The West Coast Art Museum and Pompidou Central Exhibition Mutual Aid Program Annual Special Shop “Awakening Dreams: The Sound of Journey” is being laid out. The exhibition showcases 15 pieces/group of works from the Central New Media Museum in Pompidou and audio-visual installations and acoustic sculptures from Chinese artists, showcasing how the introduction of “sound” inspires artists in their creations. Among the nearly 30 groups of artists who participated in the exhibition, there were both pioneers of contemporary art and young Western artists, and nearly a quarter of their works were from the new generation of Chinese artists and musicians, making it the highest exhibition in history. Unlike the conservative “white box” layout, this exhibition spans the outdoor space, atrium, and main living room of the art museum. It can be said that the exhibition begins as soon as the audience approaches the art museum.
Marcella Lista, the curator of this exhibition and the head of the New Media Art Center at the Pompidou Art Center National Museum of Modern Art, informed Booksandfun that the New Media Art Center at her location has established a collection of works that are related to sound since the 1970s. The essence of the collection is diverse, including works created by experimental music and visual artists, as well as works related to sound installation. The main goal of this exhibition is to showcase to the audience the latest artistic reality created with sound as the preface from the 21st century to the present.
The sound is highly expressive, contagious, and ubiquitous. Lista expressed that what she most hopes to convey in this exhibition is that the preface “Sound” has the magical power to lead us in “sightseeing in place”:
“(Sound) Dai leads us on the journey – we feel the space, feel our survival in this space, feel the movement of this space without any point, extend in all directions, and also invite us to listen to those who do not exist here, those who are far away.”
The Silent Echoes of the Dachstein Glacier by American artist Bill Fontana may be the most expressive work of the exhibition purpose. Starting from the end of June 1960, he used John Cage’s thinking and Marcel Duchamp’s ideal of “music sculpture” to create sound installations with listening as the focal point of musical conception. He strives to install consensus devices in objects and gardens, capturing the consensus of their cavities on surrounding sounds. After a fire broke out at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2019, the clock installed inside stopped ringing. The artist had a rare opportunity to join the still under renovation Notre Dame Cathedral and installed a seismometer on the moving clock to reduce the frequency of urban sound reflected by the bell chamber. In 2022, Fontana captured the sound of melting ice and snow due to global warming at the Dachstein Glacier in Austria. He played the carefully arranged two types of sounds using 20 speakers.
Lista introduced that the first installation of this sound was on the central rooftop of Pompidou, which happened to be leaning towards Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The sound that disappeared during the installation came from a real-time consensus on the city of Paris. In this exhibition, this artwork is placed on the entrance to the second floor of the West Coast Art Museum, where the audience will hear the mysterious return from Paris and the crisp sound of water dots like drums.
In 1913, Luigi Russolo, an Italian modern music forward composer and important member of the Undenian movement, presented L’arte dei Rumori. In this undescended manifesto, Lusolotti noted that the human ear has become accustomed to the urban soundscape of the industrial era – which concerns speed, energy, and music – musicians therefore need to integrate their creative forms and open up new boundaries in music. Lista didn’t point out that this was the beginning of artistic creation with sound as the preface. The artist began to test using random sounds as music material.
Under the influence of John Cage, artists gradually shifted their focus to “how to listen”, and the third section of this presentation, “Listening Threshold,” refers to this. “Multiple works have explored how we can be more sensitive to who we are, and how we can detect those discontinuous and subtle sounds from a more withering perspective, thereby expanding our perception of the world,” Lista said. “In reality, there is no ‘silence’ in the world. Even if your hearing is very keen, it is not silent when you stay in a quiet room.” For example, in the installation work ‘Silent or Not Smelling the Needle’, the sound artist Ye Hui uses a twisting mechanism to move several magnets connected to acrylic glass rods, and a glass wide mouthed reagent bottle filled with needles is placed at the bottom of the acrylic plate below. “. The pin was briefly pushed upwards due to the activity of the magnet, and then lowered back to the bottom of the glass bottle without making a faint impact sound.
Lista exaggerates that the works presented this time are not just “sound art”. In fact, she follows the approach of defining art categories with a preface. She pointed out that techniques such as sound art, impression art, digital art, or performance art were discovered by scholars and museum curators in late 1970 to grant legitimacy to new art categories that are time based and fleeting, allowing them to be accepted by museums, art history, and art malls. But in her view, the artist’s creation is not so distinct, and more commonly, the artist will use multiple media to stop creating.
The head of the Action New Media Art Center is more accustomed to referring to the works collected by the center as “unstable media” or “non changing media.”. This is because these works are usually not fixed and unchanging – as skills grow and goods iterate, a work created in the 1970s and 1980s may have no choice but to be inherited and appreciated in the present, because the display used by the artist during creation may have been damaged or worn out.
“People have a misconception about impression art, thinking that just pressing a button will automatically play. In fact, the events are much more complex, and these works are much more fragile.” In this exhibition, the oldest work is from Gary Hill, who was one of the earliest artists to visualize the absence of sound through electronic devices. In this exhibition, his works are displayed through an ancient analog monitor, and the audience will discover that this equipment itself has a certain sculptural beauty.
The last section of this exhibition, “Sound Network”, shows how some artists have grown up with unique creative techniques from inexhaustible Internet materials. Lista believes that the Internet has become an important part of the real world, and works created based on Internet materials can therefore show solidarity between people in some ingenious form. She took Molly Soda’s My Song: Rihannaas an example: in this impressionistic work, the artist had many women on the Internet to point to the camera lens to cover the video of Rihanna’s “Retain”, and divided them into a whole image mosaic wall, a big solo with dozens of voice parts. The artist himself was one of the cover singers, but we don’t know which one was her. “Through this powerful form, artists contemplate how to create a sense of connection, a brand new public space.”
Lista expressed that whether it is vocal art or art based on vocal creation, these views may be unfamiliar to Chinese audiences. Her suggestion on how to watch this exhibition is very simple: “Take the time to watch it carefully, don’t look at it with private eyes, but look at it with a withering mentality. Since they are all ‘time based’ artworks, you need some time to chew on them, and they will wear you into a very different atmosphere.”