Dismantling the White Cube Aesthetic 

How Sound Haunts the Gallery Space

 

Keywords: White Cube, Sound Art, Hauntology, Morphology, Contemporary Practice

 

Introduction 

 

The aesthetic of art curation has been dominated by the white cube for almost a century. In its history and its formation, it deliberately rejects context, time and relationality. These aspects are inherent predicates of art under the contested term of sound art and if these aspects were instead embraced, it would enrich the experience of visual art and sound art alike. I will, therefore, investigate the critiques to the aesthetic through the challenges and disqualifications of sound art.

While curational aesthetic has stagnated, culture and society has developed and with it the development of new technologies expand the horizons of curated experience.

 

Because sound cannot exist without the dimension of time and the context of a surrounding architecture, it embodies relevant challenges to how we define, exhibit and experience artworks. The physical phenomena of vibrations that pass through the air around us, bouncing off the walls and then echoes in our cochlea, creates an intimate and relational dialogue between the surrounding space, the speaker and the listener.

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Research Question

 

‘In what ways can sound art challenge the white cube aesthetic?’

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Research – Literature Review

 

I will trace the history of the white cube, to understand why it was formulated and what ideologies the space is constructed to embody. While there has been writing on the criticisms of the white cube and writing on sound in art, there is a gap in the knowledge which specifically explores the ideations and ideologies of the curational aesthetic through the lens of sound art’s rejection from the art gallery, especially one which discusses sound as representing a hauntological critique of the format.

 

 

I will discuss morphological attempts at navigating sound, comparing Schaeffer’s ideas of sound objects to Murray Schafer’s critique, Xenakis’ theory of granular synthesis and Michel Chion’s acoulogy. There are a lot of contrasting and contradictive ideas around navigating the field of sound, one of the tasks of this research will be collecting and comparing many of these ideas together, as this has not yet been done in writings on the matter. Notwithstanding, an understanding of the phenomena we call sound will help in exploring its disqualification from contemporary art, and in assisting its acceptance there may be needed to propose a new curational aesthetic which will positively affect visual art experience as well.

I believe Derrida’s Hauntology, which proposes a non-linear model of time has a relevant and unexplored conversation with Xenakis’ non-linear model of sound. Xenakis’ model understands sound as the experience of energetic phenomena that surrounds us. Where sound is not a single object that is created from and can be isolated from its source, but our experience of sound is that we hear a lot of smaller sounds (or grains) which contributes to an association with its causational event. Therefore, in this model where sound is the experience of sensory information and not an objective article, ‘sound’s inherent relationality is demonstrated. In the words of John Cage ‘There is no such thing as silence.’: his conclusion after visiting Harvard’s anechoic chamber, where he expected to hear silence, he instead heard blood moving through his veins and the functioning of his nervous system. Wherever there are spectators, there is sound and therefore in a granular and hauntological way, the sounds that haunt the gallery space are those unavoidably summoned by those that fulfil its purpose. The gallery space is haunted by the sound of its own spectatorship.

 

This research will reflect sound’s relational dialogue with space, but I also hope to extend the discussion further into contemporary understandings of space. Examining sound and curation when compressed into cyberspace, unpacking theories of the post-digital, Walter Benjamin’s Aura and Berardi’s concept of ‘after the future’.

 

 

 
Methodology

 

For this project I will attempt reproducing a directional speaker system to explore the conversational potential of acousmatic audio, for engagement with audio works and better facilitating audio-visual practices. Parabolic speakers are a new technology and are not open to consumer purchase, however they can be made from the circuit board up.

Using these speaker systems, I will compose and project soundscapes created from recordings of the sounds that already haunt the gallery space. As the foundation of the white cube aesthetic is that it removes all that might distract from the experience of art, it reduces the visitor to their only welcomed facet: the disembodied act of vision. The ideations of the format instil in its audience a feeling of displacement and an unspoken conditioning of silence. In physicality the gallery space is not, however, silent: footsteps, electrical equipment, clothing fabrics, pipes in the wall, etc all makes noise that haunts the space. Through a phenomenological emphasis of these sounds projected in the space, the audience shifts from observer to participator, in the same way that the space shifts from container to content when a sound installation is installed within it.

 

The compositions will be played in an empty white cube gallery, in a white cube gallery exhibition and outside in a public space. I may also create a virtual environment to explore the sounds in a digital context. Data will be collected from each in the form of a recording of the event and a questionnaire for viewers to fill in on the way out. Alternatively, I may also choose to gather data via a ‘graffiti wall’, to symbolically mark the pristine white walls with the visitors’ considerations on their relationship with the space and the idea of the aesthetic. This symbolic act might elicit more inspired and critical reflections.

 

This Project proposes to:

 

1. Investigate the history and critiques of the white cube aesthetic.

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2. Compose iterative immersive installations to find how the sounds that haunt the gallery space create a conversation with the surrounding architecture, visitor’s bodies and time.

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3. Explore the challenges that sound embodies and represents to the white cube.

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4. Discuss the theorisation of a new aesthetic of curation

 

List of texts to review and unpack further:

 

• Birkett, W. (2012). To Infinity and Beyond: A Critique of the Aesthetic White Cube. PhD Thesis, Seton Hall University. Accessed November 1, 2021. available online from:

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• Cline, A. (2012). The Evolving Role of the Exhibition and its impact on Art and Culture. PhD Thesis, Trinity College. Accessed December 29, 2021. Available from:

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• Derrida, J. (2006). Spectres of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Abingdon, Routledge.

• Filipovic, E. (2014). The Global White Cube, Politics of Display, Issue 22. Available from: https://www.on-curating.org/issue-22-43/the-global-white-cube.html#n1 [Accessed January 19, 2022]

• 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. Seismograf. Available from: https://seismograf.org/node/19363  [Accessed November 1, 2020]

• Iturbide, M. (2014). Expansion of Sound Sculpture and Sound Installation in Art, UNAM. available from:

•  [accessed November 1, 2020]

• Neuhaus, M. (2000). Sound Art? - Max Neuhaus, Volume: bed of sound, Contemporary Art Centre. [Online]. Available from:

•   [accessed October 9, 2020]

• O’Doherty, B. (2000). Inside the White Cube, Ideologies of the Gallery Space. Expanded ed. London, University of California Press.

• Ouzounian, G. (2008). Sound art and spatial practices: situating sound installation art since 1958, UC San Diego. available from: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4d50k2fp   [Accessed December 15, 2020]

• Pardo, C. (2017). The Emergence of Sound Art: Opening the Cages of Sound, Wiley Online Library. 

• Sheikh, S. (2009). Positively White Cube Revisited, E-Flux, Issue 3. Available from: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/03/68545/positively-white-cube-revisited/  [Accessed December 21, 2021]

• Solomos, M. (2006). The Granular Connection (Xenakis, Vaggione, Di Scipio…). Canada, The Creative and Scientific Legacies of Iannis Xenakis International Symposium. Available from: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00770088/document  [Accessed December 29, 2021]