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Annotated Bibliography
Iturbide, M. (2014). Expansion of Sound Sculpture and Sound Installation in Art. [Journal]. UNAM. available from:
https://www.artesonoro.net/artesonoroglobal/TheExpansiontOfSoundSculptureAndSound-2014.pdf
[accessed November 1, 2020]
A paper studying the interactions of sound and art as well as its development through time. Specifically focussing on sound installation & sound sculpture’s relationship to space and time. Investigating how they might help map a new genre and aesthetic language out of its current state within ‘intermedia art’.
This paper discusses sound works’ installation in public spaces as more fitting than in a gallery, suggesting that it could be itself an expanded form of art like Krauss suggests including the poles of automation and action (or composition and interaction), hereby highlighting sound works’ potential for affectivity.
Also discussed is Jose Iges’ structures of audio-visual connections: abstraction and function; adding to them the dimension of depth, and the proposed predicate of immersion; distinguishing a separation from visual arts and associating further with installation. The source therefore has relevance to my own thesis as to comprehend sound art’s challenges to the white cube aesthetic, it is important to understand the potentials as an expanded genre and how it can be best exhibited outside of a gallery.
To understand how sound interacts with visual arts, time and space, Iturbide details five premises. The three most substantial I have listed here as reference.
1A: Forging an expanded discipline
“Sculpture and installation become expanded disciplines when sound is added to them.”
1B: The effect of time to space
“The experience of the artistic visual work is modified completely when we use sound as an integral element due to the generation of a new temporal perception of space.”
1C: Creating dialogue between sound and place
“The characteristics of a place modify completely our perception of the sound element of an installation.”
Holmboe, R. (2020). The Institutional Situation of So-Called Sound Art: A Curatorial Reading of Bruce Nauman’s Sound Installation “Für Kinder” Calling for a Post-Medium Approach to Sound Art. [Article] Seismograf. Available from:
https://seismograf.org/node/19363
[accessed November 1, 2020]
This paper discusses and critiques ideas around pure sound, some of which have become internalised truisms that seem to haunt the field of sound art curation.
While the paper describes itself (in its abstract) as discussing how ideas around pure experience ‘haunt’ sound art curation, the paper does not once mention hauntology or the concept of haunting. This is where I feel there was a missed opportunity for dialogue, that I will explore in my research.
Holmboe exalts sound for its supposed liberatory power, to free contemporary art dialogue from a visual and textual hegemony. Also discussing sound art’s dialogue with the white cube gallery aesthetic.
Holmboe writes of pure sound as that which have been radically decontextualised,
He discusses Sterne’s audio-visual litany as displaying a list of binary differences between visual and the aural that promotes an ocularcentric status quo. I believe that this list can be dismantled to prove sound’s unique place in the art world.
2A: Liberatory power of sound
“Almost as if sound art discourse exists in a vacuum free from the institutional baggage that has permeated discussions within the visual arts at least since the 1960s.”
2B: Contextual neglect
“Departing from critiques of the white cube within the visual arts and the audio-visual litany within sound studies …sound art studies have largely neglected the historical, social, and cultural contexts, and especially the situatedness of its listeners…”
2C: Commissioning an approach
“What we need is a more inclusive approach that takes the auditory not as a separate field, but as a field intermingled with others,”
O’Doherty, B. (2000). Inside the White Cube, Ideologies of the Gallery Space. [Book]. Expanded ed. London, University of California Press.
A book that embodies art critic Brian O’Doherty’s criticisms of the white cube aesthetic, as the first critic to explicitly confront the style of curation. The book documents a collection of essays from artforum in 1976, as well as a critically important essay published 10 years later called ‘The Gallery as Gesture’ all of which produces a multi-faceted and balanced critique. His critique was first published 40 years after the inception of the white cube, drawing attention to the convention not as a neutral container but as a historical construct. According to O’Doherty, the spatial arrangement also consumes the work to the degree that the container becomes the context. In art galleries today, viewers are reduced to what O’Doherty calls ‘the eye’, as being the only facet of humanity permitted to enter the phenomenology of the artificial and un-shadowed site.
O’Doherty also says that in the current art world “art exists in a kind of eternity of display…there is no time”, associating with works in their actualisation an achievement of posteriority. The superimposition of the white cube ‘context’ excludes the aspects of time, and relationality from the gallery experience. This is the quintessential and most frequently cited text in all writings critiquing the white cube aesthetic, the continuous reactivation of O’Doherty’s writings collected here will continue to haunt curational aesthetics until its commission is fulfilled.
3A: Odd furniture
“Eyes and minds are welcome, space occupying bodies are not,”
3B: Atopia
“This especially segregate space is a kind of non-space, ultra-space, or ideal space where the surrounding matrix of space-time is symbolically annulled.”
3C: Limbo
“…there is no time. This eternity gives the gallery a limbo-like status; one has to have died already to be there.”
Labelle, B. (2022). BrandonLabelle. [Website] [Online]. Available from:
https://brandonlabelle.net
[Accessed: 25 January 2022]
A website collating the works, research and publications of artist, writer and theorist Brandon Labelle. His book ‘Perspectives on Sound art’ for example, ties together the nebulous genre of sound art. With specific focus on site specificity, architecture, performance and relational media. In 2021, Labelle initiated the ‘listening Biennial’ to research, create artwork around and exhibit with listening in mind. The separation between focussing on the act of listening and the media of sound is crucial as it defines the experience as immediately and unavoidably relational, fostering questions about experiences of listening that do not reject visual arts. Raises the question of whether instead of defining sound art by the essentialist quality of its mediumship, is it more appropriate to define it by its unique effect on its audience, that it compels a listening experience?
Labelle has written a lot in the field of sound in art, especially investigating questions around our auditory culture, and sonic art’s conversation with spatial arts and social practices. Key texts he has written include: Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (2015), Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (2010), Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance (2018) as well as research projects such as Social Acoustics and the Dirty Ear Forum.
Labelle is an unavoidable figure in the conversation of sound and its social relativity and therefore has great application to my own research, especially as it is also informed by my own practice.
4A: Relationality of Sound
“Sound is intrinsically and unignorably relational: it emanates, propagates, communicates, vibrates, and agitates; it binds and unhinges, harmonizes and traumatizes… It seemingly eludes definition, while having profound effect.”
4B: Connection
“To produce and receive sound is to be involved in connections that make privacy intensely public and public experience distinctly personal.”
4C: Spatial modes
“…Sound’s relational condition can be traced through modes of spatiality, for sound and space in particular have a dynamic relationship.”
Solomos, M. (2018). From Sound to Sound Space, Sound Environment, Soundscape, Sound Milieu or Ambiance. [Journal] Paragraph, Edinburgh University Press. Issue 41.1 pp.95-109. Translated by Jenny Che, [Online]. Available from:
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01537609v2/document [Accessed November 20, 2020]
In this journal article Solomos explores the idea of the soundscape and its relation to the space that surrounds us. Invoking German Biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s ‘Umwelt’ theory of experience; that all organisms experience their own phenomenal world through a species-specific, spatio-temporal reference, Solomos uses this term of umwelt and finds the translated term ‘Milieu’ to describe the object that surrounds our personal experience. In essence, Solomos also attempts navigating the nebulous area of sound experience, seeking to define objective points of focus from which to build a critical theory. It is through the understanding of a sound milieu that he explores criticisms of the soundscape and himself criticises the concept of the Schaefferian sound object. Noting the difficulty of the ‘reduced listening’ in which one attempts to forget the origin of the sound and hear only the sound in itself. Solomos invokes Murray Schafer, who critiques Schaeffer for the attempt at isolating sounds from their environment and cause. Through this article, Solomos argues his hypothesis that sound cannot be objectified, but must instead be considered as a fabric of relationships that includes the body of the listener, the architectural space, the vibrations of the speaker and ultimately the greater context and meaning. In my own research I will also compare sound morphologies and attempts at defining clear concepts within the fields of noise and soundscape, redeeming from them a clear structure by which to explore in practice.
5A: Sound as Interconnected
“…Sound defines itself as a network of relationships: to other sounds, to the ambient space and to the subject who listens.”
5B: Morphology
“Today the emphasis is on a morphological treatment that considers space to be intimately linked to sound; a space-sound.”
5C: Sound not as object
“…sound is rather the product of the interaction between the listener and the milieu.”
Birkett, W. ‘(2012). To Infinity and Beyond: A Critique of the Aesthetic White Cube. PhD Thesis, Seton Hall University. [Thesis]. Available from:
https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1211&context=theses
[Accessed 1 November]
A Thesis that critiques the white cube aesthetic as being a great and revolutionary concept in response to the unique needs of the era it was first established in, however since that time, though our art, society and culture has changed and developed, the gallery has remained in stasis. This Thesis discusses in great detail the history of the white cube, considering the aesthetics before, the history of MoMA’s Alfred H Barr, Jr; and the experimentation since its standardisation that has challenged the white cube aesthetic. An especially interesting point has been the history of the white cube as championed by the Nazi party, before even it was standardised in America. Birkett writes not of this association to villainise the aesthetic but to make the point that there are reasons to which the aesthetic appealed so much to the Nazis which demonstrates how the gallery space cannot fulfil its attempt to be removed from context and ideology. Birkett’s detailed analysis reviews Barr’s response to the autocracies in Germany and Russia; even for his first white cube exhibition ‘Cubism and Abstract Art,’ (1936) Russian avant-garde works were displayed only by photograph and some works had to be smuggled out of Nazi Germany. This challenges the curational attempt of isolation and decontextualization. Birkett continues to associate Barr’s rejection of context with a fear that all societal factors were disruptive and harmful to the creation of art as he had seen in Nazi and communist attempts to control art. It is possible however, that in Barr’s attempt to exclude the influence of communist and fascist autocratic powers on art, he inadvertently created an aesthetic that has come to symbolise the capitalist autocracy that controls the art world today.
6A: Aesthetic cause
“…a display method that was revolutionary in its objective focus and clean execution and fulfilled the unique needs of its era.”
6B: Outdated alienation
“The white cube now elevates art above its earthly origins, alienating uninitiated visitors and supporting traditional power relationships”
6C: Engagement of the Gallery
“Museums must engage with the world around them and provide opportunity to encounter, think about, and discuss ideas that are complex and simple, large and small, important and less so, contemporary and historical.”