Listening to Print Jennifer L. Roberts

Listening to Print

Sound becomes strange when it is captured in print. As it slips into the silent stillness of the visual record, it recomposes itself in unexpected ways. New shapes and relationships emerge, and images loom up even from the inaudible vibratory fringes of the sonic register. But such revelations go both ways, because sound also disturbs the ostensibly familiar realm of print, interrupting its longstanding complacency as a medium of visual reproduction. When print captures the movements of sound, it also discloses its own deep roots as a practice of revelatory conversion between the invisible and the visible. There’s a lot we can learn about sound by looking at prints, but there’s also a lot we can learn about print by looking at sounds. Sound is made and received through touch and pressure—the plink of a key, the pluck of a string, the transmission of pressure waves through the air, the vibration of the tympanic membrane in the ear. And

when sound intersects with print, it reveals that print, too, is more a matter of touch than we commonly recognize. Although print is usually associated with replicability and a certain air of dematerialization, the tactility of sound helps remind us of the primordial nature of all prints as impressions—imprints born from physical contact. Every print is a recording of a contact event between a matrix (the surface that “gives” the image) and a support (the surface that “takes” it). That transfer is a haptic one: in a printing press, for example, the press “feels” the image (by sensing differences in the plate’s topography or chemistry) in order to transmit it from one surface to another. 1

In his pigment-on-paper piano works, Jason Moran literally performs this mutual tactility of sound and print. For each work in this series, Moran, a jazz pianist and composer, spread a sheet of Japanese gampi paper over his keyboard, covered the paper with pigment, and played. The resulting image is a recording of the music taken at the intersection of the body and the instrument. The kinetic deformation of the keyboard in the course of playing is retained in the density of pressed pigment and in the residual wrinkles and contortions in the paper. The print also captures certain aspects of piano performance that are never strictly audible: the silence between notes, for example, is registered as a

1 For an extended discussion of printmaking as an art of contact, see Jennifer L. Roberts, Contact: Art and the Pull of Print (70th

Annual A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), 2021. www.nga.gov/research/casva/ meetings/mellon-lectures-in-the-fine-arts/roberts-2021.html.

cloudlike blur of pigment spread by Moran’s hands and fingers as they flew between the keys.

As gestural monuments to the songs they record, Moran’s images recall the long history of rubbings made from memorial reliefs, in which pigment and pressure applied to paper serves to “lift” inscriptions through from the invisible surface below. 2 And indeed this quality of emergence from an invisible realm, this sense of revelation or resurrection, has also long been the work of print. We tend to think of print as a visual art, but printmaking itself, in the culminating moment of the impression, is as blind as music: with the paper surface squeezed tight against the matrix, most prints are made under pressure in a dark, unobservable space. Print shows us the world as made and perceived by touch, and only later given over to the eye.

Audible and palpable experience (unlike optical experience) is multidirectional. Sound happens in the round, and print can capture this directly in ways that most other “visual” media cannot. Because prints are made under conditions of pressure and counterpressure, they can register impressions that come from either side of the paper in the act of printing. An incident detected on one side of the paper can always emerge through to the other (as in rubbing or embossing). This means that the “picture plane” in print is very different than it is, say, in painting, which is as resolutely frontal

2 On rubbings, see Allegra Pesenti, Apparitions: Frottages and

Rubbings from 1860 to Now (Los Angeles; Houston: Hammer

Museum; The Menil Collection, 2015).

as is vision. If the surface of a painting is analogous to a retina, the surface of a print is closer to an eardrum (a membrane that senses vibrations coming from all directions). Perhaps the best way to put this is to say that a print, unlike a painting, can sense things that come from behind it. Audra Wolowiec’s cast concrete relief works, based on the structure of acoustical tiles, emphasize this by exploring the multidirectional quality of the surfaces that are necessary for the capture of sound. And her waveforms, which she made while in residence at the Dieu Donné paper mill after watching pulp sloshing in vats and screens, reveal that paper itself is born from an immersive field of vibration—from an aqueous surround.

Dario Robleto’s portfolio The First Time, The Heart explores the bodily origins of sound recording’s immersive desires. After years of working physically with sound as a sculptural material (melting, pulverizing, cutting, and casting vinyl records; stretching cassette tape into filaments), Robleto began researching the graphic history of waveform sound recording. In doing so, he learned that sound recording, at its origins in the nineteenth century, developed along with physiological practices of pulse recording. His prints feature waveform images that he found in medical archives, capturing pulsations of the brain and heart that had been elicited in response to sonic, tactile, and emotional stimuli (“holding breath while listening to tuning fork”; “sadness from listening to a sung melody”). These were palpated images, created by deep vibrations coursing up through the flesh, received by sensitive detectors that rested at the surface of the skin and then traced in

oscillating lines on moving scrolls of soot-covered paper. The same instruments that captured these movements from the mysterious depths of the mind and heart would later facilitate the birth of sound recording: pulse waves in soot became soundwaves in wax and vinyl. Robleto’s work explores the impulse, broadly shared across multiple practices, to capture ephemeral signals of life from the vibratory realm. He emphasizes the capacity of the “visual record” to evoke an emotional and corporeal relationship to the past, and to store and release ineffable information through time. 3

Glenn Ligon’s Come Out project also explores sound as testimony from the body, while emphasizing its unique capacity to generate critical social awareness through harmonic interference. The project includes screenprints made by layering a series of screens bearing the phrase “come out to show them.” The screens are printed off-register, so that as the words are stacked up, interference (or moiré) patterns emerge that produce a rippling effect. Printmakers have been aware of these patterns for centuries, especially in line

3 Working with Island Press in St. Louis, Robleto first printed the pulse waves in transparent ink. Then he inverted each sheet and hand-flamed it from below with a burning candle, creating an atmospheric swirl of soot that buried the line. Then he flipped it over again and carefully dug each line back out of the soot with miniscule brushes. Robleto’s process gives us sound as an image that is both buried and retrieved, both archaeological and atmospheric, suggesting both latency and release. On Robleto, see

Michael Metzger, ed., The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto (Evanston, IL: Mary and Leigh Block

Museum of Art, 2022).

engraving, which builds images from ranks of near-parallel lines that intersect in ways that sometimes spark interference, and in screen printing and halftone-based photoreproduction, where the gridded structure of the images mean that the slightest misregistration can cause moiré effects to erupt. Usually, these unruly effects are suppressed by printers, but Ligon cultivates them here in order to highlight the disruptive spatiality that is possible in both print and sound. The phrase “come out to show them” is taken from a sound recording of the 1964 testimony of Daniel Hamm, one of six young Black men wrongly charged with murder and beaten by police. Denied medical treatment because he had no open wounds to prove his ordeal, he resorted to opening his own bruises so that the blood would come out. In his prints, Ligon nods to Steve Reich’s 1966 sound work Come Out, which looped the same recording through thirteen minutes of phase shifts and channel splits, releasing Hamm’s voice into a multidimensional aural space organized around structures of overlapping frequencies. Both Ligon and Reich give structure to Hamm’s ordeal without backing away from the agony of its embodied immediacy. And the interferences in their work generate a new kind of space from that agony—a powerful and transformative space that eludes all visual convention—that can only be evoked through this haptic-harmonic layering. 4

Jess Rowland’s Sound Tapestries are flat, flexible speaker arrays made from circuits of conductive materials that

carry audio signals. Sound is electronically generated along the surface of these hanging speaker “tapestries,” each of which serves as a separate channel for the composition. Such circuitries, generating as they do a kind of strange, pictorial electromagnetism, would seem to carry us a long way from the world of pressure and contact that we have explored so far in this essay. They seem to have taken the leap into computation (and the “digital”) that is often understood as synonymous with the so-called “death of print.” But, as Rowland’s printed circuits make plain, the circuits that are supposedly killing off print are themselves prints—circuit printing is part of the extended history of printmaking. The printed circuit was invented during WWII by the engineer Paul Eisler, who developed his prototypes by spending weeks on end in the library of the British Museum studying the history of traditional techniques like etching, engraving, and lithography. 5 Contemporary circuit manufacturing maintains this inheritance from the print room. So the digital world, in a very real sense, still runs on print.

Of course Rowland’s work also demonstrates that a printed circuit is more than “just” a print: once it is printed it is able to execute other instructions and essentially “play” other phenomena. This speaks to the capacity of print for continual regeneration—not in

4 On Ligon’s project see Ellen Y. Tani, “‘Come Out to Show Them’:

Speech and Ambivalence in the Work of Steve Reich and Glenn

Ligon,” Art Journal 78.4 (2019): 24–37; and Janet Kraynak, “How to Hear What Is Not Heard: Glenn Ligon, Steve Reich, and the

Audible Past,” Grey Room 70 (2018): 54–79.

the way it is usually understood, as the production of multiple copies from a single matrix—but in the sense of an ongoing chain of material agency in which prints can themselves become matrices, generating new impressions. This model of print as a propagating series of impressions (print becomes matrix; matrix begets print, ad infinitum) is also a very old one. It stretches back to medieval theories of the commutative image and to Enlightenment models of knowledge as a series of transfers of “impressions” in the mind. 6 It is worth emphasizing that sound is also communicated through chains of generative relay: when you hear a sound, it impresses itself on your ear. 7 But at the moment that it receives these vibrations, the ear generates a set of sympathetic vibrations and passes them on the brain: at that moment, the ear both receives and originates a sound-image.

This rolling renewal at the heart of both sound and print is intriguingly performed in Allen Ruppersberg’s Great Speckled Bird, made in collaboration with Gemini G.E.L. The print consists of a twenty-foot-long perforated player piano roll for a popular hymn that Ruppersberg then screen printed with images of vintage

5 Paul Eisler, My Life with the Printed Circuit (Bethlehem, PA:

Lehigh University Press, 1989). 6 See Elina Gertsman, “Multiple Impressions: Christ in the Winepress and the Semiotics of the Printed Image,” Art History 36.2 (2013): 310–37; and William B. MacGregor, “The Authority of Prints: An

Early Modern Perspective,” Art History 22.3 (1999): 389–420. 7 On the nature of sound recording as tympanic relay, see

Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound

Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 34, 62–67.

hotel stationery. Player pianos, common in the early twentieth century, were self-playing pianos controlled by perforated scrolls of coded music (“piano rolls”). Piano rolls were essentially long, reproductive prints in which information was “printed” by perforating rather than inking the paper. Ruppersberg then screen printed the roll with images of vintage hotel stationery. The piano roll (recalling Rowland) has very strong ties to the active matrix of computation. The concept of the executable print was first embodied in the form of the punch card, most famously in the Jacquard loom, and later in the early IBM system (several other works in this exhibition, including Terry Adkins’s disk print and Annesas Appel’s music-box scores, also explore this perforated territory of sound reproduction). When it is hung on the wall, the visual effusion of Rupperberg’s screen printing dominates the work, with its punctured code lurking inconspicuously as a form of latent storage. But when the print is spooled into a player piano, the silent perforations are activated. The music held visually in the perforations is released as a sound event. This again highlights the status of both print and music as technologies that alternate between impression and matrix, storage and release. Prints wait in dark storage drawers, holding their images in abeyance, until they are brought out and seen, impressing themselves anew on their viewers. Music waits in memories and cylinders and discs and tapes, stored in spatial arrays, until it is brought out and executed as a temporal event to be impressed on an ear (or another recording device). In fact, as musicologists Alexander Rehding and Daniel Chua point out, this alteration

between image and sound is the fundamental structure of music that allows it to pass through time and to form such a strong fabric of human culture. Music is “a space-faring and time-traveling vessel,” “a conjunction of event and storage in which sounds glimmer in time, then dim into space,” and then repeat the cycle. Sound is “locked in space and transported in silence out of its own time in order that it can be played back anywhere.” 8 Ruppersberg gestures to this in the printed rhythm of his road-trip motel stationery, which tells a similar tale of movement and stillness, emergence and retreat, rest and release. His scroll speaks to the endlessness of both print and music, its capacity for eternal reemergence, renewal, and relay. Bethany Collins’s America: A Hymnal emphasizes that this relay of culture through print and sound is always tactile and material, and thus is as much a process of deformation and change as it is a process of reproduction. A bound book in the format of a nineteenth-century shape note hymnal, it features 100 lyrical variations, written from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, of the song “America (My Country ’Tis of Thee).” Each page features the same tune, but the lyrics are different; the book tracks the melody as it was appropriated through American history in support of various often conflicting causes (it was used to support, for example, both abolitionism and the Confederacy).

8 Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding, Alien Listening:

Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth (New York:

Zone Books: 2021), 197–98.

The musical notation—the notes and stave lines—are the sounds held in common in this babel of conflicting claims to Americanness. They have been printed not with ink but singed away by a laser cutter, each coming into presence as a hole. Each page becomes a stencil, a punch card, through which a common American identity can be passed along as an executable perpetuity. But laser cutting is a form of burning, and Collins has deployed it here in such a way that the pages are singed and incredibly fragile. This means that each turn of the page, each playback of the print and the music, contributes visibly to its destruction, leaving gaping, toothless staves and musical debris littering the gutter. 9 Collins reminds us that the same material forces that make print and music transmissible—all those forms of pressure and vibration we have been following in this essay—are the forces that insist on its constant transformation and precarity. Print and sound recording can never be truly reproductive; each retrieval of a song or an image changes it forever. The tape wears out; the ink fades; the times change. These forces, of course, are social and political as well as material. Collins implores us to look and listen carefully, because no revelation will be the same as the last.

9 For an especially sensitive discussion of the material fragility of

Collins’s book, see Molly Schwartzburg, “A Book for This Moment and for This Library: Bethany Collins’s ‘America: A Hymnal.’” www.smallnotes.library.virginia.edu/2018/01/25/a-book-for-thismoment-and-for-this-library-bethany-collinss-america-a-hymnal.

Audra Wolowiec voiceprint (we the people), 2021

Bethany Collins America: A Hymnal, 2017

Jennie C. Jones Five Point One Surround, 2014