Likewise videogames also seemed to exist in an alternate universe with names of the Atari 2600 cartridges were often misspelled with surreal effects. Superman became Suppermen; Spider Fighter became Spider Fitter; and they would have completely unconnected images stuck onto the cartridges. It all felt experimental and interesting. I believe this had an immense influence on how I would start to perceive cultural artifacts. Nothing was sacred or could be considered complete, and sometimes that incompleteness could be more meaningful or profound. Everything was fair game. So I started to make my own edit tapes of audiotapes: bits of pop songs, cut in with bits from radio plays, messing about with recording techniques. When the first gulf war broke out I forgot about it for a bit but I eventually came back to this a few years later while I was studying for my degree in Fine Art.

I started making tapes again but pushed the experiments further and incorporated more of my own ambient recordings into them. I thought I was being quite radical. It was only when I was introduced to William Burroughs’ tape experiments from the ‘60s and ‘70s that I realized how much of this ground had been covered. His arrangements of audio material kicked off my interest in this work as a curatorial process.

I still occasionally make things now, but usually only for specific purposes or as a collaborative activity. My practice developed along lines that are seen as consistent with the kind of things a curator might do, so I prefer to see these activities as curatorial. When making things it’s easier to have a frame that makes more sense to more people.  Most of what I currently do would be classified as coming under the job description of the curator, so even when I make something that might be art I prefer to not call myself an artist. It makes explanations more convoluted than they need to be.

The majority of spaces in which I work are spaces that favour visual art forms. The demand for maximized flat wall spaces in art galleries is not particularly kind to the way sound bounces about. Also the relationship sound art has with technology cannot be overlooked. The aestheticisation of technology; speakers, amps, wires, etc; versus some kind of pure acousmatic, spiritualist manifestation of sound … I am often surprised about how the presence or absence of things in space can end up becoming decisions made by curators or by budgets. I’m not sure this is the best way to go about it.

Obviously sound is less easily contained than images and more difficult for visitors to ignore. This and the time-based nature of sound is part of the problem with participation. It can inherently distance the visitor from any sense of interactivity with regards to the way they may choose to navigate sound work. In your average painting show the visitor has much more freedom to navigate their way around the material. In comparison, sound can become quite authoritarian. This is something I try to avoid as much as possible, often at the risk of appearing abstruse or illogical in how the exhibitions I work on might hang together or where individual works begin and end.

One of the main threats to authorial intention in sound is the problem of exhibiting multiple works, particularly in art galleries. These are spaces created to be able to see things well whether they were purpose-built gallery spaces or converted warehouses, shops or power stations. This makes curating sound works for group exhibitions an ecological exercise, things must become part of a broader composition. There are some works that are, of course, able to do this better than others. Navigating these issues is frequently about how much of the work’s autonomy the artist might be willing to let go of. Sometimes this can be to the point at which the work is reduced to being only a hint of what it could be alone, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. It is good for art to talk to each other, even if this ends up becoming messy. Who wants to be alone?

Headphones are a common retreat to retain some kind of autonomy, but they are alienating devices. Artists who make work specifically for headphones, such as Janet Cardiff or Christina Kubisch, demonstrate how crucial it is for sound artists to be aware of the impact the technology has on the environment of the exhibition. John Cage’s famous silent composition 4’33” reminds us of how the often subliminal noises of the audience are part of the experience. What is the purpose of being in a sound art exhibition if the space around us and the people and objects we share it with are ignored? Works like Cardiff and George Büres-Miller’s The Muriel Lake Incident from 1999 are significant in this respect. The Muriel Lake Incident not only plays the soundtrack of the film the one is watching but also chucks in some exceedingly disconcerting audience noises. Experiencing that work was a really important thing for my understanding of curating sound. I remember someone laughing behind me and turning around with one of those spontaneous smiles that appear in awkward social situations only to find that there was no one there and it was all on the tape. I might just as well have ignored that laugh or made a mental note that I was sharing the gallery with idiots. These different responses to an imagined threat had a huge impact on my thoughts about the use of sound art in a gallery.

I’m also very interested in audio archives and how they are reshaping the kinds of things we might put in art galleries as artistic propositions. I’ve mentioned Burroughs, and have curated a number of exhibitions involving his tape experiments, but I’ve always wanted to do an exhibition that would have, at its center, tape recordings by Andy Warhol. I went to a lecture by the art historian Jean Wainwright, who is an expert on Warhol’s tapes, but when I contacted her afterwards she told me that there’s an embargo on them for at least another 20 years or so. Warhol is a specific case, but there is an interesting apprehension in such things being made public. Time-based materials made in such quantities are expensive for estates to vet. Yet re-evaluating such things now that there is more of an awareness of the potentials of sound as art is a really interesting place to be.

Of course sound art is still regarded as a niche art form and a little bit mischievous. I still regularly come across the preconception that sound artists are ill-disciplined iconoclasts making a noise in a space for quiet contemplation. Also the way people are used to engaging with things in art galleries seems to come more from a visual approach to meaning-making. Art galleries are not just spaces for displaying art, they serve a whole load of other functions for visitors and sound art can get in the way of this. It’s harder to socialize and to teach, for example, when you have to also just listen. To speak about a piece of sound art you often have to turn it off or, as it’s time-based, interrupt a moment that your companion might never get back. But these are not necessarily limits.  It might be more valuable for visitors to an art gallery to be aware of just how complex the experience they are having can be. Sound art seems to be a very good way of exploring this.

Having said that I’m more interested in inter-media projects than projects that are only about sound. Many years ago I spent a lot of time recording the sounds around famous paintings, and they revealed to me things that the visual record alone couldn’t. People make very distinct noises around specific types of visual work. How the visual, the aural, and the tactile work together is more interesting to me than prioritizing only one of these things.

The Internet seems to be an integral battleground in how contemporary artists are articulating their relationship to sound and the relationship of sound to other arts practices. I’m working on an exhibition at IMT Gallery in London with a young Danish sound artist called Lotte Rose Kjær Skau. She comes from both a musical and a sound art background, yet what’s exciting about her work is how visual it is and yet how it still feels fundamentally to be about sound art. I like the fact that it doesn’t necessarily matter. Sound art is a comparatively recent articulation of something people have been doing for a long, long time; it seems a shame to be purifying it into a separate discipline now. Artists like Kjær Skau are beyond that.

By Mark Jackson

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Umbrellium, Marling, 2012. Photo Credit: Igor Vermeer, and Vermeer Fotografie. Courtesy of the artist.

Digital Revolution
July 3-September 14, 2014
Barbican Centre
Silk St.
London
barbican.org.uk

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Image courtesy of Gallery Libby Sellers

Featuring: Anton Alvarez, Fabien Cappello, Philipp Grundhofer, Simon Hasan, Hunting & Narud, Peter Marigold, M/M (Paris), Nicholas Le Moigne, Paola Petrobelli

Drawn From
January 14 – March 1, 2014
Gallery Libby Sellers
41-42 Berners Street
London
libbysellers.com

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Image courtesy of Saatchi Gallery

Featuring: Tanyth Berkeley, Michael Cline, Chantal Joffe, Makiko Kudo, Eddie Martinez, Amy Bessone, Nicole Eisenman, Kasper Kovitz, Nathan Mabry, Justin Matherly, Dana Schutz, Denis Tarasov, Alexander Tinei, Andra Ursuta, Marianne Vitale, Jansson Stegner, Henry Taylor, Francis Upritchard, Helen Verhoeven

Body Language
November 20 – March 23, 2014
Saatchi Gallery
Duke of York’s HQ, King’s Road
London
saatchigallery.com

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Image courtesy of Blain|Southern

Featuring: Bruce Nauman, Jannis Kounellis, Max Neuhaus, Lawrence Weiner, and Gilberto Zorio.

ANALOG
November 30, 2013 – February 1, 2014

Blain|Southern
4 Hanover Square
London
blainsouthern.com

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1. Morag Keil, Potpourri at Cubitt Gallery, London
Consisting of a single video that was also available online, positioning a visit to the space as nearly redundant. snippets of dialog from a celeb sex tape rehearsed in mundane settings who’s filming seemed alternately meticulous and distracted. HD/SD. Choices. A strobe light held on a moving motorcycle.  This video somehow unsettled me more than anything I’ve seen recently on /b/. The title ‘Potpourri’ recalling the proximity of media culture to scented toilets.

2. Raymond Pettibon, Human Wave at SPACE, London
In a year filled with vacuous formalism masquerading as network kitsch, this show of the artist’s lesser known videos was a breath of punk smog. The degraded quality of the VHS originals seemed to ridicule the current vogue for early digital crap as an after­effect. Kim and Thurston rating and smashing records. Quasi­religious ceremonies filled with howling. Perfectly installed with a collection of random office chairs as seating.

3. Georgie Nettell at Project Native Informant, London
A show that was aggressively indifferent to itself. Variations of serialised works, printed on canvass in colour schemes to match the galleries’ textures.  Sections of the drywall theatrically removed as if to say, ‘work is here’. Everywhere a palpable urge to go on. Nowhere any horizon to meet.

4. Megan Rooney, Everything’s the same this is my dream at Baustelle Schaustelle, Essen
The weirdest show I saw this year achieved an uneasy levity. A bronze cheetah borrowed from Europe’s largest brothel was both present and depicted in scores of tender watercolors. A wall text rendered in faux­ teenage girl handwriting described a moment in said club suspended between enlightenment and existential crisis. Plato’s cave redecorated.

5. Bea Schlingellhof, Onaboat at AP News, Zurich
The glass exterior walls of this shopping mall-­located gallery were covered by blue­washed posters emblazoned with ‘TOD’, German for death. Inside people smoked vigorously, pursued some racist books and watched a film on Jacques Cousteau. The artist produced a pointed discourse about gender and exploration that evaded localization in an object, or terra firma.

See top 5’s from other NY Arts contributors here. Paul’s past work can be found here.

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Image courtesy of Lisson Gallery

Featuring: Art & Language, Tony Cragg, Angela de la Cruz, Richard Deacon, Ceal Floyer, Ryan Gander, Shirazeh Houshiary, Peter Joseph, Anish Kapoor, John Latham, Richard Long, Jason Martin, Haroon Mirza, Jonathan Monk, Julian Opie, Richard Wentworth

Lisson Gallery
Nostalgic for the Future
November 15, 2013 – January 11, 2014
27 Bell Street
London
lissongallery.com

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By Vanessa Saraceno

Aiming to explain a “certain idea of eroticism”, French artist Samuel Francois presents a new series of works, collectively titled The Joy of Man, as the exhibition at Rod Barton Gallery, London. It is his first solo show in the UK. Inspired by childhood memories of images and sensations, the project manipulates the artist’s own memories of his father’s garage with the stereotypical imageries of a car repair shop.

Personal histories have been embedded in these works, such as the oversized lighters and the crumpled foils surrounding them. These lighters are printed with images of porn models striking various sensual poses. Images of desire and seduction accompany the melancholy in this walk through the grotesque images of bygone imageries. A closer reading of the works suggests that maybe even his own memories have been turned into popular or stereotypical representations.

Accidental outcomes are employed by the artist to manipulate the way people typically see things and to stimulate multiple readings at once. Mixing different and unusual objects, Samuel Francois examines the purposeful nature of what remains – loose ends that persist, although the subject is gone. A glossy gold is employed here to query any decorative attempt to create images of seduction, like the survival blankets that are usually used by runners after a marathon to regulate the body’s heat.

Samuel Francois answered a few questions I had about his project at Rod Barton Gallery in London. He shared how it started and developed, and to what extent his activity as a publisher influenced his artistic projects.

Vanessa Saraceno: How did you start this project and why?
Samuel Francois: I think the day I found the lighters. The size of the lighters is really big and it was impossible not see to them in the shop. I bought them, and I tidied them up in a box at the studio. One day Justin Morin invited me to participate to an exhibition for which we had to propose a work in connection with Bobbi Woods’ piece which appropriated a poster of Emanuelle, a French erotic movie. The subtitle of this movie is The Joy of Woman. On that occasion, I created the first piece of this project.

VS: In The Joy of Man you examine the possibilities to provoke multiple readings by connecting objects and connected imageries in spontaneous and unexpected ways. Can you tell me more about the stereotypical representation you use in your work?
SF: I always proceeded in a spontaneous way, confronting objects of diverse universes. Mostly, I buy things and then find their peer/complement in the studio. The works change when I install them. Also, the images I use don’t tell the same thing to every person. What seems to be a joke to me, maybe it’s perceived by other people like a misogynous work, and I’m not yet aware of that. For me, The Joy of Man tells more about the discovery of eroticism for a child rather than sex. Posters and calendars seen in my father’s garage were the first pictures of a naked woman I saw in my life. They were not vulgar. These are the kind of images that make both men and women smile as they see them. I make things and then everyone is free to make his own interpretation.

VS: In your work you use a variety of media, mixing discarded materials with post-industrial elements and memories from your childhood. It seems you want to draw attention to the way society values objects and provoke awareness about this process. What is your view of the relationship we have with our environment today?
SF: I have the romantic vision of a painter. I dreamed to be a painter and did a lot of paintings in my studio. I never limited myself to a medium, always using the one that seemed the best for my comment/work/idea. During a residency at Cripta 747 in Torino, Italy, I produced a white neon with the text “No Image Yet” because I didn’t manage to decide from what to begin, and why to choose one voice/way more than another. For La Nuit Blanche in Paris, I showed this piece for the second time, but bigger, around 8m in length. The public was lost because they waited for something but there was nothing, just the text. There was a feeling of frustration, but at the same time the public had taken its time to settle in one moment. People remained there to have a drink of wine, to speak, to criticize…it was a break in the nightly race of contemporary art. I tell you this because sometimes I wonder why I do art, and what is useful in order to produce a new piece. Maybe this is one of the reasons why I use the objects of my environment.

VS: You work as artist, curator and publisher at Blank Edition. To what extent these varied experiences influence your artistic production?
SF: I need to make these things incorporated to my practice. I buy many books, catalogs, and old books. I also collect artists’ books and three years ago I thought that I could accompany artists and help them by making a publication. Most of them are friends or people whose work I like. When I organize an exhibition it’s the same. I make an exhibition with pieces that I would have liked to make. I choose pieces that have a link with my working themes and use them to serve my comment. I dreamed to paint like Jean-Baptiste Bernadet or to have a simple relationship with the city like Olivier Kosta-Théfaine, so using their work is a certain way of making an exhibition that I would have liked to make alone.

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