A tuxedo-clad man stops you at the gallery entrance. He asks for your first and last names. As you proceed through the doorway, he grandly announces your entrance into the room. Your name echoes through the gallery, filling the space. You momentarily exist outside of your body yet become profoundly aware of your physical presence.
This experience is Pierre Huyghe’s “Name Announcer performance piece, part of “Sound as Sculpture,” now on view at The Warehouse.
Huyghe’s piece is just one of many in the exhibition that demonstrate the sculptural capabilities of sound — how it can connect viewers to a space and root them within an experience, making them conscious of their bodies as vehicles for generating, receiving and transmitting sound.
The exhibition shifts between sculptural objects, performance, site-specific installation, video, archival material and sound-only works.
Curated by Thomas Feulmer, assistant curator and director of educational programming, the exhibition stems from Feulmer’s longtime fascination with sound in art.
“The everywhere-ness of sound — its ability to surround us and to enter into a dialogue with our bodies as an envelope of vibrating waves — makes it an especially powerful sculptural material,” he explains. “It frames our experience of space as an unfolding event of bodily awareness, rather than as a container for things. The visitor’s body, or the artist’s body, is the site where much of the work in the exhibition takes place, and through the experience of these works, the body becomes a dynamic entity where consciousness and space meet.”
Adrian Piper’s Humming Room also requires viewers to activate the piece.
Humming Room consists of an empty room with a guard positioned at each of the two entrances. A single instruction above each doorway reads: “In order to enter the room, you must hum a tune. Any tune will do.” It’s initially unsettling to break the traditional code of art-gazing silence.
My group was coaxed into a line, unsure of who should go first. But as we started filing into the gallery, our singular hums coalesced into a buzzy crescendo, and trepidation gave way to wonder. It was such a simple, yet profound, experience that when I later had to cross through the gallery on my own, I found myself gleefully humming a tune in anticipation.
Other pieces exist as intact vocal performances that explore the dissection or dissolution of language, asking viewers to use their imaginations to construct an image of the space.
Alvin Lucier’s hypnotic work I Am Sitting in a Room consists of a spoken text recorded, played back and re-recorded. The process repeats until the reverberations transform words into pure noise, the text physically sculpted by the room in which Lucier performed the piece.
Inspired by the early, aggressively heterosexual standup of Eddie Murphy — who was visually defined by his tight leather suits — Mark Bradford’s Spiderman places the viewer in the context of a raucous comedy club.
Using only vocals and the scrolling text of the performer’s routine, Bradford asks viewers to imagine the scene based solely on the comedian’s delivery and the audience’s reaction. As the performance progresses, the comedian’s identity becomes increasingly nebulous. Frank discussions of race, gender and sexuality are tinged with personal narratives that belie the performer’s comedic swagger.
Installations such as Nora Schultz’s Untitled and Tomás Saraceno’s Sounding the Air demonstrate how artists use new media equipment to harness and generate sound from natural sources. Schultz uses contact microphones applied to gallery skylights to capture the vibrations generated by outside noises, transmitting them into the gallery via a series of speakers.
The sounds range from mild flutters caused by the wind to thunderous shakes created by a low-flying plane. Saraceno’s elegant piece consists of three single strands of spider silk strung across a series of lights, their movements dictated by shifts in air temperature and humidity. As the silks float up and down, their sonic frequencies are captured by a camera and emitted into the room. It’s a ghostly melody spun out of thin air.
The central presentation in “Sound as Sculpture” is a series of works by Nancy Holt, who, along with her husband, Robert Smithson, was a pioneering member of the Earthworks movement. Feulmer worked closely with the Holt/Smithson Foundation to sift through the artist’s archive, unearthing lesser-known works such as Tours and Visual Sound Zones. This piece is a series of voice recordings in which Holt thoughtfully catalogs and describes a space for the listener, including step counts and directional turns, so it feels as though you are walking hand-in-hand with the artist.
The recordings are broadcast above Holt’s typewritten scripts, complete with penciled-in notes, which showcase the comprehensive subtlety with which she approached her practice. Listening to Holt describe the perimeter of an area is a poetic treatise on her role within the male-dominated world of land art, as she was often relegated to the sidelines despite being a central figure.
Holt’s inward gazing is echoed by Bruce Nauman’s Acoustic Wedge (Sound Wedge — Double Wedge), a slim, wedge-shaped structure with two corridors that funnel the viewer into a single, pointed end. The towering walls are lined with sound-dampening fabric that causes your ears to pressurize and exterior noise to fall away, as though the piece is gently squeezing the ability to hear out of you.
Unlike other pieces in “Sound as Sculpture,” this is a sculpture without sound — the absence of sound made into a three-dimensional form. While other works use sound to generate imaginary spaces or define a physical area, this piece draws it away, creating a womb-like feeling of comforting quietude, a respite from the outside world.
Details
“Sound as Sculpture” runs through May 28 at The Warehouse, 14105 Inwood Road, Dallas. By appointment only on Fridays and Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free. Online registration required. Limit two people per RSVP. For more information, visit thewarehousedallas.org or call 214-442-2872.
