the eyes see what the ears hear: dissonance between looking at and listening to objects and spaces

5/21/2018 The Eyes See What the Ears Hear: Dissonance between looking at and listening to objects and spaces

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The eyes see what the ears hear.

David Lynch1

Nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu,

excipe: nisi ipse intellectus. Leibnitz2

(Nothing is in the mind that was not in the senses,

except the mind itself.)

Note: how the reader listens to the linked sounds

in this article is a matter of contingency and

convenience. For optimum listening use a good

quality sound system and speakers, and a natural

level of volume do not over-amplify. Headphones

can tend to focus on particular sound events and

exclude ambient dynamics.

In a glass case, in the musical instrument gallery

of the recently remodelled (2009) Ashmolean

Museum in Oxford, is the so-called Messiah

Stradivarius of 1716, perhaps the most famous

of all the Stradivarii, regarded as being in a new

state as it has seldom been played. One of theconditions of its bequest to the museum is that it

remains in this condition. This is one of the most

rarefied objects in a rarefied collection, and its

sound-box, the source of much of its allure,

is perhaps one of the most considered and

mysterious sonic spaces in existence. Although

unable to produce music, the sound-box resonates

and amplifies the sound of its enhanced

surroundings.

1. Room 39, the Ashmolean Museum,

Oxford

In the XVI century gallery of the Wallace Collection,

a relative sonic oasis close to Oxford Street in

central London, the cool eroticism of the

melancholic Portrait of Eleanor of Toledo, wife of

Cosimo de Medici, by Bronzino (1503-1572) and

famed for the artists rendering of her gown, hangs

in juxtaposition to harsh walkie-talkie notifications

of a pick-up at the back door.

2. Eleanor of Toledo, (c. 1562-72), Bronzino,

XVI Century Gallery, the Wallace CollectionBusy major public contemporary spaces such

as the turbine hall of Tate Modern are reminiscent

The Eyes SeeWhat the Ears HearDissonance between looking at and listening to objects and spaces

Andrew McNiven

Artist/Lecturer: Senior Research Fellow in Visual Cultures,

Zeppelin Universitt, Friedrichshafen.
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sonically of playgrounds, railway stations or

massive receptions.

3. Shibboleth, (2007), Doris Salcedo,

Turbine Hall, Tate Modern

Gallery 3 of Camden Arts Centre, due to its

proximity to traffic lights on the A41 trunk road,sounds like the starting grid of a motor race every

few minutes.

4. Observation Point, (2012), Zoe Leonard,

Gallery 4, Camden Arts Centre

This is not to suggest that there is an ideal sonic

environment for the display of art and materialculture, one which is cloistered and hushed.

Museums and galleries are part of the social and

cultural infrastructure of our society and as such

reflect that society. Sound is a variable condition,

difficult to control. It leaks, it pervades, it is

omnipresent, it is inevitable. It resonates and

disperses in the medium in which we co-exist. We

are co-temporal with sound. It provides to us the

knowledge that we are part of something moreexpansive than ourselves.

In the early twenty-first century we create and

experience both quantities and levels of sound that

are unprecedented historically. It is noteworthy that

the motivation of many early researchers into the

sonic environmentper se approached the field in

a bid to address these changes. The Canadiancomposer and environmentalist R. Murray Schafer

established an educational and research group at
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56 engage 34The Eyes See What the Ears Hear

Simon Fraser University in Vancouver during the

late 1960s and early 1970s, which sought toestablish a documentary archive of the sonic

environment. It was called the World Soundscape

Project (WSP). (The term soundscape was coined

by Schafer to describe the existing sonic

environment.) The WSP grew out of Schafers

initial attempt to draw attention to the sonic

environment through the study of noise pollution.

The establishment of the WSP attracted a group of

highly motivated young composers and students,

and the group worked first on a detailed study of

the immediate locale, published as The Vancouver

Soundscape, and in 1973 the CBC Ideas radio series

Soundscapes of Canada.This series is comprised of

ten one-hour programmes and features extended

excerpts of field recordings, regarded as a

milestone in sound documentary practice.

In 1975 a WSP research project made detailed

investigations of the soundscape of five villages,

one in each of Sweden, Germany, Italy, France and

Scotland.3Schafers definitive soundscape text,

The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World waspublished in 1977.4In this book Schafer defined

the soundscape, analogous to the sonic landscape,

and a term not just limited to pre-existing or

ambient sounds in other words, it was able to

be made, in the manner of landscape, artwork,

musical composition or architecture, and therefore

able to be managed and controlled. Emerging out

of what he felt was increasing noise pollution,

his approach was expansive rather than restrictive.

He advocated a positive approach to the sonic

environment involving education, sensitising

listeners to the soundscape and effecting positive

change through this. He calls this education

clairaudience, literally clear hearing.5He advocated a

culture of managing and organising sound through

a clearer and more sensitive process of listening.

My own involvement with sound developed during

an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-

funded, practice-led doctoral research at

Northumbria University, in which the conditions

(both theoretical and physical) of display in the

context of the museum and gallery were

considered. Formal and informal installation

photography was used initially, but this was largely

superseded and replaced by sound recording.

Sound shares a medium

with the spaces andobjects in any recording.In approachingarchitecture and materialthrough auditory rather

than visual means, anentirely different registerof present conditionsbecome known andunderstood.


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Spending extended periods of time photographing

art and material culture made me sensible to theambient conditions of the spaces and architecture

in which they are displayed. I was particularly struck

by the hum of a dehumidifier next to a Mondrian

painting in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern

Art in Edinburgh. I used my mobile phone to record

the sound and listened to this on an iPod later.6

5. Composition with Double Line andYellow, (1932), Piet Mondrian, Room 3

(European Modernism), Scottish National

Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

In this process of separation or dislocation,

I became immediately struck by the relationship

between an object, a space and the sonic

environment which they share.

It is important to note that where photography

excludes, through the physics of its brief moment

in time and the optical restrictions of lenses, sound

is inclusive. There is leakage from the entire

ambient sonic environment of a space, and this

cannot be easily excluded. Sound shares a mediumwith the spaces and objects in any recording. In

approaching architecture and material through

auditory rather than visual means, an entirely

different register of present conditions become

known and understood. In terms of the museum,

these can be at odds with the idea of a what could

be called a projected proper or even appropriate

sonic environment and reality the ubiquity of the

squelch of walkie-talkies in many major museums

providing the soundtrack to a history of the worlds

art, or the bing-bong of a lift resonating througha sequestered Stradivarius.7

In addition, sound allows for something of the

temporality of the conditions of display to be

captured. In many cases this is unstable and

shifting in character and this instability and these

shifts are inevitably part of the processes of

reception, excluded from the photographic record.8

Ambient sound and conditions of display

My initial practice involving sound focused on ideas

of temporal and spatial displacement. Having made

online requests for ambient recordings of gallery

spaces, I made contact with a sound engineer who

had worked on a (now lost) documentary film

about Pop Art, and the work of Warhol and

Lichtenstein in particular, made in the early 1970s,

some of which had been shot in the galleries

of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

As soundman he had recorded what are known

as atmos (atmosphere) tracks which are simply

the present ambient sounds of the location being

filmed. These can be used in the final editingprocess to provide a simple and authentic textured

background sound atmosphere for any sequence

of film. Their use is ubiquitous in most film and

television production. He offered these recordings

to me to use in my research and practice.

That they were made in the Museum of Modern

Art was critical, but I was struck as much by the

point in time when the recordings were made.
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They were made in 1972, at the very end of the

modernist period.9

They were made in a part of themuseum that was demolished in 1979 and now only

exists in documentary form. The recordings were in

poor shape due to tape deterioration, and sections

had been lost, so only relatively short fragments

remained, like the persistence of scent in a Roman

perfume bottle, sealed for hundreds of years then

re-opened, a tangible trace of something long gone.

The final sound installation allowed the viewer10

an immediate and intimate access to a historically

privileged space, far-removed temporally and

spatially, what the art historian Mary Staniszewski

has described as the ideological apparatus used

to smooth and legitimate the initial passage of

modernism into the United States and one of theprototypes of Brian ODohertys White Cube, at

the very end of that period of (heroic) modernism

during the 1970s.11

6. Andrew McNiven, excerpt of Monkey

Business No. 29, (2009), (Warhol, Lichtenstein,

1972)

CD player, amplifier, four speakers, looped ambient

sound recording made in Room 15 of the Museum

of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York,

(demolished 1979), June 17th 1972. Works by Andy

Warhol: Untitled (Electric Chairs), (1971) and Roy

Lichtenstein, Brushstrokes. (1967). Sound recording

courtesy of Mark Tauman, Chicago. Gallery

information label, perspex. Dimensions variable.

Photograph: Ikuko Tsuchiya.

The work invited the viewer to examine closely the

space which art inhabits when on display, whilst atthe same time experiencing directly something of

its archaeology and history.13This can be

understood in the same terms as an installation

photograph, a representation of a particular set of

cultural circumstances the installation of these

works at thissite at thistime which is revealing of

the ideas about, and the methods of temporary

display. Through evoking something of the

phenomenological and sensory experience of

being in a specific museum and looking at specific

art, the intention was to create in the viewer a kind

of temporal and geographical dislocation.

Using ambient sound recording in a creative

practice led me to consider more carefully therelationship between a document and its

documented subject in terms of the conditions of

display. Unlike a photograph, a sound recording

undoes the stability of audience attention. In this

sense, sound recording is a form of capture that

fails to fix (render static) these conditions, and

which therefore, reinstates and reproduces,to an extent, something of the original interplay

(between space, object and viewer) in the

processes of reception.

7. The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors,

Even (The Large Glass), (1915-23), Marcel

Duchamp, reconstruction by Richard Hamilton

1965-6, lower panel remade 1985, TateModern
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I recorded specifically (and continue to record) the

sonic conditions of museums and art spaces of allkinds from the institutional to the alternative to

create an archive of these conditions. Almost all

the spaces were purpose-built or adapted and

directed to the display of art and material culture,

with a few exceptions, such as the Freud Museum.

The choice of site was determined by the

relationship between the object and its site;

the architecture, the external influences, the

consideration (or lack thereof) of the sonic

conditions through management or design,

or the iconic nature of the site or work. It is an

architecture of predominantly hard surfaces,

acoustically reflective and amplifying, often

precluding a closeness or intimacy within the

spaces and therefore with the work they host,

distorting ideas of distance and often affecting

communication with others and through this

determining patterns of behaviour.

Being with not looking at

It was possible, through a process of critical

reflection and seminar discussions withundergraduate and postgraduate students

from Northumbria University, to come to some

conclusions around this documentary-based

practice The experience of listening to a sound

recording of a gallery or museum space places

the viewer securely in that space; unlike

photography which easily isolates viewers from

their surroundings, with the unrestricted capture

available in a sound recording, it is difficult to

imagine that one is elsewhere. Recorded and

reproduced sound reflects the co-relation of object,viewer and context, and demonstrates something

of the phenomenological aspects of experiencing

architectural spaces and the material on display.

Creating sound documents of exhibitions shifts our

attention away from the ocularcentric aspects of

display; in focusing on the sonic envelope of an

exhibition space, the knowledge of display is

suspended within our expanded awareness of the

wider sensual range of exhibition experience.14

8. Room 9 (Jeff Koons), Pop Life: Art in a

Material World, 2009, Tate Modern

Consideration of sound recording as an art practice

and in relation to photography, led me to ideas that

relate sound with spaces and objects, speculating

that a space or an object might experience the

display process. The sound practice could then

be said to side with the spaces, objects and the

processes of display it represents, being with rather

than looking at.

A literary precedent for this creative siding is theFrench prose-poet Francis Ponges (1899-1988)

writing, especiallyLe parti pris deschoses,

published in 1942, which has previously been

translated as The Voice of Things,but more

recently, and perhaps more usefully, as Siding With

Things.15Ponge takes the side of specified objects

in the material world - doorknobs, figs, crates,

blackberries, stoves, water. He elaborates their

view and the world they inhabit. He does not
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anthropomorphise these inanimate or insentient

objects but simply reflects something of theirstuff. In the words of Margaret Guiton, one of his

English translators, his work is nourished by

things.16

In Le Parti pris des choses,(The Pleasures of the

Door) from Le parti pris de choses, he both sides

and sounds: With a friendly hand you hold on a bit

longer, before firmly pushing it back and shuttingyourself in of which you are agreeably assured by

the click of the powerful, well-oiled latch.17

9. Latch

Through further critical reflection and speculation,

I propose that through this process of siding, the

viewer/listener can be exhorted to be complicitwith the spaces and the objects rather than with

the institutional or cultural context, and through

this, to be more sensible to the conditions of

display. In placing the shared aural experience

(shared between the recorder, the recorded and

the viewer) at the centre of the practice, rather

than marginalising or ignoring ambient sound,the wider conditions of display can be experienced

distinctly, shifting something of the processes of

reception and therefore the production of

knowledge.

Contemporary museums often seek to sequester

themselves from the external environment, but are

punctuated and infiltrated by external sounds andsmells of traffic and the contemporary world, as

well as with the sensory clamour generated by

visitors: the squelch of walkie-talkies, or the low-

level murmured fizz of audiotours, the (oftendigitally reproduced) clicking of cameras, the

squeal of sneakers, the lurid colours of visitors

clothes, a Babel of languages, co-mingled

odours, and what James Joyce called the pale

phosphorescence of farts. (Equally, absolute

stillness and the absence of others are factors,

the solitary viewer and solitary invigilator being,

sometimes, for some viewers, an inhibiting

experience.) These all influence the processes

of display and reception and it is important

to consider the museum as a multi-sensory

environment. We have to go back to a period

when emphasis was placed on the analysis of style

and form and the discrete work of art, notably the

writing of Heinrich Wlfflin and the Second Vienna

School, or the photographic representations of

visual culture in Andr Malrauxs (1901-1976) La

Muse Imaginaireto find a critical discourse that

fully dissociated context from meaning in art.18

Multi-sensory knowledge

Michel Serres in Le Cinq Sens: philosophie descorps mles (The Five Senses: The Philosophy of

Mingled Bodies, 1985: trans.:1998) writes of our

dependency on language as the mediator of

knowledge and understanding. Serres describes

the body as receptive and subtle, preferring the

idea of a topology (rather than a geometry) of

knowledge. He appropriates Aristotles idea of

sixth sense, the quasi-sensesensus communis,

which mediates the other senses, and identifies this
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with the skin. Serres uses lists and formal devices

to evoke the complexity of sensuality rather than,as is common in most theoretical writing, seeking a

precise word or term. He speaks of sensory stimuli

fanning-out, diffusing, broadcasting, infiltrating,

to suggest the elusive qualities of the sensual.

Serres approach is, to an extent, reiterated by

Christoph Menke. Writing in 2012 in a discussion

of art as knowledge versus art as surface (andspeculating that both positions are wrong), Menke

emphasises that art should (still) be regarded as

a phenomenon beyond theoretical and rational

control.19In referring to Nietzsche, he points out

that art is about play, chaos, ecstasy, coincidence,

materiality and life, factors in what could be called

arts production of knowledge which are notconditional on language.20

Recent work has challenged the cultural

dominance of vision, supporting the idea of sound

as a medium that has both documentary and

creative potential. Casey OCallaghan and Mathew

Nudds (2010) write that No topic in extra-visual

philosophy of perception has generated as muchattention in recent years as that of sounds and

audition.21They go on to state:

More important, however, it signals a departure

from the tradition of relying upon vision as the

representative paradigm for theorizing about

perception, its objects, and its content. While the

implicit assumption has been that accounts of

visual perception and visual experience generalize

to the other senses, nothing guarantees that what

is true of seeing holds of touching, tasting, orhearing. Intuitions about critical issues or particular

cases might differ in the context of different

modalities. While it might seem obvious in the case

of vision that perceptual experience is transparent,

or that space is required for objectivity, gustatory

and olfactory experiences might tell otherwise

(see, e.g., Lycan 2000; A. D. Smith 2002).22

Dan Flavin, one of the artists who emerged from the

ocularcentric shadow of Greenbergian modernism,

was reluctant to consider the unavoidable buzz and

hum made by his fluorescent light works and these

sounds were, of course, invisible in the photographic

installation shots used to represent and disseminate

his work.

10. Untitled(Marfa Project), (1996),

Dan Flavin

One of the legacies of modernism is the resolute

visuality that still dominates the design and

practices of the contemporary museum, its staging

of practice, its management of site and material,and its modes of display. This is in contrast to

strands of development in artists practice through

the postmodern period which both question and

are suspicious of the privileging of, or emphasis on,

the purely visual or the single viewpoint. Hans

Haackes unrealised Norbert: All Systems Goof

1970-1, Wolfgang Laibs beeswax structures, or

Bruce Naumanns 2004Raw Materialsin Tate

Moderns Turbine Hall are unrelated examples.
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This legacy is expressed through museum and

gallery architecture which accommodates manyof these shifts easily, almost by default, or simply by

square acreage. However, the exclusion or co-option

of non-visual parts of the sensory register is often

contingent, and certainly open to question.

In considering the contribution made to my

recordings by the architecture and spaces

themselves, it is difficult not to conclude that this isarbitrary. In other words, the sound environment

has not been considered actively, as in the

remodeling of the Ashmolean, or if considered,

through acoustically sympathetic materials, for

example, it is localised and exerts little overall

effect. In the case of larger museums, the sonic

conditions contribute to a strong sense of themonumental institution, with little opportunity

for the intimate or tuned experience.23

In place of such unintended reluctance, rooted

perhaps in the aesthetic impulses of modernism,

the approach of R. Murray Schafer, and others,

outlined earlier - a culture of managing and

organising sound through a clearer and moresensitive process of listening - suggests an

approach within the museum and in museum

practices in which the wider sensual register,

and in particular the sonic, is considered in relation

to architecture, exhibition design, and day-to-day

management: an approach to art, material culture

and its display in which, as much as the visualcontext, the sonic conditions are considered to

be a factor in the production of knowledge.

11. Metopes, Pediments and Frieze from

the Parthenon, Athens (The Elgin Marbles),Room 18, the British Museum, London

Coda: Sigmund Freud

12. Freuds Desk

The study in the Freud Museum, in his former

home in Hampstead, north London, is the room in

which he died. It includes the couch Freud used for

treating patients a symbol of psychoanalysis, and

to some an object of veneration. The soundscape

of helicopters, traffic, giggly visitors, loud telephones

and leaked audio-visual programmes, is sometimes

at complete odds with the rooms and the objects

history and its production of meaning.

A recording was made by placing a microphoneinside the front right-hand drawer of Sigmund

Freuds desk in the study. The intention was to

demonstrate the sonic conditions experienced by

the desk as it now exists, within a museum, and

place it firmly, through sound practice, within

material culture. This is the same desk that

resonated to the sound of Freuds voice and thoseof his patients, the motions of his pen as he wrote

and other sounds associated with him, both

intimate and public, perhaps even sounds of his

death. The present sound environment in which

it exists includes a particularly jarring telephone

ringing tone, the commentary of visitors, the

sound of an audio-visual display elsewhere

within the museum looping GlucksEurydice

and the sounds associated with people moving
https://soundcloud.com/engageinthevisualarts/11-bm-elginmarbles/s-b5fOu?in=engageinthevisualarts/sets/andrew-mcniven/s-b5fOuhttps://soundcloud.com/engageinthevisualarts/11-bm-elginmarbles/s-b5fOu?in=engageinthevisualarts/sets/andrew-mcniven/s-b5fOuhttps://soundcloud.com/engageinthevisualarts/11-bm-elginmarbles/s-b5fOu?in=engageinthevisualarts/sets/andrew-mcniven/s-b5fOuhttps://soundcloud.com/engageinthevisualarts/11-bm-elginmarbles/s-b5fOu?in=engageinthevisualarts/sets/andrew-mcniven/s-b5fOuhttps://soundcloud.com/engageinthevisualarts/12-freud-desk/s-4iYkK?in=engageinthevisualarts/sets/andrew-mcniven/s-b5fOuhttps://soundcloud.com/engageinthevisualarts/12-freud-desk/s-4iYkK?in=engageinthevisualarts/sets/andrew-mcniven/s-b5fOuhttps://soundcloud.com/engageinthevisualarts/11-bm-elginmarbles/s-b5fOu?in=engageinthevisualarts/sets/andrew-mcniven/s-b5fOuhttps://soundcloud.com/engageinthevisualarts/11-bm-elginmarbles/s-b5fOu?in=engageinthevisualarts/sets/andrew-mcniven/s-b5fOuhttps://soundcloud.com/engageinthevisualarts/11-bm-elginmarbles/s-b5fOu?in=engageinthevisualarts/sets/andrew-mcniven/s-b5fOu


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63

around a space of that kind - the creak of parquet,

for example.24

The effect of placing the microphone in the desk

was significant; it picked up sound resonating

through the desk as well as the air, so the soundswere muffled, distorted, sometimes indistinct.

The sonic atmosphere created could be described

as dark, even malevolent, suggesting something

hidden or concealed. It also contains narrative

elements, with distinct events occurring

throughout the 19-minute recording. The work

forefronts the object, Freuds desk, as one of theprimary sites of his activity (the other, his couch,

was a few feet away) and the work demonstrates

what the object experienced - the room, its

activity and the processes of the museum. It could

be considered analogous to the point-of-view

shot in cinema, an analogy assisted by the diegetic

nature of the sound. (Sound in film is termeddiegetic if it is part of the narrative sphere of the

film. For instance, if a character in the film is

playing a piano the resulting sound is diegetic.

If, on the other hand, music plays in the

background but cannot be heard by the films

characters, it is termed extra-diegetic.) Through

this process, the objects own agency, its active

presence emerges, as it stands and filters its

present sonic conditions.


11/13


Notes

1. The Air is on Fire,Fondation Cartier pour lartcontemporain, 2007

2. Leibnitz, G., New Essays on Human

Understanding, Book II, Ch1, 2 1704

3. Excerpts available through the British Library

here:http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/

sound-and-vision/2013/07/five-european-villages.html

4. Schafer, R. M. (1977)The Tuning of the World,

New York: Knopf. (Reprinted asOur Sonic

Environment and the Soundscape: The Tuning of

the World,Destiny Books, 1994).

5. Schafers legacy is apparent in projects such asthe London Sound Survey: http://www.

soundsurvey.org.ukor the British Librarys UK

Sound Map:http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/

UK-Soundmap

6. I came to consider this sound as the hum of

modernism.

7. This is not to argue for what Walter Benjamin

termed the auratic in museum conditions.

8. There are of course many efforts to document

exhibitions using both images, sound and the

temporal, from film to VR (video recording). In the

context of this article however, and the relationship

between sound and display, it is important tonarrow the sound register.

9. And in the same week as the Watergate burglary

in Washington DC.

10. I have maintained use of the term viewer and

its active sense in this text to indicate a museum or

gallery attendee, whether they actuallyview or not,

for sake of clarity and consistency.

11. Staniszewski, M.A. (1998)The Power of Display:

A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum

of Modern Art, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT

Press. p. 70

12. Monkey business is a reference to Donald

Judds Statement for the Chinati Foundation

(1986) in which he states (of temporary installation

in relation to permanent installation) It takes a

great deal of time and thought to install workcarefully. This should not always be thrown away...

Otherwise art is only show and monkey business.

Judd, D. (1987) Complete Writings 1975-1986,

Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum. P111

13. A note on installation: soundworks are

reproduced as close as possible to original sound

levels, at a 1:1 scale. This avoids theatricality andblends with existing ambient sounds, which tend

to support and enhance rather than interfere.

14. The process of making recordings has produced

some interesting collateral consequences. In

seeking to exclude my own sounds from the

recording I wait until my breathing is steady and

quiet after walking around say - and will stand

still, relaxed, legs slightly apart, hands behind my
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/sound-and-vision/2013/07/five-european-villages.htmlhttp://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/sound-and-vision/2013/07/five-european-villages.htmlhttp://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/sound-and-vision/2013/07/five-european-villages.htmlhttp://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/UK-Soundmaphttp://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/UK-Soundmaphttp://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/UK-Soundmaphttp://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/UK-Soundmaphttp://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/sound-and-vision/2013/07/five-european-villages.htmlhttp://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/sound-and-vision/2013/07/five-european-villages.htmlhttp://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/sound-and-vision/2013/07/five-european-villages.html


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65

back and staring ahead, all so that I can avoid

any movement and rustle of clothing or noisy

breathing. I find I can stay like this for several

minutes, and it is an unobtrusive pose. There is

something of an air of self-conscious listening

about it, perhaps with parallels in the self-

conscious looking of the photographer.

The unintended consequence is that in being

still and quiet I start to share the physical dynamics

of static objects around me; I am more sculpture

than viewer. The affinity with the objects, the

siding with things is enhanced. Whilst recording

in the British Museum I had a very strong sense of

being part of the community of objects, complicit

with these.

15. Ponge, F.Selected Poems, (1942, trans. 1994)Edited Margaret Guiton, with translations by

Margaret Guiton, John Montague and C.K.

Williams. London, Faber and Faber. 1998

16. Ibid., page ix

17. Ibid., p. 29(Dune main amicable il la reticent

encore, avant le repousser dcidment et senclore,

- ce donc le dclic du resort puissant mais bien huil

agrblement lassure.)

18. It is noteworthy that parts of MalrauxsLa

Muse Imaginaire were published in the UK asThe

Voices of Silence.

19. Christoph Menke, Brauchen wir Kunst?

Documenta Brauchen wir Kunst? Und wenn ja,

wozu? Kassel hat die Documenta erffnet und eine

aufregende Kontroverse ber zeitgenssische

Werke entfacht, Die ZEIT, (23.06.2012):5

20. Writing of Catherine Bodners 2002-2004

installation Bounce, an empty space filled with the

scent of air-freshener, Jim Drobnick observes that:

For the artist, who originally hails from Switzerland,

the scent of Bounce is noticeably North American.

It is a cultural artifact, as much as any other

manufactured product, ... It also demonstrates thecapacity of the sensual to communicate and be

understood, beyond language, in this case the

knowledge and understanding of something

explicitly North American. Drobnick, J. (2010)

Airchitecture: Guarded Breaths and the [cough] Art

of Ventilation in: Art, History and the Senses, eds.

Patrizia di Bello and Gabriel Koureas, Ashgate Press,London.

21. Callaghan, C. & Nudds, M. (2010)Sounds and

Perception: New Philosophical Essays,Oxford:

Oxford University Press. p.2

22. Ibid., p2

23. In some cases institutional sounds could beconsidered expensive or exclusive in the manner

of the manufactured or engineered clunk used in

the doors of expensive cars. The faintly fluid sound

of parquet sounds distinct and expensive, as does

the muffled swish of a large and heavy damped

door mechanism.


13/13


24. Prior to the museum opening that morning,

Anna Freuds study, where decorators were

working, was filled with the Ken Bruce show on

BBC Radio 2 : Popmaster and Showaddywaddy.

Images

1. Idealised Portrait of a Courtesan as Flora,

(Lucrezia Borgia),Bartolomeo Veneto (c. 1520-25),

Stdel Museum. Laser print, 13 x 10 cms, 2011.

Photo: Andrew McNiven.

2.Eleanor of Toledo,(c.1562-72), Bronzino, XVI

Century Gallery, The Wallace Collection. Laser print,

13 x 10 cms, 2011. Photo: Andrew McNiven.

3. View of the writing desk in the study (detail),

1938, silver gelatin print. Image: Edmund Engelman,

courtesy Thomas Engelman.

the eyes see what the ears hear: dissonance between looking at and listening to objects and spaces

Documents