The Musicalisation of Visual Arts

Abstract

This article was first published in Images Numeriques: L'aventure du regard, 1997, O. Blin et J. Sauvageot (eds.), University Press of Rennes/Distique, pp. 147-151. Reproduced courtesy of the publishers.The work of French sociologist Antoine Hennion, along with that of other authors such as Tia DeNora (2003), represents the latest attempt to conceptualise the relation between society and works of art, or rather the work of art in society, without resorting to the kind of purely internalist readings favoured by aestheticians nor, in reverse, burying their material specificities under the weight of social determinants. In this dense but beautifully composed article (two fitting qualifiers for the topic of image processing), the reader will find two key terms in Hennion's analytical toolkit, namely mediation and amateurs, mobilised in a reflection on the changes brought about by the digital reordering of artistic practices (for a comprehensive summary of Hennion's sociological approach, see Looseley 2006). Needless to say, the media ecology of which the author speaks has gone through substantial changes since the article's first publication in French more than ten years ago. Using Hennion's example of the now residual technology of the CD-ROM, we could sum up this socio-technical evolution as having moved from a 'read-only' model to what has come to be known as a 'remix' culture, characterised by a 'relayed creativity' (Born 2005) in which the respective roles of producers and audiences are redistributed and the material status of the resulting work is more fluid than ever. Although Hennion's idea of 'musicalisation' shares many features with the equally musical trope of the remix - now prevalent in so many cultural spheres, from open-source software to footwear - his historical cross-analysis of music and the visual arts should remind us that the regimes of art result from complex and contingent mediation effects, through which possibilities for greater openness and performativity coexist with the more established processes of authoriality and stabilisation. Facilitated by new media technologies (laptop, internet, editing software, etc.), the emergent cultural forms such as audio mash-ups, fan videos, live soundtracking, VJing and the like, largely confirm the role of 'amateur instrumentalists' in our audiovisual culture. By pointing in the direction of this creative force, and away from the isolated works presented to us in museums, galleries and other institutional art spaces, Hennion's contribution should be taken as an invitation to investigate further the objects, procedures and collectives that are simultaneously constructing and constructed through new regimes of digital creativity. Beyond the oscillation between naive enthusiasm and conservative scepticism that inevitably greets the introduction of new technologies, it is possible - and perhaps even necessary - to draw a few insights from their recent dramatic proliferation in the realm of image and sound.First, it must be noted that it is the fundamental characteristics of the visual arts, once easily taken for granted, that have been affected by digital media technologies. Indeed, if the virtual image conjures up a sense of loss, or absence, it is not that of the real 'body' of the represented subject - be it the flesh of the model or the reality of a chosen landscape - but of the very texture of the picture and the stability of its support. What we see is truly a change of medium, as expressed in the change of vocabulary from painting and visual arts to images and their processing - a painting cannot be 'processed' (at best, it can be restored). The model suggested by the uses of computer technologies constitutes a mirrorimage of the model historically constructed by the evolution of painting:* The painter produces a fixed image, attributed to a single author, created on a given medium (or, in the case of sculpture, equivalent to this medium), and whose distinct occurrence is guaranteed by the indivisible link between the 'matter' of the painting and the image it reflects. …