scholarly journals Sound-as-Art: The Rise of the Corporeal and Noise in Twentieth-Century Art Practice

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Chris Black
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Sonic Art ◽  
Field Form ◽  
Acousmatic Music ◽  
The Relationship

<p>This thesis explores the relationship between human corporeality, space, sound and noise in twentieth-century art. The thesis introduces some novel concepts, notably that corporeality, noise and the notion of an expanded field form the bedrock of contemporary sound-based art practice, or what the author refers to as sound-as-art. The terms Corporeal Sound Art and Non-Corporeal Sonic Art are introduced as a way to highlight the traditional distinction between corporeally inclusive sound art and corporeally exclusive acousmatic music. Ultimately, this thesis extols extramusical elements in the realization of sound-based artwork and champions human corporeality and noise as central concerns for sound artists and sonic artists in our current age of digital mediatization.</p>

scholarly journals Sound-as-Art: The Rise of the Corporeal and Noise in Twentieth-Century Art Practice

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Chris Black
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Sonic Art ◽  
Field Form ◽  
Acousmatic Music ◽  
The Relationship

<p>This thesis explores the relationship between human corporeality, space, sound and noise in twentieth-century art. The thesis introduces some novel concepts, notably that corporeality, noise and the notion of an expanded field form the bedrock of contemporary sound-based art practice, or what the author refers to as sound-as-art. The terms Corporeal Sound Art and Non-Corporeal Sonic Art are introduced as a way to highlight the traditional distinction between corporeally inclusive sound art and corporeally exclusive acousmatic music. Ultimately, this thesis extols extramusical elements in the realization of sound-based artwork and champions human corporeality and noise as central concerns for sound artists and sonic artists in our current age of digital mediatization.</p>

Acousmatic Approaches to the Construction of Image and Space in Sound Art

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Batchelor
Keyword(s):  
Current Trend ◽  
Image Space ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Concert Hall ◽  
Spatial Sound ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
Acousmatic Music ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This article considers ideas of image and space as they apply to acousmatic music and to sound art, establishing overlaps and compatibilities which are perhaps overlooked in the current trend to consider these two genres incompatible. Two issues in particular are considered: compositional (especially mimesis and the construction of image, and what shall be termed ‘ephemeral narrative’) and presentational (in particular multichannel speaker deployment). While exploring several relevant works within this discussion, by way of a case study the article introduces the author’s GRIDs project – a series of four multichannel sound sculptures united in their arrangement in geometric arrays of many (in some cases potentially hundreds of) loudspeakers. These permit, by virtue of being so massively (and geometrically) multichannel, the generation of extremely intricate spatial sound environments – fabricated landscapes – that emerge directly from an acousmatic compositional aesthetic. Owing to their alternative means of presentation and presentation contexts, however, they offer very different experiences from those of acousmatic music encountered in the concert hall. So the latter part of this article explores the various ways in which the listener might engage with constructed image space within these sound sculptures, along with the relationship of the audio content of each with its visual and situational setup – that is, its environment.

“Sound Houses”

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Till
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intrinsic Property ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Musical Practice ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
Modernist Architecture ◽  
Music And Architecture ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter looks at the relationship of music and architecture, both historically and with regard to the “spatial” and “acoustic” turns in recent cultural thinking. The author suggests that during the twentieth century sound art offered a distinctive challenge to the formalizing tendencies of both modernist music and modernist architecture. Architecture is instead understood in its multi-sensory materiality, while the sonic is understood as an intrinsic property of architectural experience. Similarly, space is understood as an intrinsic property of music, while much recent musical practice is shown to have recognized the inextricable association of sound and space. Examining the work of sound artists alongside the spatially conceived music of composers, this chapter considers the spatial and acoustic turns of the later twentieth century as a means for thinking about the postmodern sonic as a field that challenges the old modernist aspiration of both music and architecture to aesthetic autonomy.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

Poetic Trespass

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lital Levy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Old World ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Emile Habiby ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, “Homelandic,” is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a “language plague” that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. This book brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, the book presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging. Blending history and literature, the book traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, the book finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their “other,” as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, the book introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, the book will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

The Gallic Singularity and the Royal Mistress

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
Christine Adams
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Marie Antoinette ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Realm

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.

The Afterlife of Art and Objects

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Still Life ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Spanish Baroque ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Moving Pictures ◽  
Tableau Vivant ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Like the tableau vivant, the cinematic still life experienced a stunning revival and reinvention in the late twentieth century. In contrast to the stereotypically postmodern overload of images, the still life in film initiates a moment of repose and contemplation within a medium more often defined by the forward rush of moving pictures. It also involves a profound meditation on the relationship between images and objects consistent with practices as diverse as the Spanish baroque still life and the Surrealist variation on the genre. With the work of Terence Davies and Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse (1986) as its primary touchstones, this chapter situates this renewed interest in the cinematic still life within the context of both the late twentieth-century cinema of painters and a socially oriented art cinema that focuses on marginal people and overlooked objects rather than the hegemonic historical narratives also undergoing a revival at the time.

The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison James
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Visual Evidence ◽  
Current Events ◽  
Twentieth Century French Literature ◽  
A Site ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This book studies the documentary impulse that plays a central role in twentieth-century French literature. Focusing on nonfiction narratives, it analyzes the use of documents—pieces of textual or visual evidence incorporated into the literary work to relay and interrogate reality. It traces the emergence of an enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage with current events or the historical archive. Writers idealize the document as a fragment of raw reality, but also reveal its constructed and mediated nature and integrate it as a voice within a larger composition. This ambivalent documentary imagination, present in works by Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano (among others), shapes the relationship of literature to visual media, testimonial discourses, and self-representation. Far from turning away from realism in the twentieth century, French literature often turns to the document as a site of both modernist experiment and engagement with the world.

The Ancient Prehistory of Modern Adults

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Murnaghan ◽  
Deborah H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Hilda Doolittle ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers some of the ways in which the association between childhood and antiquity has been conceptualized and elaborated in works for adults, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century. Memories of formative encounters by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) set the stage for a discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis, the scholarly theories of Jane Harrison, and the works of James Joyce, H.D., Mary Butts, Naomi Mitchison, and Virginia Woolf. The practice of archaeology and the knowledge of Greek emerge as key elements in distinctly gendered visions of the relationship between modern lives and the classical past.

Fixing Improvisation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthea Kraut
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Intellectual Property Law ◽  
Tap Dance ◽  
American Vernacular ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter juxtaposes brief case studies of African American vernacular dancers from the first half of the twentieth century in order to reexamine the relationship between the ideology of intellectual property law and the traditions of jazz and tap dance, which rely heavily on improvisation. The examples of the blackface performer Johnny Hudgins, who claimed a copyright in his pantomime routine in the 1920s, and of Fred and Sledge, the class-act dance duo featured in the hit 1948 musical Kiss Me, Kate, whose choreography was copyrighted by the white modern dancer Hanya Holm, prompt a rethinking of the assumed opposition between the originality and fixity requirements of copyright law and the improvisatory ethos of jazz and tap dance. Ultimately, the chapter argues that whether claiming or disavowing uniqueness, embracing or resisting documentation, African American vernacular dancers were both advantaged and hampered by copyright law.

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