual arts culture. Since SoundCulture
highlighted the fact that sound art is a solid field, hopefully
it will help to overcome some of this resistance and garner the
area a bit more attention. As that happens, describing oneself
as a sound artist will not be quite such a novelty, nor will it
lead to the kinds of puzzlement that I am now used to encountering.
Référence: http://cadre.sjsu.edu/switch/sound/articles/interview_ed/Sound%20Artist.html