ART
FORUM (US)
RETURN TO FORM
Christophe Cox on neo-modernist sound art
"Whatever
happened to postmodernism?" asked the critic Hal Foster
in 1993, reflecting on the apparent exhaustion of the postmodern
project in art and theory. Rather than declare the end of post-modernism,
however, Foster went on to sketch a complex historical picture
in which modernism and postmodernism are engaged in a kind of
temporal dance, where one or the other comes to the fore at
different moments.
Foster's suggestive analysis helps account for the steady reemergence
of modernist commitments and strategies over the past decade
and particularly in the past several years. In critical theory,
for instance, Alain Badiou and Alenka Zupancic are offering
potent challenges to postmodern thought, reviving distinctly
avant-gardist conceptions of aesthetic innovation and revolutionary
commitment. In a recent manifesto, new-media critic Lev Manovich
celebrates the "new modernism of data visualizations, vector
nets, pixel-thin grids and arrows" in software art. And,
this past summer, curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev mounted
an international group exhibition in Turn polemically titled
"The Moderns," featuring work by a generation of visual
artists, most born in the 1960's, who reanimate modernist practices
for a digital age.
This revival of modernist strategies of abstraction, reduction,
self-referentiality, and attention to the perceptual act itself
- what could be called, without irony, "neo-modernism"
- is nowhere more evident that in sound art. Appropriately,
"The Moderns" included a sound-art component, curated
by Anthony Huberman, that featured many fo the field's leading
practitioners, among them Carsten Nicolai, Richard Chartier,
Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Bernhard Günter, and Kim Cascone.
Postmodernist music and sound art exhibited many of the signature
features of postmodernism in the other arts: quotation, pastiche,
and the hyper-speedy collapse of time, space, high art, and
pop culture. Exemplary figures such as Christian Marclay, John
Oswald, and John Zorn reveled in jump-cut fragments ripped from
the entire archive of recorded sound. Neo-modernist sound art
could not be more different. Where postmodernism is about mixture
and overload, neo-modernism is about purity and reduction. Whwere
postmodernism is about content and the concrete (the vertiginous
string of recognizable samples), neo-modernism is about form
and abstraction. Nicolai creates spare loops out of crystalline
ticks and beeps, while Ryoji Ikeda, another leading figure,
sets up patterns of interference with simple sine tones. Chartier
explores the limits of auditory perception with nearly silent
surfaces crossed by quiet digital rumbles, scribbles, and pinsharp
signals. Like their postmodernist forebearers, the new generations
- Günter, Fransisco Lopez, Steve Roden, and William Basinski
- begin with found sound; yet these neo-modernists take care
to abstract their raw material beyond recognition, stretching
and layering it into dense drones and loops.
Neo-modernist sound art summons the ghosts of a few key modernist
composers. Last year Ikeda and Lopez paid tribute to Iannis
Xenakis with Persepolis + Remixes, and Chartier, Roden,
and Günter to Morton Feldman with (For Morton Feldman).
Yet by and large, neo-modernism is akin less to modernist music
than to modernist visual art. Feldman himself tried to emulate
in sound the abstract canvases of his friends Mark Rothko, Philip
Guston, and Franz Kline. The neo-modernists are implicitly allied
with a later group of visual abstractionists and their works:
the austere paintings of Brice Marden and Agnes Martin, the
sculptural repetitions of Donald Judd and Carl Andre, and the
luminous installations of Dan Flavin and James Turrell. Kindrid
in sensibility to these predecessors, the neo-modernist sound
artists undertake an investigation, at once spiritual and scientific,
into the basic forms of aesthetic matter and the fundamental
conditions of perception.
Sound installations such as Nicolai's Telefunken, 2000,
and Roden's moonfield, 2002, reference this visual tradition.
But, for the most part, the neo-modernists adhere to Clement
Greenberg's famous characterization of modernism as foregrounding
"that which [is] unique and irreducible in each partiulcar
art." Hence, they offer up the experience of sound-in-itself:
Before performances of his self-termed "transcendental"
sound compositions, Lopez distributes blindfolds; Ikeda's Matrix,
2000, requires "a totally darkened anechoic room";
and Chartier notes that his music and installations "try
to remove visual cues" in order to "approach as closely
as possible a state of non-referentiality." So, whil the
benches and speakers that populate Chartiet and Taylor Deupree's
recent installation specification.twelve, 2003, may recall
the sculptural work of Judd or Robert Morris, their primary
function is to reveal that fact that sound is directional and
immersive.
To the postmodernist, the new sound art might seem to retreat
from social and political concerns. But neo-modernism has a
politics of its own - a distinctly avant-gardist one that recalls
both Greenberg and Theodor Adorno and implicitly criticizes
post-modernism for its symbiotic relationship with the culture
industry. In eschewing mass-media content, the genre proposes
a more radical exploration of the formal conditions of the medium
itself. Against the anesthetic assault of daily life, it reclaims
a basic function of art: the affirmation and extension of pure
sensation.
