Sound Installation and Time: Becoming, Place, and the Case for Performance

Abstract

SOUND INSTALLATION AND TIME: BECOMING, PLACE, AND THE CASE FOR PERFORMANCE WILLIAM DAVY COLE AX NEUHAUS COINED THE TERM “sound installation” in the late 1960s to refer specifically to “sound works without a beginning or an end, where the sounds [are] placed in space rather than time” (Neuhaus 1994, 42). He conceived of the sound installation as a permanent or semi-permanent art form, “related completely to [its] location” (ibid.), predicated upon the principle of “removing sound from time, and setting it, instead, in place” (Neuhaus, quoted in Cox 2006; 2011, 83). “The important idea about this kind of work,” he declared, is that “it doesn’t exist in time” (ibid., 84). More recently, broader definitions of sound installation art have been proposed that reflect the diversity of creative approaches to have emerged in the wake of Neuhaus’s pioneering aesthetic project. One such definition is offered by Gascia Ouzounian, who describes sound installation as, spatially-organized sound works, and, by extension, as sound works that privilege concepts and experiences of space and place. In my M 12 Perspectives of New Music definition, sound installations may be site-specific or not (they may even be mobile, moving from site to site); they may include performance , recording, or broadcasting elements; they may be installed across multiple spaces and times (real, virtual, and imagined); they may be installed in galleries, museums, electronic networks, and in myriad non-traditional spaces (parks, elevators, subways, bodies, and so on). (Ouzounian 2008, 33; original emphasis) Under this definition, Neuhaus’s brand of sound installation practice can be seen as just one amongst an indefinite number of potential strategies for producing “sound works that privilege concepts and experiences of space and place.” Avoiding Neuhaus’s dichotomization of the time and the space of sound, and making no reference to the notions of timelessness that he posited at the heart of sound installation ’s framework, Ouzounian’s definition accounts for the possibility of ephemeral sound installations, and for sound installation practices that deal with temporal as well as spatial relations. Her expanded model thus encompasses sonic practices that seek to engage Neuhaus’s aesthetic principles beyond the restrictive terms that he himself put forward, terms that this essay sets out to show are inherently misleading. Through an analysis of sound installation’s aesthetic intentionality, it will aim to reveal the centrality of time within the structures of this art form and to present the case for a time-based performance sound installation practice that tackles these underlying questions of temporality head-on. SOUND WORKS WITHOUT BEGINNING OR END With his definition of sound installation art, Neuhaus sought to clearly demarcate his sonic practice from music, drawing clear distinctions between music as a temporal art form and sound installation as an art form set in place. I don’t make sound events in time; I don’t make a series of sound events in time, which progress in time. You don’t come to a sound work of mine at the beginning and leave at the end; that is a basic definition of music. . . . In music the sound is the work and in what I do the sound is the means of making the work, the means of transforming space into place. (Neuhaus 1994, 130) For Neuhaus, sound installation marked a break away from the “codified sound language” (ibid., 129) of musical narrative, and its Sound Installation and Time 13 concomitant culture of concert-hall listening, and towards working with sound as means of opening listening up to wider questions of context and situatedness. Eschewing the singular locus of the musical object, Neuhaus drew his practice “into the purview of the visual arts” (ibid., 42), where during the late 1960s and early 1970s installation art was gaining momentum and finding definition as a category of artistic practice that “rejects concentration on one object in favour of consideration of the relationships between a number of elements or of the interaction between things and their contexts” (de Oliveira, Oxley, and Petry 1994, 8). Times Square (1977–1992, 2002–present), installed on a pedestrian island in the heart of New York City, epitomizes Neuhaus’s sound installation aesthetic. From beneath a metal...