Oct. 19, 2020
I have work in two museum exhibitions that open this month in Europe. Of course, I won’t get to see them and probably neither will many other people. But here’s what I know about them.
Audiosphere / Audiosfera: Sound Experimentation, 1980 - 2020 (Oct. 13 - Jan. 11 at Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid) is a sprawling survey – 810 artists! – of what curator Francisco López calls “social experimental audio.” Much of the work in this exhibit has its roots in the international cassette network of the 1980s, when certain pre-digital technologies emerged and converged, enabling an unprecedented level of autonomy in the creation and sharing of homemade music.
The rise of good quality consumer-level audio gear – Sony Pro Walkman cassette recorders, TASCAM Portastudios, 4-track reel-to-reel recorders, etc. – made it possible for anyone with a modest budget to sidestep the expense and time limitations of working in a professional recording studio. Freeing time from financial constraints encouraged experimentation. Cassettes were cheap and ubiquitous, easy to duplicate and distribute. At the same time, copy machines had greatly improved, allowing for cheap, good quality small-run printing, which spawned zines and Copy Art, as well as packaging for cassette tapes.
These technological developments, coming directly on the heels of punk’s embrace of enthusiastic amateurism and DIY anti-corporate ethic, and dovetailing with the conviviality of the earlier Mail Art scene of the 1970s, encouraged artists to reclaim the means of musical production from studios, labels, and record pressing plants. Bypassing those traditional gatekeepers resulted in a flood of homemade audio work that was then shared through the mail with other like-minded weirdos around the world. Today it’s easy to recognize this as the primitive precursor to making music on laptops and sharing it on the internet. At the time, though, it was revolutionary. And now, in the wake of the resurgence of pricey vinyl LPs, all the hip kids are making cassettes again.
While some aspiring musicians used these new technologies to basically mimic the mainstream music business on a smaller scale, many others had no such ambitions and were content to be able to play with sound as a physical medium, unencumbered by musical convention or the demands of the music industry. Punk was certainly an influence, but many cassette artists were well aware of earlier historical avant garde precedents such as Fluxus, Dada, experimental and electronic music, etc. Some of them did in fact come from a more typical background of playing in bands or going to art school, and some have since gone on to get advanced degrees and become professors or even to forge an artistic career for themselves. But most were, and remain, dedicated amateurs.
Audiosphere curator Francisco López was very much involved in this international cassette network, which is how I first came into contact with him in the early 90s. We traded tapes in the mail and I visited him when I was in Madrid in 1992; he would later visit me in New Mexico where we made field recording trips and performed together, and I have presented him both there and in Seattle. He has continued to be an active networker, and I suspect the content of this show is very much a reflection of those personal relationships he has cultivated over the past thirty-plus years. Artists were invited to send a 5-6 minute piece (or excerpt) of our choosing from any point in our career, though I’ve since heard that in some cases he asked for specific pieces. I chose to send this piece from 2010:
The full list of artists/works, along with many scholarly essays, can be found in the digital exhibition catalog. I see many friends included on the list, and am familiar with many more of them. Yet despite the huge number of artists included, I’m surprised by some of the omissions. Obviously I don’t know if that is because Francisco hadn’t crossed paths with them, or if they just chose to not participate for whatever reason. No doubt there are some disgruntled feelings among those not included. In any case, I can’t imagine the number of emails it must have taken for him to round up contributions from over 800 people (I think his original goal was 1000).
The work is being presented without any kind of visual accompaniment. Museum visitors listen to the works on headphones via an app, moving through seven different rooms in the exhibit which have been architecturally designed to encourage leisurely listening. All of the artists will be given ten download codes for all of the audio content, to distribute as we see fit.
Another exhibit called Tree Time (Oct. 30 - May 30 at Museo della Scienza in Trento, Italy), curated by Daniela Berta and Andrea Lerda, is a show of mostly visual art that originated in the Museo Nazionale della Montagna in Torino last year. (Details in this press release.)
I’m not sure how they found me, but the curators originally asked to use my piece Index Filicum, which is actually about ferns. When it became clear that they would not be able to present that piece in the four-channel format for which it is intended, I offered to make a new piece that would work within their limitations. Fortunately the curators liked it even more than their first choice.
Arboretum is a collection of sounds of actual trees culled from my archive of recordings made using contact mics attached to tree branches, either in the wild or played in the studio (bowed, plucked, scraped, shaken), and they are all electronically processed to some extent.
Again, I can’t imagine I know anyone who will get to this show, but please let me know if you do. And by the way, for those who might assume that artists get paid to be in museum shows, please know that is typically not the case. It’s nice to be invited, but for most of us it’s just about getting the work out there.