Introduction Elleree Erdos, Curator

Introduction

The coronal suture of the skull…has—let us assume—a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of sound, but existed of itself naturally—well, to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen? A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music…

—Rainer Maria Rilke, “Primal Sound,” 1919

In 1919, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke pondered what sounds might occur if we looked beyond the groove of the phonograph cylinder to a naturally occurring incised line: the coronal suture of the human skull.

With a phonograph or a record player, the waveforms of sound vibration correspond to etched or incised marks on a rotating cylinder or disc. To play back the sound, a stylus vibrates as it traces the groove around the object. The channels inscribed in a record are thus the material embodiment of sound, inseparable from the potential sound they contain. Rilke’s mystifying proposition suggests that our own bodies—our skulls—contain similar conduits that offer an unmediated conversion of human subjectivity into sound.

The artists in Visual Record: The Materiality of Sound in Print seek out ways to take up Rilke’s proposition—not literally, of course, but by revealing that sound and print are both composed of generative, physical forces that can, as Jennifer L. Roberts writes in her text for this publication, “show us the world as made and perceived by touch.” In other words, print and sound can transform the way we feel.

Grounded in the mechanical similarities between sound recording and printmaking, the exhibition features fifteen artists whose work translates between sound and print through distinctly physical means. Some explore how cast, perforated, and printed material surfaces affect sound’s dispersal and our experience of it, while others extract meaning from the visual representations of sounds elicited by external emotional and physical stimuli. Several artists in the exhibition explore the gap between sound and vision as a productive space from which to examine the shortcomings of social and political systems. Across a wide range of subject matter—from the rhythms of jazz and American nostalgia to the sound of silence and the encoding of race in aural matter—the

works examine the idea of the “record” through innovative technical and conceptual approaches to print.

The comparison between sound and print is, on one level, technically direct: the mechanics of analog sound recording resemble the creation of a printing template. And for decades, artists have sought to subvert the reproductive qualities of the record. John Cage—considered the father of experimental music for his embrace of chance, ambient noise, and silence—possessed an infamous disdain for records and encouraged their use only in order to make something new and original:

…though people think they can use records as music, what they have to finally understand, is, that they have to use them as records…the only lively thing that will happen with a record, is, if somehow you would use it to make something which it isn’t. If you could for instance make another piece of music with a record…that I would find interesting…But unfortunately most people who collect records and use them, use them in quite another way. They use them as a kind of portable museum or portable concert-hall.¹

Christian Marclay, as both a visual artist and a DJ, has since the 1970s exhaustively mined the vinyl record’s potential as a productive medium, looking far beyond its conventional function to embrace sound as

1 Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier, Broken Music: Artists’ Recordworks (New York: Primary Information, 2018), 73.

something that is not just passively heard, but which can reflect the accumulation and individuality of lived experience. He recognized the futility of physical objects to preserve something as fleeting as sound. In the 1980s, Marclay cut, scratched, and walked on records; he collaged them, broke them, and glued them back together; and he allowed dust and scratches to collect on records sold without sleeves—“whatever I could do to them to create a sound that was something else than just the sound that was in the groove.”²

Marclay, like Rilke, sought a sound that was raw, palpable, and human. The other artists in this exhibition similarly reimagine the way we encounter sound and visual representations of it. Through physical gestures— burning, tracing, cutting, perforating, erasing—they create works that embody sound, rather than merely represent or record it. This physical, material approach impels us to reflect on the conventions, stereotypes, and assumptions encoded in our senses. While Visual Record features work by primarily visual artists, it parallels developments in contemporary sound art, where artists are cultivating a wider perceptual engagement that challenges medium specificity and engages with the politics of sound, listening, and silence.³ We can only begin to understand sound as a reflection of our time—its social, political, and cultural implications—when we consider that sound belongs not just to the ears. Sound is a total perceptual experience,

2 Rob Young, “Don’t sleeve me this way,” The Guardian, February 14, 2005, www.theguardian.com/music/2005/feb/14/popandrock.

captured not only through listening and hearing, but through touch and feeling. Prints, too, contain evidence of a tactile encounter—the transfer of ink, the imprint of a plate. The artists here ask and answer questions through physical interventions deeply intertwined with the history of print: pressure, contact, transfer, and interference.⁴ The works in Visual Record range from unique transfer drawings to editions of varying sizes, but each is most importantly an intimate record of human experience. They capture the anguish of the wrongly accused and the silence of death, the bated breath of broken Constitutional promises and the fragility of a moment in time. They express the exhilaration of musical improvisation and the joys of listening to a sung melody. In doing so, each work thus brings us closer to an unmediated “primal sound.”

3 Walker Downey addresses the work of Kevin Beasley, Christine

Sun Kim, and Nikita Gale as examples of sound artists embracing an expanded, multimodal conception of sound. Walker Downey,

“For Eyes and Ears: New Sound Art Serves Different Senses with a

Multimodal Approach,” ArtNews, June 7, 2022, www.artnews.com/ art-in-america/features/sound-art-multimodal-approach-1234630791. 4 Jennifer L. Roberts brilliantly unpacks some of these concepts, among others, as they apply to print in her 2021 Mellon Lectures.

Jennifer L. Roberts, Contact: The Art and Pull of the Print, 2021, www. nga.gov/research/casva/meetings/mellon-lectures-in-the-fine-arts/ roberts-2021.html.

K.P. Brehmer Ballet of the Unhatched Chicken, from the portfolio Pictures at an Exhibition, 1975

Dario Robleto Sadness from listening to a sung melody, (Le Vallon) Gounod, 1896, from the portfolio The First Time, the Heart (A Portrait of Life 1854–1913), 2017

Allen Ruppersberg Great Speckled Bird, 2013