Sounding: Towards a Black Theory of Sound Art

Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring,

Ring with the harmonies of liberty;

Let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies,

Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.…- J. Rosamond Johnson / James Johnson

King James BibleSo the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.

Joshua 6:20

Sounding: Definition: 1. information or evidence ascertained as a preliminary step before deciding on a course of action. 2. the action or process of measuring the depth of the sea or other body of water. 3. A sociological term for “the dozens” which are insults directed playfully towards one’s mother, also known as "the dozens".

Allow me to begin with a controversial statement: Black people have a unique relationship to sound and sound making technology. Whether it’s speaking ebonics, the loudness with which people may be prone to talk in public, spontaneous laughter, hand clapping, casual singing, the harmonic sound of spirituals, drive-bys, ghetto blasters, subwoofers in the trunks of oldsmobiles, techno, house music, the twang of the blues, the frenetics of jazz, the cadence of free-style rapping, the Platters crooning, Motown, the funk of Parliament, beats by Dre, or Hi-fi systems installed by Ralph Ellison,  African-Americans have always had a unique and leading edge relationship to sound and sound making technology, a relationship that stems primarily from the voice, and the activation of discarded technology, be they traditional instruments, guitars, trumpets and saxophones, or drum machines and samplers. From the Negro spirituals of the cotton fields, to the gospel songs of Jim Crow, to the Blues, to Jazz, Rock n’ Roll, Motown of the civil rights era, hip hop during the drug wars, and house and techno music during the era of globalization, the speeches of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr., Snoop Dogg, Biggie, Michael Jackson, Mahalia Jackson, Tupac, ODB, Kanye West, Beyonce, Whitney Houston, these voices and their qualities are unmistakable, not because they are black necessarily, but because there’s something about the essence of the humanity that they carry, (it’s no wonder that the black national anthem is Lift Every Voice and Sing). The human voice was the one thing that couldn’t be taken away from black people. The language, the culture, the history, the tribe, the land, the family, all other signifiers of humanity, but not the voice. And it is the timbral quality of that voice that gives it its distinction, impossible to imitate, instantly recognizable. The voice has been the pick in the lock of oppression to open the door to freedom, to tear down the walls of segregation, the spirituals, the speeches, the music of black people have defined us and elevated us in a far greater way than any other medium, and they have elevated those who are not black as well. Even in literature, we have Baldwin, Dubois, Douglass, Walker, Morrisson, Hughes, Wright, Larson, Coates, Ellison, Angelou. These too are voices. They become lodged in our heads, fixtures of our collective, multi-cultural, logocentric memory.

The quality of black voices is unique. They embody a kind of relationship and sensibility to sound that is itself artful. But the voice is only one aspect of our relationship to sound. Our presence in this country represents another.

Malcolm X famously made the statement that one need simply to look up white and black in the dictionary to determine the justification for the treatment of black people in America. I would like to take this analogy further into the realm of sound that we have just established. This is the dichotomy. Black=Bad, 

White=Good, 

taken further…

blackness = noise-a sound, especially one that is loud or unpleasant or that causes disturbance.

whiteness  = Silence-complete absence of sound.

"sirens pierce the silence of the night"

quietness, quiet, quietude, still, stillness, hush, tranquility, noiselessness, soundlessness, peacefulness, peace (and quiet)

Noise is jazz, hip-hop, techno, the music that keeps the neighbors up at night, the incessant 4/4 beat that drives “educated” musicians crazy. The music that cost Jordan Davis his life at a gas station, a music named degenerate by Adolph Hitler as well as by Theodor Adorno (yet naively embraced by Matisse and Paris cafe culture). The sound of Jay-Z being pumped on a car’s sound system designed to shake your chest, and make you look over your shoulder. The sound of debauchery, lecherousness, drunkenness, a sound that must be prohibited by the Council of Concerned Citizens, and the PMRC, and the PTA. Noise that must be labeled “Warning: Explicit Content” America has determined that Blackness itself is a Noise that must be cancelled, it must be moved away from by white flight, it must be displaced through gentrification, going to “the other mall”, locked up, shot down, kept in a padded cell, choked out, shot in the back or while reaching for its wallet, straightened with chemicals, lightened with cream, corrected with surgery, voice lessons, etiquette, and a house in the suburbs, it must be perpetually pushed towards annihilation, pushed towards silence.

Silence however, is golden. Silence is the space within the great concert halls of Europe, the serene monastery or cathedral, the deep forest far from the inner city (somewhere upstate) a mountain vista, the midwestern prairie, an empty beach in the bahamas at sunset, the interior of the Louvre, or an art gallery, the pre-existing condition for all things great to be born. Silence is safety, silence must be protected, policed, silence is fragile, silence is pure, untainted, like light (and we all know what color that is)

I used to think “Silence” was something to be taken for granted, but at some point, Silence was revealed to be an illusion. When John Cage entered the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, he heard the noise of his nervous system and the noise of his circulatory system. He came to realize, by the guidance of Zen practice, that Silence only exists in the abstract, the only state in which silence exists is wherever there is no life, life itself creates noise as the byproduct of its existence much like art creates truth as a byproduct of its creation. In short,

 silence = death. 

It is revealed that noise lies at the heart of human existence much the way it was discovered that all humans came from Africa. So if Silence is a social construct, and good and bad are social constructs, and white and black are social constructs…where do we find ourselves between Silence and Noise? And how then do we approach a largely white dominated field of Sound Art and studies given blackness’ proximity to sound itself? Ah, there's the rub…

If the sound art we take for granted was borne of silence, if we are required to know David Tudor, Alvin Lucier, Erik Satie, and Brian Eno, where in that picture is the DJ, the hype man, the nameless MC or displaced art student from Cabrini Green, who for the first time has been given an Apple laptop and an unlimited license to Max/MSP, only to find himself playing last at the end of the student showcase?

We are the dark matter of American culture, and if we have no stake to claim in the world of Sound-Art, we have no claim to anything at all. The sounding of a black art of noise is just as much a necessity today as the Harlem Renaissance was 85 years ago.

A Black Theory of Sound Art is not an anti-“white” theory of sound art (whatever that may be), it is not against silence or for silence, it is not for noise or against noise, it is a means by which we can expand the repertoire currently available to artists of the African diaspora and beyond by using a medium with which we have a unique relationship. It encompasses improvisation, performance, language, technology, and approaches these from a sometimes coded, subversive position, in much the way our progress has been defined by subversion of established norms, so too can the invisible medium of sound be employed in this fashion to a degree even farther and more nuanced than it has been in the past. A black theory of sound art intersects with afro-futurism, post-blackness, black post-blackness, the mortal sin of passing, black power, the use of discarded or disparaged materials and moves beyond, but not against, the logocentrism* that has defined our creative legitimacy, and in the end will act to enrich an area of critical inquiry into the nature and role of art and artist.

*"Logocentrism" is a term coined by the German philosopher Ludwig Klages in the 1920s. It refers to the tradition of Western science and philosophy that regards words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality. ... According to logocentrism, the logos is the ideal representation of the Platonic ideal.

Why I am a Multimedia Artist.

I call myself a multimedia artist as opposed to a visual artist not necessarily because I work across a broad spectrum of media that happens to be visual, but because I have grown skeptical of the term "visual media" itself. While we experience Art, Painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, architecture, film, video, photography in a primarily visual way, it is not the only sense that is activated or stimulated by the work that we see. Our other senses play a role in our visual experience of Art. And the sense that plays probably the most important role is our sense of hearing. The aural/visual connection that we have evolved to possess is so strong that it almost goes unnoticed because it impacts every aspect of our lives, and many of us cannot imagine life without it. This turn to the sonic, and the realization that the sonic realm exists in its own dimension as well as in tandem with the visual is what has led me to settle on the term "multimedia artist" as opposed to strictly "visual artist". or Sound Artist. And while every one of my activities inevitably bring me back to my home base of drawing and Painting, what I have to express as an Artist has grown so far beyond the realm of drawing and Painting, that to not acknowledge that fact would be for me to make Art in bad faith. And for me Art and Faith are just as inseparable as looking and listening.

Sound is a Visual Medium.

The following collection of entries is intended to be the outline

of an essay that may never be written, but is rather better

communicated and demonstrated through my artistic practice

itself; After all, “Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain

silent”; - Ludwig Wittgensteing, Tractatus-Logico-Philisophicus

“The audience has eyes as well as ears.”-John Cage

“When you look at a Painting in a gallery you hear somebody

talk behind you about their feet hurting. You hear all the noises

around you. You start to talk to other people and that is how

you see art. So why not hear it as well as see it all at the same

time? ... everything is moving along at the same time. [The

aural and the visual] are both growing at the same time. There is not one dominant.”— Lawrence Weiner,

Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories, 16

“There are no purely visual media because there is no such thing as pure visual perception in the first

place...The problem with the term ‘visual media’; is that it gives the illusion of picking out a class of

things about as coherent as ‘things you can put in an oven’; Writing, Printing, painting, hand gestures,

winks, nods and comic strips are all ‘visual media’, and this tells us next to nothing about them.” — W.J.T.

Mitchell, There Are No Visual Media, Media Art Histories, 403

Thesis

The instability of the term “visual art”; and the context from which sound art emerged as a conceptual

medium in the wake of installation art, land art, etc. put it more in common with visual art forms such as

sculpture, architecture, and installation, than with even the most radical experimental music; and while

modern technology has done much to advance the emerging discipline of “Sound Art”, it is my belief

that just as many, if not more meaningful aesthetic gestures can be made without the use of computers,

relying on the materiality of the plastic arts themselves, using a philosophical approach to sound that

causes us to reassess what our experience of the “visual art” object can be.

Topics:

• What is Sound Art? How is it different than music?

• How do we define Visual Art?

• Is Visual Art a stable designation?

• Does the instability or stability of the label Visual Art allow for Art that is Sound based to be

included in the definition?

• What are the implications for visual art if we approach Sound as a visual Medium in conjunction

with sculpture, painting, performance, drawing, architecture, installation, etc.?

• How can an art form be labeled visual if it centralizes the experience of listening?

• How is the act of listening like the gaze?