This week I gave my Final Review and finished my thesis.
Final Write-Up:
It is the most surreal feeling to finish a project of this scale, I cannot stress how much time and effort has gone into refining this thesis and the accompanying tool of the research journal.
In preparation for the presentation, one thing I did was to revamp the research journal to make it more accessible. I knew that I was going to discuss the RJ and I wanted audiences to have a simple time navigating it. For this, I have hyperlinked sections such as the 'Seance' feature and the 'Digital List of Figures' so that instead of having to scroll to find the discussed feature, you can press a button and immediately be taken to that feature.
In writing the conclusion, at first i wanted to talk about lots of new information about how the deconstructive framing of the project allows for the application of the project to be extended beyond the White Cube. However, I have decided to use the conclusion to refine the points made in the thesis and sew the threads of the thesis together into a crafted argument of many discussions of how sound installation can explore the challenges of the 'White Cube'.
What i have found, in response to the research question of 'in what ways can sound installation challenge the 'White Cube'?' is that the uniquely relational quality of sound can embody and make perceptible challenges to how the ideologies of the space haunt our experience.
Presentation:
This week I gave my Final Review.
I am so pleased with how this review went, I now feel confident to present my work in a formal way to introduce new audiences and feel confident that I can present the work in applications for PhD study.
The feedback I received was phenomenal and really insightful, assisting me to formulate my conclusions effectively and encouraged me to refine the thesis as much as possible. Thank you so much to everyone who has helped me get to complete this project, it is truly my greatest academic accomplishment and i am very proud to have completed it.
Aesthetic choices:
While i have certainly moved past the aesthetic of including illustrations of bats, I wanted to have something to characterise the aesthetic.
What I decided to use was these images that have been translated into artificial spectrographs. I have included them sparingly, so as not to overcrowd the thesis, but i do recognise that they adequately reflect the themes of sound, connection, place and time. This is why it features on the abstract poster for the project, the research journal and now the thesis itself.
I have edited the titles to sustain the Red trend i have maintained throughout this project. However, i will not make the paper black and the font white. I think its important to separate the aesthetics of the research journal and the thesis in a coordinated way that compliments each other. this contrast of colours hopefully establishes the separation but also the complimentary role that the research journal has as a tool for the thesis.
I have edited the figure 'captions' to the font 'Baskerville', because while it does not conform to the Calibri typeface used throughout, I found that it is the font that the national gallery uses to caption artworks, as well as other galleries. I felt that by using the font in this way, the white of the paper would feel more like the white walls of the gallery.
Another thing I did purposefully, was that i extended the images used to the very edge of the paper. While simple, this was done so that the images are not surrounded (or contained and overwhelmed) by the white of the paper. The white is visibly separate from the images held in the thesis.
Conclusion cuts:
Initially i wanted to write a lot more in the conclusion, about the deconstructive perspective of sound and further applications. However I feel like the former requires assumptions not actually supported by the constructed argument of the thesis and the latter is not totally necessary. Here is what I cut from the conclusion (forgive its incomplete phrasings, I decided that these points were unnecessary before I finished formulating these points appropriately):
Beyond the Echo Chamber
Just as Alvin Lucier resonated with the space he was in, in I am sitting in a room (1969), until the distorted broken noise became overwhelming, like the resonant frequency of an opera singer’s voice that shatters glass; the goal of the project has always been deconstructive.
Sound Artist Bill Fontana’s recent work Silent Echoes: Notre Dame (2022) records this deconstructive resonance. The ambient soundscape of any given site is catalysed by many different frequencies. Sometimes the frequencies in Paris match the harmonic resonant frequency of the bells that survived the Notre Dame fire in 2019, causing them to ‘secretly vibrate’ in unsound (ibid). It is because the bells are freely hanging, that their resonance can be heard. The soundscape of the environment around 'White Cube' galleries resonate with the dislocated site, through unsound that is revealed through active listening.
All architectural spaces have resonant frequencies; this includes all ‘White Cube’ galleries and so it is in the re-installing of the sounds that already haunt the ideological space, and the muralisation of the white walls with sounds that resonate both from the echoes inside and the site-specific ambient soundscape outside that we can deconstruct the aesthetic.
The physical ‘White cube’ attempts to fulfil the ideologies of the second, a non-place and neutral container for art experience.
There is a trend, to associate institutional critique with an outside force that seeks to criticise and break down institutions, however ‘Institutional critique has always been institutionalised’ (Fraser, 2005). In other words, it is only from within, from the appreciation of discourses that recognise that concept, idea, object or gesture as art.
The White Cube aesthetic continues to expand its influence, and even art biennales which by definition are international events that exhibit in a specific time and place.
‘Timeless, hermetic, and always the same despite its location or context, this globally replicated white cube has become almost categorically fixed, a private “non-place” for the world of contemporary art biennials’ (Filipovic, 2014)
In fact, there are many self-proclaimed ‘White Cube' galleries that appropriate the terminology used to criticise its repeat aesthetics as a brand for global identity.
Curatorial Reflections
Progressing from the 19th century bourgeois apartment, ‘…as modern art became more abstract and more autonomous, it called out for a space that mirrored its homeless condition.’ (Foster, 2016). It was Barr’s suprematist ‘White Cube’ aesthetic which prevailed, fulfilling the unique needs of its era. However, A century has passed since the formulation of the space and time has revealed an observable shift in content and container. Because of… zeitgeist (culture contextualises the gallery) O’Doherty quote.
The aesthetic has persevered, likely due to its convenience and flexibility (Vasquez, 2018).. Although there has yet to be a revolutionary and widely embraced alternative to the ‘White Cube’ (Birkett, 2012), this research project hopes to provide an audiosocial ecology to inspire new curatorial formats which better facilitate the experience of all artwork.
A century has passed since the formulation of the space, and with time, culture frames the container of the art gallery-O Doherty - As Modernism gets older, context becomes content’. ‘In a peculiar reversal, the object introduced to the gallery “frames” the gallery and its laws.”
As a site haunted by ideologies, we are in need of a new alternative that places the spectator’s experience of the art at the centre, acknowledging the important dialogues of time, place and relativity.
Curator Paul O’Neil writes that exhibitions are essentially contemporary forms of rhetoric, complex expressions of persuasion (Rugg, 2007).
Although there has yet to be a truly revolutionary and widely embraced alternative to the aesthetic white cube, many museums and galleries have been searching for alternate ways of presenting artistic content. (Birkett, 2012)
Other cuts:
The following I have cut from my section on Acousmatic haunting. I felt that this section concluded itself effectively before continuing this discussion into repetition and glitch aesthetics which I did not feel as appropriate as other discussions.
The attention of the listener may shift from the sonic information to the aspect of its frequency. This is achieved through a phenomenological haunting by which the repetition suggests a fault in the speaker technology, distracting from its dramatic context. An example of this would be a broken record which rhythmically skips, creating consistent loops. Heidegger would say the readymade ‘invisible’ record player is then introduced to the listener’s attention with phenomenological reference to the sound experience. This shift in the listener’s priorities encourages a mode of reduced listening to the sound’s dramatic context as their haunting frustration is inspired by an active attention to the frequency of its playback. Effectively this is the goal of Schaeffer’s sound fragment, however instead of an active musical appreciation, I have found that the distraction from dramatic context by repetition instead attributes the nature of the sound to a new context of malfunction and glitch aesthetics that we are all too familiar with in our contemporary culture and which haunts our experiences with both visual and aural technology. To utilise acousmatic haunting effectively, repetition is not sufficient to separate a sound from its causal context as it encourages a mode of reduced listening and activates a phenomenological attention towards technology.