An ear-opening reassessment of sonic art from World
War II to the present
Marcel Duchamp famously championed a "non-retinal" visual
art, rejecting judgments of taste and beauty. In the
Blink of an Ear is the first book to ask why the sonic
arts did not experience a parallel turn toward a
non-cochlear sonic art, imagined as both a response and a
complement to Duchamp's conceptualism. Rather than treat
sound art as an artistic practice unto itself—or as the
unwanted child of music—artist and theorist Seth Kim-Cohen
relates the post-War sonic arts to contemporaneous
movements in the gallery arts. Applying key ideas from
poststructuralism, deconstruction, and art history, In the
Blink of an Ear suggests that the sonic arts have been
subject to the same cultural pressures that have shaped
minimalism, conceptualism, appropriation, and relational
aesthetics. Sonic practice and theory have downplayed - or,
in many cases, completely rejected - the de-formalization
of the artwork and its simultaneous animation in the
conceptual realm.
Starting in 1948, the simultaneous examples of John Cage
and Pierre Schaeffer initiated a sonic theory-in-practice,
fusing clement Greenberg's media-specificity with a
phenomenological emphasis on perception. Subsequently, the
"sound-in-itself" tendency has become the dominant paradigm
for the production and reception of sound art. Engaged with
critical texts by Jacques Derrida, Rosalind Krauss,
Friedrich Kittler, Jean François Lyotard, and Jacques
Attali, among others, Seth Kim-Cohen convincingly argues
for a reassessment of the short history of sound art,
rejecting sound-in-itself in favor of a reading of sound's
expanded situation and its uncontainable textuality. At the
same time, this important book establishes the principles
for a nascent non-cochlear sonic practice, embracing the
inevitable interaction of sound with the social, the
linguistic, the philosophical, the political, and the
technological.
Artists discussed include:
George Brecht
John Cage
Janet Cardiff
Marcel Duchamp
Bob Dylan
Valie Export
Luc Ferrari
Jarrod Fowler
Jacob Kirkegaard
Alvin Lucier
Robert Morris
Muddy Waters
John Oswald
Marina Rosenfeld
Pierre Schaeffer
Stephen Vitiello
La Monte Young
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