Sound Art

Panel chair:

Melissa Warak, Ph.D., University of Texas at El Paso (mcwarak@utep.edu)

Session Speakers:

1. Ming-Yuen Ma, M.F.A., Pitzer College (ming-yuen_ma@pitzer.edu)

“Media Soundscapes: Listening to Installation and Performance”

2. Anna Mecugni, Ph.D., University of New Orleans (amecugni@uno.edu)

“Female Voices of Resilience: Helen Cammock’s Che si può fare (What can be done, 2019)”

3. Emily Edwards, M.A., curator at Dallas Contemporary (Emily.edwards@dallascontemporary.org)

“An Invitation to Listen: The Sound Installations of Shilpa Gupta”

Abstracts:

Ming-Yuen Ma, “Media Soundscapes: Listening to Installation and Performance”

Art and media scholars have pointed out the recent ubiquity of moving image media in historically ‘visual’ art spaces. Yet, within scholarship on art, media, and sound there is a pervasive muteness around how sound in contemporary art is understood: not only are we not consciously listening to sound as a part of an artwork, we also do not have the language, theories, and methodology to study the sound that is vital to these works. My talk proposes three and half rubrics: 1) history and theory, 2) empirical research, 3) direct listening and observation, and 3.5) institutional practices through which one may begin to conceptualize a study of sound in contemporary media installation and performance art. Specifically, I would like to share the results of my empirical research, which surveys over two hundred artists working in media installation and performance globally, where I ask them how they work with sound and their philosophies on sound. My research into institutional practice is a look and listen into the conditions that enable the presentation of such works in seven art institutions in the United States, Australia, and Hong Kong. These institutions range from artist-run spaces to campus art galleries to a new museum currently under construction. Although by no means conclusive— thus the half rubric—my findings suggest that how we listen to media installations and performance may have more to do with the architecture, construction, labor, and expertise in these institutions rather than in the art and artists themselves. My goal here is to propose the beginning of a framework on which more extensive and in-depth scholarship can be built.

Anna Mecugni, “Female Voices of Resilience: Helen Cammock’s Che si può fare (What can be done, 2019)”

Voice, spoken and sung, is central to the practice of London-based artist Helen Cammock (b. 1970), joint winner of the 2019 Turner Prize. Always plural and shared, voice exposes the interplay of the personal and the political, the affective and the intellectual. A veteran social worker, Cammock uses poetry, music, performance, and video to question mainstream historical narratives around womanhood, blackness, power, and vulnerability, thrusting lost, buried voices into public consciousness.

This presentation investigates one of Cammock’s most ambitious projects and exhibitions to date, Che si può fare (What can be done, 2019). Titled after an aria for solo voice by largely forgotten Baroque female composer Barbara Strozzi, Che si può fare is the outcome of the artist’s six-month itinerant residency in Italy as the winner of the 2017–2019 Max Mara Art Prize for Women. My study focuses on the live performances and the three-channel essay film Chorus I, which excavates past and present female voices of resilience. Drawing on American feminist authors and civil rights activists Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde, as well as photographer Luigi Ghirri and Italian filmmaker and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini, my presentation examines the ways in which sound and image come together in Cammock’s work to create meaning through slippages as well as resonances.

Emily Edwards, “An Invitation to Listen: The Sound Installations of Shilpa Gupta”

Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta is one of India’s most important contemporary artists. Though the artist has created works in a range of mediums, including internet art, video, performance, and sculpture, this presentation will focus on Gupta’s decades-long engagement with sound installations that respond to the entanglements of the global contemporary.

Case studies will include Untitled (2001), In Our Times (2008), Singing Cloud (2008/9), and Speaking Wall (2010). The presentation will end with an in-depth investigation of her 2017/18 work For, In Your Tongue I Cannot Fit, most recently exhibited in the Aresenale at the 58^th Venice Biennale. In 2021, the sound installation traveled to Dallas Contemporary. As curator of the exhibition, I will also discuss the logistical intricacies of recreating this site-specific artwork.

Gupta’s sound installations stimulate the active involvement of the viewer and address international concerns that dictate our lives as citizens or stateless individuals. Her work makes visible the power of repressive state apparatuses and responds to the embedded and often invisible structures that steer the way we think in daily life.