“Forty-Part Motet,” a sound installation by Janet Cardiff, in 2005.
By BLAKE GOPNIK
Shhh. Listen.
Nothing?
Listen again.
Note the sound of your computer’s fan amid distant sirens. Hear your spouse in the next room, playing the Bowie channel on Spotify while chatting on the phone with your mother-in-law. Farther off, a TV is tuned to the news and a stereo plays Bach, while a mouse skitters inside a wall.
And know that every one of those sounds can now be the subject of art, just as every vision we see and imagine, from fruit in a bowl to the color of light to melting clocks, has been grist for painting and sculpture and photos. Sound art has been on the rise for a decade or two, but it may have at last hit the mainstream: On Saturday, the Museum of Modern Art is opening its first full sonic survey, “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” while two major sound installations are to go up in New York in the fall.
“The art of sound questions how and what we hear, and what we make of it,” the curator Barbara London writes in her catalog essay to the Modern show — which means the movement has purchase on a lot that matters. Perched in an office high above MoMA’s garden, where her exhibition will insert stealthy recordings of bells, Ms. London explained that artists are more than ever drawn to sound art, maybe because it sits on the exciting double cusp, as she said, of both music and gallery art. Her new show (or should we call it a “hear”?) reflects the “apogee,” as she put it, that sound art has now reached.
Ms. London’s survey will include those recorded bells, by the American soundster Stephen Vitiello, as well as recordings made near Chernobyl by Jacob Kirkegaard, a Dane, and a grid of 1,500 small speakers, each playing a different tone, by the young New Yorker Tristan Perich. It will also feature the Glasgow-born Susan Philipsz, whom the larger art world has taken to heart.
At the Modern, Ms. Philipsz will be reprising a 2012 work from Germany’s Documenta, the twice-a-decade festival that is one of the world’s most prestigious artistic events. Her “Study for Strings” riffs on an orchestral piece composed in 1943 at the Theresienstadt concentration camp for musicians there. For her recording, Ms. Philipsz has redcted the parts for all the instruments except one cello and one viola, leaving plangent silences between those two players’ scattered notes — and, of course, evoking the erasure of musicians and artists by the Nazis.
“For the public, sound art it still a fairly new and also a very, very accessible medium,” said Tom Eccles, the curator of a new Philipsz commission this fall in New York. “On a very basic, basic level,” he added, “sound is one of our first experiences — in the uterus, in fact.”
Ms. Philipsz’s new piece, called “Day Is Done,” will be the first permanent work of contemporary art on Governors Island, a former military site just south of Manhattan whose public spaces are being revamped with a budget so far of $75 million. Ms. Philipsz is mounting four old-fashioned “trumpet” speakers — the kind you’d see in an old ballpark — across the facade of a sprawling old barracks, and for an hour every evening, they will broadcast the notes of the bugle call “Taps.” The tones of the ghostly melody will pass from speaker to speaker, fanning out across the island’s open spaces.
At a test run one cold day in the spring, the piece evoked the era when “Taps” would have been played daily on the island, while it also triggered thoughts of military funerals and loss of life. (On Sept 11, those on the island were able to see the collapse of the twin towers.)
“Day Is Done” also evokes New York’s maritime presence. Visiting from her home in Berlin for the test run, Ms. Philipsz said that after the recording had played on site for the first time, “we thought it was still on.” She added: “But it was the sound of a ship’s horn. We were so happy.”
Mr. Eccles pointed out that with a piece like “Day Is Done,” “you don’t have to recognize it as art, immediately” — meaning that any knee-jerk resistance to contemporary art is less likely to kick in. “A sound work allows you to do something quite complex that might be unacceptable in another medium,” he said.
That could be because of the role MP3s and podcasts now play in our lives and because of our new comfort with the immaterial world of pure data, which makes immaterial sound art seem less esoteric. Sound waves floating through air may not seem any more exotic than information flowing through cyberspace.