The Noises of Art

Art History, Image, Sound, Sound Art, Sound-Art History
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Noise accompanies every manifestation of our life (Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (1913)); I think it is in sound’s nature to be free and uncontrollable and to go through the cracks and and to go places where it’s not supposed to go (Christian Marclay).   The boundary between visual art and aural modes of creative practice is porous. Since the beginning…
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‘It’s Gonna Rain’ (‘After a While’)

Sound, Sound Art
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‘Music is the soul of language’ (fortune cookie message, San Francisco, 20 06 2013).  The cookie’s ‘wisdom’ is a misquotation. It should read: ‘Music is the language of the soul’. This has been a commonplace sentiment in music theory over the centuries. It’s derived from a crude essentialization of Plato’s discourse on the nature of music and its relation to…
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Staking the Lizard

Image, Sound
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Burn a bridge and burn a boat, Stake a Lizard by the throat (‘Prince Rupert Awakes’).  Gini Wade (née Barris) was responsible for designing one of the most revered and idiosyncratic progressive-rock album covers of the 1970s. Between 2007 and 2010, she studied for an MA in Fine Art at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University. She had returned to…
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The Practice of Art History

Art History
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As an art historian, writing is my practice (Michaela Zöschg: 30 05 2013). When I first attended art school in the late 1970s students and tutors habitually regarded art history as a subsidiary discourse, contingent upon the primary discourse of the art object. More scathingly, art historians were maligned as parasites that fed upon, infected, and, at worst, threatened the…
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The Listening Art Historian (30 05 2013)

Sound-Art History
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I feel like a gramophone needle placed at the very edge of the record and moving inwards towards the first track (email to NE:02 06 2013). I participated at The Courtauld Institute of Art’s workshop series ‘The Listening Art Historian’. As I remarked to MZ (one of the organizers), in respect to the study of sound and art history we are…
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